Forthcoming Courses and Talks Info
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This page gives information on courses and public talks by Alastair McIntosh. Information is correct at time of posting, but should be checked with the relevant organising body (to which bookings inquires should also be addressed). Some abstracts for events which have taken place are left on the page to indicate to future event organisers the sort of topics that can be covered.

 

The summaries posted here are either what has been provided to the organisers, or what they have written. Only public events for which an abstract has been prepared are featured here. For a chronological itinerary of all major events , click here.

 

 

Index:

 

Ruskin Mill Anglo-Scottish land reform weekend workshop 10 - 11 November 2007

Diocese of Liverpool Clergy Training Workshops 16 - 17 October 2007

The Vital Spark conference of Interpret Scotland, Aviemore, 1-3 Oct 2007

Schumacher College with Verene on Earth and religion, 8 - 13 July 2007

Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Society conference, 27 April 2007

 

 

Workshop on Scottish insights for English land reform at Ruskin Mill, 10 - 11 November 2007

                                          

Community, Spirit and Land - Reconnecting People with Land              

 

       A day and a half workshop with Alastair McIntosh, Saturday, 10 November and Sunday, 11 November 2007,  at Ruskin Mill, Old Bristol Road, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, Gl6 0LA

    £65.00 including meals

 

 

Land in Britain is treated as a commodity, to be bought and sold on the market.  This has resulted in market failure, as homes are now unaffordable for most young people.  People feel disconnected with the living earth, with place and community, and social inequality is growing as ordinary people are 'cleared' from rural communities.

 

Alastair McIntosh is a radical ecologist and land reformer who shows how to take on corporate power successfully.  As a founder member of the Isle of Eigg Trust, he worked to help clear the Laird from the land in a spectacular community buy out.  This paved the way for the Scottish Land Reform Act of 2003.  He will present his radical philosophy of community, spirit and place.

 

He will also give challenging insights about the nature and power of English landlordism.  Many of us know the story of the Scottish clearances, but the English clearances, sanitised as enclosures, are less well known yet had enduring, disempowering effects that reformers such as John Ruskin sought to remedy. 

 

This workshop will also present the work arising from the English and Welsh Community Land Trust (CLT) movement, and consider in the wake of the Fordhall Farm community buy out, and the Soil Association Land Trust, how best to secure farmland for biodynamic farming.

 

The weekend will start with a walk through the Ruskin Mill Horsley valley to engender a sense for the power of creating identity within a “sense of place” both for individual and community education and development.  The workshops will then invite you to consider artistic, spiritual and practical ways of reconnecting with our land heritage. 

 

Jehanne Mehta and Earthwards perform songs that call us to remember who and what the Earth truly is and celebrate the powers of renewal in our connection with her.                                 

 

For further information, full programme and enrolment please contact:

Laura Cammish, Ruskin Mill Educational Trust

Telephone:  01453 837605

E-mail:  laura.cammish@rmet.org.uk

 

 

 

Diocese of Liverpool Clergy Learning Workshops (as invited by Revd John Reed)

Day 1 – Tuesday 16 October 2007 – Globalisation & Community 

This workshop will explore globalisation and community in an experiential way. I will suggest that there is nothing new about the spirit of “globalisation”. It was very much around in Jesus’s time, and that “Bibliodrama” using the three temptations of Christ can powerfully help to unmask its dynamic. We will enact such a Bibliodrama during the morning. In the afternoon, we will discuss what the temptations drama might teach us about the nature of worldly power and, also, about the three pillars of spiritual community.

 

Day 2 – Wednesday 17 October 2007 – Prophecy and Poetics

If we were to take seriously Moses’s cry in Numbers 11:29, what might it mean today? What might prophetic witness look like? Where might it be exercised? What would be its targets? When might we be moved to step into, and out of it? How might we discern right relationship to it? This workshop will explore prophecy as being, arguably, the deepest understanding of social, environmental and spiritual activism for change. In particular, it will study prophecy as a poetic function, not so much in the sense of “writing poetry” as in the sense of “poesis” - participation in the making of Creation.

