Our History

The Wilderness Foundation UK was founded in 1976 by Dr. Ian Player, international conservationist, and Sir Laurens van der Post, writer, explorer, and philosopher. Ian Player, a native of South Africa, is best known for saving the white rhinoceros from extinction.

Player established the first two protected wilderness areas in all of Africa, iMfolozi and St. Lucia in South Africa. With his Zulu guide and mentor Magqubu Ntombela, he founded the Wilderness Leadership School.

At a time when it was illegal for people of different races to gather in South Africa, they established a multiracial program that became a worldwide movement dedicated to preserving wild spaces and enabling people to experience them.

Using the Zulu word for erythrina, Ntombela said:

“The msinsi is a tree found in the wild and also in the settlements. It is our job to take people from the settlements to the wild and then bring them back again. The leaf has three points, and each point contains a message: Man to God, Man to Man, and Man to Earth.”

Player added:

“Many years later I realised that the fourth relationship was the internal relationship of each of us to ourselves, and that was as big a mystery as the leaf itself.”

Ian Player died in 2014. His colleague Magqubu Ntombela preceded him in 1992.

Their work lives on in Wilderness Foundation Global and the Wilderness Foundation UK, expanding to touch thousands more lives in many different ways.

We take young people and adults, on once-in-a-lifetime wilderness trail adventures in Southern Africa, Europe and the UK—adventures that often inspire a deep connection with nature and a passion for conservation.

Inspired by our founders’ belief in the healing and spiritual powers of wild spaces, we provide programmes that bring people into the wild to connect with nature, experience nature’s healing and recover their own resilience.

When Ian Player looked for a symbol for the Wilderness Leadership School, Magqubu Ntombela gave him an erythrina leaf. That leaf became the symbol of Wilderness Foundation across the globe.

We are also one of the four founding partners of Wilderness Foundation Global

1983 Scotland World Wilderness Congress with Dr Ian Player, (founder of the World Wilderness Congresses and our charity) and Laurens van der Post

ABOUT THE CONGRESS

Since 1976, the World Wilderness Congress has helped nature defenders from around the world gather to develop new strategies and actions for our wild Earth.

Beginning in South Africa as a partnership between famed South African game ranger, Ian Player, and his Zulu mentor, Magqubu Ntombela (you can read more about their friendship here), the Congress was convened to bring together wilderness advocates from around the world to address the root cause of the environmental crisis: a broken relationship with nature.

We invite you to join WILD12, the next gathering of the World Wilderness Congress to be a part of a historic moment when wilderness is reinterpreted through the lens of traditional cultures, rooting Indigenous principles and lifeways at the center of the movement to keep Earth wild.