Where the Wild Things Are – with Chris Salisbury, Max Hope and Alan Watson Featherstone

Chris Sailsbury

Chris founded and currently directs WildWise, an outdoor education and training organisation in 1999, after many years working as an education officer for Devon Wildlife Trust. With a professional background in the theatre, a qualification in drama-therapy and a career in environmental education he uses every creative means at his disposal to encourage people to enjoy and value the natural world on courses he facilitates in the UK and abroad. He has worked with and been profoundly influenced by Ray Mears, Bill Plotkin, Joanna Macy, David Whyte amongst very many others. He is a course facilitator at Schumacher College, Devon, where he also directs the Call of the Wild Foundation year-programme. He is also known as a professional storyteller (aka ‘Spindle Wayfarer’), and is the co-founder and Artistic Director for both the Westcountry and Oxford Storytelling Festivals. He is also a theatre ensemble teacher for the International Schools Theatre Association.

Chris is married with 4 children and lives in enchantment on the edge of the Dartington’s forest with his astonishing dog ‘Dexter’…..

Max Hope

Max started her professional life as a youth and community worker and then worked for adecade as an academic at the University of Hull, where her research and teaching focused on radical, democratic and student-led education. She co-founded the Freedom to Learn Project (www.freedomtolearnproject.com) and travelled the world looking for the best ways to educate children and young people. Through this, she started to encounter wild education, wild pedagogy, rewilding and deep nature connection. Her own personal rewilding adventure began at this point.

Like Max, the main character from the children’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, Max has been on an epic personal adventure into the wild, and through encountering wild creatures and wild people and wild places, she started to see life radically differently. She now lives in Devon and is excited about any opportunities to explore what rewilding means, and how to rewild people and places.

Max recently published a book called Reclaiming Freedom in Education (2019, Routledge). Her next book, co-authored with Daniel Ford, will focus on Rewilding Education and will incorporate rich personal stories alongside research with young people who have had immersive wild experiences.
In her wild time, Max loves to walk, climb mountains, sit still, listen to the birds and tell stories.

Alan Watson Featherstone

In 1986 Alan founded the award-winning conservation charity, Trees for Life, which works to restore the Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands. It has become the leading organisation working to restore the Caledonian Forest in Scotland and took on ownership of the 10,000 acre Dundreggan Estate in Glenmoriston as its flagship project for native woodland recovery.

Through his work with Trees for Life, he has helped to provide the inspiration for other ecological restoration projects in the Scottish Borders, on Dartmoor in England and for the creation of the Yendegaia National Park in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. He also founded the Restoring the Earth project, to promote the restoration of the planet’s degraded ecosystems as the most important task for humanity in the 21st century. He is one of our country’s most inspiring rewilding pioneers.