 

 

 

 
Abstract of Keynote Address to The Vital Spark international conference of Interpret Scotland - Aviemore, 1 - 3 October 2007.
 
Sparking the Fire of Regeneration: Interpretation of Scotland's natural and cultural heritage matters not just for visitors who often yearn for the "real" rather than the packaged Scotland. It is also vital in giving expression to healthy community dynamics and to local and national identities that can be both authentic but also open to the surrounding world. Interpretation concerns the stories that we tell about ourselves, or which are told about us, and if these fall short or become distorted, our vision for the future will be compromised. As such, interpretation across the wide range of interests that encompass Interpret Scotland's membership is of critical importance in sustaining and regenerating community in Scotland - community through both the natural and the social environments. This begs the question as to whether these relationships are mere social constructs, open to arbitrary manipulation, or whether in representing a place and its peoples we are also dealing with a quality that might be considered "essential" - the "vital spark" of this conference theme. In other words, does interpretation mean engagement with qualities of the human spirit, of the spirit of place, and of elementality such as might be considered, in a word, to be "spiritual" qualities? If this is the case, what attributes of sensitivity, listening and wisdom are required from the interpreter? Where do the boundaries lie between sloppy "woo woo" emotionalism, and MacDiarmid's message in The Islands of Scotland (1939): “Finally, since too much writing about the Scottish islands is taken up with the rather morbid preoccupation with what is vaguely called ‘nature’ – an obsession that does not allow for any very clear spiritual vision or insight into the true inwardness of the thing that is the obsession, one of my aims in this book has been to try to expose through the physical form the spiritual meaning of Scotland today.” In this keynote lecture, I will draw upon fresh research in rural and urban Scotland undertaken by human ecologists and supported by WWF International into community regeneration. I will suggest that the role of the interpreter is a trust that, in a bygone age, would have been qualified with the adjective, "sacred." (For booking information see: http://www.interpretscotland.org.uk/website/interpretscotland.nsf/byunique/news.html ).

 

 

 

Abstract of a week's teaching by Verene Nicolas & Alastair McIntosh at Schumacher College, Devon, 8 - 13 July 2007 on Earth and Religion.

 

50 Word Summary: The root global problem is a shrunken and shrivelled sense of what it means to be human. To heal and grow, we must integrate the head (thinking), the heart (caring) and the hand (doing). This means relating in community with the Earth and other people - a spirituality of that which gives life. (More information incl. booking in due course at http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/prospect/homepage.html .)

 

Earth and the Sacred: The personal and the planetary

 

July 1-20, 2007,

A short course at Schumacher College, UK

 

Teachers:

Rupert Sheldrake, Alastair McIntosh, Verene Nicolas & Marianne Williamson

 

http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/ShortCourses/Diary.html#SACRED

 

 

Much of today’s environmental thinking is based upon a predominantly scientific analysis of complex planetary problems. This course will explore the sacred, religious and spiritual dimensions of environmentalism to develop a vision where the care of the earth plays a central role.

 

Week 1: Religion and Ecology, Rupert Sheldrake, who is himself a controversial scientist, will present his perspective on the relationship between religion and ecology.

 

Week 2: Ecopsychology and Ecopolitics, Alastair McIntosh and Verene Nicolas will explore the relationship between ecopsychology and ecopolitics which can lead to a more holistic world view.

 

Week 3: Personal/Planetary Transformation Marianne Williamson will work with course participants to develop a vision in which personal transformation and planetary sustainability go hand in hand.

 

This is a wonderful time of year to stay at Schumacher College in the South West of England as countryside is in bloom and the days are long and warm. The College is set on the historical Dartington Hall Estate, an inspirational place which boasts fantastic woodland, managed gardens, and a range of arts and cultural activities. As well as engaging in this unique course, participants at the College can enjoy one of England’s finest estates, join local field trips, enjoy organic and local food, and immerse themselves in nature – the personal and the planetary.

