Objectives:
- Fifteen months after the closure of Landlife and National Wildflower centre in Knowsley, to raise awareness of the opportunity to build upon this charitable legacy, the wildflower fields and harvests and the projects, and a new future with Eden Project.
- To launch new partnerships which have the potential to build on the grass-roots nature of the work and to make wildflowers more of an integral part of urban planning and peri-urban sites, bridging rural divides, with environmental justice.
- To engage people in support of the Northern Flowerhouse and the National Wildflower Centre, charting a forward-looking vision for creative conservation in Merseyside and across the North. Linking Northern and Southern energies.
- To inspire forward-looking thinking in what is meant by green infrastructure.
- To make clear links between environmental action and social justice.
- To celebrate wildflower landscapes and to openly thank those who have stood by the ethics and have supported the past work and charitable purpose of Landlife and the National Wildflower Centre.
31st May 2018 World Museum, Liverpool
“A celebration of new partnerships and wildflowers in bloom”
Objectives:
- Fifteen months after the closure of Landlife and National Wildflower centre in Knowsley, to raise awareness of the opportunity to build upon this charitable legacy, the wildflower fields and harvests and the projects, and a new future with Eden Project.
- To launch new partnerships which have the potential to build on the grass-roots nature of the work and to make wildflowers more of an integral part of urban planning and peri-urban sites, bridging rural divides, with environmental justice.
- To engage people in support of the Northern Flowerhouse and the National Wildflower Centre, charting a forward-looking vision for creative conservation in Merseyside and across the North. Linking Northern and Southern energies.
- To inspire forward-looking thinking in what is meant by green infrastructure.
- To make clear links between environmental action and social justice.
- To celebrate wildflower landscapes and to openly thank those who have stood by the ethics and have supported the past work and charitable purpose of Landlife and the National Wildflower Centre.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER – Michael McCarthy
Michael McCarthy, Merseyside born and bred, is one of Britain’s leading writers on the environment and natural world. He has won a string of awards for his environmental journalism, first as Environment Correspondent of the Times and later as the long-standing Environment Editor of The Independent; his accolades include Specialist Writer of the Year in the British Press Awards, the Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London, and the Medal for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, this last awarded for “outstanding services to conservation”. His most recent book, “The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy” puts forward a new defence of the natural world which is now so threatened and has been widely praised in Britain and America: the New York Times called it “wonderful”. In it McCarthy describes how his love for Nature began with butterflies, when he was seven, in a suburban street on the Wirral: and later how he found his love intensifying as a teenage birdwatcher, on the marshes of the Dee Estuary on the Wirral’s western edge. McCarthy lives in London but returns regularly to the shores of the Dee to write.
McCarthy asked the question: Nature -why does it matter? After spending three months in different hospital wards, I would say contact with Nature does matter even if it is only the view from the eighth-floor window over the mist-covered urban landscape to the Mersey Estuary and Welsh hills to bring back divine or past memories and a legacy of feelings of well-being.
HH@MBAN/31/05/2018
