No Trees No Seas

For thousands of years, the British Isles were home to vast forests that swept across the land, right to the sea’s edge. When we cut down the forests, we severed that connection, and our seas have been suffering ever since.  

On a mission to change that is Sam Manning, a forest ecologist and environmental writer, who has spent more than 15 years at the forefront of forest restoration in the UK. Joined by Carl Rowlinson, arborist and co-founder of Plant One, they are undertaking a bold restoration project. An evolution of Plant One's core aim to reforest and reconnect people with woodlands, The No Trees No Seas campaign's ambition is to bring together storytelling, science and impact to reforest 500 hectares of woodland in high-priority areas near the Fal and Helford Rivers. The ultimate hope is that this approach will help to heal what Sam calls our Flowscape – a radical new way of approaching ecological restoration.  

“We tend to put boundaries around things and manage them as single units.” Sam explains in the groundbreaking new documentary, No Trees No Seas. “People understand the idea of a ‘landscape’ and a ‘seascape’, but what we’re talking about is ‘flowscape’, so it’s not just looking at managing individual parts of the environment, but actually seeing that they are all connected – not just physically, but by the processes that go through all of those systems. If you have damage in one area of the system, the whole thing doesn’t function.”  

“A couple of years ago Sam found a book called ‘If The Forest Dies, The Sea Dies’, available only in Japanese. He painstakingly translated the text and by the time he had finished reading, it had completely changed the way he viewed the natural world forever. “It essentially said that forested landscapes are like teabags,” he explains, “and they stabilise the wider ocean and river ecosystems with a kind of ‘nutrient broth’.”  

There are still some places in the UK where we can see parts of these systems in action. But only just...

The shores of Cornwall are home to one of the last remaining fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest in the UK. If you have ever visited the Helford River, you may be familiar with the densely packed forests crowding the riverbanks, the gnarled roots of ancient oaks reaching out over the water and even plunging deep below the tideline. These woodlands are rarer by land area than even tropical rainforests, covering less than 1% of the earth’s landmass. For these systems to recover, and begin delivering their benefits back to the ocean, we need to drastically rethink how we manage our watercourses and bring the focus back to reforesting these tidal landscapes.

Enter Plant One, a Cornwall based tree-planting charity co-founded by arborist and surfer Carl Rowlinson and biologist Rai Lewis. Joining forces with Sam, the team’s ambition is to create new ‘Fish Forests’, planted upstream in the flowscape, to benefit the lower sections of the system, all the way to the sea.  

It’s not just about the loss of trees. We have systematically drained every inch of the landscape; canalising waterways until they are practically artificial, overfarming and degrading our topsiol, and stripping away any ability for the land to absorb and retain water. This leads to an increase of flooding and devastating extreme weather events, like Storm Goretti early in 2026, where some areas of Cornwall lost up to 80% of their tree coverage. In fact, by 2070 we will be experiencing 50% more peak fall rain flow in winter because of climate change and, Sam argues, if we do nothing to restore our flowscapes, the land will simply not be able to cope.  

The cycle, is simple...

If we fail to restore our woodlands and consider the whole flowscape, pollution and run off will continue to rush into our seas, devastating plankton and fish stocks. But, if we do restore them, the story could be different. The landscape could retain more water. River systems could heal and slow down the flows that rip through the land during floods. Fish stocks and plankton numbers could rebound. And our ocean could thrive once more...  

To achieve this, the No Trees No Seas campaign aims to drastically speed up woodland restoration over the next five years. Plant One have provided a method to do this, and the group are on the cusp of announcing their first ‘Fish Forest’.  

If you want to get involved, secure your tickets to watch exclusive screenings of No Trees No Seas at your local Finisterre store and join the movement.