Instant Genius - How to engage more deeply with the natural world

Episode Date: April 5, 2026

Perhaps due to poor weather, the COVID pandemic, or a simple lack of motivation, these days many of us spend a lot of our time indoors. However, wherever we live, there are always opportunities to get out into nature and learn more about the world we live in. Doing so can not only enrich our own lives by more deeply engaging with the environments that surround us but can also help scientists and researchers to gather data and make new insights that are vital for the survival of our flora and fauna. In this episode, we’re joined by Jo Harris, the education manager at the Field Studies Council. She tells us about her work helping people of all ages to get outside and learn more about the rich environments and ecosystems that are on our own doorsteps and the huge contribution that we can all make to deepen our collective knowledge of the natural world by engaging in citizen science projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear a world-leading scientist and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus.

Perhaps due to poor weather, the COVID pandemic, or a simple lack of motivation, these days, many of us spend a lot of our time indoors. However, wherever we live, there are always opportunities to get out into nature and learn more about the world we live in. Doing so can not only enrich our own lives by more deeply engaging with the environments that surround us, but can also help scientists and researchers, to gather data and make new insights that are vital for the survival of our flora and fauna.

In this episode, we're joined by Joe Harris, the Education Manager at the Field Studies Council. She tells us about her work helping people of all ages, get outside and learn more about the rich environments and ecosystems that are on our own doorsteps and the huge contribution that we can all make to deepen our collective knowledge of the natural world by engaging in citizen science projects.

So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. Oh, you're very welcome. So we're talking about the work that you do with the Field Studies Council. So I think the best place to start then is can you give us an overview of actually what the Field Studies Council does? Yeah, absolutely.

So the Fields Laws Council is an environmental education charity. It was set up just over 80 years ago, just after the Second World War. and the kind of premise at that point was getting young people out of London into the countryside. So that's sort of where it started. And over the last 80 years, it's developed into this charity who are delivering outdoor learning, environmental understanding and education courses, field work for science and geography and other subjects, to people of all ages from all backgrounds and from all over the country and sometimes the world. the broad mission is to create these outstanding opportunities that get everybody outside,

hopefully to engage with and then care for the environment. You know, it's the old adage of you can't care about what you don't know. So we really strongly believe that in order to get people to care about the world, they have to understand it. And to understand it, they have to be immersed in it. So that's kind of what we try and do. So how did you get involved in this yourself then? Well, I mean, sort of by accident.

And I guess I'm a bit of a poster person for the organisation in that I was pretty convinced at age 17 that I was going to be a peer teacher or something like that. And then I went on my biology A-level field trip to a field studies council centre in Pembrokeshire. And I spent a week in the rain, counting barnacles and looking under seaweed for crabs. And whilst I looked around this group of girls that I was there with from school, and there didn't seem to be as much enthue. for the rest of the group as there was for me. And I just thought, I love this. This is, this is what I need to do. And I, I went home and told my parents that I was going to go to university and study marine biology, which I don't think they could have been more shocked about. And then I, I did that and I ended up working at the same centre where I'd done my first biology course and I worked with the person who'd taught me in that course. And I'd never looked back. I just absolutely love it. I love the idea of being, able to showcase things I find fascinating to a sea of sometimes little and sometimes bigger than me faces. When you find a crab or when you show them, you know, a bee orchid, or when you say, you know, can you hear the rustling of the wind and the trees and the birds? And that's a chif chif,

and can you hear a cuckoo? Not many people get to hear cuckus anymore. Oh, look, a kingfisher, you know, it's the wow factor. That's what I love. That's the thing that I love doing is seeing that realization of how amazing the natural world is for students and everyone, really. Yeah, so you mentioned there outdoor learning. A lot of people maybe haven't heard that term or come across it before, you know, so what does that mean? Well, outdoor learning can mean a huge different range of things and actually sometimes it's used as a bit of a catchall, which is fine for lots of different types of learning. So you'll get at kind of one end of the scale, you have something called Forest School. And Forest Schools is very specific.

type of outdoor learning, which is very play-based and learner-led and essentially children discovering the world around them. And you can go right through outdoor learning with primary groups learning about what lives in ponds or woodlands and through kind of adventurous activities and personal and social skill development and that kind of stuff, right up to the very specific curriculum-led coursework and exam preparation around fieldwork and sampling. that students need to do for, you know, their GCSEs or their A levels or the equivalents. But what we kind of want to really make sure is happening is that outdoor learning isn't just for students and for young people, it's for everyone. So, you know, you can experience outdoor

learning on a dog walk. If you have a guide with you, you know, whether that's someone who knows what they're talking about or just a guide book, a guide book, you can learn about the environment anytime, anywhere. So do you run the environment? So do you run the, these courses and experiences year-round, or is it sort of seasonal? Absolutely, year-round. We run a huge range of courses. So we have all types of learners, school courses, primary, secondary, university, we do D-O-V experiences, we have adult learning and biodiversity courses. And they all have their kind of slot, I would say, in the year. So clearly if you have a course where you're identifying wildflowers, December is not the time to do that. You're much more likely to be doing

that in the spring and summer. But similarly, if your course is an adult-led sort of biodiversity course that we run and it's all around identifying fungi, it's probably going to be in autumn and October, September, October, the best time to see an array of fungi. So although we are a year-round operation and we have learners, whether students, adults or other all year round, they kind of fit with the seasons as to what they're studying and what the needs of that course might be. So you mentioned earlier that initially the idea was to get people out of London into the countryside. So how many centres are there now? Because they're spread all across the country, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. So we have 14 centres in total. We've got one in Scotland.

