Apprentice Selection Week | | Episode 1 | Ben Law's Woodland Year

After gathering dust for more than a decade, See Through News is making unique footage showcasing an exemplary zero-carbon life available - for free.
Not everyone can put his name to his face, but Ben Law is well known in the UK. Grand Designs is a TV series about architecture and homes, each episode telling the story of a self-build project. Since its first broadcast in 1999, there have been more than 200 episodes, often repeated. The one everyone remembers, and the one consistently voted their favourite-ever episode, featured Ben Law.
His name may not ring a bell, but if you say 'The Man Who Built His House In The Woods' on Grand Designs, almost everyone will know who you mean. They remember all manner of details, as Ben and a few local mates upgraded his residence from tent to home.
The design was traditional, but no one had built one for centuries. It was made almost entirely from materials gathered from within a mile of where it was raised.
As well as building, Ben uses his hard-acquired traditional craft skills to make a sustainable living in the modern world. The sustainable world in which the old woodsman acquired their skills is now long gone. The rapacious consumer culture that has replaced it needs to learn their sustainable secrets more urgently than ever.
Ben teaches courses, writes books, and every year, takes on two apprentices who share his woodland year, coppicing sweet chestnut for everything from pea sticks to construction timber, building locally for others, making charcoal, harvesting fruits of the forest. Ben is the kind of soft-spoken, deep-thinking expert who makes a sustainable, zero-carbon lifestyle an aspiration, not a sacrifice. We may not all be able to live off a few acres of woodland, but we can all learn from how Ben makes his living by working with, rather than against, nature
Throughout the year, young people write to Ben asking to be considered as one of the two apprentices he takes on every year. Every September, Ben invites a few of the most promising ones to his home in Prickly Nut Wood, for a week of woodland activities. He observes them carefully, before selecting the two winners.
The stakes are much higher than in some confected Saturday night TV entertainment format. Ben has to balance who he thinks will gain the most from the experience. He has to imagine how they might get on with each other. He has to consider how he’ll get on with them, and if they’re tough enough to endure the challenges of living for a year alone in off-grid caravans in the middle of the woods. They will become his Apprentices for the next annual woodland cycle.
What happened next will be revealed over a series of videos on this channel, of which this is the first.
We're not asking for any money. But if you like what you see, please support this project by sharing it widely among your own social media. network, subscribing to the See Through News CZcams channel.
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This footage was filmed in 2012/13, and is only now being released, exclusively via See Through News. The full saga of why it has taken so long can be found on the www.seethroughnews.org website, but it's down to the gap between the way commercial TV wants us to see the world, and the way the director (Robert Stern of Litmus Films, AKA SternWriter) and Ben wanted to show the real world.
When this was filmed, we depended on broadcasters, as gatekeepers to public eyeballs, and purse-holders of the kind of budgets required to make professional-standard documentaries.
Fortunately, after SternWriter founded See Through News in 2021, both obstacles have been overcome. Ben's work and life completely align with the See Through New Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active. STN's street-smart volunteers experts have created our own audience, for no money, and our zero-budget ethos has attracted top-notch volunteer professionals to post-produce the footage to broadcast standards, but without broadcaster interference in the message.
Fortunately, the kind of values Ben's sustainably life exemplifies are timeless. A decade is nothing in the context of a forester, and turns out not to matter much in the context of a documentary series filming a year in the life of 'Britain's Greatest Living Woodsman'.
We thank our volunteers for bringing this footage to the public, and helping sow seeds for a sustainable future.
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If you have the editing and digital marketing skills to turn this footage into shareable content for today’s platforms, and would like to help, email [e-mail].
You can also support See Through News by checking out our many other free projects at www.seethroughews.org. They’re all different first steps towards the same Goal:
Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active.

[@beaulunaedvantures]

Fascinating, think I might be a bit old at 51 which is a shame. However it’s still extremely interesting the selection process he goes through. When was this filmed?

[@SeeThroughNews]

@beaulunaedvantures, thanks for your interest. This was filmed more than a decade ago - the full saga of why it's taken so long to release is on the www.seethrougohnews.org website, and also mentioned at the bottom of the video description - but the point of what Ben does is that the sustainability principles by which he lives are timeless. What's a decade when you're a forester?...

[@simonjones7785]

looking for a list of trees to plant my own coppice ideas of trees happ to be close to each other

[@torque9889]

I’ve got a sweet chestnut woodland and it’s honestly a pleasure to coppice. Easy to work with, beautiful trees, beautiful wood similar to oak but easier to split and you can eat the nuts or feed them to any livestock you have. Win win

[@simonjones7785]

@@torque9889 ah I know the sweet chestnut is easy to split Im pagan by belief and want to be buried in s small coppice of oaks in a u shape with the open end facing south so the ground will always get the most sunlight I want 8 oaks to be placed so i have the energy of the oaks feeding my spirit in the u