All welcome

 

Alastair McIntosh is a Quaker, a writer and campaigner for justice and environmental sustainability and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Thought for the Day’. He holds fellowships at the Centre for Human Ecology and the E. F. Schumacher Society. In 2005 the University of Strathclyde gave him an honorary post as Scotland’s first professor of human ecology.

 

Best known for writing Soil and Soul and his work on land reform (Alastair McIntosh played a leading role in the campaign that brought the Scottish island of Eigg into community ownership. This helped dig  out political channels that led to the passing of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003) he has guest lectured around the world at institutions including the Russian Academy of Sciences, the World Council of Churches, WWF International in their ‘One Planet Leaders’ programme and, for more than a decade, speaking about nonviolence on the Advanced Command and Staff Course at Britain’s foremost military staff college.

 

In his groundbreaking 2008 book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair McIntosh summarises the science of what is happening to the planet – both globally and using Scotland as a local case study. He moves on, controversially, to suggest that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity.

 

In a fascinating journey through early texts that speak to climate change – including the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato’s myth of Atlantis, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth - McIntosh reveals the psychohistory of modern consumerism. He shows how we have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and the motivational manipulation of marketing. To start to resolve what has become of the human condition we must get more real in facing up to despair and death. Only then will we discover the spiritual meaning of these our troubled times. Only then can magic, new meaning, and all that gives life, bring hope to a broken world.

 

Supported by Brighton Friends’ Meeting House

“An excellent book. Its psychological and spiritual insights make such an important contribution to the debate surging around climate change.” - Jonathan Porritt, Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, 2009.

 

“Disappointing book of the year was Hell and High Water by Alastair McIntosh. This ticked all the right boxes for me, detailing climate change … but then he started talking about faeries.” - “Suitably Despairing’s” blogspot, Dec 2008.