Earth Month 2025 - Rewilding Conference & Closing Event

🌿 Rewilding Scotland: From Past to Future 🌍

Scotland’s landscapes have been shaped by centuries of deforestation, but today, rewilding is rewriting the story. This Earth Month 2025 event will bring together experts, artists, and activists to explore how we can restore ecosystems, strengthen biodiversity, and redefine our connection with nature.

📅 Glasgow on May 22

6:00 pm: Doors Open

6:30 pm: Join us for a conversation with Pierre-Henri Guignard, (former Secretary General of COP 21 in Paris) and Stephanie Kiel (Affric Highlands), and an introduction by Alan Watson Featherstone (ecologist, nature photographer and writer) on the current opportunities and challenges around rewilding. Through engaging discussions and interactive sessions, we’ll explore global rewilding efforts, Scotland’s unique challenges, and tangible ways to support land regeneration.

7:30 pm: Break

8:00 pm: The discussion will be followed by a screening of “Pourquoi on se bat” /(“Why We Fight”, 2023) by activist Camille Étienne and Solal Moisan. 

The film tells the story of Camille Étienne, french young climate activist, who sails to Iceland with her two best friends. The plan is to see  climate change effects with their own eyes and film the melting of the ice capes.  On the way, they will battle the elements, but also the invisible enemy that hides deep inside our most intimate beliefs: denial, unconsciousness, fear and defeatism. Step by step, they will fight to speed up the global awareness on climate change. Their goal : get  a lucid optimism to rise again inside every one of us.

Our Guests and Speakers:

Pierre-Henri Guignard served as the Secretary General of COP 21 in Paris in 2015, the COP edition that resulted in the Paris Agreement. He was also France's Special Envoy for the Alliance for the Conservation of Rainforests (2019-2023). His diplomatic career includes positions as French ambassador to Panama and Argentina, as well as France's permanent observer to the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington. In Paris, he was Adviser and Chief of Staff to two Ministers of Foreign Affairs – Mr Dominique de Villepin and Mr Michel Barnier. Throughout his career, he has strongly advocated for rainforest conservation, highlighting their vital role in climate regulation and biodiversity, and has actively participated in international forums, including the United Nations, to advance this mission. Now a board member of the French Association for the UN, he is also locally elected in Southwestern France. A writer, he recently published a short biography of naturalist Aimé Bonpland who, alongside Alexander von Humboldt, chartered the wild forests of South America.

Stephanie Kiel is a respected Ornithologist and Ecologist with over 14 years of consultancy experience, with particular specialism in providing construction environment and ecological services for development projects, wind farms and hydro schemes. With little hesitation she moved to Scotland in January 2005 and worked for several ecological consultancies. Her work focused on the planning, construction and operation of renewable energy projects in the Highlands, allowing her to develop an in-depth knowledge and understanding of upland ecology and land management, project management and budgeting.In 2021, Stephanie Kiel joined Trees for Life as the Team Leader for the Affric Highlands rewilding area. 

Alan Watson Featherstone is based in the Findhorn Community in the northeast of Scotland. In 1986, he founded the award-winning conservation charity, Trees for Life, which works to restore the Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands, and was its executive director for almost 30 years. During that time it became the leading organisation working to restore the Caledonian Forest in Scotland and took on ownership of the 10,000 acre Dundreggan Estate in Glenmoriston as its flagship project for native woodland recovery. Through his work with Trees for Life, he has helped to provide the inspiration for other ecological restoration projects in the Scottish Borders, on Dartmoor in England and for the creation of the Yendegaia National Park in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. He has also founded the Restoring the Earth project, to promote the restoration of the planet’s degraded ecosystems as the most important task for humanity in the 21st century.

Camille Étienneis a French ecological activist, writer and director. She is a member of the "Avant l'Orage" duo with Solal Moisan, with which she has co-directed the short films "GENERATION", "DESOBEIR" and "GLACIER". After studying at Sciences Po Paris, she quickly became involved in many political battles, striving to popularize new and alternative ways of cohabiting with our world in the face of impending climate crisis. She has often intervened at the European Parliament along with fellow activists Greta Thunberg and Adelaïde Charlier for climate related questions, has made apparitions on national television calling for civil disobedience and a search for meaningful work in a slower society, and has written in left-wing newspapers such as Socialter or L'Humanité.

Founder of the #LookDown action, she calls for the prohibition of deep sea mining across the globe. She is also an outspoken member of the #StopEACOP initiative, speaking out against French giant TotalEnergies' construction of a crude oil pipeline in East Africa. She is in Vanity Fair's list of the 50 most influential French women of 2020, alongside Adèle Haenel or Virginie Despentes.