The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees

At a moment when Britain ranks as the least nature-connected country in Europe, our oldest neighbours, the trees, are quietly offering a way back.

Part memoir, part science, part spiritual reckoning, Dr Lindsay Branham’s book, Heartwood, weaves together scientific research, lyrical language and wonder to illuminate what it means to truly belong to the living world. The book sits at the intersection of climate change, chronic health and healing, laying out what the forests can teach us about mutual aid, community and collective flourishing.

Join Lindsay and Gemma Mortensen at The Conduit for an interactive evening of conversation, connection and rediscovery of our kinship with trees.

Event Schedule

6:00pm: Pre-event socialising and networking
A cash bar will be available for refreshments.

6:15pm: Event begins

7:30pm: Event ends

Speakers

Lindsay Branham, PhD, is an environmental psychologist, Emmy-nominated film director and eco-doula. She is the founder of NOVO, and for two decades, has directed collaborative film-based interventions to improve human rights and ecological crises. Her expertise is in behavior change media and connecting science to story to prove impact and move the needle on the most complex issues the world faces including reducing bonded labour and improving mental health for formerly abducted children. Her interventions have reached over 200M people worldwide and raised over $80M for organizations in their ongoing work to improve planetary flourishing. Her investigative docmentary, “Behind The Fence,” was part of a successful coalition effort to advocate for the UN to recognize the atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar as a genocide. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge where she was a Cambridge Trust scholar and pioneered the discovery that interoceptive awareness is a foundation for connecting to nature. She has been featured by the New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, and National Geographic. She is a regular columnist for The Aspen Times.

Gemma Mortensen connects people, ideas and possibilities to meet the interlocking challenges of our times. An award winning social entrepreneur, she has a track record of making big ideas happen, and draws on her experience in media, international politics, civic participation, technology and transformational process work to stretch established thinking. She is currently Chair of Dartmoor Futures, a new initiative to build a regenerative place-based system in Dartmoor, founder of New Constellations through which ‘the journey’ methodology was launched, co-founder and of More In Common and sits on a number of advisory boards, incluing Yale University’s International Leadership Centre. She was previously Chief Global Officer at Change.org and CEO of Crisis Action – which won the MacArthur Award and Skoll Award for its innovative systems model – and co-chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on systems leadership.