Date: Tuesday 21 October 2014 at 6pm
Venue: Bristol Zoo Gardens, Pavilion Buildings (1st Floor), College Road
The Converging World strongly supports eco-restoration and has partnered with Joss Brooks who has been a pioneer in this area for more than 40 years.
Joss and The Converging World are launching an exciting project that aims to ecologically restore land in Tamil Nadu, India. The land is 100 acres (about 400,000 square metres) which equates approximately to 1 square metre per person living in Bristol and the aim is to promote this as a Bristol-Indian twinned project, one of many in the year of the Bristol European Green Capital (2015).
Joss grew up in the Australian state of Tasmania, a place full of wild natural beauty and came to Auroville in India’s Tamil Nadu state in 1970 after living in Europe and Africa. He joined the early pioneering efforts in land restoration at Auroville and founded the Pitchandikulam community in 1973 which is now a vibrant 60 acre forest with 800 species of plants in the grasslands, a nursery and an ethno-medicinal forest.
For more than 100 years, biospheres, ecosystems and habitats around the world have been gradually destroyed with devastating consequences. Local people who depend upon the flora and fauna have been left marginalised, species are disappearing, there is poor water retention and local and global climatic conditions are changing for the worse because of the destruction of large areas of forests.
Eco-restoration aims to restore these areas with indigenous flora and fauna that can sustain local people for generations to come through the nurture and protection of the natural environment.
During his talk Joss will take us through his journey of restoring wildlife habitat in South India. This includes the story of creating the sanctuary of Auroville and Pitchandikulam, his work with the Irula tribal snake catchers (setting up a snake venom extraction cooperative) and his work with different materials in creating wildlife art.
We look forward to welcoming you on Tuesday 21st October 2014. This lecture will be free of charge. In order to book your place, please email Ali Cotton on acotton@bristolzoo.org.uk by Friday 17th October 2014. Drinks and nibbles will be served.
We hope to see you there! For further information on supporting the Bristol-Indian Forest please follow the link below: