Some intelligence can only be found by returning to the wild.

Beneath the kelp forests and along the coastline outside Cape Town, Craig Foster and the Sea Change Project have taught our community to look at the living world, and at ourselves, in a different way.

· 6 min read · By RHISE AI

Our team with Craig Foster on the rocks of the Cape coast, ochre on our foreheads, mountains and sea behind.

Our team with Craig Foster on the Cape coast, February 2026.

For the past four years, Craig Foster has been part of our extended community and one of our ambassadors. Craig is an Oscar and BAFTA winning filmmaker, naturalist, ocean explorer and cofounder of the Sea Change Project, the organisation behind My Octopus Teacher. But what has stayed with us most is not what Craig has achieved. It is what he has taught us to notice.

Craig Foster at the water’s edge, kelp drifting in the sea behind him.

Craig Foster at the edge of the Great African Seaforest.

Beneath the surface

Our first journeys together took us beneath the surface of the Great African Seaforest outside Cape Town, the underwater wilderness made known around the world through My Octopus Teacher. We freedived, explored the kelp forest and learned to look at an environment that can initially seem unfamiliar as a living system filled with relationships, signals and forms of intelligence.

Columns of kelp rising through blue-green water in the Great African Seaforest.

The Great African Seaforest, the world’s only sea bamboo forest. Photograph: Sea Change Project.

A cuttlefish gliding over an urchin-covered rock beneath a swarm of small fish.
A female octopus tending strands of eggs inside her den.

A Simonstown cuttlefish, found only on South Africa’s south coast, and a female octopus tending her eggs. Photographs: Craig Foster, Sea Change Project.

1,000+Kilometres of sea forest, from Namibia to the tip of South Africa
100,000+Years of humans living alongside it
A thirdOf the world’s coastlines fringed by kelp
HalfOf kelp forests worldwide degraded in 50 years

Figures from TIME, “The Power Hiding in Underwater Forests”, May 2026.

The cover of TIME’s Oceans issue, showing the Great African Seaforest.

In TIME · The Oceans Issue

The sea forest Craig has spent his life protecting made the cover of TIME.

In June 2026, TIME’s Oceans issue put the Great African Seaforest on its cover, with a feature on the work of the Sea Change Project: a living network of species found nowhere else on Earth, and a kelp ecosystem scientists say we are only beginning to understand.

When you’re face-to-face with what’s happening, it’s absolutely terrifying. Craig Foster, cofounder of the Sea Change Project, in TIME
An octopus stretching its arms across a shallow cave, its reflection on the still water above.
The reflective eye of a small shark, close up.

An octopus exploring a shallow cave, and the mirrored eye of a small shark. Photographs: Craig Foster, Sea Change Project.

Back onto the land

Over time, those journeys moved from the ocean back onto the African land. On another visit, our team travelled with Craig along the Cape coast while learning about the original wild swimmers and the extraordinary relationship early humans developed with this coastline over tens of thousands of years.

Figures in ochre cloaks standing on a rocky headland above a turquoise bay on the Cape coast.

The original wild swimmers, re-imagined on the Cape coast. Film still: Sea Change Project.

Our group walking single file along the rocky Cape coastline beneath cloud covered mountains.

Walking the Cape coast with Craig, February 2026.

Craig crouched at a tidal pool, showing our team the salt crystals the sea has left behind.
Craig kneeling on the rocks, examining something in his hands while two members of our team lean in to look.

Reading the rock pools with Craig: salt, tracks and whatever the tide leaves behind.

Walking that landscape changes the scale at which you think. The ocean in front of you is immense. The mountains have been there long before any company, technology or generation alive today. Somewhere along that coastline, our ancestors learned to read tides, tracks, animals, plants and one another well enough to survive.

One member of our team painting a line of ochre across another’s cheek, orange lichen covered boulders behind.
Ochre being painted onto a forehead beside a rock pool, with Cape Point in the distance.

Ochre, worn on this coast for tens of thousands of years.

Our team standing in a darkened exhibition room, reading illuminated panels about human origins.
A member of our team looking at a lightbox artwork in the Human Origins exhibition.

At the Human Origins exhibition.

Intelligence is also attention

Craig’s work reminds us that intelligence is not only our ability to calculate or build. It is also our ability to pay attention. To notice a footprint. To understand another species. To recognise patterns in a landscape. To remember that the human being observing nature is itself nature.

Craig and a member of our team looking down at a red and black locust resting on an open palm.
A locust on an open hand in the foreground, three people standing on the rocks by the sea behind.

Part of how we think

These experiences have become part of the way we think at RHISE AI. As we build increasingly capable forms of artificial intelligence, spending time with Craig reminds us of another kind of intelligence humanity has carried for thousands of years: curiosity, attention, intuition, connection and an understanding of our place within a much larger living system.

Sea Change Project

Cofounded by Craig, the Sea Change Project explores and protects humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and in particular the Great African Seaforest. seachangeproject.com

Craig walking towards the camera across the rocks, members of our team around him and the sea behind.

Technology may become extraordinarily intelligent. Our responsibility is to make sure humanity does not become less connected in the process.

Participate with us

The RHISE community does more than support organisations financially. We participate. We visit. We learn. We bring members of our community with us, and we build relationships that continue over years.

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