Our Team
The Board of Trustees is drawn from a wide range of backgrounds including anthropology, governance, finance, law, biodiversity and the media.
Dr Luci Attala, Chair
Luci Attala is an award-winning anthropologist who received her PhD from Exeter University. Her ethnographic work with Indigenous groups in Kenya, Spain, Wales and now Colombia and Alaska looks to people’s relationships with water and how water’s physical behaviours actively shape people’s daily lives.
Luci’s work aims to counter the environmental violence that human exceptionalist and extractive perspectives produce by providing an alternative eco-sensitive lens through which to relate to the other-than-human agents we all live with.
She is the Deputy Executive Director of UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Global Coalition, the Director of BRIDGES (UK), an Associate Professor in Anthropology and edits the Materialities in Archaeology and Anthropology series with University of Wales Press.
Petra Gomersall, Treasurer
Petra Gomersall TEP has been working as a consultant in charitable Estates and Trusts and probate for over 17 years. Serving as THT’s treasurer, Petra brings on board her wider expertise in nonprofit governance, legal management and fundraising. She has a Master in Law from Charles University in Prague and is a member of the England & Wales Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners.
Petra’s passion is learning from Indigenous cultures about the timeless principles of ecology and landscape management, and finding parallels between the ancient and modern paradigms through the understanding the life-giving medium of water and our relation to it.
Barbara Hoffman, Trustee
Barbara T. Hoffman is a preeminent arts, cultural heritage and cultural institution lawyer in New York City. She is a former Chair of the International Bar Association Committee on Art, Cultural Institutions and Heritage Law and the Chair of the New York City Bar Association Committee on Art Law. Barbara was the first woman Associate Professor of law at Seattle University School of Law (formerly UPS).
Dr Vian Sharif, Trustee
Dr Vian Sharif is founder of nature and biodiversity insights platform NatureAlpha, and Head of Sustainability at FNZ Group. She leads the development of innovative technology solutions across financial platforms to catalyse the shift to more sustainable capital allocations, and ultimately a more sustainable world, working closely with academics and scientists from leading global institutions. Prior to this she spent over a decade at global asset manager Investec. As part of a number of governmental and international sustainability advisory groups, she was a Member of the Taskforce for Nature Related Disclosures Technical Experts Group and the UK Government’s Business Advisory group for the Convention on Biodiversity. She was a founder member of the Taskforce on Nature Markets and is a board member of Nature Finance.
Alan Ereira, Founder
Alan Ereira founded the Trust and retired in 2024. Alan is an award winning film maker responsible for the two documentary films created with the Kogi in the 1990s and later in 2012. He is the author of a number of books including ‘A Message from the Heart of the World’, which detailed the making of the first film of similar name. Alan was a Professor of Practice at the University of Wales, Trinity St. David.
Graham Townsley, Patron
With a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, he started his career working as an anthropologist on ethnographic films for the BBC. Films: ‘The Shaman and his Apprentice’ based on his own fieldwork with a tribe of the Peruvian Amazon. He was also involved with the making of “From the Heart of the World”.
Wade Davis, Patron
Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. He has been described as ‘a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity’. In recent years his work has taken him from East Africa to the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.