Carbon Calling – a space to speak your mind and free your mind!

I am very much looking forward to the Carbon Calling conference in Cumbria where I will be putting my Environmental Dialogue Broker hat on to help facilitate a ‘Food, booze, and talk’ session on the Friday evening. An informal but moderated with ‘house rules’ warm-up bar-stool open-mic session exploring diverse contested wider rural topics to provide an opportunity to share experiences with others at the bar.

I will also have the awesome responsibility of helping set the weekend events rolling on the Saturday morning with the ‘Open Field – anything goes’ session…

As mentioned in the video above, this is a novel session for Carbon Calling on Saturday August 3^rd from 9.35 to 10.45am to get juices flowing. I will be compèring / framing questions and hosting an interactive rotating panel and audience-dynamic session – a sort of ‘Mock the Week style’.

What can you expect?

Anything could happen at this thought-provoking session! A forum to stray into unspoken areas / topics, a chance for quiet voices to be heard, explore counterintuitive funding / knowledge exchange / unusual collaborations – giving a voice to what’s in the heads of those in the room while challenging groupthink and not fearing push-back.

Interactions will be pithy within a ‘safe’ space (Chatham House rules and I’ll protect protagonists from the mob) to help set the scene, provide confidence to attendees, to empower them towards a ‘without fear or favour’ Carbon Calling conference 2024.

What will it not be?

An echo chamber of social media hackneyed gripes, boring position statements or a shouting match (though no harm in harnessing, learning from, any spicy tensions)

Please join me – and have in mind a topic or two (aiming for diversity of voices and topics so no chance of repeats) if you want to appear on stage (for circa 3 minutes max to enable audience feedback).

We already have a starter of 3 volunteers who will take to the stage: Tim Williams – farmer and consultant in Dorset, Victoria Ballantyne – farmer with a diversified business in north Scotland, and Stuart Johnson – farmer and consultant from Northumberland.

Book tickets for Carbon Calling here.

Associated Agricology Partner Organisation(s):