The Art of Finding Treasure: Sean Ashworth's episode

By Sandy Glanfield

I've been thinking about treasure hunting. Not the pirates-and-buried-gold sort, but the quieter kind, where curiosity, patience and a willingness to rummage around in things that others have discarded might just lead you to something rather wonderful.

I have this lovely image of a young Sean Ashworth sitting in the basement of a bookshop in Brighton's Lanes, while his dad worked upstairs, happily making his way through piles of remainder books. Amongst them he discovered a book about vertebrates that he still treasures today. And I can't help smiling at the thought that, years later, this same boy would rescue an old map of Sussex's lost kelp forests from another pile of things destined to be thrown away. Little did he know what that particular find would eventually help make possible.

I love that thread running through Sean's life, and it's got me wondering about our ability to recognise value in things that others have stopped noticing. What is it that makes one person walk past something while another stops, looks a little closer and sees something worth keeping?

We live in a world that is rather good at deciding what has value, often in quite narrow terms. Things are useful or useless, profitable or unprofitable, important or insignificant. And once we've decided, we don't always think to question those judgements. The kelp forests off Sussex are a rather wonderful example. Once considered a nuisance because of the quantities of seaweed washing up on beaches, they are now recognised for the extraordinary role they play in marine ecosystems. The kelp hasn't changed, but our understanding of its value certainly has.

And I wonder how much else we might be overlooking, not because it lacks value, but because we've become so accustomed to seeing it in a particular way.

There's another kind of treasure in Sean's story that I've been thinking about, and that's the treasure we find in other people. I was struck by the relationships that helped make his work possible, particularly the connections between people who brought very different skills and ways of seeing the world. Someone looking at a river through the eyes of a fish, another through the lens of flood management. A scientist who understands the importance of a kelp forest and a filmmaker who knows how to help others fall in love with the idea of bringing it back.

I find something rather magical about what can happen in those spaces between people. Neither has to abandon what they know or what matters to them, but by being curious about what the other brings, they can begin to see possibilities that might otherwise have remained hidden.

And perhaps that's where some of our greatest opportunities for change lie. Not necessarily in finding the next brilliant idea or extraordinary individual, but in creating the conditions for different people, perspectives and experiences to come together. It makes me wonder how often we miss those opportunities because we're too busy defending our own corner, working within our familiar circles or assuming that the way we've always done things is the only sensible way.

Sean describes himself as a 'positive disruptor', which I rather like. Disruption can sound rather aggressive, as though it requires someone to come charging in, knocking things over and generally making a nuisance of themselves. But what I took from Sean's stories was something quite different. A willingness to ask questions, to challenge assumptions, to listen to the evidence and to keep chipping away, sometimes over many years, while building the relationships that allow something different to emerge.

It's not particularly glamorous, and I imagine it can be enormously frustrating. But there's something hopeful about recognising that change doesn't always require a grand gesture. Sometimes it begins with someone noticing something that doesn't quite make sense, asking whether it could be done differently and finding others who are willing to explore that possibility.

At Reboot the Future, we often come back to the Golden Rule, treating others and the planet as we would wish to be treated. I've been thinking about how that might connect with these ideas of treasure hunting and relationships. Perhaps part of living the Golden Rule is being willing to look beyond our own immediate needs and assumptions, to recognise the value of things and people that we might not fully understand, and to be curious about the contribution others can make.

After all, we are part of an extraordinary web of relationships, with one another and with the natural world. The decisions we make, the things we choose to value and the people we choose to listen to all shape that web, often in ways we may never fully appreciate.

And that brings me back to the little boy in the bookshop. I wonder what he would have made of the idea that one day, a forgotten map, a collection of unlikely relationships and a rather famous voice from his childhood would come together to help bring life back to the Sussex seabed.

I suspect he'd have been delighted.