What's the Eden Project all about?

[Music] so we took a china clay pit 20 years ago and we transformed it we put a biggest greenhouse in the world in it we put a smaller greenhouse it's pretty big we put the core building we made 83 000 tons of soil from recycled waste the pit was that shape when we started so we cut the tops off put it in the bottom to make it more suited to people than to mountain goats we planted millions of different plants from different environments around the world and we created this global garden so you could immerse yourself in the different environments of the world you could meet all the crops that you use from blue jeans to coffee beans and to see how by interacting with the world and everything being interconnected and how you act responsibly you can leave the world a better place so here we are in the rainforest biome largest rainforest in captivity 200 meters long 100 metres wide 50 meters high and it weighs about 600 tons and the air inside it weighs about 600 tons so it's a very very light structure and it takes inspiration from bees honeycomb hexagons maximum strength using minimum materials so we built it as a big lean to greenhouse there's a massive wall over there which absorbs heat in the day reflects it out at night and each of these biome hexagons has got three layers of etfe this sort of recyclable plastic cling film with attitude blown apart with air very very insulated environment so we've managed to recreate a rain forest in cornwall and if you can recreate a rainforest in cornwall you can regrow the amazon [Music] so what's the rainforest climate eden all about well it's divided up into this journey so you come in and there's four different worlds rainforests so you go through four different parts of the world the plants in them look similar to me and maybe to some of you but they are different in each area and they're just designed to live in that environment and in each of those rainforest environments tropical islands west africa southeast asia and tropical south america we tell a different story of biodiversity we tell a different story of people who live in those areas a piece of rainforest the size of this biome disappears every 12 seconds so by the time i finished this piece several of these by and worth the rainforest would have would have been cut down their storehouses of biodiversity storehouses for future crops provide livelihoods for people within those regions and act as the world's bridge they keep the world four degrees cooler than it would be if they weren't here how did they do that there's big white clouds that are above them white reflects heat so it gets reflected back up they sweat and that cools the whole area they turn the carbon dioxide in the air into trees and from there into dead leaves on the ground and into peat bogs under the ground the biggest peat bog in the world in west africa is the largest carbon store bigger than the rain forest itself so they all store carbon they make weather which makes the winds go around the world they produce our oxygen as well a little bit but they they take most of that back in so really they are the climate regulators and the weather makers so welcome to the weather maker [Music] i'm lindsay brummett i'm the program director here at eden and i look after everything to do with our communities and everything that's away from eden so engaging people with eden who may live elsewhere in the country eden is all about connecting people with one another and the natural world and what i do is the kind of one another connection bit and what that means is we work with people all over the country and indeed all over the world a good friend of mine chris hines often says there's a trade-off for living on planet earth and that is that we give something back and so that's what we work with people and communities to do so give them ideas that they can do something where they live that makes a difference to them and to their surrounding neighborhood and the reason why that's important is if we can build people's community resilience and people get to know one another we're better placed to face the challenges that are coming so whether those are social change political change or environmental change something like a pandemic people better place to deal with that if they know people around them and so that's what we spend our time doing kind of building social capital on a mass scale across the uk so the big walk was about taking people on an epic journey across our four nations in the uk walking from point to point where you slow down you take things in and meeting with amazing community projects right across the country um and shining a light on the good stuff that they're doing and it was a lovely project for so many reasons not only the the journey that the walkers go on which is really kind of you know it's tiring they're walking 20 30 miles a day for days on end but when they turn up at these projects there's so much joy that comes out of the projects you know you've got everything from people working with older people youth projects community energy projects uh cleanups environmental projects food projects inclusion so many things and people respond to the things that matter to them where they live and that's what's really heartwarming about the work that we do we see so many ordinary people who just do stuff because they care if we can encourage people to take stuff on and to do things that matter to them we'll see a change in the social structure of the uk as people start to feel more positive and more hopeful about the direction of travel because they feel they're in control of it global situations like we're in at the moment if you boil that down everyone experiences it locally you your experience of the pandemic is in your town in your village in your city in your house and so how do we work with people at that local level on some of these big hairy issues it's a