Tag Archives: Environmental crisis

Llangollen Fringe 2020 Climate Summit

I was pleased to be asked to be a member of the Llangollen Fringe 2020 Climate Summit panel this month

You can see the recorded video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoGa4XqHzZs

(It doesn’t really get going until about 11 minutes in!)

The full ‘line-up’ was:

  • Documentary Filmmaker, Bruce Parry: best known for his BBC series Tribe which saw him living with indigenous peoples around the world, and thereafter his work focusing on globalisation and climate change. More recently Bruce switched from television to the big screen with his directorial debut, ’Tawai, a voice from the forest’ – his attempt to dive deeper into the heart of what he had learned on his many years travelling the world. Bruce screened this film at the Llangollen Fringe Festival 2019.
  • Deputy Welsh Minister for Housing and Local Government, Hannah Blythyn MS
  • Kate Hamilton, Director of Renew Wales
  • Jessica Lloyd-Jones, Local Visual Artist
  • Me

It was pleasure to be part of the discussion with such a distinguished group!


Swarm Thickness

Most people following this blog will be familiar with the notion of ‘swarm intelligence’. So here’s a question … Could ‘swarm thickness’ be a thing? (Seriously!)

Swarm Intelligence (SI) shows itself all over the place in nature and discussion goes back at least as far as Darwin. Through SI, birds and fish maintain apparently impossibly coordinated formations, ants find the best path to food and bees and termites build complex structures to name just a few examples.

The essence of SI is a wonderfully simple one. Individuals do the most basic of operations, follow the crudest of directives or instincts but the cumulative effect for the flock, shoal, colony or hive is something magnificently clever.  They’re guided, by something they don’t understand, to play a small part in something good.

You can probably see where we’re going here … Could humans be doing this the other way around?  Could we, guided by something we don’t understand, be playing a small part in something awful?

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