From the importance of getting children outdoors to the power of curiosity, natural history and seeing the world through his own children's eyes, we caught up with naturalist, explorer and presenter Steve Backshall for our latest Explorer Series interview.
For Steve, nature is everything. It's where he's found some of the finest days of his life, what he feels most passionate about protecting, and something he hopes his children will grow up to treasure just as much.
We asked him about the importance of getting the next generation outside, finding adventure closer to home, what makes someone an explorer and the moments in nature that have stayed with him most.
Here's what he had to say.
Why is it more important than ever to teach kids to appreciate nature?
I think it's more important now than ever to teach kids to appreciate nature, because we have so many things that are calling out for their attention, not all of which are good. Anyone who spends time outdoors, surrounded by wildlife and nature, knows it's good for you and makes you feel good. It's good for your mental health, it's good for your physical health, it can offer so many things to our youngsters, and we just need, by whatever means, to get them outside and get them loving it.
Getting kids off screen and outdoors is like one of the big challenges in my life, and I have to be very careful to make sure that I'm not being preachy and not shouting that screen time in the digital world is a bad thing, because that's something that's immediately going to switch kids off. They know it's cool. So what you've got to do is make sure that the outdoors is cooler, and there are lots and lots of ways of doing that. There are so many things you can do; you can head out and surf a wave, go out and try to find a cat shark in a seagrass meadow. Go and find a bizarre rainbow coloured nudibranch in a rock pool. The things that we have on our doorstep here in Cornwall are way, way cooler than anything that can be found in the digital world. We just have to make sure that people know that.
What does nature mean to you personally?
Nature to me personally is everything. It's the core of who I am. It's given me all of the finest days of my life and is the thing that I treasure most and want to protect the most. Now, as a dad, more than ever, I want to protect nature, to make sure that my kids can enjoy it and get the same things from it that I have.
How can more families inject adventure into their lives?
So the question of how more families can inject nature into their lives is a complex one, and very much dependent on where you live. We can all go on exotic holidays and take time out to go and do super, super cool things. But the trick is the everyday. The trick is finding things in your own backyard that can still be fun and enticing and full of information and knowledge. For me, things like learning about invertebrates, because the bug world works anywhere. You can find incredible mini beasts, even in your playground in the middle of an inner-city area; you can find bugs in a window box and in the local park no matter where you are. But also, you can learn things like birdsong. The second you start to understand what songs are coming from which birds, what those birds might be saying and what other animals they might be reacting to, it completely changes your experience of being outside. So I think that learning as many of these skills and information as you can, and then just being curious whenever you're outside and wanting to learn about the world you're seeing, hearing, and smelling.
How do you feel personally when you get outside with your own family?
For me, when I get outside with my own family, it's a blessing, and it's particularly a blessing because as a parent to quite young, quite feral kids, I know that if they spend a lot of time outside running wild, then they will eat better, sleep better, be more regulated, be kinder to each other, and just be overall nicer, happier, healthier people.
And I think that anyone who has young kids and does just that- takes them out and lets them go absolutely bananas for a little while- will see that change in them, and you get completely the opposite if they're sat in front of the telly all day long: they come out at the end of it, and they're grumpy and moody, and they don't sleep so well, and they don't eat so well.
It is an absolute free gift for parents, and I just want as many parents as possible to know that it's out there and free for them.
What do you think it takes to call yourself an explorer?
I've never been very comfortable with the title because it seems incredibly smug and pretentious. The only problem is, what else am I going to call myself?
I think what it genuinely takes to be an explorer is a sense of seeing the world as something that needs explaining. It is seeing it as somewhere that still has so much for us left to learn, and we can tend to be quite arrogant and think that we have massive brains and we know everything, but that's far from true.
You can be an explorer looking down a microscope at microbes and invertebrates. You can be an explorer heading to the stars or the deep sea. But effectively, the second your mindset is about seeing the world as something that needs more explanation, then you are an explorer of sorts.
Has there ever been a moment on an expedition where everyone around you was excited and you were privately thinking, I do not want to do this?
Usually it's the other way around. I am a bit like a labradoodle puppy, in that everything I see is the best thing I've ever seen. I have endless enthusiasm, sometimes to the point of being proper annoying and irritating the hell out of everyone else on my expeditions. I think because I am a naturalist, I get excitement out of seeing new flowers, new epiphytes, new bugs that I haven't seen before. Even from seeing a cloud formation that I've not seen before.
So it's far more likely that I'm the one who's going to be super excited and they won't be.
What have animals taught you about humans that humans haven't?
I think that there is a simplicity to animal life that we could learn an awful lot from. I think that all of our closest relatives share very similar things that they need in their day-to-day life, and once things start getting complicated - once you start having an embarrassment of different relationships that you're trying to manage at any one time and, you know, managing between different tribes and troops and groups, particularly with our primate cousins- you see the happiness quotient start to fall. And I find that having moments in my life where I embrace simplicity, and that simplicity may be nothing more than how far I walk, how my breathing is going, where I'm going to stop and what I'm going to eat. Nothing more complex than that is often when I'm at my happiest.
We in the modern world are bombarded with so much information, so many distractions, so many choices, and that's not always good for us. So every once in a while, taking the time to just sit and breathe, just sit and watch a view like a sunset, can be the things that really give you proper joy.
Is there a smell that means adventure to you?
Yes, there are. There are lots. The smell of freshly ground coffee always reminds me of the first cover on a jungle expedition. The smell of musty, wet boots reminds me of the end of the day when you're maybe not quite so full of energy. Petrichor, the smell in the air after it rains when it's been hot, warm and dry.