 

Can be take as a 1, 2, or 3 week course

 

Masters credits available

 

For further information including application details, please contact us:

 

www.schumachercollege.org.uk

Tel: +44 (0) 1803 865 934

Email: admin@schumachercollege.org.uk

Mail: The old Postern, Dartington, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EA, UK

The college is an initiative of The Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity.

Biographies (please edit to suit):

Vérène Nicolas is a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh and an experienced trainer and facilitator.  Over the last few years, she has been working with deprived communities in Scotland and Ireland, providing support to community activists, especially women and black and ethnic minority people, in unfolding spiritual development and local community action. She is particularly interested in the "Training for Transformation" approach, a worldwide movement and educational approach for transformation at individual, interpersonal, local and global levels. Vérène also teaches on the MSc in Human Ecology delivered in partnership between the Centre for Human Ecology and the University of Strathclyde. She lives with her husband, Alastair McIntosh, in Govan, Glasgow. As a couple, they are committed to walking the ‘Path of the Heart’, inquiring into the challenges and transformative power of open heartedness both in their relationship and when engaging with social and environmental justice.

Alastair McIntosh is a Fellow of Scotland's Centre for Human Ecology and Visiting Professor in Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Soil and Soil, described as "world-changing" by George Monbiot, "life-changing" by the Bishop of Liverpool, and "truly mental" by the pop star Thom Yorke of Radiohead. He regularly contributes to Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Scotland and his poetry collection, Love and Revolution, is due from Luath Press in August 2006. His best-known work has been for land reform on the Isle of Eigg, in helping to stop the Harris superquarry, and with developing human ecology as an applied academic discipline. Also, in the past 8 years he has lectured on nonviolence to over 3,000 senior military officers at the Joint Services Command & Staff College. Spirituality is central to all Alastair’s work, and he particularly values working on this jointly with his wife, Vérène Nicolas, as they have done previously at Schumacher College.  

 

 

Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Society

 

A talk and discussion panel on the theme, After Beltane? Sustaining Community; Sustaining Ourselves, as part of a forum with Chloe Dear and Neil Cameron in a public forum on "Ceremony and Sustainable Culture" organised by the  Beltane Fire Society, at St George West Church, 58 Shandwick Place, Edinburgh, 7 - 9 pm, Friday 27 April. Open to the public.

 

Abstract: The age of "high modernnity" has left many people bereft of a sense of meaning in their lives and without connection to the essential elemental qualities of the natural world. I am happy and honoured to accept this invitation to speak to the Beltane Fire Society, since I consider that Edinburgh's annual "pagan" festival of life on Carlton Hill speaks prophetically to this need. But does a one night event go far enough? Of course not. In a world where loss of meaning haunts many folks to the point of loss of soul, there is a pressing need for the sense of inclusively retribalised  community that is evident at Edinburgh's Beltane to be carried forward and invigorate everyday life; indeed, to invigorate a nation for which Carlton Hill is so politically symbolic. This is what our ancient quarter-festivals were for and what they are becoming for once again thanks to the efforts of groups like the Fire Society. Personally, I am dismayed at the manner in which our festivals have become dis-integrated under, and from, mainstream Christian traditions. While I know that this is controversial amongst both pagans and Christians, I consider that Scotland needs both these strands. We need the pagan (a word that originally meant "country dweller") for its elemental wildness and mind-clearing intoxication with the spirit of life as expressed in both wild and human nature, and we also need the Christian insights for, at its best, their understanding of grace and providence, and how to carry suffering, how to forgive, how to overcome the frenzy of violence, and how to love in all the meanings of that word. The bottom line is that by sustaining ourselves from these diverse sources within Scottish (and wider) tradition, we also start to rebuild community; we heal the divisions within ourselves and, simultaneously, divisions that have historically split the psyche of our peoples and set their energies destructively against one another to the detriment of this Earth..

 

 

Last Updated: 15 October 2007

www.AlastairMcIntosh.com

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