Saturday, 28 March 2026, Firstsite, Colchester
Humanising Climate Change, 10:00 - 10:45 am
Speaker: Abi Daré Moderator: Rosalind Green, Director of Essex Book Festival
Abi Daré, the winner of the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize (2025) for And So I Roar - a novel that shows with unusual force how climate change is never “just” environmental, but inseparable from justice, power, education, and actual human lives.
In And So I Roar, Daré shows how environmental breakdown is rarely experienced as an abstract crisis. Instead, its consequences are absorbed by those with the least power, who are then blamed and punished for systemic failures they did not create. The novel follows a young girl accused of “crimes” that are, in reality, the outcome of climate disruption, poverty, and entrenched social injustice.
This conversation explores why fiction can be such an effective way of opening dialogue around climate change: not because it offers easy solutions, but because it exposes how responsibility is displaced, how power operates, and how environmental harm is lived at the most personal level.
This event is presented in partnership with Essex Book Festival.
Broken Food Conversations, 11:05 - 11:55 am
Speakers: Dominic Watters & Anna Jones Moderator: Peter Tibber
Broken Food Conversations
From farm gate to food bank, Britain’s food system reveals some of the deepest divides in society. Journalist Anna Jones, author of Divide: The Relationship Crisis Between Town and Country, examines the growing gulf between urban consumers and rural producers. Food poverty campaigner Dominic Watters brings the conversation down to earth with a powerful personal story about raising a child while navigating the challenges of food insecurity. Together they ask: how did our food system become so disconnected - and how can we build connections that lead to greater resilience -- and understanding?
Bread 101: From Monoculture to Meaningful Diversity, 12:15 - 1:05 pm
Speakers: Ben MacKinnon & Lindsay Wright Moderator: Joanne Ooi
Bread is everyday, but the system behind it is anything but simple. Why and when did bread become centred on a narrow range of wheat varieties, long supply chains, and uniformity - and what have we traded away in nutrition, resilience, and farmer livelihoods to make it cheap and consistent?
Ben MacKinnon, founder of E5 Bakehouse, has built his baking practice around organic grains, heritage wheats, and on-site milling - connecting flavour and craft directly to farming and biodiversity.
Lindsay Wright is a cook, miller, teacher and baker, and co-owner of Silva Kitchen & Bakery - one of several enterprises based at Wakelyns Agroforestry in Suffolk. Wakelyns is internationally recognised for its pioneering work in organic agroforestry, integrating trees, crops, and research to create resilient farming systems that support biodiversity, soil health, and farmer livelihoods. Wright’s baking and cooking practice is embedded within this model, using genetically diverse YQ grain developed and grown at Wakelyns alongside other UK-grown and milled grains, and working within short food chains that reconnect bread-making to ecology and local grain economies.
Together, MacKinnon and Wright explore:
the business model of modern bread
why sourdough alone is not a cure-all
how grain diversity could improve both nutrition and farming resilience
what it really means to localise food systems without romanticising the past
Renaturing, a FREE workshop about domestic-scale rewilding with James Canton, 1:20 - 2:10 pm
This workshop explores domestic-scale renaturing in gardens, meadows, and plots beginning at around half an acre, offering a practical alternative to the landscape-scale rewilding that requires vast estates.
We’ll begin with a short film tracing James Canton’s own renaturing journey, made by acclaimed documentary filmmakers Fleeting Year Films. Drawing on his acclaimed book Renaturing, James will then lead an interactive workshop and open conversation on how to bring nature back to your property through simple, achievable changes.
What to expect
Short film screening about James Canton’s renaturing journey (by Fleeting Year Films)
Practical guidance for renaturing gardens and meadows at home
Audience Q&A and open discussion
The Ancient History of Bread - a FREE Taste & Talk with Giovanni DiSarno, 1:20 - 2:10 pm
Bread’s story stretches back thousands of years and runs through the entire history of civilisation. From Neolithic barley and millet flatbreads to Egyptian leavened wheat loaves, from the Greeks’ seventy varieties to the Romans’ water-powered mills, bread has shaped cultures, rituals, and daily life across the world. No food carries more symbolism, memory, or meaning.
In this Taste & Talk session, you’ll explore that journey through three historic breads: Greek Horiatiko Psomi made with semolina, an Egyptian-style barley and oat bread, and an ancient Roman loaf made with grape juice and millet flour. Listen, learn — and taste history.
The Genius of Trees, 2:30 – 3:15 pm
Speaker: Harriet Rix Moderator: Rich Yates, CEO of Essex Wildlife Trust
Trees don’t merely adapt to their environments. In The Genius of Trees, Harriet Rix explores how trees evolved to actively shape the world around them - transforming soils, influencing water systems, moderating climate, and forming complex relationships with fungi, fire, animals, and other plants.
Drawing on ecology, evolutionary history, and deep time, the book reframes trees as dynamic agents in the making of Earth’s living systems, rather than passive background scenery. This is not a sentimental celebration of nature, but a rigorous and eye-opening account of how trees have quietly engineered the conditions for life on Earth.
If you love trees, forests, gardens, rewilding - or simply want to recalibrate your sense of scale (in the universe) - this conversation will change the way you see the living world.
Co-Housing - an Introduction to Community-Led Sustainable Living, 3:35 - 4:35 pm
Speakers: Deborah Benham, Anne Thorne & Owen Jarvis
Many people are seeking alternatives to isolated living — housing that is social, efficient, and rooted in community — yet co-housing remains poorly understood in the UK.
This session explains what co-housing is, why people choose it, and why it can take well over a decade to realise. You will hear directly from the leaders of two major projects, both of which required extraordinary persistence to overcome planning, financial, and regulatory barriers.
Owen Jarvis, CEO of the UK Cohousing Network, provides a national perspective on the movement - its roots in Northern Europe, its growing momentum in the UK, and what needs to change for community-led housing to scale.
Crucially, this discussion shows why co-housing is not simply an alternative to care homes, but an appealing model for people of all ages who want shared resources, mutual support, and a different approach to living well together.
Decarbonising the Art World — and Why Artists Matter, 4:55 - 5:45 pm
Speakers: Heath Lowndes & Imani Jacqueline Brown. Moderator: Veronica Sekules
How do you reduce emissions in a sector built on travel, shipping, and energy-intensive buildings — without losing the exchange and experimentation that make culture meaningful?
Heath Lowndes, Director of Gallery Climate Coalition, discusses how the visual arts sector can meaningfully decarbonise through shared tools, standards, and collective responsibility. GCC works internationally with galleries, institutions, artists, and fairs to help the sector reduce its carbon footprint in line with the Paris Agreement.
Artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown brings the conversation to the level of individual practice, connecting climate change to longer histories of extractivism, colonialism, and environmental injustice. Together, they explore how cultural climate action can be practical, systemic — and still deeply human.