on the stunning Isle of Cumbrae. There's three in Wales, north, south and west Wales. And then the rest are in England, and that covers everywhere from Devon to East Anglia up to the Lake District. So there's 14 centres, but we also then work in partnership with organisations like the Royal Parks in London

and county parks in Birmingham. So where we don't have centres in kind of urban locations, because our centres do tend to be big buildings, you know, in, more remote locations. In urban locations, we tend to go into partnerships with other organisations and we use their locations. So, for example, we work out of bushy park in London and Greenwich Park and we work out of parks in Birmingham as well. Where some learners won't be able to get to us,

we can be in a place where they can with just a walk away or a bus ride away rather than getting a coach to further a field. So yeah, we try and cover most of the UK. There should be a centre near everybody really. And the centres themselves, you know, certainly the residential centres are all really unique and beautiful. So we've got Georgian mansions in valleys in Somerset. We've got big ex-sanatorium buildings, halfway up mountains in the Lake Districts. We've got old forts that have been converted up, you know, on the edge of a cliff in Pemmetshire. So they've all got their own unique beauty and experience. And then with our day centres, because we have three, three of those 14 are day centres, they tend to be in more accessible places. So we have one

in Epping Forest and there'll be places that you can get to more easily and in a more kind of built up area. So like, let's have a look at some of the kind of people that attend the courses then, because you mentioned there, like it's kind of aligned with certain things in the curriculum for primary students up to older students, even university students. But I wanted to think, I think a lot of people listening who perhaps would be interested in something like this. We think, well, I don't know, maybe, maybe, you know, my opportunity is passed now because, you know, I wasn't lucky enough to have the opportunity to do this when I was at school for whatever reason. We didn't do it. So, you know, I can't do it now, but that isn't the case at all, is it?

Absolutely not. No. know, our strapline is learning for all. So environmental education for all. And actually, you know, we do have lots and lots of school visits. That's sort of our bread and butter. So throughout the term time, we'll have primary groups, as you say, secondary science and geography, university courses. But it doesn't stop there. So we've also got lots of other experiences. So we have our kind of youth program, which is sort of 18 to 25, so young adults, basically. And those courses fit into three broad categories. So there'll be subject courses where you can study ecology or science, geography, environmental science, all sorts of things like that. And they're kind of

like deep dive. So we'll have marine science courses. And often it will be people who maybe don't really know what they want to go off and do, but are kind of interested in finding out. We also have sort of more vocational styles. So things like green skills and employability or adventure learning, you know, kind of if you wanted to get into the adventure activity area, we've got skills, courses around that, and then, you know, more kind of adventure-based stuff, so climbing, canoeing, all those kind of things. So that's sort of our young adult program. But then we also have our whole biodiversity department. And I guess that's really what you're talking about is what do you do if you're not in education anymore, but you still want to learn. So our biodiversity

department within our organisation runs both in-person and online courses. And obviously, we'd love everybody to be in person out in the field, but we do understand that accessibility reasons, that doesn't, it's not always possible and that shouldn't be a barrier to people. So we have online courses, we have in-person, and we have a blended approach. And these are a range of courses which cover kind of natural history for the leisure learners. You know, I just, I'm really interested in marine mammals or I'm really interested in what might live in my pond and I just want to find out, you know, what's in hedgerows. How can I identify which plants I can forage and eat? You know, those kind of courses, the sort of special interest courses. And those are really, really popular

with people of all ages. So we have courses where you'll have a 19 year old and a 62 year old on the same course and then gnaturing away, you know, discussing the fungi that they've just found and whether you can put it in a stew or whatever. And then the sort of other end of that is, the more professional side. So we run from beginners through intermediates to professional, where we have a lot of courses that are around employment. So things like biodiversity literacy, biodiversity net gains, these are things that employers might put people on to develop their professional interests. And it helps to kind of build that, you know, that they're accredited courses that they can take on. So CPD modules. But in all of those things,

we're just trying to emphasize the hands-on immersive learning aspect to it. So whether you're doing this because your employer wants you to be able to identify what plants you can't move when you're building something or planning something, or whether you just are really interested in wildflowers or trees, it's about kind of underpinning the knowledge with the experience. So it becomes real and it's hands-on and you really benefit from that expert. tuition and the other people in the group. It's just really nice to talk to light-minded people quite a lot of the time. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the

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Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, an unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Yeah, so I think another thing like some people listening who might be interested in engaging in these activities might also be interested in citizen science. So do you do any work along those lines?

