DICE Annual Lecture 2017

The Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology and the School of Anthropology and Conservation are delighted to invite you to attend the annual DICE reception and lecture for 2017, presenting Tony Juniper as the speaker for the evening. The lecture is taking place on Thursday 9 March at 18.30 in Woolf Lecture Theatre. Tony Juniper is an independent sustainability and environment advisor, working as Special Advisor to the Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit, as a Fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and as co-founder of the sustainability consultancy group Robertsbridge.

For more information about this event please visit our Facebook page. If you have any questions, please contact the Corporate Events team on 01227 824347 or email them.

Talk title: Why ecology and economy must embrace

The ongoing degradation of the natural world is often presented as a regrettable but inevitable ‘price of progress’. Conventional wisdom holds that in order to achieve economic ‘growth’, the environment must be sacrificed as part of a balance between the protection of habitats and prevention of pollution on the one hand, and promotion of people’s interests and combatting poverty on the other. While superficially believable, this line of thinking is, however, a dangerous and deeply flawed misconception. In reality, the healthy and functioning natural systems underpin all aspects of our welfare, from the recycling of nutrients in soils that sustain food production to the replenishment of water supplies by forests: the more we degrade ecosystems, the more in the end we will imperil development. We must urgently fuse ecology and economy, not only to protect nature, but the interests of people too.

Tony Juniper biography

Tony Juniper is an independent sustainability and environment advisor, working as Special Advisor to the Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit, as a Fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and as co-founder of the sustainability consultancy group Robertsbridge. He is President of the Wildlife Trusts and of the Society for the Environment, a Trustee of Fauna and Flora International, and a Harmony Professor of Practice at the University of Wales Trinity St David. Juniper speaks and writes widely on conservation and sustainability themes and is the author of many books, including the multi-award winning best-seller “What Has Nature Ever Done For Us?” published in 2013.

He began his career as an ornithologist, working with Birdlife International. From 1990 he worked at Friends of the Earth, initially leading the campaign for tropical rainforests, and from 2003 to 2008 was the organisation’s Executive Director. From 2000 to 2008 he was Vice Chair of Friends of the Earth International. Juniper was the first recipient of the Charles and Miriam Rothschild medal (2009) and was awarded honorary Doctor of Science degrees from the Universities of Bristol and Plymouth. His latest books are “What’s Really Happening To Our Planet?: The Facts Simply Explained”, published in June 2016, and “Climate Change (A Ladybird Expert Book)”, which was co-authored with HRH the Prince of Wales and Emily Shuckburgh, and published in January 2017.

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