Turning the Boat for Home – Richard Mabey in Conversation
NB THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT
Turning the Boat for Home
Richard Mabey in Conversation with Jules Pretty
7.30pm Friday 15th November
British Legion
Wivenhoe Quay
Tickets £5
Tickets on sale at the bookshop, or call 01206 824050 to book
Richard Mabey is the father of modern nature writing in the UK, and we’re delighted to host this special evening during which he’ll be talking with Prof Jules Pretty. This will be a seated event with a licensed bar.
About Richard Mabey
For five decades Richard Mabey has been a pioneering voice in modern nature writing. From the rediscovery of foraging that led to Food for Free, through his groundbreaking expeditions in the ‘edgelands’ in the 1970s, to his reflections on the musicality of bird-song, he has consistently explored new ways of thinking about nature and its relation to our lives. In Turning the Boat for Home, he introduces pieces from his rich writing life that reflect on how his ideas evolved.
Richard Mabey
At the heart is a passionate belief that Earth is a commonwealth, of all species. Mabey recalls the fight against the commercial afforestation of the Scottish peatlands and recounts the experience of running a ‘community woodland’, one of the first in Britain.
Plants, the organisms that underpin all life, have been a source of constant fascination. In his encyclopaedic Flora Britannica Mabey explored how deeply they are embedded in our popular culture. But they are also autonomous beings with their own agendas, as experienced in his own ‘serendipitous’ garden ‘in which wild organisms improvise their own landscapes’.
About Jules Pretty
Jules Pretty
Jules Pretty is Professor of Environment and Society, and Director of the Centre for Public Engagement at the University of Essex. He is also President of the Essex Wildlife Trust, and received an OBE in 2006 for services to sustainable agriculture.
Pretty is pre-eminent in the field of scholarship around ecology, the natural world and our relationship with it, and has written numerous award-winning books about the importance and relevance of the mental and physical health benefits of nature.
About the Book
In Turning the Boat for Home, from the viewpoint of ‘the slow-moving carapace’ of a boat on the Norfolk Broads, Mabey ponders the migration of geese and the home-loving whirligig beetles. His epiphany is that a sense of “neighbourliness” may be the best model for our relationship with the rest of the living world.
Throughout there is a commitment to writing and to language, which may be ‘our greatest ecological gift’. In a celebration that links the work of the poet John Clare with the political warnings of Rachel Carson, Mabey suggests that ‘the answer to the still present threat of a silent spring is for us to sing against the storm.