That's something that instantly transports me to expeditions. They say that the sense of smell is the one that's most closely linked to memory, and I think that's definitely true, because every once in a while, you get a whiff of a certain kind of herb and it transports you to the Mediterranean; you get a whiff of a certain particular plant, particularly the chlorophyll from cut plants, and instantly I could imagine myself with a machete in hand, hacking through the rainforest.
So yeah, smell has that power more than just about anything else.
If you could give every child one outdoor skill before they leave primary school, what would it be?
I'm gonna have to be boring and say, swimming. You know, when Helen and I got together, and we talked about what we would give to our kids and what we would insist they would learn, we were actually pretty good. Helen's a massive overachiever, but she didn't for a second say, "Our kids are going to be athletes. Our kids are going to play tennis. Our kids are going to play football.”
But swimming is something else entirely. Swimming not only means there is a whole environment that is accessible to you that wouldn't be otherwise. Not only are you able to enjoy the river, the sea, the lake, the rock pool with ease and comfort, but it's the skill that is most likely to save your life. So if I had one really old-school, old-fashioned thing that I would compel all children to have to do, it would be to learn to swim.
After everything you've done, what are you still desperate to see with your own eyes?
I have a fair few things that are still on my wish list. But I think that it's all about seeing things through my kids' eyes, seeing them experiencing things that I love and seeing them excited by it. This year alone, my kids have had some incredible opportunities. But the thing that I have loved seeing the most this year was my little boy, Logan, swimming with grey seals and having a grey seal that just decided it really liked him in his face, turning upside down and looking into his eyes. I mean, I feel like I want to burst into tears even talking about it. So that, I think, is the thing that I have had the most joy from this year, and I hope I will have the most joy from something else next year, because I'm seeing my kids experiencing it.
Has becoming a dad changed what you're prepared to risk, or has it simply changed the way you calculate risk?
So I think that people think that becoming a dad will mean that all of a sudden you just cut risk out of your life, and that's not possible. I think that as someone who has spent their entire adult life assessing risk, I have a very, very different take on it than most other people and the things that I do, there are ways of doing it that are comparatively safe. Then I spend time wandering around a big city, and I see danger everywhere. It's impossible to take risk out of your life completely, and there are, without question, things in my life that I do with my kids. You know, I've taken my kids diving with sharks; they're six years old and eight years old, and most people would say that I'm off my rocker, but there are locations and conditions that I believe can make that near enough safe.
The way I assess that risk is changing, not just throughout my life, but throughout the day. You know, I'll be looking at things around me and going, you know, are we gonna go in with the sharks now? And it's getting towards dusk, and the water's not quite so clear, and they're more active, and this is their time to start hunting, so no, we stay out of the water now.
And that kind of constant risk assessment is something that I do all day, every day throughout my life. The thing that's really changed since I've been a dad is that I just don't want to be away as much anymore. I spent all my life up until this point going, okay, I've got an expedition, how long is it? Three weeks. Can we make it four? We've got this time in India to go and film tigers. Can we double it? Can we try and get more time out of it? Because I think we need more time to make it better. And all of a sudden, I'm doing the exact opposite, because I want to get home to the family.
And that's the biggest change, and it's a massive one.
Do you think curiosity is something we're born with and lose or something we can actively relearn?
Oh, yes. I very strongly believe that we are born curious and that if we don't have the right role models and if we're not led in the right way, it can fade away. One of the main reasons I have for doing that is that I have done a lot of work with kids, and young kids are always curious about new things that are put in front of them, and once they get a little bit older, they pick up much more on the signals from the people around them, from their friends, and even more so from the adults that are nearby.
And that curiosity, if you can keep it going, if you can keep it rolling, is one of the most fundamental things in life. And as someone who studies the process of evolution by natural selection, it would make sense for that to be one of those things that's there in the back of our brains, because that curiosity is the thing that's driven the human species to be the most, some argue, successful in our planet's history.
It's been that urge to find new things, to try things out and to see if things work. That's how we manage to bake bread, develop the wheel, develop agriculture and farming, and all those things that have made us successful have come from curiosity. So I think it's there. But if we don't take good care, then we lose it.
Lastly, you've been campaigning for nature to sit at the heart of education. If you could redesign the curriculum tomorrow, what would you want every child to learn about the natural world before they leave school?
So I would say one of my biggest passions over the last few years has been to try and get nature into the curriculum, specifically with the Natural History GCSE. So I have kids who have a lot of their education outdoors because they're in primary school, and you see what Forest School does for certain kids- not all kids, as there are plenty of kids who are absolutely happy in school and do brilliantly there. But others don't, and they really succeed when they're learning outside and when they're learning in a, for what of a better word, organic way with nature.
Then we lose a lot of those kids in secondary school. We lose a lot of those kids when it comes to GCSEs, and natural history should be one of the most important things we can ever teach, because it's one of the most important things we have. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we plant our food in - those are the most important things on the planet. We stand in a period of time when we are losing so many of our natural wonders before we even understand them, let alone appreciate them.
There is a huge appetite from young people to want to study the natural world, and since going on this crusade to try and get this natural history GCSE working, the responses I've had have been amazing. From teachers saying, ‘I want to teach this, how can I get involved?’ with kids saying, ‘I am so desperate to do this’ and from older people saying, ‘why wasn't this around when I was at school?’
I think it's going to be enormous. It's not going to be for everyone, but for the kids it is for, it’s going to change their whole experience of being in school.
A huge thank you to Steve for taking the time to chat with us and share his thoughts. We hope his words inspire a little more curiosity, a few more questions and plenty of time spent exploring the natural world.