Tunde Morakinyo: ‘I feel a deep sense of responsibility to help people think about their part in nature’

The tropical community forestry specialist on conservation in Nigeria and the transformation of Meath Gardens from a desolate park into an urban oasis in the East End.

One of Tunde Morakinyo’s earliest memories is of being six years old at school in Ibadan, Nigeria, curious about why there was a commotion in one corner of the playground. He rushed to the front of the crowd and was shocked to find his peers throwing stones at a frog. ‘I was horrified, absolutely horrified,’ he says as if the traumatic incident happened only yesterday. 

‘I remember rescuing this frog, putting the frog in my lunchbox, and taking the frog home.’ He nursed the amphibian back to health for a week before setting it free in his garden. ‘I had this really strong sense of, “Who’s gonna fight for the animals?” The animals don’t have anyone to speak for them.’

Now aged 57, the tropical forestry specialist still feels as deeply attached to wildlife as he did as a child. Throughout our conversation, he talks about the interdependencies between animals, trees and fungi as if he’s reciting lines of poetry, his voice full of awe for the delicate intricacies of the earth’s ecosystems. 

For Morakinyo, a ‘tree is not just a tree’, but a powerful locus of infinite life. ‘There are hundreds of insects living on the branches of those trees. There are fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the tree. There’s the fact that the tree produces moisture, which turns into rain, which then enables plants all around the tree to grow.’ He speaks with a remarkable serenity and sense of peace – perhaps derived from his surety that he’s inextricably tied to this miraculous ‘web of life’. 

Dividing his time between Globe Town and Nigeria, Moyakinyo has dedicated his life to conservation. He’s the co-founder of Friends of Meath Gardens, a community association he formalised in 2015 with landscape architect Joanna Milewska, on a mission to transform a barren, dying green space into a thriving jewel of a park. 

When Moyakinyo isn’t digging, planting and weeding in Bethnal Green, he’s mobilising African businesses to protect the Gashaka-Gumti National Park on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, preventing the spectacular rainforest from logging, illegal mining and bushmeat hunting. But when did his journey with environmental action begin?

His mother is from Hemel Hampstead, and his father is from Ibadan, Nigeria. He grew up in Portsmouth before the family moved to Ibadan when he was three. With nature-loving parents, his childhood was full of adventure.

‘Every other weekend, they would just get out the map and stick a pin in and say “Let’s go there”, so as a kid we had lots of family adventures. Going to climb mountains, going to visit national parks, going to visit forest reserves, going to visit villages and all sorts of far-flung places that lots of people in Nigeria don’t go to visit,’ he says.

At 16, he returned to the UK and studied chemical engineering at the University of Bath. But childhood memories of trips to the lush, spellbinding rainforests of Togo on the Gulf of Guinea would pursue him, compelling him to the Natural History section of the library to immerse himself in the study of forestry.

‘That was when I found out that the world’s rainforests were disappearing at an alarming rate. I thought: “Oh my God, why isn’t anyone doing more about this?” So when I was 18, I wrote to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWFN) saying that I wanted to do something to save the rainforests.’ 

At 22, he got a job with the WWFN and was sent to Nigeria to work in a threatened rainforest community on the border with Cameroon. ‘People in the village couldn’t read and write, but they’d been sent a logging contract which they were about to sign.’ The company had promised to build roads, a school and a health clinic in exchange for chopping down trees, but when Morakinyo read the contract, it was clear the loggers had no intention to deliver on any of these promises for at least 10 years. 

‘I said to the village: “Have you read this contract? Do you, do you understand what you’re about to sign?” And they didn’t.’ He immediately intervened and set up a cooperative to protect their rainforest from exploitative companies trying to take advantage of the impoverished community.

‘That was a really important moment in my life because I realised that it doesn’t take much to help people gain control of their environment, and people are not intrinsically bad,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to destroy the planet, people would like to look after the environment if you can give them the tools and the ability to be able to do that — and that’s what I had done.’

In 2001, Morakinyo started working for ERM: Environmental Resources Management as a consultant, but he gradually found the corporate lifestyle unfulfilling, knowing he was destined for a different path. ‘I spent a lot of time travelling around the world, helping various companies develop policies which would minimise deforestation, improve workers’ rights and minimise their impacts on the environment. But I always felt that I was just greenwashing what companies were doing,’ he says. ‘At the end of the day, companies are driven by profits. I was making that rapacious profit motive slightly better, but I didn’t feel it was my true calling.’

After 17 years of consultancy and finding himself finally ‘fed up with working on the treadmill in the City of London’, Morakinyo hit a turning point. Dissatisfied with the hollowness of the grind, he shifted his focus to making a real difference and co-founded the Africa Nature Investors Foundation — a nonprofit on a mission to conserve threatened, spectacular landscapes like the Gashaka-Gumti National Park and the lush forests of the Edo State in central southern Nigeria.

