COURSES
CPDs and training courses
A wide range of courses, from 2 hour CPDs through to 4-day residential courses, tailor-made for your needs, are offered directly from the Biosphere Research Institute, covering a wide range of subjects, from design and architecture to business management. Click here for more details.
Field and online course in 2024/5
Sustainability: a Primer
Dr Keith Skene
Wednesdays 7pm - 9pm 2 weeks Starts: 6 November, 2024 (Online)
* Each unit can be taken separately.
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Water
Booking: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/08-116-sustainability-a-primer-session-1-tickets-988600499707?aff=ebdsoporgprofile
In this course, we aim to dive down into the core issues facing our planet, focusing on a different issue each session. Short two-week units will be offered, spread over several years. Each self-contained session will be bookable separately, so you can pick and mix which sessions to attend. In the rapidly changing world in which we live, verging on information overload, it is easy to become overwhelmed or to struggle to see through the green haze generated by marketing and policy gurus. This course aims to empower you with the knowledge needed to clear the haze and have the confidence to distinguish between mirage from reality. We will look at how each of the core issues arose, why they are important, the historical development of the search for answers, the key people involved, the current state of the art and what the future could hold.
Keith will share his own current thinking and recent papers on these important issues and a series of case studies are aimed to allow participant-led discussion and thinking.
Spring 2025:
The Pluriverse: resolving the social, environmental and economic conundrum
Dr Keith Skene
Wednesdays 7-9pm
12 February – 12 March, 2025 (4 sessions)
Online course
Bookings on Eventbrite from January 2025 (link willl appear here)
The greatest challenge facing humanity is to resolve the social, environmental and economic issues simultaneously. Each brings with it apparently insurmountable problems, that are inextricably linked to the others, yet whose solutions appear to be immiscible. Silo thinking increases the unlikelihood of meaningful progress. In this course we explore some new thinking that attempts to bring together solutions across these fields. We begin with the post-development school of the social pluriverse, as set out by South American thinkers such as Arturo Escobar. We then explore the ecological pluriverse as a case study in local and global functioning that has worked successfully for as long as there has been life on this planet, before encountering the economic pluriverse, an imagined solution space for a more sophisticated set of economies. In the final session, we bring these three strands together, developing a framework within which to begin addressing the wicked problems facing us.
Summer 2025
Walks on the Wild Side: A series of field trips to incredible sites of natural history, including Glen Doll.
Details in Spring 2025.