These are some of the pioneering people we spoke to on our journey.
Bruce Parry is a filmmaker, award-winning documentarian, author, indigenous rights advocate, explorer, trek leader and former Royal Marines commando officer.
Since finishing with the BBC in 2010, Parry has concentrated on making a feature documentary for the big screen with the working title “Quest”. The film aims to take a deeper look into some of the issues touched upon within his television programmes and the personal lessons which he has learnt from his explorations.
Sarah is a founding director of Shift Bristol and the lead tutor and facilitator on the Practical Sustainability Course. She has been teaching Permaculture in Bristol and the UK since 2004, working alongside Patrick Whitefield and Mike Feingold. She is a founder member of the Bristol Permaculture Group and has worked in community gardens, city farms, festivals and a community newspaper. In 2007 she set up Transition Bristol, the first Transition City. She lives in Easton, Bristol where she also works full time as a single mum.
Martin Shaw is a storyteller, author and wilderness rites-of-passage guide. An international teacher, he leads the Oral Tradition and Mythology program at Stanford University in Northern California, and is visiting lecturer on Desmond Tutu’s leadership program at Oxford University. He is author of the award winning ‘ A Branch From The Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness’ .
International ecocide law advocate, barrister, award-winning author of Eradicating Ecocide and author of Earth is our Business, senior legal advisor to the Earth Community Trust.
Chris is best-known for his theory that human language, religion and culture emerged in our species not simply by gradual Darwinian evolution but in a process culminating in revolutionary social change. The details of his scientific hypothesis remain controversial, but the underlying idea that symbolic culture emerged during a ‘major transition’ or ‘revolution’ (often termed the human revolution) has been current for many years and is now widely agreed.
Chris has written and edited a number of books, has been a political activist for years and as well as doing science also does political theatre. There is a wealth of information on his website.
Patrick Whitefield, who died aged 66 after a short illness, drew on his boyhood love of the landscape, plants and animals to become a leading advocate of permaculture, an approach to farming that maintains both food production and the balance of nature. With his guiding principle of “nature as teacher”, he helped transform growers’ attitudes towards permaculture from its previous marginalised status in the debate about sustainable farming.
Patrick’s surname, Whitefield, was taken from a beloved meadow in Somerset that he lived on in a tipi during the 1980s. His first book, Tipi Living, was published in 1987 as Patrick became involved in the Ecology party (later to be known as the Greens). His introduction to permaculture from two Australians triggered what would become his lifelong, pioneering work in permaculture education and publication.
As with so many of those who challenge orthdoxies, the true significance of Whitefield’s ideas was not adequately acknowledged during his lifetime, but his influence will survive him, under the stewardship of the many he influenced. His example will continue to remind food producers that instead of plundering natural capital through industrial agriculture, farmers of the future will have to devise of ways of co-existing with nature.
Howard Johns author of “Energy Revolution – your guide to repowering the energy system” is an energy engineer, entrepreneur, business leader and activist.
Following completing a degree in energy technology and environment in the early 1990s, Howard became a protestor, about energy and climate change, trying to stop amongst other things the digging of an open cast coal mine, and being evicted from a tree in the process. He then about building solutions, founding Southern Solar a national solar energy company, and Ovesco a locally owned renewable energy cooperative which created the first community owned solar power station in the UK. For five years Howard chaired the trade body representing the UK solar industry, and represented the industry in the media as well as battling for it in the courts.
Howard is currently MD of ENcome UK a solar O&M provider, and chairman of the positive climate change campaign charity10:10. A believer in solutions, Howard is convinced we have all the technology and money we need to implement the climate and energy solutions we urgently need. It is now time for lots of people to get involved with making it happen.
Jewels Wingfield is an educator, a catalyst and a healer. She lives and offer her work within the context of deep wild nature in the middle of the Ancient 200,000 acre forest of Dean where she has birthed her life long vision to steward a piece of wild land for people to come and connect back to their essential wild and interconnected nature. Jewels is the founder and director of Living Love and the creator of the EarthHeart vision in the Forest of Dean. Her work is unique and known for its earthy approach to humanities evolution with its roots planted in our interconnectedness with all life. She brings sacredness to the ordinary and make the ordinary sacred.
She brings this rich tapestry of her life’s journey to her work which includes: Teachings of earth based spirituality, sacred ecology/environmental work, shamanism from Celtic lore, ancestral gateways, the ecology of conscious relationship and sacred sexuality. Also grief work, ancient womb wisdom teachings and women’s blood mysteries. Group, individual and couples therapy, ecstatic dance & somatic movement/meditation practices, birth, breath and regression work, NVC (non violent communication), drama therapy and more. She also has her own private therapy practice for couples and for women.
Included in her personal journey of exploration more recently she has been trained, experienced or been inspired by: Satyananda, Frances Weller, Stephen Jenkinson, Satish Kumar, David Deida, Alexandra Pope, Miranda Gray, Glennie Kindred, Joanna Macy and Sobonfu Some.
Peter Owen Jones is a maverick 21st century priest, ecological thinker and champion of ethics who, as a celebrated BBC TV presenter, has explored the world’s vast pa
ntheon of religious and spiritual ideas and distilled essential wisdom for contemporary modern life and business.
Over the last eight years Peter has presented a number of award winning TV documentaries for the BBC, including Extreme Pilgrim, Around the World in 80 Faiths, and How to Live a Simple Life. He has also written four highly acclaimed books:Bed of Nails: an advertising executive’s journey through Theological College; Small Boat Big Sea; Psalms; and Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim.
Born and raised in the UK, Peter left school and went to work as a jackaroo in Australia, before becoming a copywriter and ultimately creative director in London’s advertising industry. Disenchanted with the material rat race and eager to follow a life imbued with service and meaning, in his late 20s he joined the clergy, becoming ordained in 1992. He served as a rector of three parishes just outside Cambridge and is now a house for duty priest on the Sussex Downs.
Paul was born in 1972. In the early 1990s, he studied history at Oxford University, where he also became a road protester. This changed his life. After graduating, Paul worked for a year on the staff of the Independent newspaper, which he hated. Following a three year stint as a campaign writer for an environmental NGO, he was
appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist.
In the early 2000s, having spent time with the tribal people of West Papua, who continue to be brutally colonised by the Indonesian government and military, he was one of the founders of the Free West Papua Campaign, which he also helped to run for a time.
In 2009, Paul launched, with Dougal Hine, the Dark Mountain Project, a writers’ and artists’ movement designed to question the stories our culture is telling itself. What began as a self-published pamphlet has become a global network of writers, artists and thinkers. Paul is now the Project’s editorial director.
