The environmental crisis that continues to face communities today has far-reaching implications, including an average biodiversity loss of 68 per cent from 1970 that threatens both the human and natural world. Humanity’s existing relationship with the natural world is highly extractive and, at times, disconnected, which could further perpetuate the destruction of nature, biodiversity loss and slow action in the face of a changing climate. Changing people’s relationship with nature could play a vital role in setting a sustainable equilibrium between the two.
Promoting rights for nature becomes one way to support its healing process after decades of extractive exploitation and to develop a sustainable relationship between humans and nature. For example, the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution reaffirms that nature ‘has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes’. Our latest speakeasy event will ask what it means to be a person or to be nature. Is it just the sum of rights and obligations? How can we, as humans, recognize our role in the natural world? What could be radical ways to halt biodiversity loss and establish a regenerative economy?
On 28 April, come to talk and have a drink with changemakers, activists, philosophers, policymakers and businesses – everyone is welcome – to connect and discuss how we can re-establish empathy as the cornerstone of our relationship with nature and identify ways to live in harmony.
The Sustainability Accelerator Speakeasy Series will bring together people from different places, sectors and backgrounds to provide thought-provoking and fun talks that will broaden your knowledge and bring to life the discussion on the values we need for the future we want. Accompanied by drinks and nibbles, it draws inspiration from the illicit speakeasies of the 1920s US and the political and philosophical debates of French salons in the eighteenth century.
