RTE Culture File records for broadcast, four nature writers as they discuss how we can better resolve the complicated promises of wild nature.
This event takes part as part of the Dublin Book Festival at the National Botanical Gardens at 2pm on Sunday 12th November.
Lisa Fingleton, Anja Murray, Gwen Wilkinson, and Paddy Woodworth talk about the idea of ‘the wild’ has great power both to attract us, and to repel us – sometimes both at once. Before the Romantic movement, the term was mainly repellent in European literature, referring to ‘uncivilised’ lands and peoples, savage, dangerous and frightening places. The Romantics inverted this stereotype, seeing untamed and uncrowded nature as a lost Eden, a blessed refuge for souls fleeing the constraints and oppression of industrialised cities, even as a synonym for the sublime. Today, it’s a powerful and frequently used word in book titles, whether offering a more authentic version of something familiar, or responding to the degradation that has generated the climate and biodiversity crises. But for all its popularity, it remains a problematic word, not least in discussions of ‘rewilding’ or when used to evoke a counterfactual world in which human intervention never happened.
The event will be recorded for broadcast. Chaired by Luke Clancy by RTE Culture File
TO BOOK YOUR TICKETS CLICK HERE:
LINKS to Lisa Fingleton’s Books:
The-Local-Food-Project-Book
This Could Be the Last Hug For A While, New Book by Lisa Fingleton, 2021