Awe-inspiring Eden
Tim Smit, co-founder and Chief Executive of the Eden Project in Cornwall, talks about is background, the Eden Project’s work with schools and why a ‘doom and gloom’ approach to the environment won’t wash with kids.
Tim Smit was born in a small Dutch fishing village, he was educated in Britain and was briefly an archaeologist before becoming a successful record producer. Seeking pastures new, he settled in Cornwall and helped to ‘discover’ the Lost Gardens of Heligan - documenting the amazing story in a book and TV series. He then co-founded the Eden Project, the awe-inspiring global garden built in a 34-acre reclaimed china pit and designed to promote new thinking on sustainability and the relationship between plants, people and resources.
It’s one of the stickiest days of an extraordinarily hot summer. “I think you’re probably expecting me to say ‘ah, it’s global warming’,” says Tim Smit whose gardens of Eden are home to not only 250,000 different species of plants but also some world-leading philosophies and facilities. “I remember starting out as an archaeologist in the summer of 1976 when all the crop-marks came up for the first time. I try not to read anything into the odd summer of excessive heat and I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying ‘this is a sign of things to come’ like some latter-day Jeremiah.”
Tim has a healthy mistrust of many of today’s eco-terms and conditions. “I’m very suspicious of the connotations of being called an environmentalist,” he says. “It reminds me of the critics of the Make Poverty History campaign. What do they think the alternative should be? Similarly, to be uninterested in the future of the planet seems a bizarre proposition to me.
“But I’m certainly not from the hair shirt, sandal and nut cutlets school of thinking.” Tim takes a similar approach to entertaining and educating the thousands of school visitors to the Eden project each year.
“The ‘we’re all doomed’ environment debate is not where we go at all as that provides no grounds for optimism. We see our role as making pupils and teachers see how totally dependent they are on the environment, living and working with it rather than apart from it.
“We are, to a great extent, pushing an open door with them as it seems that many schools are composting like crazy, recycling, creating wormeries and pressurising parents to use lowenergy light bulbs.
“It’s quite difficult to find things that haven’t already entered their airspace.” To keep things interesting, the Eden Project bases its education programmes on a mixture of hands-on practical experience and a sense of jeopardy.
“We encourage children, for example, to think about kitting themselves out for an expedition to the Amazon so they have to learn about how to feed themselves, what the dangers are and what they have to do to survive.
“We also have a superchef challenge in which the children have to go around the biomes at Eden to find ingredients for a cake that is then baked for them on the premises. And we’re huge fans of teachers and we like to do special events for them to get them excited about teaching.” A recent Eden event saw eminent scientists judging films about environmental concerns made by students.
“The quality was amazing and the films revealed a very sophisticated understanding about a wide range of issues and how a lot of what happens is connected to politics and not simply goodwill. The kids realise that all the doom and gloom messages have been done to death and they appear to prefer a more confrontational approach.” This attention to detail contrasts starkly with Tim’s own school days; concerns about the environment were not addressed at all and his first curiosities were stirred at university in the mid- 70s where he witnessed Greenpeace campaigning at first hand.
After university, Tim became deputy county archaeologist for Durham, based in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle. “It sounds grand but there was just me and the county archaeologist who is now, incidentally, in charge of the digs at Pompeii. I have to say my contribution to archaeology was a big fat zero. I participated in a number of prehistoric digs and I used to love Friday afternoons when the public brought their finds to us for identification.
“But there were no lost civilisations for me and, while it was a great job, it was so poorly paid I couldn’t afford to stay.”
So Tim decided to chance his arm in the music industry and moved to London with a rock band in 1978 at the height of the punk/new wave explosion. “We thought we were God’s gift and could make a good living. In London, we met thousands of other musicians who thought exactly the same. Unfortunately, we made 1970s Genesis look simple and concise. It was absolutely loopy and, in hindsight, an act of sheer wilful anti-commercialism.”
Another change of career beckoned when he met an engineer who had the run of Abbey Road studios when they were not booked out to the rich and famous. Tim’s life changed completely when a singer booked for a session called in sick one morning. “The previous evening, I had been introduced - purely by chance - to an opera singer called Louise Tucker. I phoned her up and asked if she’d like to do the session. We made the record, Midnight Blue, and it went on to be a number 1 in 13 countries. It was pure serendipity.”
Tim went on to produce records for the likes of The Nolans, Barry Manilow and Alvin Stardust but claims that, in retrospect, his biggest contribution to music was ‘to do a Captain Oates and leave’. Moving to Cornwall, his life changed again when he teamed up with the owner of the Heligan site; this time, digging holes in the ground proved to be more productive, particularly when the Cornish hurricane of January 1990 uprooted trees and helped to reveal the treasures that lay beneath the surface.
He followed that success with the Eden Project, the complex of massive, space-age greenhouses that features what Tim calls ‘a living theatre of plants’. “I don’t know what the future holds,” he says. “We’ve got new developments happening at Eden all the time so I don’t envisage changing for a while. But there could always be a little more serendipity around the corner.” www.edenproject.com