Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Raised on a remote farm at 7,000 ft in Kenya, with leopards and hyenas the greatest challenges, Simon has passed through diverse fields since agricultural college, including leading-edge work in computer-based training, telecoms, new banking software, and the first blueberry farm on Exmoor, UK. Latterly, he has been breaking new ground in Community Rangeland holistic management in the vast Northern frontier districts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania.
Simon’s presentation shares important lessons learnt from a decade of tackling the degradation of landscape-scale grasslands. By taking a disciplined and holistic perspective, incredible results have been achieved, promising huge possibilities for the 40% of our planet’s land areas that are desertifying grasslands, with knock-on effects for climate and human prosperity. Involving cultural traditions as well as ecology opens up a more inspiring future. Simon says: “The importance of the human interior world – an unconscious obstacle usually missing from ‘solutions’ – has demonstrated the importance of a holistic approach that addresses this. This interior world is significant in all of us who are unwittingly subject to its forces, as we are often diverted and constrained by its unseen grip.”
Recorded at the Glastonbury Symposium, July 2025
Raised on a remote farm at 7,000 ft in Kenya, with leopards and hyenas the greatest challenges, Simon has passed through diverse fields since agricultural college, including leading-edge work in computer-based training, telecoms, new banking software, and the first blueberry farm on Exmoor, UK. Latterly, he has been breaking new ground in Community Rangeland holistic management in the vast Northern frontier districts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania.
Simon’s presentation shares important lessons learnt from a decade of tackling the degradation of landscape-scale grasslands. By taking a disciplined and holistic perspective, incredible results have been achieved, promising huge possibilities for the 40% of our planet’s land areas that are desertifying grasslands, with knock-on effects for climate and human prosperity. Involving cultural traditions as well as ecology opens up a more inspiring future. Simon says: “The importance of the human interior world – an unconscious obstacle usually missing from ‘solutions’ – has demonstrated the importance of a holistic approach that addresses this. This interior world is significant in all of us who are unwittingly subject to its forces, as we are often diverted and constrained by its unseen grip.”
Recorded at the Glastonbury Symposium, July 2025
