For thirty years, James Aldred has been adventuring into the wilderness with his camera. Now, with an Emmy and a BAFTA nomination, having worked with David Attenborough on shows like BBC’s Planet Earth, the nature filmmaker and writer has turned his attention back to the forest where he was raised: the New Forest.

Ahead of his BridLit event, we sat down with James to discuss what about this forest still captures his attention after a global career, why nature writing is vital in the fight to protect our ecology, and how humans can once again find our place in the forest.

You grew up in the New Forest and have spent much of your life in woodlands around the world. What is it about forests that has led you to devote so much of your life to them?

When you get into a proper old-growth, ancient woodland or forest, you feel pretty immersed in nature in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else. I like the smells, I like the touch, the sounds. It’s a sensory experience, isn’t it? Obviously, it’s very calming, but also, for me, it’s a window on the wildlife. I just find the adaptations, the evolutionary processes and the animals really captivating.

You’ve seen some of the most extraordinary forests in the world. When you go back to the New Forest, does it still captivate you in the way it did when you were growing up?

It does. I think the New Forest is pretty unique, inasmuch as there’s a continuous thread, a line of history which goes right back to the dawn of time, really.

People have sort of trodden lightly there down through the centuries. What I find interesting is the relationship between people and the landscape itself, but also that it’s a very honest landscape. A lot of the trees are just left to be and to do what they want to do, how they want to do it. In modern Britain, that’s a very rare thing: to have such an area of landscape which is pretty much left to do its own thing.

It’s a window on the past for me. It’s also wrapped up with a lot of nostalgia because I grew up there. I’ve been living on the outskirts of Bristol for 20-odd years, but I’ve been constantly trying to find a way back to the forest because there’s just something about the forest that taps into a very deep need of mine to just step outside, away from things for a while, and reconnect with things which are genuine, honest and true. Things that actually matter in this life.

The forest embodies that for me like nowhere else on the planet. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Amazon, the Congo, Southeast Asia, most rainforests around the world. But there’s something special about where you grow up because it’s a landscape of memory.

We all have our own reasons for enjoying being there. But mine is just that it’s about as close a thing as we can get to a wild habitat in modern-day Britain. And that’s very precious.

You’ve written about your time in the woods before. What’s different about this book?

Gosford Summer was written during lockdown. It was very focused on wildlife filming and centred around the avoidance of people, whether it was active or passive.

This book is very much about the human interaction with the parts of the forest where we managed to get a bit of land. I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the connection between people and that landscape historically and going into the modern world as a working relationship, because it is a working landscape. The New Forest is very much a product of people’s interaction with it.

I really enjoyed using it as almost an excuse or a portal into discovering more about, for example, the Romani heritage, the Romani people that used to live on the open forest, the foresters, the commoners, the traditional ways of working that were handed down generationally, the shift away from smallholdings to increased livestock.

Having a patch of land gives you a point in the landscape that gives you a focal point. There’s quite a lot of history to delve into just by talking to local people and pulling on those threads. Someone might say, “Have you read this book? Someone who lived here 100 years ago wrote this about this very valley, about that very patch of land you’re standing on.”

It’s a rabbit hole. You sort of begin to look into that, and I thought I knew the forest quite well. Well, it turns out I didn’t know it half as well as I thought I did. The whole thing was a journey of discovery. It really opened my eyes.

The book explores the relationship between people and the natural world. How important is it to recognise that humans are part of the ecosystem, rather than separate from it?

We are part of the ecosystem, and that’s where we come from. That’s how it’s always been, pre-Industrial Revolution. That’s why I feel so grounded back in the woodlands and the natural landscape.

What I have never wanted to do is try to replicate some sort of world in the absence of humans, because I do feel that we are very much integrated. If you take us out of the equation, it kind of absolves us of responsibility, apart from anything else. And that’s not good in this day and age.

There’s something very unique about the New Forest, which speaks of a very close relationship between people and the landscape for centuries, millennia. That is very, very precious. And it’s important to recognise human influence, because it’s not always negative at all.

