How Stories and Sagas Create Agency for the Climate and Biodiversity Crises

Please note that this event will now be held on 9th March 2023.

Environment, society and culture are closely linked. They shape each other.

Professor Pretty’s new book, Sea Sagas of the North takes the North Sea and eastern North Atlantic as its palette, and tells tales of ecological and economic change in six 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. It about acting and inspiring. It is about the options available to all of us for a low-carbon good life. The American poet, Mary Oliver, put it well in her seven-word poem, Instructions for Living a Life: “Pay attention, Be astonished, Tell about it.”

During this seminar, Professor Pretty will also highlight a few of his most highly cited papers and explore the main take home messages and the magical ingredient(s) that made them so widely read and paradigm shifting. A must see for any budding scientists trying to write a publication classic in an increasingly saturated market.