Sustainable Bristol

Bristol’s ‘Seeing Futures’ climate change conference

Posted on 25 October 2010

Sara Parkin, one of Forum for the Future’s Founder Directors, and author of her new book, The Positive Deviant, is chairing this timely conference in Bristol next month on climate change knowledge and what we do with it.

The event will look at an integrated approach to the human problem of assimilating the knowledge about our possible futures which science makes available.  The underlying view is that this both clarifies choices and helps to empower action, at all levels.

The one day Seeing Futures conference at Bristol’s University of the West of England (UWE), on Saturday, 13 November is being organised by the University’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies, in association with their Institute for Sustainability, Health and the Environment.

Humans are responsible for the sixth great species extinction in our planet’s history, now taking place. But we tend to act as if we are unable to grasp that we are part of an interdependent, sensitive eco-system. Climate change both epitomises and dominates this picture.

Climate science is a complicated interdisciplinary scientific discipline. All good scientists are sceptics, but the proof of what is happening is now clear enough, and the broad picture and our choices clear. The block to ecologically informed living is a complex of ideological, political, economic and psychological factors, blending lethally into our very survival as a species. 

Bristol’s Seeing Futures conference aims to contribute to this multi-layered task, combining the best scientific knowledge available, with the fullest possible understanding of the factors inhibiting necessary change, to find new visions and pathways to sustainability.