Sir Tim Smit on the Future of Eden

Sir Tim Smit knows a thing or two about nurturing life. As the co-founder of the Eden Project he is, after all, the man who created the world’s largest indoor rainforest in a desolate clay pit.

Since it launched in those now-iconic domes in Cornwall, South West England, in 2001, housing re-creations of earth’s three distinct climates, Eden has earned praise from each corner of the world whose environmental diversity it seeks to represent. The New York Times called it “the eighth wonder of the world” and Britain’s Daily Telegraph praised its work as “education by visionaries.”

But instead of celebrating Eden’s recent 20th anniversary, and annual turnover of over £20 million, Dutch-born pioneer Sir Tim saw the milestone as an opportunity to renew his goals for the life-defining project, that earned him an honorary knighthood for his services to public engagement with science in 2002.

“I actually think Eden, as it was, has come to an end,” he says. “It was inspired by the idea of taking a place as derelict as you can find, a sterile clay pit where the alternate use was a landfill site, and bring it to life.

“And we are now the most successful man-made environment center in the world, no-one is even close to us. We have significant influence and 1.1 million visitors every year.

“So are we going to be proud that we achieved that? Or do we realize the horrible truth that whoever wrote that it was ‘education by visionaries’ has just not got out very much.

“We’ve just got to be brutal. And if in another 20 years, if we’re still just the world’s number one in this area, and we’ve still got 1.1 million people coming each year, how s*** is that? How s*** would it have been to build a project, the purpose of which was to change the way people thought about the world, and end up falling into the same trap of measuring your success by your turnover and your profitability.”

Sir Tim found new perspective, like so many of us, in lockdown. “It has provided me with something that I never thought I’d have,” he says, “which is enforced time to reappraise my life.” And he had plenty to reflect on, having enjoyed a vivid and colorful life, starting his career as a successful record producer, before moving to Cornwall from London in 1987. Soon after arriving in the South West of England, he revitalized the Lost Gardens of Heligan, the grounds of an estate that were once one of Cornwall’s crown jewels before falling into neglect around a century ago. Then Eden was his next obsession, and has remained so for the following two decades, until the pandemic finally gave him a rare opportunity to pause and consider his achievements, although he’s not satisfied just smelling the roses.

Sir Tim decided to reread some of the most influential books that have changed the course of his life “to find out whether they retained a fresh odor,” but this mission actually stopped with the second he picked up, ‘Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth’, written by groundbreaking engineer Buckminster Fuller in 1969. “I agree with every word and it reads as if it was written today,” he says. “He’s talking about looking at your one planet, home, as a system. And the marking of a successful species would be people who could live up to their intelligence and manage their circumstances in such a way that they were in equilibrium.

“I spent several hundred quid buying copies of the book, sending it to colleagues and then emailed them all and said, ‘Look, guys, I’m having a bit of a moment.’ We then all decided we were going to work on Eden 2.0 – I’m afraid we couldn’t think of anything cleverer to call it.”

Sir Tim’s new goals focus on making sure Eden is more than just a tourist attraction, that it spreads its message louder and wider, and practices what it preaches.

The 66-year-old explains, “We’re going to dig up our sewage and water systems and make them circular. We’re going to do all our processing of waste through aerobic processing systems, which means that at the end of it, we can produce 200 tons of fish and prawns and give nutrient rich waters into our research greenhouses.

“We’ve started drilling to the center of the earth, we’re about 1,300 meters down now, and we’re heading to about five kilometers down. This will give us superheated water capable of giving us heat for all of Eden. Then it will, we hope, power big turbines and give us electricity of about 3.4 megawatts, which is enough to do 17,000 homes.

“Then we’re then covering all our car park areas and walkways with solar. The aspiration is that within 18 months to be so carbon negative, that even if every single visitor to the project came from Venus, they would still be carbon negative. We’re very aggressive about that.”

Eden’s biggest legacy will be the people it influences. And on top of approximately 20 million people who have visited the attraction Sir Tim, who is critical of the self-fulfilling nature of academia and established universities, is looking to create an alternative education center to inspire the next generation of environmentalists.

He says, “We have become so pleased by academia, with its nose in the trough of research money, that they all judge each other on whether they’re suitable for funding, which has meant that they’re studying narrower and narrower things.

“I’m an establishment figure and a commercial person. I’m not anti-capital. But how on earth can an investment bank seek to make money out of shares in a water company that is deliberately poisoning rivers and streams in order to maximize their profits? These people should be put in jail.

“I feel so deeply disturbed by the fact that we’re in a secular age, but if we can’t then replace organized religion by some deep respect for protecting the natural world on our only planet, then what kind of species are we?”

Sir Tim looks to the charisma in his former industry of music, as well as the worlds of fashion and literature, as examples of what can be achieved when our minds are given the freedom to explore and create.

“And by charisma, I don’t mean that someone walks into the room, people’s jaws dropped open. I mean, the charisma that comes from people having a completely independent confidence in who they are and where they are going,” he says.

“So we’re setting up something called The Emergence Academy to give a helping hand, because I think our country, our civilization, is going off the rails because it doesn’t understand the interconnection between all things.

“And we need to give the gift of that knowledge to people. We want to take people who want to understand the difference between spending a lot of time thinking and a lot of time doing.”

‘Doing’ is certainly a talent of Sir Tim’s, who was praised as “someone who makes things happen” by Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall Lady Mary Holborow, when she presented his knighthood on behalf of the Queen. He credits making the seemingly impossible Eden Project a reality by using ‘The Tinkerbell Theory’, which involves persuading three people that a wild idea can be reality in order to bring it to life. And this is allied with another of the secrets to his success, which is never using the word “if” but instead saying “when.” He says, “It takes between two and three months, if you use the word ‘when’, for everybody to believe that it’s going to happen.”

The reimagining of the original Eden site is just one of several new projects to which Sir Tim and his team are applying this determined approach. An outpost in Morecambe Bay in the north of England is in the works. They are also planning new Eden centers on every inhabited continent in the world, including in Australia, Costa Rica and China.

And while it’s clear this approach to his professional pursuits has been incredibly successful, what has this great nourisher of life learned about caring for ourselves along the way?

The father-of-four, who divorced from wife of 20 years, Candy Pinsent, around the time he became a household name for his Eden success, says, “Leonard Cohen once said that the problem with the human condition is we haven’t figured out what to do between mealtimes.

“Everybody is shuffling through cities, doing their important transactions and creating wealth through buying things and selling things. And mainly, it’s all a lot of noise because we’re scared to death.

“Those jokes that no-one ever died wishing they’d spent more time in the office are absolutely true. And so many people I went to school and university have actually become quite sad shells of themselves, because they fell in love with the idea that money was the thing they needed.

“But the best investment you can make in your life is to work on your relationship, so you keep it as fresh on the 30th year as it was on your first meeting. If you have managed to hurt people occasionally throughout your life, by straying from the path of loyalty, the pain you cause compared to later on that contentment you will have knowing that, like that old thing from Thomas Hardy in ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, where Gabriel Oak says all he ever wanted was, ‘whenever you look up there I shall be, and whenever I look up, there will be you.’

“Which might sound trite to a young person. But when you get older, you realize that profound contentment that comes from knowing someone is genuinely watching your back and has your interests at their heart, rather than it being the reciprocation of the first flush of love where you’re basically finding the other person so clever for finding you marvelous.”