Fight climate crisis with ancient wisdom, says Britannia star

Though Ms Cornell lives in Australia, she prizes her Scottish ancestry. “What I know of people from Scotland is that it seems from the people I speak to, that there’s a belief system and a fascination with the environment, and a desire to protect it. I feel there’s a holding on to ancient ways when in other places it has been decimated.”

Ms Cornell is most famous for playing Ania, a member of the Celtic Regni tribe who is captured by another tribe and lives for some time with the Druids, in Britannia. The anarchic Sky Atlantic show, set at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain was described by critics as "totally off its head" and "brilliantly bonkers".

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She is the daughter of Crocodile Dundee producer, John Cornell, and actress Delvene Delaney, who starred in Crocodile Dundee II, and lives in Byron Bay, where she grew up, with a family of many  “environmentalists”. There, she is currently helping her mother regenerate an area of land with the help of ecologists - and, she said, allowing "nature to speak to us".

Her father’s religion, she said, was nature. “It was woven into everything he did. Nature was always what he returned to. He was very sick for twenty years. He had Parkinson's and emphysema and I think the reason he lived as long as he did was because he was consistently staring out into the mountains. He was always finding beauty in nature.” 

Does that make Crocodile Dundee an environmental film?

Ms Cornell said, “It definitely had its environmental moments. And it is a celebration of the land."

Byron Bay, she said, has already seen some climate impact. “I look around and there’s less wildlife than when I was growing up. You would have seen way more possums and snakes. And they’re gone and we have had fires and floods. Where I live has been ravaged by floods that are meant to be once in a hundred years."

Filming Britannia was, she said, an experience that put her further in touch with her Celtic roots. “I was raised with a very deep awareness of Celtic practices,” she said. “We followed the cycles and the harvests and everything growing up and I think that was a unique blessing in my life. When I got the show that deepened my interest a lot more.”

She used her earnings from the series to fund Refugia. In biology, a refugium is a place that supports an isolated population of a once more widespread species.  

The actor and filmmaker, who describes herself as “a very passionate earth mother and by no means a scientific expert” is passionate about work that rebuilds biodiversity wherever it is in the world – and interested in some of the rewilding projects currently taking place across Scotland, as well as regenerative farming, a soil-replenishing approach being advocated by Scottish Government.

She said; “I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about carbon-neutral farming and I love permaculture and methods where each round is putting nutrients back into the ground."

She is also keen not to discount any particular approach. “My argument is always that if it’s benefitting the environment – planting trees,  reforesting seaweed beds  - it excites me. We’re seeing in a multitude of ways the way we can act as protectors of the planet to heal it.”

Time in nature, she believes, can also heal us. While filming Britannia, she recalled, she was living in America and working with members of the Native American church doing rewilding. “I had also simultaneously experienced rape and trauma and I found that the deepest healer for me was going on these rewilding expeditions where I would learn to make fire and track and see where the sun was. Returning to those old ways felt like years of therapy."

Her role in Britannia also gave her, she said, "a deeper understanding of what it would be like to have sovereign lands invaded and see my family wiped out and sacred areas not honoured."

 “I come,” she said, “from a country that has been invaded very recently and it was done so. I see that all of the problems in my country seem to stem from that invasion and not listening to the original landholders that have been caretaking that land for 60,000 years plus. That seems to be the case the world over. There’s a running theme around the world that we’ve forgotten these care-taking practices, ignored them, or destroyed them."

One of the projects she has personally been involved in has been rewilding a patch of forest that had been damaged by chemicals and cleared so that no fungal lifeforms survived – and which left her feeling “nobody walks here for the next five years”.

However, she described herself as "someone who has lived in Hollywood and come across some incredibly wealthy people" and recognised that ecological action can seem the preserve of the privileged. 

Ms Corrnell is an advocate of spending time in nature and the first episode of Refugia focuses on how humans can replenish themselves by getting their hands in the soil and spending time in natural landscapes. She grows her own vegetables and then trades them with a neighbour.

She said: “That’s a privilege, but it shouldn’t be a privilege. Land rights, and water rights - should be there for everyone."

She also believes that nature - for instance trees and rivers - should have legal rights.

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Whenever she travels, she always offsets it three times. She said: “I did that for Refugia because it was a road trip and so we offset that by the power of three. I think you want your carbon credits to be with people who are ensuring those trees are reaching maturity. I’ve seen a lot of projects where suddenly that gets sold in ten years and that gets cut down."

Refugia centres on joy and positive change. “I do believe," she said, "that we can heal the planet by refocusing in an intentional manner and with that symbiotic relationship at the forefront. That’s what I loved about Refugia.  It's that there are so many people out there doing amazing things all the time.”

The series has been released on WaterBear, the first online interactive platform which allows the viewer to take direct action for the issues they are watching.

Ms Cornell said: "One of the positive things we can do is find good work – or find other people who are doing that good work, and support them whether through donations or hands-on."