Living Land - Sustainable Projects for Healthy Ecosystems - Online Panel Talk

Join us online on the 2nd of October at 7pm for ‘Living Land’. This talk is part of Just Stop Oil’s Food and Farming series in which we investigate our relationship to our environment and what we eat.

In this talk a panel of experts will be discussing their inspirational projects which re-evaluate traditional and industrial methods of landworking. The speakers will look at how connecting with and protecting our environment can help tackle climate breakdown and better our wellbeing. Speakers include Marina O’Connell Director of The Apricot Center, Architect Duncan Baker Brown,  Stockfree Farming and Wild Card Rewilding.

The Speakers

Marina O’Connell is a horticulture and permaculture expert, founder of The Apricot Centre in 2006. In 2015, The Apricot Centre took on the tenancy for Huxhams Cross Farm, in Dartington and Marina helped to design the new farm. The center explores innovative ways of working the land sustainably and has a local veg box scheme. Marina delivers courses at the center including the Permaculture Design, Biodynamic training, Agroforestry and is a tutor for the Permaculture Diploma. She also carries out consultancy designing farms and holdings using the toolkit of Permaculture design, Biodynamic methods and Agroforestry.

Duncan Baker Brown is a qualified Chartered RIBA Architect who has practised, researched, and taught around issues of sustainable design, the Circular Economy and closed-loop systems for over 25 years. Duncan is the author of ‘The Re-Use Atlas: a designer’s guide towards a circular economy’ published by RIBA, for whom he is the Climate Action Expert Advisory Group co-chair. He is also in the RIBA National council, Architects Declare Steering Group and Architects Climate Action Network and a principal lecturer at the University of Brighton. For this talk Duncan will be discussing his projects in working woodlands and sweet chestnut coppicing for sustainable building.

Stockfree Farming is a Scottish-based, grassroots group established to inspire and support farmers in the transition to animal-free agriculture. Whether through shifting to growing crops for human consumption, farming carbon capture through planting trees and restoring ecosystems, or by diversifying into a non-traditional agricultural enterprise, StockfreeFarming presents the rationale, case-examples, and connections to support. Realising the lack of governmental support for the above initiatives, Stockfree Farming’s lobbying group is hard at work talking to MSPs, Cabinet Ministers, committees, and policy advisors to ensure that farmers are supported in the endeavours that take our planet to a better place.

Wild Card is a grassroots group of ordinary people, campaigners and experts. As the climate and extinction crisis worsens, they are setting their long-term vision on 50% of the country being rewilded. That's a big goal, so Wild Card are starting by asking the country’s biggest landowners to urgently commit to ambitious rewilding projects to get them started.

In 2021, Wild Card launched a campaign to encourage three of the biggest landowners in the UK to take action. They are the Royal Estates (including the Crown, Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall Estates), the Church Commissioners, and the Oxbridge Colleges. The UK is “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. They appeal to these institutions to lead the way for landowners across Britain, setting an example of care and love for the land.

Hosted by Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil is this year's biggest climate campaign. This Autumn, thousands of people from all walks of life are taking action against the Government’s plans for new UK oil fields and demanding an end to all new fossil fuel extraction. Each month we are holding hundreds of public talks all around the country on the dire reality we face. Just Stop Oil is a coalition of groups working together to force the Government to commit to halting new fossil fuel licensing and production. We demand that the Government immediately halt all future licensing and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK. At present, the Government’s plans to give the green light to 40+ new North Sea oil and gas fields are not compatible with the recent strongly stated conclusions of reports commissioned by the IPCC and International Energy Agency (IEA) - that there must not be any new exploration of fossil fuels if we are to avoid imminent climate catastrophe.

Once you have signed up to this meeting you will recieve an email from Action Network with a further registration link. Follow this link to complete the zoom registration, this is essential for you to have access to the above talk. You will then recieve an email from zoom with the direct meeting link for the event.