Hay on Earth
Imagining Sustainable Futures
Backstory
The Hay Festival has a world-wide reputation for bringing together inspiring speakers and inquisitive audiences for literary delight. For over 20 years, people have listened to speakers that range from Gordon Brown, William Hague and Alan Greenspan to David Attenborough, Wangari Mathai and Tim Flannery. In 2007, around 150,000 tickets were sold in the name of inspiration and education.
During a brief visit and speaking engagement in 2007, TYF EcoSapiens' Andy Middleton was infected with a sense of the opportunity that the Festival had to bring together environmental and climate change speakers with the audiences that most needed to hear them – business and government decision makers. Through TYF, Andy committed to donate revenues his business’ One Percent for the Planet funds for the next two years to make this happen. Since autumn 2007, he’s worked with the Hay Festival’s Andy Fryers designing the Hay on Earth programme to make this happen.
Summary
Hay on Earth is a programme of four separate one-day seminars that bring leaders together to examine the detail of what the delivery of government and business goods and services needs to look like in a low carbon, post peak oil world.
Invited audiences of 30-40 participants attended one of four workshops, each of which has a distinct and related theme. The four Hay on Earth workshops in 2008 focused on:
- 2030 Vision - county level change
- Fit for the Future - business in a changing climate
- Learning from Tomorrow – educating for different thinking
- Making Change Happen
Hay on Earth 2009 will continue the work started in 08, and focus on:
- Wales commits - leaders stepping up to the mark and acknowledging the scale of change needed
- Cradle to Cradle & Food Security - strategy zero waste, resilient food supply
- 21st Century Food - practical solutions to turn strategy into action
- Messages with meaning - creative ideas to make meaning of the messages
At the start of each day, participants are given an update of climate change and peak oil research and of the previous day’s outputs, to ensure that discussions focus on the scale of change and urgency that is needed. Participants at each of the seminars will be encouraged to develop action plans for their own organisations and report back the following year.
