Holly Budge is a force to be reckoned with. She has two rather extreme world records and is an adrenaline junkie and wilderness lover. But more than that, she is also a passionate conservationist. She founded How Many Elephants, a devastating visual campaign to raise awareness of the elephant poaching crisis, has worked with an anti-poaching group the Black Mambas and has raised over £300,000 for charity.
Did your love of adventure inspire you to become a conservationist or vice versa?
I started life as an adventurer at an early age and spent a lot of my childhood in the outdoors, so it was on the cards I would get involved in both adventure and conservation, but it took me a while to figure how my passions for both would align.
At 21, I did my first skydive whilst backpacking around New Zealand and was blown away by the experience and the fact that people were getting paid to jump out of aeroplanes for a living. My careers advisor at school definitely hadn’t mentioned that as a possible career path! I decided there and then that that was the job I wanted. Six months later, with lots of training, dedication and hard work, I achieved my rather far-fetched goal and became the third woman to work as a freefall camerawoman in Lake Taupo, New Zealand.
On reflection, I refer to this as the ‘boldness of youth’ as, when I set myself this goal, I knew nobody in New Zealand, I knew nothing about skydiving and I knew nothing about filming, but none of that mattered. I knew I could learn all the skills I needed to get the job, or I could at least try! Achieving my goal and getting my dream job at the time, gave me immense confidence and self-belief that I could try and achieve whatever I set my mind to. I continued with this positive mindset, and I now have two world records under my belt, including being the first woman to skydive Everest and race semi-wild horses 1,000kms across Mongolia in just nine days.
However, as much as I loved the adventure side of things, I found my creative itch needed to be scratched. I enrolled to study for a Masters in Sustainable Design and this led onto founding my How Many Elephants charity. My adventures now provide a platform to raise valuable funds for charities.
To date, my adventures have raised over £300,000 for various projects.
What's the story behind How Many Elephants? What prompted you to set it up?
The inspiration came from vegetable ivory, a sustainable plant material from the South American rainforests. I have worked with this beautiful, robust and versatile material for over a decade in my professional practice as a jewellery designer and formally researched it whilst studying for my Masters in Sustainable Design, taking a field trip to Ecuador to meet the farmers and artisans working with the material. The similarity of vegetable ivory in both colour and texture to elephant ivory was the starting point of the campaign.
I was shocked and horrified to learn that 96 elephants are poached each day in Africa for their ivory.
At this astonishing rate, they will be extinct in the wild in the next 10 years. I wanted to do something to help so I turned this disheartening poaching statistic into a powerful and award-winning piece of jewellery and a hard-hitting art installation, which displays 35,000 elephants, the annual poaching rate, to raise awareness of the sheer scale and devastating impacts of the elephant ivory trade.
I’m using design to bridge the gap between scientific information and human connection in the field of African elephant conservation. Over 2,000 school children have now visited my exhibition for workshops. Part of the originality of this exhibition is in my approach to avoid gruesome and shocking imagery to portray the facts. To actually see this data visually is very impactful. It is not about scaring people or assigning blame, it’s about raising awareness of the enormity of the poaching crisis.