Inspiring Change: Festival Programme Out Now!

A spectacular line-up of internationally renowned speakers and celebrities is aiming to attract visitors from around the country to Bristol’s BIG Green Week in June. Their  mission to inspire the next generation of great green ideas through a fun-filled nine days of one hundred events.

Festival tickets are now available, along with the full programme for all the 9^th to 17^th June’s events.

Highlights include Vivienne Westwood, Bill McKibben, Deborah Meaden, Caroline Lucas, Kevin McCloud, The Eden Project’s Tim Smit, Great British Menu’s Prue Leith, Comedian Nathan Caton, Jonathon Porritt and Scrapheap Challenge’s Robert Llewellyn compering the world electric bike championship.

Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future, and chair of the festival said; “Big Green Week will be a giant mixing bowl of experts, innovators, and fresh ideas, finished off with good food, friends, and fun, to inspire change for the better. It’s easy to be pessimistic about Rio+20, its predecessors, the process, and the outcome, or lack there of. The trouble is, we can’t afford to fail. Life changing, planet saving ideas need inspiration.”

To launch the programme, some of Big Green Week’s key contributors have been sharing their inspirations:

“For me seeing the Earth from space for the first time was life changing.  It’s the only home we have, and I realised that if we don’t take care of it, it won’t take care of us.

Sara Parker, Founder Director of Forum for the Future

“Seven years ago, I was a barrister in court defending a client in a case which had gone on for years. At one point I looked out of the window and realised that if I was defending the Earth, as a lawyer I wouldn’t have the tools of my trade to protect it.

Polly Higgins, Barrister, author and the brain behind the Ecocide trials

“Trekking in Nepal, seeing those huge mountains made me realise how insignificant my tiny life was. I found that incredibly liberating.

Eugenie Harvey, Founding Director of the 10:10 Campaign 

The final festival programme and tickets follows hot on the heels of the announcement that Bristol is the only UK city in the final three bidding to be European Green Capital 2014. And now the city is aiming to become the ‘Edinburgh of green festivals’ with its first ever Big Green Week.

Green jobs are already big business in the Bristol region with about 13,600 people work in environmental technologies and services. Bristol is the world capital of the wildlife and environmental film industry, and the region is the biggest silicon design cluster anywhere outside of Silicon Valley, attracting over $1.25 billion in investment.

From Brunel to Banksy, Beryl Cook to Blackbeard, Bristol’s past and present is bursting with big names that have inspired millions. BIG Green Week aims to inspire the next generation of great green ideas. Festival goers can visit the BIG Green Week Facebook page and post stories or pictures of what inspires them for a chance to win a festival ‘Green Pass’ that gives discounted entry to many of the events.

Jonathon Porritt

A pint of BIG Green Week

I recently had to sit through an excruciating meeting all about the Rio+20 Conference taking place in a few weeks time. Everyone was doing their best to be as up-beat as possible, but you could tell that their heart’s really weren’t in it. Try as they might, they couldn’t help but acknowledge that ever since the Rio Earth Summit 20 years ago, we’ve been doing little more than mark time.

To cheer them all up, I told them about the Big Green Week in Bristol! Perhaps it’s not a fair comparison, but the Big Green Week has been designed to inspire and empower people, to give them a feel for so much of the creative thinking and practical action that is going on all around the country.

Our starting point will of course be Bristol in the West of England, but Big Green Week is very much a national event, and in due course, we are hoping it will become an international event. We are particularly keen to share best practice with other European ‘Green Cities’ where so much of the really exciting stuff seems to be happening.

Forum for the Future believes it’s so important to show case what ‘living sustainably’ means to people in practice. The only way to counter some of the doom and gloom that will no doubt descend upon us after the Rio+20 Conference is to celebrate what works, encourage our politicians to help make it work better, and just get on with things without waiting for anybody else to join the party!

BIG Green Week

We are very glad about having Evening Post as Big Green Week’s Media Partner. The first article about the festival is out. BIG Green Week is one of the first festivals of its kind aiming to inspire people and bring  ideas to life. With a wide range of speakers and themes, people from all over the country are invited to come and  have fun.
Read the full article published by This is Bristol