Friends, we’re Belgium well doing it again!
Join me on Thursday 26th May at the Royal Geographic Society for the 2022 Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture!
Douglas Adams was a founding patron of Save the Rhino International. He once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in a rhino suit to raise money for the fledgling charity.
When Douglas Adams died in 2001, Save the Rhino International worked with Douglas’s family to establish the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, inviting conservationists, wise and funny people to speak about the universe.
The lecture has been delivered by Neil Gaiman, Professor Alice Roberts, Baroness Susan Greenfield and this year, I am delighted to announce that our lecturer is Professor EJ Milner-Gulland, Professor of Biodiversity and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science at Oxford University.
Why am I personally so excited that Professor Milner-Gulland is delivering DAML this year? Because she co-founded a movement that resonates very strongly with me, the Conversation Optimism movement.
Their website explains a bit about their mission:
As nature erodes and the response of human systems is inadequate or destructive, it can seem like the only rational response is despair.
Yet if you zoom in from the big picture, a mosaic appears; in amongst the stories of loss there are inspiring stories of regeneration and positive change, with nature making a difference in people’s lives, and people valuing and nurturing their natural environment.
These stories are the key to securing our planet’s future; we need to learn from them, replicate them and thereby build a world in which nature and people can coexist.
Our mission is telling these stories of conservation optimism — large and small — so as to inspire change.
Please join me on Thursday 26th May to celebrate Douglas’s life, writing, and conservation with me, Professor EJ Milner-Gulland, and a host of funny people.
And if that wasn’t enough, Douglas’s archivist Kevin Jon Davies curator of 42, The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams will be presenting an exhibition of archival material and photos at DAML in the Royal Geographic Society’s Map Room (where the bar is).
Thank you, and I hope to see you there.
Rachel Wheeley 