Teri Clayton
Teri spent her childhood waist deep in rivers, falling out of conker trees, galloping down main roads and sleeping on the stable floor with goslings and ducklings snuggled into her jacket. With a love of nature and a deep desire to support life to thrive, Teri aspired to find ways that would help life to thrive.
Teri noticed that biodiversity was poor in many areas of the countryside and as a conseuqence, life was not evolving together in the way that it could. Ecosystems did not seem to be evolving into increasing complexity, balance and harmony - but appeared to be doing the opposite direction. Through degrading our soils and reducing biodiversity with our way of life, Teri wondered what could be done to better support life.
Teri could see that we were missing opportunities for helping ourselves and nature evolve into increasing levels of wellbeing through encouraging greater diversity, balance and harmonious relationships. Whilst there is much great work being done to find ways forward, it is vital that we do not leave ourselves totally reliant on innovation through technology for our basic needs.
Through seeking to live in greater harmony with nature, we can discover how to live better quality lives.
Teri's focus is now on helping to create more small scale nature friendly farms, that build more soil and help restore biodiversity.
We could be growing our food in small scale systems that create healthier soils year upon year, using plants that grow by themselves without requiring constant disturbance of the ecosystems in the soil.
Teri's vision is creating additional resilience in our food system, whilst restoring biodiversity. Through focusing on small scale permanent plantations of wild or heritage plants, perennial market gardens and edible forest gardens, fully designed to convert as much sunlight as possible into organic matter to feed life on earth. Every grower will create different ecosystems - with a diverse collection of life. Some people will focus on creating as much diversity of planting on their plot as possible, others will focus on fruits, nuts and seeds, some will focus on diverse pastures or mature woodland for keeping livestock. We need as much diversity in food growing as possible, if we are to find a balanced way forward
Teri created Biome Box as a way to facilitate this happening. From making small scale growing immediately viable for new growers, to increasing the amount of land that is both productive AND restorative for biodiversity, Biome Box was created to show one way in which we can build a better future for all life.