very crazy place to work and i would say that there's never a day that's the same as another and i guess that makes it all the more fun really my name's rosie and i'm a technician on the new living landscapes team i work in the mediterranean biome and i've worked here for three and a half years and prior to that i volunteered for three and a half years both in this biome and the rainforest [Music] uh okay well it's definitely not like other jobs i've ever had i i used to be an i.t project manager so i used to work in the uk and overseas and as you can imagine it was very different this is fabulous you know you walk in on a monday morning and there's the most wonderful scents and aromas the birds are singing the plants you know were just always astonish you it's like no other monday morning anywhere else [Music] we all work on some of the areas we share them but the ones i focus on and absolutely love are south africa the citrus grove which i'm sitting in and then in terms of crops i look after the succulent farm which is our new exhibit for the winter and in the summer the aubergine exhibit most of the trees that you'll see in the citrus grove which are lovely mature trees have the kind of familiar fruits that you'll see in the supermarkets the other classic which our visitors love is the citron and it has amazing large very large fruits which everybody think are enormous lemons but it's actually the parent of the lemon the modern hybrid lemon and the citron is a really interesting plant because it actually has comes in three different forms and one of the forms is this amazing buddha's hand it's native to china it's very special it's very weird looking it doesn't actually have any juice but in these fingers is pith which is actually not as bitter as normal citrus so it can actually be candied and the zest is incredibly fragrant it's got the most gorgeous gorgeous smell and it has medicinal uses as well so the peel can be dried and it's supposed to be a tonic but the amazing thing and the point that i love about this tree it's it's actually come back to health it was really um not particularly good for quite a few years it rarely had fruit and they usually dropped off after a few weeks and last year it suddenly decided to have fruit after a lot of watering and feeding and careful pruning um so i'm very proud of it and this year it's stunning so the other use is um in china it is used as a new year's gift and it's also used as a buddhist offering it symbolizes long life and happiness and to me this little tree absolutely bursting with fruit at the end of what has been an absolutely awful year um can give us all hope that we will have long life and happiness my name's emma smart and i'm the lead storyteller here at eden i have a fantastic job before we tell stories about all the plants around the rainforest biome and the mediterranean biome and the outside gardens but every one of our stories we tell tells the connection of people and plants the absolute reliance that we have on the natural world and how important it is for us to regain the balance of it which brings me here to the tropical islands and this is one of my favorite stories to tell and it is a story about the relationship between plants and people now i bet you've been asked once or twice what things you would take to a deserted island well this story is about what a canoe full of polynesians took to their deserted islands it was around 2000 years ago in the ancient world the south pacific islands were inhabited by clusters of coastal communities but for some reason whether it was through war or a natural disaster a island of polynesians decided they had to leave their lands and travel north to new lands now at that point nobody had ever been north before so it was a journey of discovery a journey of courage they set sail in double-hulled canoes big enough to hold families and stalls but crucially they took with them plants plants that they could survive with now these weren't just plants for food albeit they took many food plants with them but this was also plants for construction like bamboo plants that made bowls like gourds medicine plants like spices and turmeric now these collectively were known as the canoe plants and we have many of them around this rainforest biome there were about 27 they thought they sailed using natural navigation skills it was truly remarkable what they did they used the stars the currents on the seas the debris migratory birds and finally after 2 000 miles they found the islands of hawaii the pacific ocean is immense so it's a bit like finding a needle in a haystack this voyage is acknowledged today as one of the most incredible voyages that mankind has ever taken now hawaii was thought to be at that point uninhabited so these brave plucky polynesians are thought to be the ancestors of the hawaiians today and the canoe plants all survived and they are the staple crops of hawaii so i ask again what would you take to a deserted island it would have to be plants we all need plants to survive and that's why we have to take care of them [Music] so we are in the mediterranean biome now and i'm standing in the grape exhibit now this grape exhibit tells a marvelous story about wild versus cultivation and it tells that by using dionysus god of the vine we can see him depicted here as a untamed wild bull now this was a wonderful work of art made by tim shaw right at the start of the eden project about 20 years ago and it is one of the most photographed exhibits we have here but let me tell you its story dionysus's father was zeus king of all gods but his mother was a mere mortal princess which made him half god half man now this gave him a human quality he enjoyed being with humans he enjoyed giving them joy and pleasure he gained many followers from the minorities the outcast and the poor mainly women now on his wanderings around the mediterranean basin he met an old man who showed him