Photo by: @timcooper_photo (Instagram)
Our friends at The Big Canopy Camp Out are busy gearing up for the tree top event of the year. We were honoured to join their 2017, World Land Trust campaign at the Eden Project and can’t wait to see what they have in store this year!
Join us as we catch up with them before they set off, once again, to far-flung corners of the world to camp out in the canopy…
With The Big Canopy Campout 2018 now only two weeks away, attention at TBCC headquarters is turning to finalise the details of what on earth to pack for ten days in the tropical forest canopy.
This year TBCC team will be heading out to Borneo to celebrate the success of last year’s World Land Trust campaign SAVING KINABATANGAN appeal and camping out in the world’s tallest rainforest.
We know it’ll be hot, humid and beautiful. We know there will be more than enough mosquitoes to go around. We know we need a huge range of kit to keep us safe and comfortable as we manoeuvre around some of the tallest tropical trees on the planet.
What better gear to use than a Tentsile Tree Tent? We can remove the rainfly on those sticky, humid nights and have a 360° view of the stars and the majestic canopy above us, while, the insect mesh will keep us keep safe from those pesky mosquitoes. Plus, being up, off the forest floor means that myriad other creatures won’t be a problem either. And to top it all, we know we’ll get a comfy night’s kip because we’ve slept in them last year.
Photos by Ruth Samuel and @goodleafiw
Perhaps less obviously, we know we also need to be ready to share our adventure with the world – whether that’s by somehow getting connected ourselves, or by sending snippets of our experience to our wonderful volunteers in the UK so they can keep our wider community up-to-date. But why is this important when we already have so much to think about?
- It’s important because the tropics lost 39 million acres of tree cover in 2017.
- It’s important because forests, whether tropical or temperate, are crucial for regulating global climate and rainfall.
- It’s important because millions of people living adjacent to forests rely on them for ecosystem services like clean water.
- It’s important because thousands of species we know about face unprecedented threats due to habitat loss. Thousands more we’ve yet to discover do, too.
TBCC was created to celebrate and showcase all the efforts made by those dedicated to protecting forests. TBCC team are a motley crew of professional climbers, arborists, photographers, conservationists, writers and film-makers that have had the privilege and pleasure of meeting hundreds of incredible individuals and organisations over the years doing their bit for forest preservation.
Whether it’s been through activism, science and research, professional tree care, exploration or conservation there are incredible people and stories all over the world and TBCC was built to provide a platform for these people to come together in an entire global stand for forests, whilst raising money to protect a different area of critically endangered forest each year.
If we can show people how beautiful, challenging, diverse and vital forests are, we can begin to mobilise more of a global movement of forest protectors. By providing near-real-time updates from our campout in Borneo, we can get people enthused and excited about forests in a way they might not have been before.
We want to hear your stories. We want to share the different forests you fight for and we want to know why it’s important to you.
It’s taken a dedicated community of people to get us to this point, and our sponsors are a huge part of that. We want to thank Tentsile for their unlimited enthusiasm, contributions and of course their fantastic Tree Tents that not only encourage people to spend time outdoors but in forests. It’s like they say, ‘If we’re all hanging out in trees, they can’t be cut down’.
