Ray Mears talks to the tree

Mears’ unsensational talk about the whispering leaves will be no surprise to those who have attended his bushcraft courses (he founded the Woodlore School in 1983), or have observed him in his unnatural habit, on TV, where he operates as kind of successor to Sir David Attenborough (squashed into the body of Ray Stubbs). In shows such as Bushcraft Survival and Ray Mears Goes Walkabout he has established himself as the don of extreme nature programming. Not for him the He-Man histrionics of Bear Grylls. Mears is happier discussing fish forks with Inuit elders.

He is a serious man, and avowedly unexcitable. When I suggest the sensations he has been describing might be animal instincts, he regards me warily. “They manifest themselves in a way that you would describe as an instinct, but I don’t think they’re instincts. We talk about the hairs on the back of our neck going up when someone’s watching us, and sometimes I can sense a fox hunting in the garden. Those feelings intensify when you’ve been out on your own for a time -- but if you’ve spent a few days in town, you have to work to get back to it.”

Mears talks quietly, insistently and with an unshakeable belief in his own logic. Conversationally, he’s not unlike Gordon Ramsay, albeit without the swearing. Rather than cooking, Mears is monomaniacal about bushcraft, which means going where the wild things are and being at one with nature.

It is scouting for adults, except that Mears’ worldview seems to emphasise individual experience over group activity. He’ll enthuse about the campfire, but he looks truly wistful when he talks of being away from the ravages of polite society.

“I was an only child,” he says. “I was used to my own company, and that’s a strength. When you do a trip on your own you have to make all your own decisions, and that’s a special thing.”

Does he ever get lonely? “I didn’t used to,” he says. “I do now on the first couple of days, and I think that’s a reflection of the amount of time I currently spend around people. For the first day I find it strange not to have that psycho-babble going on. On the second day I reconnect with myself, and on the third day I’m completely happy. But you’re not really alone. You’ve got wild animals with you and you communicate with them.”

Mears, 45, grew up in Kenley, Surrey, a suburban enclave on the fringes of the North Downs. He began by tracking foxes. “The school I went to, we were taught judo,” he says. “The man who taught judo was a wonderful man and he became a mentor. I remember telling him I wanted to stay out all night with the foxes, because they’re nocturnal, but I didn’t have camping equipment. He said: ‘You don’t need it -- just use these skills’. They were things he remembered from his Burma days.”

Mears says his parents were “very wary” of letting him stay out all night. “But I think it is important to let youngsters out and not to be too fearful of the world. As a society we should perhaps deal more firmly with people who create those fears.”

Mears’ latest journey -- chronicled in the book and BBC TV series Northern Wilderness -- takes him to the wilds of Canada, where he follows the trail of great explorers such as Samuel Hearne and the Orcadian John Rae, who he considers to be “the greatest Arctic explorer, bar none”.

“It was the woodsmen who really opened up Canada,” Mears says, “and most of them have been forgotten.” Hearne was the first explorer to travel like a local, setting an example for all who followed, including Rae, who travelled across Canada and into the Arctic wastes in snowshoes, including one epic 1200-mile traipse from Winnipeg to Sault Ste Marie. “He thought of the distances he covered as minor journeys, but he had expanded his mind to the scale of Canada.”

Mears says that by retracing the journeys of these earlier travellers, he can see the world through their eyes and test the veracity of their observations. “The work of these explorers is very important because many of the cultures they were encountering have ceased to live those traditional lifestyles. There will be vestigial remnants and cultural techniques, but these guys were seeing it as it was, hardcore, first-hand.

“This is going to sound down,” he says. “I don’t mean it to, but I’ve had a unique experience to see the last days of cultures, because the elders are dying -- dying rapidly because of diabetes and the effects of the modern diet. There’s an exponential loss of elders, just at the point where people wish they could learn new skills. Now, more than ever, it’s important to ask the right questions.”

