with Prof. Jules Pretty

Sea Sagas of the North takes the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic as its palette, and tells tales of ecological and cultural change in countries looking inward to the sandy shallow sea. A burnished ancient skipper of the drifters and trawlers leant across the café table overlooking the long-abandoned site of a beach fishing village, and said, “You know, we were more tolerant and kind in those days, when we had the fishing. We went to other ports and places, and came back with stories and gifts.” An Icelandic author, Andri Snær Magnason, wrote a lament to their first glacier entirely to disappear, saying, “How do you say goodbye to a glacier?”

It is a common feeling for people, these days, to feel anxiety and fear, helplessness too, in the face of global-wide crises. Yet stories can create agency, can be like tricksters of old who set us on the path through the dark forest. A very simple solution exists: leave all fossil fuels in the ground. Yet implementation seems impossible. This talk is about hope and heroic journeys, about acting and inspiring and about the options available to all of us for a low-carbon good life.

Jules’s new book Sea Sagas of the North: Travels and Tales at Warming Waters will be launched after this talk.

Jules Pretty is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Essex, and Director of the Centre for Public and Policy Engagement. He is Chief Editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability and received an OBE for services to sustainable agriculture.

All welcome. £8 full/ £5 concession.

Tickets now available online here

For further information please ring the bookshop on 020 7724 7699.

Tickets also available in the bookshop on the night.