WildEast Founder Hugh Somerleyton has been the driving force behind our first ever festival - ROAR - so a huge thank you from all of us for being such a wonderful host.

The week-long event brought together a rich and varied collection of academics and pledgees that included farmers, smallholders, gardeners and landscape architects.

Celebrations like this are a vital part of how this movement of 'people for nature' will grow and flourish - and we cannot wait to welcome you all for round two.

WildEast ROAR was launched as a way of thanking all our pledgees for their support with a day of informative lectures, wild swimming, safaris and a good old shindig to finish. We wanted to thank all our incredible speakers, Owls and Wolves surely the wildest band in the east and all of you who came to support.

Most of you will know that Lynx – our WildEast spirit animal and logo, don’t roar but this was really about giving our pledgees the confidence to ROAR – at their neighbours! Wild East really is wilder by the sum of its parts and those parts are our pledgees, the greater the number the easier to create lasting change in our region.

For such a small operation we were incredibly fortunate to secure such an array of key speakers; academics from top universities, Leo Linnartz from ARK in holland, Chris Jones from the beaver trust and perhaps saving Ben Rawlence, author of The Tree line – until last somehow made sense, framing what lies ahead of us as an urgent period of ‘adaptation’ to climate change rather than indulging more time on denial and simply hope.

Left to right: WildEast Pledgees Mark Hayward, Daisy Greenwell, AQlex Moore Dal Luz, Sophie Flux, Hugh Somerleyton, Jane Fitzgerald White, Sarah Taigel, Laura Hampton



Listening to these modern day ‘preachers’ made me reflect on what it must have been like for us ordinary folks listening to prophets like Jesus and his disciples and indeed for those preaching too. Presumably for most their ideas were simply too big to fathom, too far away and irrelevant to the grind of everyday life. And yet the promise of salvation proved too tempting in the end and so Christianity held the majority of western civilisation in its grip until very recently.

‘salvation’ is exactly what these modern-day preachers ae trying to communicate – a more attainable and believable but more prosaic version – a sustainable life on earth! I wonder how long we will have to wait to find books like Ben Rawlence’s The Tree Line in every hotel bedroom alongside the Gideon Bible and how long we will have to wait for this kind of more modest ‘salvation’ becomes a truly mass movement.

WildEast, with your help are trying to build a framework to assist humanity get to this place and ROAR felt like a big step forward so thank you all for coming and hope to see many more ROARING next year!