Biography

Over the last ten years, Ray Mears has become recognized as an authority on bushcraft and survival throughout the world. With his charismatic personality and interesting background, he is much in demand on the After Dinner corporate circuit.

He has appeared in many television series including: Tracks, World of Survival, The Essential Guide to Rocks, Extreme Survival, Trips Money Can't Buy with Ewan McGregor, and The Real Heroes of Telemark.

In 1983 Ray founded his own survival school which he called ‘Woodlore’.

For the last 22 years he has taught at the school, aiming to enable others to understand more about bushcraft and survival. The aim of Ray’s bushcraft way of life is for man to understand and re-acquaint themselves with nature, to understand their roots and to liberate them from the consumerism of the 21st century.

Its aim is to encourage people to understand for themselves the beauty of nature and what can be achieved within it by trusting in themselves and the world around them. Ray encourages this, through teaching and getting stuck in. His main pleasure is to see the challenging of his audiences own beliefs and perceptions of the world around them as they start to understand the world of Bushcraft and as Ray says “The art of the possible”.

Developing the Passion Ray grew up in Southern England on the North Downs, where he discovered a countryside abundant with wildlife. Developing a unique attunement to his local environment, he learned to track foxes into the forest, never realising that he was embarking on a journey that would become his life's mission. Wanting to be able to sleep out on the trail yet unable to afford camping equipment, he resorted to a more Robinson Crusoe approach to solving the problem.

It was his judo teacher (Kingsley) at school who fired his imagination and encouraged him to look at the world in a different way. Kingsley was a wonderful man.

He had fought behind enemy lines in Burma during the Second World War and he taught Ray to challenge conventional wisdom and practices. "You don't need equipment, you need knowledge to survive in the wild", he would tell him. "Maximum efficiency from minimum effort", was another of his themes. These simple principles have been enshrined in Ray's Bushcraft philosophy in his writing and teaching.

Digesting every scrap of information relating to survival that he could find in his local library, he soon began to re-learn skills that had not been employed on the North Downs for perhaps as long as ten thousand years. Since those early days Ray has expanded his horizons literally traveling the World many times over. Conversing in the universal language of Bushcraft, he has won the friendship of many of the Earth's first Nations and has been privileged to accompany them while hunting, tracking, and searching for wild plants for food and medicine.