School of Sustainability

Fifty-three farmers score their own land before the agave goes in

At the end of July, fifty-three smallholders travelled to Vía Orgánica, Regeneration International's sister organisation in Mexico, for two days answering questions about their own plots. They had come from sixteen municipalities across the state of Guanajuato. The questions were not a formality: plot size, crops, animals, household decisions, farm income, pesticide exposure. Each answer fed into a single score.

The instrument is TAPE, the FAO's Tool for Agroecological Performance Evaluation, which rates ten elements of a farming system from zero to a hundred. It was built to be used by farmers rather than on them - it works at the scale of a single plot, and the results can later be pooled to read a whole region. The point of the sessions was to fix a baseline: a written record of where each farm starts, so there is something honest to measure change against eighteen months from now.

The sessions open a collaboration between Regeneration International and Renature that aims to train two hundred smallholders, half men and half women, in agroforestry using agave with companion trees, under the Billion Agave Project. Soil samples from participants' fields are being read for their physical, chemical and biological condition, and further field interviews follow over the coming months. Two days of questions first, then the planting; whether the baseline survives contact with the growing season is the part worth watching.

Regeneration International · Read the source

A Victorian station in the Dee gorge stays cool without machinery

Every Saturday, Peter Dickinson drives the best part of a two-hundred-mile round trip from Worcestershire to a half-timbered station above the River Dee in North Wales, where he volunteers as station master. The building he unlocks dates from 1865, was designed to match the Chainbridge Hotel across the water, and is now Grade II listed. The old first-class waiting room serves tea. The booking office and general waiting room are being taken back, piece by piece, to their Great Western Railway appearance of a century ago.

Berwyn Station is the kind of place the railway age left behind. The line closed in the 1960s, and volunteers spent nearly fifty years reopening a ten-mile section between Llangollen and Corwen, with heritage steam and diesel trains returning to Berwyn in the mid-1980s. Some of Peter's team were there for the original tracklaying, four decades back. He describes himself as the present custodian, and says the station belongs to the community rather than to him.

This summer the station joined Cool Off in Culture, a network of almost four hundred venues offering respite in extreme heat. Berwyn has no air conditioning and, Peter argues, should never have any: fitting modern cooling units into a Victorian building would betray the restoration. It does not need them. On its viaduct, with the river and canal alongside and trees all around, a breeze moves through even when the valley is stifling, and the old building stays naturally cool.

The station keeps finding new reasons for people to come. A shuttle called the Berwyn Explorer, launched in February 2026, runs between Llangollen and the station and will return next year; in 2028 a small four-wheeled German railbus from the 1950s will take over the service. Walkers, cyclists and canoeists already use Berwyn as a gateway to the Dee Valley. Now, when the heat closes in, so can anyone who simply needs to sit somewhere cool with a cup of tea.

Julie's Bicycle · Read the source

At Dundreggan, the children design the mental-health programme themselves

On a spring morning in Glenmoriston, two groups of Highland schoolchildren got off a bus at Dundreggan, a rewilding estate above Loch Ness where Trees for Life has been letting the Caledonian forest come back for nearly twenty years. Aged eleven to fourteen, from Farr and Kinlochleven High Schools, they spent the day pond dipping, learning to tell one tree from another and lighting fires the old way. Then, in workshops, the researchers asked them what would actually help.

The visits were part of Healthy Young Minds, a nature-based early-intervention research programme run by the University of South Wales with the University of the Highlands and Islands and Dundee University, funded by the Medical Research Council. Its premise is that mental-health difficulties often surface in early adolescence, and that rural teenagers face them behind infrastructure and social barriers, isolation among them. Rather than hand pupils a finished programme, the researchers asked them to co-produce one.

In sessions facilitated by Ewen's Room, a Highland mental-health charity, the young people listed what they thought would lift their wellbeing outdoors: camping, fire-building, hill walking, wild swimming, beach combing, outdoor cafés, natural crafts, board games, family activities. Each idea got feedback from other young people and from green-health specialists, then the pupils refined the list and voted on their favourites.

The workshops also taught the five ways to wellbeing - connecting with others, learning new skills, giving, being active, and taking notice of small things - but framed around places the children already live among. Afterwards, the students reported that they now saw nature as important to their mental health, went outside more, and thought about other people more. The research team is writing up two papers and looking for further funding, while keeping contact with the schools to turn the pupils' chosen activities into something that runs.

The setting carries some of the weight. Dundreggan holds over four thousand recorded plant and animal species, many rare, and its rewilding centre has forest trails, a café, a storytelling bothy and bunk accommodation for forty. The partnership around the project - NHS Highland's child and adolescent mental health services, Ewen's Room, the young people's charity Kinlochlovin', and the Highland Green Health Partnership - suggests the day out was the easy part, and the infrastructure around it is the real work.

Trees for Life · Read the source

The chestnut groves that were never wild

Some seabeds were gardens. Among the systems Dr Lyla June Johnston gathered through years of doctoral research are clam gardens - places where the ocean floor itself was engineered, worked by Indigenous Nations so that shellfish became a harvest people could build their lives around rather than a luck they stumbled into. She spoke about them in a recent live conversation with Gaia Education, drawing on research into regenerative land management from Indigenous Nations around the world.

Further inland, and for far longer, there were chestnut groves along the eastern side of North America tended for three thousand years. Not wilderness, and not orchards in the fenced European sense either - stands of trees managed and handed down, generation after generation, until the keeping of them was simply what a community did. Neither the gardens nor the groves were incidental. Each was deliberate management, carried out on time and at landscape scale, and each ran for longer than most nations have existed.

Johnston's harder question, put honestly in the conversation, is why so few of us were ever taught any of this. The write-up of the event does not carry her answer - it records the question and points to the video. What it does carry is her reading of the human animal, unfashionable and worth sitting with: that our big brains and opposable thumbs are "tools given to us to enrich the earth", not to enrich ourselves.

The conversation doubles as an introduction to Indigenous Sciences, her second course with Gaia Education, built on that research. What this account cannot give you is the texture of the work itself - how a clam garden was made, who kept each grove through the centuries. The source is a dialogue and a course announcement, not a field manual. For the doing of it, the course, or the nations themselves, are the places to go.

Gaia Education · Read the source