Clear Direction

I first came across Walter Jehne in a small outback town you may never have heard of, Dubbo, in New South Wales, Australia.

By complete chance we both happened to be there on the same day in May 2015. I was from London. He had come from a bit nearer, Canberra. My motel, with even more synchronicity, was across the road from his four person meeting, to which I was invited.

My heart sang not being stranded in Dubbo with an empty day stretching ahead. Four years later my jaw dropped when I joined a webinar with Walter, organised by Sheila and Christopher Cooke of the UK Savory Network hub.

In the Dubbo meeting I was not exposed to Walter’s solution for the planet, just the campaigning details on how to push the message of soil in Australia. Here in the comfort of my own home I was mesmerised.

Usually turned off by statistics, because of my inability to remember them, Walter held me captive for two hours, still possible in the novelty of pre-lockdown Zoom. His fluency, and his ability to take the overall picture beyond the normal narrative, was, and is, extraordinary.

Not to forget the novelty of listening to a man totally at odds with the doom-laden subject of climate change. Here he was on my screen, smiling cheerily, and giving hope. My intuition told me it wasn’t because he’s a mad scientist with his head in the clouds. It's because he knows he has the answer, and that it's not too late.

Before I met him I was already focusing on soil and livestock for carbon capture, but had not moved on to connect the potential of soil with the oceans and rising temperatures. That is the crux of Walter’s message, backed by thousands of years of planetary evolution, and when you hear him speak you want the whole world to take notice.

Well they did in India. 

On May 11th we have a rare opportunity to hear Walter in London, six days off the plane from his tour of India, where he spoke to senior government officials about the successful regeneration of a million Indian small-holdings, a project where he served as advisor.