the power of the vine how it could make wine and how wine could give joy and pleasure so dionysus became god of the vine and he took his followers and the wine into the woods and the rites of dionysus began a cult of drunken revelry [Music] but like most good parties things started to go a little bit too far and people started to call the women the wild women of the woods the main ads the maynards lost all reasoning we can see them here in their crazed state they wrecked nature destroying everything as they went they became greedy and considered only themselves they carved up the landscape but dionysus suddenly realized that things had gone out of hand he needed to put the balance back between human and nature so we could all live in harmony so he took his main adds back to the woods and he metamorphosed them into oak trees where they found peace in regaining the balance between human actions and nature dionysus realized that nature soon recovered nature came back it is all about balance my name is peter stewart i'm the executive director for outreach and development here at eden project i start from planet earth and i go 20 50 9 billion people on the planet you know about seven now so how do you feed them water them keep them happy stop them fighting huge kind of challenges and this place um here at eden is kind of built as a symbol of transformation what people can do when they come together to do things so everything is possible you know the line of the future remains ours to make is really really well and truly embedded in there's a problem in it though there's a problem in it we're restricted to about a million visitors a year so when you're kind of then starting to think about how do i do 60 million people within the uk seven billion people on the planet and start to think like that then for me what my job is is taking the essence of the little red tag the eden project of seeing what could happen and take the essence of here of hope and transformation and take it to people who may actually never come to eden we'd love them to come by the way but you know they may never be able to do that so how do you do that so for best part of over a decade i've worked on ideas where you know people can do things in terms of transformation right in their kind of own backyard without doing that the biggest one um that we've been able to work on for that period is the thing called the big lunch and basically it was a very very simple premise a proposition what would happen if you could simply stop the whole of the uk for about four hours and invite people to sit down and have lunch with the neighbours so everything kind of stops don't give a reason why but just do it and we started um back in 2009 and i think we probably had something about 300 000 people participating when you think about 60 million i mean that's really really small so we called it like a light snackette at the time but actually when you research them it moved people in a completely different way fast forward to where we are now and over a decade we've had over six million people participating every single year and when you research the heck out of that what we find that we're accredited we're doing is that we are credited with building social capital on a mass scale what you're doing is when you think about here hope transformation you're doing that right in people's backyards and some of the most hardest to reach communities across the land so the idea of transformation is embedded in that in that in that concept back in 2010 we had been going with the with the big lunch for a while and it caught the eye of of buckingham palace of all places and 2012 was going to be the the year of the the celebrate the diamond jubilee for her majesty the queen and so tim schmidt um got uh an invitation for us to go and have a chat with the uh private secretary up at the house at the big house in buckingham palace so myself and tim were gonna go and we also brought a lady a lady fantastic lady called linda quinn from the national lottery because they had funded us up to this point anyway we get to the gates i mean i'm not joking everybody i'm sure looking at this festival of discovery if i said to you you were going to go to buckingham palace tomorrow morning we wouldn't have to have a conversation about what you were going to wear would you you i mean you wouldn't you know but so linda and i we didn't have a conversation we arranged to meet in the park just before buckingham palace i turned up she was looking a million dollars i was there in a suit and a tie and we arranged to meet tim outside of the gate so we come outside and standing outside buckingham palace and tim arrives um jean's check shirt and i know i don't know if you ever watch that program bread and you see freddie boswell i mean his hair was absolutely extreme it was absolutely going wild and he had this bag with him and we just linda and i looked at it we went up to the gate and the policeman said can i help you looking at myself and linda and tim put his head in between us and the policeman said i'm really sorry sir can you back off a minute we'll be with you in a second and i went uh no officer i'm really sorry he's with us and to which uh to which uh the police say i'm really really sorry sir but but no i'm just oh i'm really sorry i'm really sorry so he reached into his bag which is about this size and he pulled out a jacket which had you could not have had more creases in it and he threw this through shack put it on basically put it on is that okay now officer to which the policeman said i don't think so sir but we'll try shall we to which he radioed through sure enough we went up into this incredible room private secretary and we all had place names tim apologized profusely to edward young the private secretary to say that he was wearing the devil's clothing um and and we sat down and incredible meeting in the fact that we since that that meeting started us on a relationship which we were then an official partner of the diamond jubilee celebrations in that year eight and a half million people kind of took part across the uk not only that we were then taking it through into the commonwealth and we got something like 45 46 countries all participating and since that time we've been really really honoured because her royal highness the duchess of cornwall has been our royal patron and subsequently to that we've done things in in ghana in barbados in rwanda and we've been an integral part of the commonwealth heads of government meeting only two years ago so the essence of this charity has gone out far afield and although i can't control our esteemed founder in terms of his dress sense but hey we got over the line in what we did so yeah i am sam kendall and i am lucky enough to be education manager here at eden based in this amazing building the core our task is to try and take those big eden stories and messages about our dependency on nature our connections natural world the problems that we're facing and the things that we can all do about them so giant complex fascinating amazing stories and figure out ways to make them accessible to children and young people last year we welcomed 53 000 school visitors here from all over the uk and all over the world so it's kind of big numbers but a lot of them are only here for a really short amount of time so we have to create really compelling engaging delightful learning experiences that are really going to suck young people into these important stories that we want to tell [Music] our approach is is kind of crafted through these these years and these thousands of young people have experienced of how you really engage and kind of grab young people by the collar so that they really want to engage with you on these topics and be excited about them you don't do that by starting with the facts actually what we do is we start with stories just like the rest of the eden project we know that people are hardwired for stories and if you want to bring people with you then stories are a brilliant way to do it we can't teach children who come here everything about sustainability it's about equipping them to be the kind of person who can figure out those solutions and make those choices for themselves so i'm dave hunt i'm the chief executive of eden project international and here we are in our wonderful foundation building so not part of the biomes but you know this is where it all happens so you've got the international team you've got finance you've got hr you've got everyone up here a few years ago we decided that we'd had a fair amount of success here in the uk and that actually you know we're an educational charity we're trying to connect people to natural world and we felt that we needed other locations around the world where we could actually allow people to have their own conversations their own dialogue about their connections with the natural world um and so now we're working on sites in qingdao in china one of those small cities of 8.3 million people that actually most of us have never heard of before we started work there ground has broken there uh we're working in australia um down the great ocean road uh working new zealand in the uh the former or the red zone uh in christchurch where the earthquake happened uh and then closer to home um because you have to realize you know this is cornwall so anything beyond the tamar is international uh we have got a site up in morkham uh on the fabulous morecambe bay uh that we hope to open in 2024 uh we've also got a wonderful site in derry and we're working on new feasibility up in in dundee and all of these sites are about um bringing people you know finding their connection with the natural world telling stories about the natural world so they're not copies they try to actually uh you know work through our us humans our connection with the planet and to remind people that we only get one planet we're here we're in a form of china clay pit so i was born and bred in in cornwall and actually this to be honest was a place that you were probably going to leave when i was growing up because there was no industry it was dying uh you know there was there was actually hope seemed to be evaporating from from mid-corner and even has been part of a revolution actually not just eden but it's been part of a revolution that has seen actually people like yourself having careers here in uh in cornwall um and if you like bringing hope back to the area so what we like when we look for new sites is we like sites where there can be transformation and that can be community transformation that can be a physical site transformation like here so around the world in qingdao for example we're working on a site that used to have prawn breeding in christchurch in new zealand it's about uh you know where the earthquake happened uh in the red zone in anglesey in australia it's all about a former coal mine but it's not about the restoration of the coal mine there it's about about how does a mining company leave and leave a legacy actually after they've gone there are so many themes that you can play on in the natural world so here if you like we're in the theater of plants and people but the story that we want to tell in morecambe and also in qingdao is about water and how we use water as humans so the power of water uh the water abundance water scarcity and so on so loads of different things that you can that you can riff on if you like and what we hope to create is if you like a sisterhood a network of sites across the world that yes we'll share some content but we'll each have their unique theme and their unique place within our within that system

Channel: Eden Project Communities

Views: 8,565

Keywords: community, nature, Eden Project, Festival of Discovery, Largest rainforest in captivity

Id: nKFNIjllurc

Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020