Yeah, absolutely. We're really big ambassadors of citizen science. a hugely important thing in ecology and also in geography and other areas as well. Just because it generates big volumes of data, you know, that a scientist alone can't collect that much data, even if you had a group of scientists going out and measuring things, the amount of data collectible by a small group of people is nowhere near what citizen science can produce. So that's really helpful because it allows this representative sample that we can then sort of make judgments from and infer from. And we use I record a lot in our centres

with our students. So introducing the importance of biological records and sightings and showing them how the experts interact with those so they can verify what we've recorded. Because often I think people are worried that they might get it wrong. You know, I don't know if I'm definitely right about that. But the beauty of systems like I record and there's lots of others is that you have a who will say, yes, you know, that very blurry picture, yes, it is a tree creeper, or, you know, it is that sound that you've recorded is a cookie or whatever it is that you're doing. So we do that a lot with students and visitors to our centres. And we have other citizen science projects.

So previously we worked with the Opal surveys, which the actual recording is now closed, but the surveys are still free to download offline. And our current project that we do is the Signs of Spring Survey. And that's in conjunction with the Royal Society of Biology. So that's in its third year and is mapping the start of spring and the spread of spring across the UK. So really important for understanding phonology, you know, the kind of timings of things within the year, which obviously links really clearly to climate change and impacts on biodiversity monitoring and conservation. But I think the beauty of citizen science for us is that it helps to improve.

empower people to see where they can have an impact. So just as an example, we had a D of E a group a couple of years ago, Duke of Edinburgh youth group who were visiting the centre with me. I was teaching the group. And we went down to the local coastline here. And they found, whilst we were doing our crab survey, an invasive species of crab that hadn't been recorded at that site previously. So we had with us a delivery partner from the the Marine Biological Association, who was the most excited I've ever seen somebody in real life about this crab. And the students, you know, they weren't in school necessarily. There were sort of young people 18 to 25. They could feel how exciting this discovery was just from them,

you know, mucking around in a rock pool and seeing what they could find. And that is one of the first recorded actual monitoring of that species, a hemagreptus, in that area, that they've contributed to that. That's really important. you know, the geographical spread of organisms is really important to monitor and will only become more so with the impact of climate change. Yeah, so do you think that sort of taking an interest in the environment and sort of learning more about it and how to take care of it has been growing, you know, particularly amongst younger people? Yes, I do. I think really we've seen a difference over the last kind of 10 years. There's a clear rise in what you might call

eco-awareness and kind of climate crisis anxiety and just general interest in the world around them. And I think young people feel a really strong sense of responsibility for the planet and the world around them. But there's also, as I say, there's this level of kind of anxiety or maybe sort of helplessness in the way that it's reported in the news and the way that students are taught in school. It's quite doom and gloom. You know, it's the fact it's this is going to happen and this is the impact. And I think they struggle sometimes to see what the action they can take and what impact they can have. So for us, it's really important to be solution driven. So we can talk about the facts and talk about the change in carbon dioxide levels in the air, atmosphere and the

global temperatures. But then we can talk about solutions, whether that's individual level, whether it's a kind of community level, national level, global level, and allowing them to see the successes because there are successes. People are making things happen and things are changing. And it's about sharing that with them in order to inspire them to be the next generation of people with the skills to actually make change in the world. And I think that's really important. The want is there. The interest is there. They just need to be given the kind of empowerment to act and shown what it is they can bring to the future. I think one of the most test, telling things that we have a youth panel in our organization, so 12 young people who help us

to sort of shape the way the organization works. And one of our youth panel said, you know, the thing we have to remember is that nature and green skills isn't just for scientists. It's for all jobs. We have to take it into medicine. We have to take it into law. We have to take it into finance. You know, it's not just for the people who like hanging out at the beach. It's got to be for everyone and we've got to inspire them to take that with them on their journey, whatever they're going off to do. Yeah, so having said that, say someone's listening and thinks, oh, that sounds right up my street. That's like something I'd like to get involved in. How can they find out more information? So the simplest way of doing that is to go to our website.

So it's field studies council.org, basically. That it's a really simple website. If you search Philisleas Council, you'll find us. And that website is a one-stop shop for all of our free resources, you know, there's loads of downloadable free resources, all of our fold-out guides, which are really, really popular, you know, really lovely glossy guides. Chris Packham loves them and all of our courses and experiences. And it's also a way of looking at our youth panel. So if you wanted to join in our youth panel, we recruit each summer to get more people involved in how we can shape the organisation and any of the experiences and courses that we run as well. And, you know, there's lots of discounts and grants out there as well, if that's something that

you need to look into. We're always happy to hear from anybody that wants to get involved. So just pop on the website and it will be clear where you need to get to. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Joe Harris. If you'd liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why?

not check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC ScienceFocus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems,

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