Joanna Yarrow doesn’t have a job title. “When people ask what I do for a living I take a deep breath and see how long they’ve got,” she says. The general gist of her working life is using a number of different outlets to make a greener way of life more attractive and accessible, through consultancy or property development, TV presenting or writing, or through Wilderness Woods in Hadlow Down, East Sussex.

Joanna actually grew up in the woods, which were bought by her parents 30 years ago. She says: “I was five when they bought them. It was really unmanaged, there weren’t even any paths. We lived in Lewes at the time and used to go there each weekend to stay in a caravan and cut paths or make bonfires. When I was nine we moved there, lived in the caravan and built a house.”

Her parents began managing the 62-acre woodland, but discovered making a living solely from forestry isn’t possible on a relatively small site so they diversified, adding a tea room and running educational visits for schools. Soon they had a successful business with more than 30,000 visitors a year.

When she was 18, Joanna left to study at Oxford University and went on to gain a masters in Sustainable Development. After working for a while as a sustainability consultant, Joanna and her partner Jonathan set up Beyond Green.

She says: “It started out as a consultancy but we realised we were too value driven to be good consultants. We got fed up with people making excuses why they weren’t going to follow through with our strategies so we decided to put our money where our mouth was and set up a company to design and deliver sustainable places and communities so we have tangible examples of sustainability in action.”

Beyond Green currently has three communities in the planning process, including a 5,000-home development on the edge of Norwich which will include schools, places to work, energy and food production and integrated transport.

And last year Joanna was brought back to Wilderness Woods. When her parents retired, she and her partner took over the running of it.

“We want to carry on their legacy in terms of sustainably- managed woodland with education access,” she says. “But we also want to broaden it out so people can come to experience and learn about a more sustainable way of life in an attractive way. We’ve now got a cafe serving locally-sourced food and we’ve expanded the shop, selling wood furniture we make on site.”

The ultimate goal is to make the woods a hub for like-minded organisations, somewhere business groups can go to learn and team build, and to “get people engaged in a hands-on way”.

With a finger in so many sustainable pies, doesn’t she ever get bored or lose motivation? Not really, Joanna says. “It’s a really fertile and creative field to be working in. The mainstreaming of the whole agenda has been so exciting. After my masters, most of the time I didn’t even bother trying to explain to people what I did. People would assume I was an environmental health officer or something. Now, not everyone knows what to do about it, but almost everyone recognises the environment is relevant to them.”