Leigh Morris: Sexy carrots & feral wallabies - the adventures and curiosities hidden behind Manannan’s cloak

Midway through the Isle of Man’s Manx TT motor-racing festival lies a day (terrifyingly aptly) branded as “Mad Sunday”. David Oakes chose this bacchanalian festival, one filled with inebriated petrol-heads and super-charged exhaust eruptions, to talk with the Manx Wildlife Trust’s CEO, Leigh Morris. Recorded in perhaps the only two quiet enclaves the island possessed that Mad Sunday, Leigh expands upon a journey that took him from horticultural nurseryman to the head of a Wildlife Trust that oversees the planet’s sole Unesco whole nation biosphere. Leigh’s journey - starting simply enough in Yorkshire, then Wales and Scotland - quickly expands into a life of volunteering and vocational placements in India and Nepal, Ethiopia and Oman, the Galapagos and St Helena… the list goes on. Whether upon an island paradise or beneath the waves, there is seemingly no habitat that hasn’t drawn Leigh’s attention. In his own words: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know…” Armed with an insatiable curiosity, Leigh hopes to turn the Isle of Man, all 35 by 10 miles of it, into “what good looks like”. In this episode we discusses the sex-appeal of carrots, the rivakry of a petrol vs. electic (or even hydrogen) powereded TT, community conservation movements such as SeaSearch, and the hot potato of viewing agriculture as a very necessary part of our species’ ongoing environmental ambitions. Filter in a menagerie of rare Loaghtan sheep, Penguins, Sea Iguanas and the Isle of Man’s escaped feral Wallaby population, and you have a gloriously ambitious discussion about the state of the world, and where to take it next. Oh - and October’s episode is not sponsored by the Visit Isle of Man board… we promise!

For further information on this and other episodes, visit: https://www.treesacrowd.fm/leigh-morris/

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