Mears doesn’t say so himself, but there is something political about his worldview. Partly, it may be a kind of nostalgia for a world more suited to his loner’s temperament. He talks gloomily about the impossibility of “hearing your inner voice” on a train, due to the irritating pervasiveness of mobile phones, but he is also making a broader ecological point. “The ultimate aim of my work is to reconnect people with nature, because I believe that the most endangered species on the planet is our own.”

Mears’ prescription for man’s ailments is to “build nature back into our lives”. It’s not just about trees, he says, “but actual trees with names and values and purposes, so we feel a kinship with them, and that makes us cherish them more. You have to give people the opportunity to touch things, to feel the dirt and the damp of the countryside, to sit round the fire, to smell the fumes. Those very subtle things weave a spell round us that connects us back to the natural things around us. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t exploit nature. That is part of our role; we are at the top of the food chain for a reason, but we have, as a species, an uncanny responsibility. We have a responsibility to care for the things around us, to nurture them, control them, to manage them, so that we can live harmoniously with them.”

When he talks like this, it’s tempting to see Mears as a 21st century version of John Muir, the Scot who founded the national park system in the US. So I ask him what he thinks of the recent American legislation, signed by President Obama, which allows people to carry guns in those same national parks.

Mears, an admirer of Obama, answers by telling of the time he was with a companion, a park warden, when they encountered a man with a revolver on his belt. “My friend, who’s an Indian, went over to him, armed only with his can of Mace, and said to him: ‘Going hunting, sir? I see you’re carrying a side-arm. Is that for protection against bears?’

“The man says: ‘Yip.’ And my friend says: ‘It’s a fine-looking firearm, would you mind if I had a look?’

“The guy gets it out very proudly, hands it to him, and my friend looks at it, and he says: ‘A Colt Python? Do you mind if I give you a bit of advice? The front sight, I’d file that down a bit.’ And the guy looked at him and said: ‘Why’s that?’ My friend said: ‘So that when the bear shoves it up your backside it isn’t going to hurt as much’.”

But Mears isn’t anti-guns. He argues that, after the Dunblane tragedy which led to handguns being banned, “we disarmed the wrong people because, when someone commits a crime, I don’t think we should allow the misery of that crime to spread out to other people. The focus of the legislation should be targeted where it’s needed -- and most of the people I meet who possess firearms are the most law-abiding citizens.”

If anything, Mears is becoming more uncompromising as he ages. He teaches less now, because he is in “an acquisition phase”. His drive to discover and experience things for himself may have been prompted by the death of his wife, Rachel, from breast cancer in 2006. “It had a very profound effect,” he says quietly. “It really did bring home how short life is. She died ahead of her days. And I don’t want to waste a minute. When you’re filming you have to stand around a lot and I get irritated. Every minute that we live we never get back. We must fill it, and I try to.”

He seems to exclude the possibility of feeling sorry for himself. So, to his evident discomfort, I ask again about his wife’s illness. “She was typical cancer,” he says. “Two years. I think I did a pretty good job of coping, but I’m only just starting to find my feet again.” Worried, perhaps, that it sounds like self-pity, he adds: “I had good support, so I was lucky.”

Upwards and onwards, then. But for all his individualism there is a sense of engagement with the world. He evangelises about the need for children to be given access to nature.

In TV terms, you could imagine Mears moving from Attenborough-mode to Jamie Oliver-like campaigning, introducing inner city kids to campfires. He clearly has a political brain. The nearest he comes to losing his cool is when he considers Westminster, the MPs’ expenses scandal, and Gordon Brown’s prevarication over the Ghurkhas (“a failure of leadership”). But political talk makes him uneasy, and he falls back on bushcraft, noting that after a great storm, wildlife flourishes.

“Whenever something goes wrong out in the wild, there’s usually something you can build out of it. Your fire gets put out by the rain, so you get better at making fires.” I suggest that the nation might need the assistance of a Ray Mears tsar, and he looks decidedly unimpressed. “I don’t like the sound of ‘tsar’. It makes me think of Rasputin and rather unpleasant ends.”

Northern Wilderness is published by Hodder & Stoughton on September 17, £20.