He also moved house to the other side of Bethnal Green onto Palmer’s Road, on the edge of Meath Gardens. ‘That, for me — certainly for my life in London — was transformational, in that it finally gave me a raison d’être to be part of the community,’ he says. It was the start of a new era for Morakinyo, and the beginning of radical change for a barren, unloved strip of land. 

Meath Gardens is a 4.1642-hectare park, formerly part of Victoria Park Cemetery, to the west of Regent’s Canal. Opening to the public in 1894, it was poorly maintained for over a hundred years, with several trees falling victim to successive housing developments. In the 1950s, a chemical plant was even built on its grounds.

When he moved next to the suffering park, Morakinyo stumbled across a Facebook group called ‘Friends of Meath Gardens’, made up of residents appalled by the state of their suffering excuse for a local green space, which was crying out for some love. ‘It was essentially a protest group,’ says Morakinyo.

‘There were lots of posts on the Facebook page about how awful the council was, how all these trees were being cut down in the East End.’ He noticed a unique opportunity — to transform the protest group of simmering discontent into a productive forum for radical, community-led action in the East End.

In Tower Hamlets, trees are political. It’s the London borough with the least access to green spaces – 0.89 hectares per 1,000 residents, compared to the borough standard of 1.2 hectares per 1,000 residents. It also has the fifth worst air quality in the capital, disproportionally impacting the poorest, the elderly and the young with respiratory diseases.

So in 2015, when Morakinyo galvanised the Meath Gardens protest group into a formalised community association, he gave residents a lifeline, empowering them to turn their craving for a green space into reality. 

‘We came up with a plan to create three new woodland areas, and we told the park that we would oppose them cutting any more trees unless they absolutely had to be cut down for health and safety reasons,’ he says. ‘The whole idea was to make Meath Gardens a place that would be wonderful for biodiversity, but also a place that would bring the community together.’

With Morakinyo and co-founder Milewska at the helm, the Friends group came up with a bullet-proof blue-print to metamorphose the lifeless strip of land into a thriving, urban wilderness.

At the first voluntary tree-planting event in 2015, around 50 parents, counsellors, pensioners and students came together to plant over 100 trees, and the rest is history. For nine years, the Friends group have nurtured a desolate park back to life by planting thousands of spring bulbs, establishing wildflower meadows, maintaining ancient trees like the veteran black poplar, and reviving bare grass into exuberant woodland. 

The next year, the park won a Green Flag award. Fast forward to 2024, and its accolades have only grown. In March, Kingsley Obaseki, one of the volunteers, won the Geographical Better World Video Award for his short film ‘Saving the Lungs of London’, about the park’s centrality to the community. The following month, the Friends group received the Civic Award from the council for their outstanding service to the community.

For Morakinyo, the success of Friends of Meath Gardens is a testament to the power of even the most disenfranchised to transform their local environments for the better. ‘We can make a difference. We can change things,’ he says. ‘You can write to your MP. There are all these things you can do to bring about change and the government will do things differently if they realise people want things to be different.’

The rejuvenated green space is a symbol of why we shouldn’t give up on fighting for the betterment of our streets, parks and the planet, even when genuine change feels impossible. ‘Sometimes I can’t bear to think about the big picture,’ he says. 

‘The amount of plastic we’re generating every second, the amount of rainforests being cut down, coral reefs are dying. There are such big forces at play, both in politics and with big business and with big industry, that one almost thinks, “Oh my God, it’s really depressing, why don’t we give up?” But I’m also such a strong believer in humanity’s ability to come together to save itself and humanity’s ability to do good.’

And that’s what Friends of Meath Gardens is about: a diverse, disempowered neighbourhood, denied access to green space, coming together to fix a broken system, one tree at a time. ‘I feel a deep sense of responsibility to help people think about their part in nature and what they can do, and I feel a great responsibility around giving people the tools,’ Morakinyo says.

As an ambitious environmentalist, Morakinyo’s sights are beyond the humble park in Bethnal Green, but even when he’s away saving African rainforests, his heart is still with his home-grown woodland.

‘Meath Gardens is my oasis. It’s my place of calm,’ he says wistfully. ‘Even when I’m in Nigeria in my hotel room, I take a mental walk around Meath Gardens and that makes me go to sleep. It really is my place of refuge and my place of calm, and I think it is for a lot of the residents living around Meath Gardens. It is that oasis of calm in the East End of London.’

If you enjoyed this article, you might like reading our interview with Bow local and soon-to-be Olympic diver, Scarlett Mew Jensen. 

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