One wild and precious life

On 19 June, I lost a dearly beloved friend, one of my favourite people: the journalist-turned-forest rewilder, Janine Stephen.

I met Janine in 2012 on a media junket to Nambiti game reserve; back then, I was a precocious 22-year-old "editor-at-large" for a glossy lifestyle magazine; she was a 39-year-old freelance writer (and, as I would soon discover, one of the most talented scribes ever to have graced the pages of South Africa's newspapers and magazines). We had an immediate rapport; I was utterly charmed by this person who was both gentle and kind but also had a marvellous, spiky sense of humour and a critical and curious way of engaging with the world.

In the intervening years, I'd meet frequently with Janine to talk shop and chat about culture and travel and nature and politics. Before I moved to the USA in 2019 she told me about the dream she and her partner, the artist Connor Cullinan, had to move to Connor's childhood home on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg to begin restoring and rewilding indigenous mist belt forest. In 2021 the pair left Cape Town to do just that. Their project, ferncliffe Forest Wilding, has subsequently cleared hectares upon hectares of invasive bamboo (and other stubborn specimens) and planted over 1200 indigenous young trees.

I visited Ferncliffe in April 2022 on my first post-lockdown trip back to South Africa and saw up close the immense effort and love Janine and Connor were pouring into the project. I was inspired by their action, their doing instead of simply talking, how they were channelling their concerns about climate and environmental degradation into hacking, digging, planting, measuring.

Somehow fittingly, the last article I've done for South African media was the piece I wrote about the Ferncliffe for Financial Mail published October 2022. It came out a few weeks after I'd lost my dad to a brief battle with cancer. By then I was aware that Janine was living with stage four cancer too and I resolved to visit her as often as I could.

My last visit to Ferncliffe was in May.

The treatments which had been fighting back Janine's cancer previously were no longer able to do that and we knew there wasn't much time left. We sat in the autumnal sun chatting – the conversation touching on our usual favourite topics, book recs etc. but also swerving into the existential – of course – too.

While she rested, I tried to muster the motivation to work on the written assignment soon due for my environmental law master's.

Janine was still strong enough to venture into the forest and was keen to accompany me there. She and I went slowly and carefully together to measure two different trees she had planted (both were healthy, growing – taller than a year ago).

This act I keep coming back to. Janine obviously knew she wouldn't get to see these trees get any bigger, but she was out there measuring anyway. It was totally in keeping with the spirit of loving stewardship which has imbued this rewilding project from the beginning.

What do you do with the love for someone that has gone?

A humanitarian worker I know who has experienced much more than his fair share of devastating loss recently told me "life is for the living and we owe it to the people we lost to make the best of it". I'm not sure we owe the dead anything, but still his words have struck a chord.

I'm trying to allow myself to feel the sadness, the horror at Janine's gone-ness but I also know I can't focus solely on that. Yes, I must mourn but to focus only on her absence would be blinkered and parsimonious. I must not neglect all that remains: the work to be done, the people to care for, the causes to fight – and this beloved, beleaguered yet still so lively and staggeringly beautiful planet.

I need to make space for, to cultivate, gratitude too. Because: what an honour to have been friends with someone so extraordinary – someone who had an abundance of kindness and determination and integrity! What an inspiring, energising, soul-nourishing gift!

I described losing my dad as "a lesson in impermanence" and I certainly could've done without a refresher this soon – but of course life, the universe, cancer don't work according to our inclinations or preferred timetables. I have been returning often to that Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day, which so exquisitely celebrates paying tender, slow, careful attention to the natural world. More than that, though, it acknowledges life's transience and fragility ("Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?") which leads to the question Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?