Leadership Board Bio

Is an ecologist, nature photographer and inspirational public speaker who has been living in the Findhorn Community in Scotland since 1978.

In 1986 he founded the award-winning Scottish charity, Trees for Life, to help restore the Caledonian Forest in the Highlands of Scotland, having been inspired in part by visiting Auroville in 1985 and seeing first-hand the forest restoration work that had been carried out there.

Alan has visited Auroville several times since then, most recently in March 2020, and has close connections with many of the people involved in Auroville’s greenwork. He has given public talks in Auroville about ecological restoration on several occasions, and regularly promotes Auroville through his own work elsewhere – for example a photograph of banyan trees at Fertile in Auroville features in the Forests Forever perpetual calendar that he has produced.

Alan is a former trustee of the Findhorn Foundation, currently trustee of Wild things! (an environmental education charity in Scotland) and a trustee of Trees for Hope (a charity which aims to restore degraded ecosystems).

Alan is on the Advisory Council of the Ecosystem Restoration Camps project and is an advisory board member for the Ecological Citizen journal. He is also a Patron of the charity Moor Trees (forest restoration work on Dartmoor, England).

Auroville continues to be a great source of inspiration for him, and he is one of the links between the two sister communities of Findhorn and Auroville.