Julia Hailes MBE - Haller’s Co-Founder - is a British environmentalist, author, and sustainability consultant renowned for her significant contributions to environmental awareness and advocacy. This is the first of two blogs Julia has authored about René Haller and the evolution of The Haller Foundation to date.

Read the second blog on Julia’s website here. The original version of this article can be found here.

Young René at the Tanganyika Coffee Plantation

THE HOUSE OF EDEN

Perhaps, René’s extraordinary life was destined from the start. His very first home was called the House of Eden. How appropriate that turned out to be.

Born in 1933, he has early memories of the war years with American bombers flying over his home in Lenzburg, Switzerland. He remembers planes being shot down and landing in the nearby lakes as well as witnessing the Swiss mobilisation after Germany invaded Poland, with long columns of men and vehicles filling the streets. But the most striking influence of this time for Rene was that food was short and his family had to grow their own using every bit of available land. He took this lesson with him to Africa later in life.

RENE’S MOTHER WAS A FREE THINKER

René’s father ran a factory making wine vats that went bankrupt the year René was born. He then found work running a prison workshop. Perhaps he passed his practical skills onto Rene, but it was René’s mother who seems to have had a more profound influence on her son. She lived in a world of ideas with artists, musicians and thinkers. More importantly, she was a free thinker and encouraged intellectual exploration.

RENE HAS ALWAYS QUESTIONED EVERYTHING

The sense of being different was a hallmark of René’s time at school and he describes himself as being a bit of an outsider. His memories from this time are not happy ones and he says his school reports were ‘lousy’. One reason why he may have been considered a nuisance was because he questioned everything and didn’t always accept what he was told. For example, when a teacher said that it would be possible to see the stars at the bottom of the well in Lenzburg castle – it was over 50ft deep – Rene decided to find out if it was true. He climbed right down and nearly died. The candle he was holding snuffed out from lack of oxygen but luckily he was rescued just in time.

LOVE OF NATURE

Where René excelled though was in his love of nature. His walk to school was through the woods and he’d linger on the way to explore the forests and observe what he saw. And he’d spend many hours drawing the birds and animals he found. He recalls finding a bird’s nest and climbing a tree every day to look inside. One day he stole one of the eggs and remembers with guilt his mother calling him a liar when he said he found it on the ground.

René left school when he was only 16. Unusually, this didn’t stop him from being accepted to study agronomy at the Technical University in Basle. Even here though Rene didn’t conform. Rather than taming nature and creating manicured lawns and flower beds, he saw the value in bringing the wild into human landscaping and embraced an ecological approach. It was here that the seeds were sown for Rene to become a pioneer in ‘Rewilding’ or ‘Wilding’ as it has become known.

AN AFRICAN DREAM

The pull of Africa started when René was very young as his house was filled with books about the continent. He was enthralled. But his dream of going there happened for the first time in an extraordinary way. Whilst in Basle he was living in a boarding house owned by a peculiar old woman with black teeth – Rene describes her as being like a character from a Hitchcock film. She commissioned him to fetch something from Africa – René wasn’t clear what this was. Much more important was that he arrived and his fascination intensified.

MANAGING DIFFICULT PEOPLE!
His initial intention had been to work on a cocoa plantation in West Africa. In fact this first trip took him to the Congo, Rwanda and Kenya. And, it was to East Africa that René returned after a mandatory spell in the Swiss Army when he was 18. His military service and his earlier time in the Boy Scouts taught him valuable lessons about practical leadership which meant that he became known for his ability to handle difficult groups – he found this useful for getting people to do things differently!

RENE LEARNED ABOUT SURVIVING ON SMALL PLOTS OF LAND

Working on a coffee plantation in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) was his first proper job. It wasn’t an entirely happy experience as his Greek bosses didn’t like that he got on so well with the African workers! More than that Rene was intrigued by the local tribes, in particular the Chagga people who lived on the edge of Mount Kilimanjaro. Apparently, they had been pushed into this inhospitable area by the Masai and had learned to survive on small plots of land with ingenuity and resourcefulness – using their engineering skills to make the most of what they had. This was another valuable lesson for Rene about land stewardship.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HOW RENE TRANSFORMED LANDSCAPES ‘FROM WASTELAND TO PARADISE’

When René joined Bamburi Cement in 1959 his job was to help them grow fruit and vegetables to feed the workers. But he didn’t stick to his brief. He used the knowledge he had gained to transform the desert landscape created by mining coral for cement into a tropical paradise. That’s the main story of Rene’s life because today he’s 91 and still living and working at Bamburi. Click here to find out what he achieved and what led him to be described as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’!