Catherine Edsell

Catch Catherine Edsell on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick 18th - 24th May 2026.

Adventurer, Conservationist, and Expedition Leader

Catherine Edsell is a global expedition leader, conservationist and TEDx speaker whose life has been shaped by a restless curiosity about the natural world and an unshakeable belief that wilderness holds the answers to questions we have forgotten how to ask.

Over more than twenty-five years, she has led expeditions across three biomes - jungle, ocean and desert. She has trekked seven hundred kilometres through Namibia's ephemeral valleys tracking desert elephants; built harpy eagle nesting boxes in Belize; led reef check expeditions in Oman and the Maldives; monitored sperm whales in the Azores and whale sharks in Tanzania. She is a Qualified Field Guide of Southern Africa, PADI Divemaster, Reef Check trainer, Day Skipper, qualified yoga teacher and a published author, as well as an ambassador for Elephant Human Relations Aid (EHRA).

Nine years ago, she created The Matriarch Adventure, an all-women, ten-day wilderness expedition in Namibia tracking the desert elephant herds she first encountered on foot in 2002. Designed for women who have given a great deal to others and are ready to give something back to themselves, it strips away phones, itineraries and creature comforts, replacing them with ancient landscapes, open fires and the awe-inspiring spectacle of matriarchal elephant society. Women between the ages of twenty-six and seventy-eight have made the journey. Jobs have changed. Relationships have shifted. Perspectives have permanently expanded.

Her own inner life has been deepened by a ten-day vision quest in the Lake District, four of those days fasting alone in nature, during which, after a night of ceremonial rattling under the stars, she heard what she later came to understand as the Music of the Spheres: a celestial sound that bonded her, in her words, to the cosmos and to the ecosystem in a way she has never lost. She now leads medicine walks and story councils alongside her expeditions, and runs a writing and nature connection retreat in the Cairngorms.

A mother of two, she navigated the shock of returning to London from the wilderness with characteristic directness, eventually finding in Steiner education the same holistic values she had encountered in the jungle: beauty, patience, and trust in natural cycles. She speaks warmly of the long game, in education, in conservation, in personal growth, and of freedom as the word that has guided every threshold she has crossed.

Her adventures now range from the Amazon to Southern Mozambique, where she is pioneering a new humpback whale expedition. She invites listeners to consider their fifties not as a closing down but as a new beginning, a return to the freedom and curiosity of their twenties, this time with everything life has given them to draw on.