Dr. Zach Bush spent 17 years in academic medicine where he studied biochemistry, cellular biology, pharmaceutical management, disease and ultimately worked for many years in the hospital system. During the 1990’s and 2000’s he witnessed an epidemic of chronic disease in the US, that was hugely accelerated from previous decades where the main cause of death was trauma or infectious disease. He believes this is a result of the toxic pesticides that we have pumped…

For over four decades, Vandana Shiva, has vociferously advocated for farmers’ rights, indigenous knowledge, diversity, localisation, and real democracy. She has been at the forefront of seed-saving, food sovereignty, and connecting the dots between the destruction of nature and indiscriminate corporate greed. In her keynote talk, Dr. Shiva will reflect on a life of activism, recounted in her new memoir, Terra Viva. She shares memories of her childhood in post-partition India, and reflects on how…

Raj Patel and Marion Nestle have forged careers focused on the politics of food and how to transform the current food system beyond its current focus on corporate profits to a system designed and conducted to promote human health and environmental sustainability.  Their books provide an analysis of the need for systems change and a roadmap for how to do it.  Nestle’s most recent book, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics, explains how and…

Just how much trouble are the invertebrates in; why does this matter; and what can we do about it? In this session we will be exploring these questions with Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, who is one of the leading scientists studying the ecology, behaviour and conservation of bumblebees and a supporter of citizen science where the public can actively support scientists via observations. He is also a brilliant and…

Life on the land; it’s the dream of many but the realisation of the few. In Our Wild Farming Life we share the story of our journey from the busy south east of England to the Highlands, leaving behind our jobs, family and friends to follow our dreams of living a more self-sufficient existence. The leap led us into small-scale regenerative farming, building a business from scratch in a corner of Scotland deemed marginal at…

When colonists arrived in Australia they ignored the First Peoples’ style of land management, which nurtured diversity, and chose instead to replicate the systems they had left behind - ploughing soil, planting exotic food plants, and almost completely ending the use of fire in the landscape. Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man, a writer and farmer who has been observing the recovery of his own and others' land in Australia since the…

Over the long arc of history, humans have eaten extraordinarily diverse diets: thousands of varieties of cultivated crops and wild foods. There is a rich bank of human and culinary history, as well as an important resource for food security and climate resilience, in the world’s rarest foods: from wild honey harvested by the Hadza in Tanzania to windswept wheat on Orkney. These foods could hold the key to our food future, but they are…