Justin Albert

I cannot remember a time when I was not drawn to our fragile natural environment. As a child I grew up playing and exploring along the River Wye in rural Wales and it was in those pools, streams, and woods that I inherited a profound and lasting love of our planet’s extraordinary diversity of life. After studying and briefly working in arbitration law and international policy in my early twenties, I put my passion for nature into practice and was invited to join an expedition to Southern Chile. For many months, as carer of the pack horses, chronicler, and general gofer, I travelled with a mixed team of naturalists, volcanologists, and geographers through some of the planet’s last great untouched coastal temperate habitats. By the time I returned to London I knew what I would do with the rest of my life: make people aware of the fragility of our natural world and to protect and celebrate it. I acted upon my new determination by spending several years writing and directing multi award-winning international documentaries for Channel 4, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and National Geographic. Through making these science-based documentaries I came to more fully understood both the beauty and the peril of our planet’s natural world. After a few years I moved from film production into broadcasting management and the role of senior executive at Discovery Channel Networks in Washington DC. Here I launched and ran specialist nature television networks like Animal Planet and the Science Channel. My experience filming with some of the world’s top conservationists informed how I positioned and branded the TV channels. I believed in programming wildlife shows that were fun and engaging, but always backed by expert research. A chance meeting with Dame Fiona Reynolds at the Hay Festival gave me the opportunity to have direct influence on how we look after so much of our shared special heritage, as well as being able to publicly advocate for its protection at the highest level. For the last ten years I have been doing just that and happily working for the National Trust and running National Trust for Wales. Two years ago, serendipity struck again, and I met the visionary John Hardy and my life profoundly changed. John’s challenge to me was to think and act bigger, to be a genuine ‘front seat’ revolutionary and to join forces and help save the world. I have now blended my hands-on conservation skills, film making experience and a decade of running one of the world’s largest ENGOs into a new drive to work with the very best in their fields to make lasting change. My efforts are in two areas: Firstly, through radical changes in education and secondly around changing Western eating and farming habits. Two huge projects, but both with brilliant people backing them and 100% support to think and deliver at scale. It now all seems possible, exciting and doable.

The future

Hope

Cooking, horse riding and laughing