The mosaic nature of the New Forest is there because of a certain degree of human intervention, maintaining the heathlands through selective burning. As a tool for the restorative regeneration of a landscape, it can be a very powerful thing. It’s certainly one of the things that down through the centuries has made the New Forest the way it is. It’s a very important dynamic. It shouldn’t be ignored.

As a wildlife cameraman and writer, you have the opportunity to connect people with nature. Do you see that as part of your responsibility?

Definitely. I know it’s a cliché, but we can only protect what we care about. Care is an emotive reaction to something that we’re spending time with, that we’re connecting with, that we’re immersed in, that we’re appreciating on its terms.

You have to have affection for a place and discover it for yourself. You appreciate it, and you’re being let into a world that’s really quite special. And then you’re going to fight to protect that.

Otherwise, you can look at a picture or a photo and say, “Oh yeah, that’s a very pretty part of the world.” But it doesn’t have that emotive stirring or that connectivity, or that willingness to fight for it, if you have to, that comes from being immersed in it.

I feel very strongly, certainly as a parent as well, about giving kids and people just the space to do that.

It’s all wrapped up in the issues of land ownership, trespass, right to roam, wild camping. I feel a little bit hypocritical because the way that I’ve got a toehold back into that landscape that I love is by buying a patch of land.

I’ve wild-camped there my whole life, and I will absolutely continue to do it as long as I’m around. But a lot of people want to go there and get to know a landscape, and the bottleneck through which people have to pass to get into a landscape to really learn about it is quite tricky in modern Britain.

If people are going to really learn to love it, they have to meet it on their own terms, normally on their own or with a friend, but certainly in a small group where there are no distractions.

Can nature writing help people who might find the countryside intimidating or difficult to access begin to build that connection?

Absolutely. I would love to think that someone would read something that I’ve written and it might just give them a starting point in the landscape.

They might think, “Oh, that sounds like an interesting tree. That sounds like an interesting landscape feature. I’m going to go out there this Saturday. I’m going to check it out.” And then they work sideways from there.

That’s the little nudge that they needed to get a point of reference into the landscape. Otherwise, it’s quite intimidating and daunting.

It’s a difficult line to tread as a writer or a filmmaker, because it’s a privileged position. It’s so easy to come across as entitled because you have access to a certain place that a lot of people don’t. It’s important to remain conscious of the fact that it’s not that easy for some people.

You’ve worked on some extraordinary wildlife projects, including with David Attenborough. Do you have any favourite memories from your time filming?

I did a big project in the Congo for National Geographic magazine in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We pretty much walked across the Congo, and I was camera-assisting the photographer.

That was extraordinary because we were entering ecosystems where a human being had never been. We had encounters with chimpanzees and gorillas who had never seen a human. We were treated just like another primate.

They came right in close, really close, sat down with us, copied our body language. There was a degree of communication, and there was no fear. There was nothing. There was just curiosity from one primate to another.

That is about as integrated within an ecosystem as I’ve ever felt in my life. We were truly just another animal.

It’s very levelling as well, because it’s like going back to the Pleistocene. You’re not the dominant species, you’re on foot. There’s nothing that artificially bumps you up or down the natural place in the hierarchy. If you meet an elephant, you give way because it’s an elephant. If you get charged by an elephant, you run for your life.

It was like a window back on where we had come from. It was wonderful. It was so special. I don’t think there are many places like that left on the planet now. I think we just caught the tail end of it.

Working with David Attenborough was an absolute gift. I worked on and off with him for 15-odd years, and still keep in touch. He is everything that you would hope him to be. Every memory I’ve got of time spent with him and the crews in various places is very precious.

Having witnessed these extraordinary places, how do you feel about what we stand to lose as wildlife and habitats diminish?

I was born in 1975, but when I read books about what was going on in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, there’s part of me that longs to have been alive then. Whenever you look back in history, it all sounds so much richer than it is now. On the wildlife and habitat side, I think that is actually the case.

I do wonder sometimes whether we’re scrabbling around for the last few crumbs left underneath the dining table after the main, wonderful feast has long since gone. We’re trying to make something of dwindling things now, and it’s very, very sad.

But hopefully it’s not too late. There’s still plenty of magic out there.