Core Facilitators

Chris Salisbury

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’…..

Fiona Tilley

Tilley’s career began in academia researching and teaching sustainable business related subjects. After a couple of decades working at various Universities in the north of England, exposure to alternative forms of education and process work led Tilley to Schumacher College in Devon and a new chapter began. Eventually relocating to this part of the world a second career has unfolded with a much greater emphasis on nature connection, the imaginal, story, rights of passage and guiding groups through processes of transformation and change. Tilley has had the privilege and joy to facilitate courses involving many different teachers including Colin Campbell, Pat McCabe, Carolyn Hillyer, Vandana Shiva, Bayo Akomolafe, Jon Young, Rupert Sheldrake, Mary Evelyn Tucker and Derek Gow. The courses Tilley is now drawn to guide, teach and facilitate are typically process orientated; involve participatory approaches to inquiry and look into the changes personal and collective that many of us find we are facing today. Nature connection and forest bathing combined with a passion for animism have led to rewilding and this new programme Where The Wild Things Are.

Tilley lives with her wife Mirella and son Oli in a village situated equidistant between the sea and Dartmoor and close to the Dart. She is often to be found wandering alongside the river walking her dog Mae.

Visiting Facilitators

(More facilitators TBC)

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.

Mac Macartney

Mac Macartney is a writer, speaker, leadership consultant, eco/peace advocate, and spiritual journeyman. He has explored many paths, some unwisely, some with discernment, all with enthusiasm, vigour, and persistence. As a young child, he fell deeply in love with nature and since that time has endeavoured to listen to the guiding dreams, visions, and experiences that have landed in his outstretched arms. In their different ways all have invited him to do whatever he can to shift our world for the better. Mac moves between, learns from, and contributes to, many diverse and contrasting spheres of society – an enriching, stimulating, and often, deeply troubling pathway. Over a period of twenty years he was mentored and coached by a group of Native American teachers. During this training and ever since he has attempted to bring two worlds together – an ancient worldview that emphasises relationship, interdependence and reverence for life, with the huge challenges and equally huge opportunities of the 21st Century. You can find out more about Mac’s work here.

Derek Gow

Derek Gow is an ecologist, author of the wonderful book ‘Bringing Back the Beaver’ and a keen advocate of species reintroductions, particularly that of the Eurasian Beaver. His farm in West Devon is home to the first licensed beavers in the UK and he works with Wildlife Trusts and other landowners to bring back this species to the British Isles.

Online Guest Speaker

Eleanor O’Hanlon

Eleanor O’Hanlon is a writer, teacher and story-teller, with a passion for renewing our inner relationship to animals and wild nature. She has travelled widely, with the indigenous peoples of the Russian Arctic and the Kalahari, and been guided by outstanding field biologists whose work is directly illuminating this innate bond with our wild animal kin.  Eleanor’s book Eyes of the Wild Journeys of Transformation with the Animal Powers won the Nautilus Gold book award for writing on nature, and praise from leading ecological voices for its innovative blend of personal experience, science, story-telling and spiritual insight. Her writing has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Spiritual Ecology The Cry of the Earth, and been published in magazines including BBC Wildlife, Geo, Parabola and others.
“When I met the lucid depths of a gray whale’s gaze, when I saw the aliveness in the eyes of a wolf, or stood before the towering family of wild African elephants who came deliberately to meet us, I realised I was in the presence of beings whose depth of awareness was far beyond anything I had learned about them before. These, and other animals, have been my companions and guides on the journey to inner awakening. In the language before words, they have taught me how their consciousness is inter-connected with my own – just as the world’s indigenous peoples have always known and contemporary biologists are now re-discovering.”

Bill Plotkin

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As founder of western Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute in 1981, he has guided thousands of seekers through nature-based initiatory passages. Previously, he has been a research psychologist, professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide. Bill is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche  and most recently, The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries