Ben Goldsmith is an author and rewilding activist who has poured his passion and resources into the land. Raised in the wilderness, nature has always been in his blood, but after the tragic death of his 15-year-old daughter Iris in a farm accident, his connection to the environment deepened.

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Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres is widely recognized as the architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, where 196 countries pledged to keep climate warming levels well below 2°C. What is less known is that during this pivotal moment, she was grappling with deep personal trauma, including the emotional toll of a marriage breakdown.

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Dr Mya-Rose Craig is a twenty-two-year-old British-Bangladeshi diversity activist and author better known as Bird Girl for the blog she started aged just eleven. In her travel memoir, the founder of Black2Nature reveals how birdwatching kept her family together when her mother was struggling with an undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

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Satish Kumar is a global peace activist and author, campaigning for ecological regeneration, social justice, and spiritual fulfilment. In 1962 he made an 8,000 mile pilgrimage from Gandhi’s grave in Delhi to Washington in protest against nuclear weapons and has been inspiring change ever since as Editor of Resurgence, the magazine described by The Guardian as the 'spiritual and ecological flagship of the environmental movement'.

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Andy Cato is one half of the electric music duo Groove Armada and founder of Wildfarmed, recognised by the French President for his services to farming. In 2007 he sold his music rights and ploughed the profits into a piece of land in the Pyrenees. His inspiration? A sobering article on the environmental consequences of food production, at the end of which it said. “If you don’t like it, don’t depend upon it.” For Cato there is no debate; its not wilding or farming. It’s a great big AND.

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The life of the comedian and broadcaster Ruby Wax was turned upside down in 2008 when she committed herselt to a psychiatric hospital. Today, Wax has an OBE and a Master's in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University and knows that by talking about her own experiences she opens the door for others, bringing the black dog out of the shadows.  But still, she says she isn’t a mental health campaigner.

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The founder of Survival International, Robin Hanbury-Tenison OBE, has been described as ‘an explorer with a conscience’ for his work protecting rainforests and the people living amongst them. The story of how and why his son Merlin, a veteran of three tours in Afghanistan, created the Thousand Year Trust to protect the Atlantic temperate rainforests surrounding their home on Bodmin moor is beautifully told in Our Oaken Bones, published on March 20th 2025.

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Some of you may have noticed Jim Murray at last’s year’s 2024 March for Clean Water carrying a very large fish. Best known for roles in Primeval and The Crown, the actor, artist and activist had his life turned upside down in 2009 when he and his wife the actress Sarah Parish lost their baby daughter to a congenital heart disease. Seeking solace in fishing, Jim became aware of the plight of our rivers. Now he actively campaigns for clean water, founding Activist Anglers, hosting a podcast and championing the salmon.

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Roger Tempest and Paris Ackrill, who are shortly to be married, have spent eleven years creating a truly transformative retreat centre at Broughton Sanctuary. Previously Broughton Hall, the stately with no less than 56 chimneys was home to the Roger’s recusant Catholic family for a thousand years. But now it's time for change, say the couple, who describe a rising of ‘an unarticulated movement’. Changing its name to Broughton Sanctuary, they have regenerated 3000 acres, created Avalon, a state-of the art wellbeing centre and “as without, so within” are now hosting formative visionaries including Dr Zach Bush, Bruce Damer and Lawrence Bloom, Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Urban Management. On this episode of Hope Springs we discuss the need for a spiritual Davos and the reasons why Broughton Sanctuary is described as “the birthing place of a new humanity” by Andrew Harvey, founder of Sacred Activism.

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Galahad Clark is a cobbler by birth and trade who is on a mission to change the way we connect with the earth through a shoe inspired by the sand bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. In this episode of Hope Springs, the co-founder of Vivo Barefoot talks about what he learned from indigenous people, about his Quaker roots grounded in the Clark shoes legacy and about a little film called Shoespiracy with a big message: like Big Agriculture and Big Pharma, Big Shoe with its big, padded soles is quite literally disconnecting us from the natural world. We learn that had it not been for his mother’s sudden illness and death when Galahad was just twenty, he might never have found his way into making a shoe honouring our connection with the land.

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