Vanity Fair named Simran Sethi ‘the environmental messenger’. The Independent has hailed her as ‘a top ten eco-hero of the planet’. She’s hosted forums with Al Gore, moderated panels for the White House, and been on Oprah and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She’s writing a book on the loss of biodiversity in our food system.
Now, in partnership with the Sustainable Living Festival, she’s coming to share her wisdom on food, sustainability and climate change with the Wheeler Centre.
The good news for the human among us (i.e. everyone) is that her approach is both passionate and imperfect. For example, she eats – and ‘loves’ – meat, despite her status as a high-profile environmental journalist and educator. She believes we’re trapped in a poisonous cycle of judgement, when we should be putting our energy into doing our individual best, whether that’s reflected in our supermarket shopping or the way we eat and cook at home. It’s not just up to the big corporations to create change, she says: we all contributed to the environmental catastrophe we face, and it’s on all of us to do something about it.
This is a chance to get ideas on we can each do our part, in ways that are eminently manageable, to combat climate change and promote sustainability – in our everyday lives.
(Image credit: Cem Ersavci for Dumbo Feather)
Featuring
Simran Sethi
Named one of the planet’s top ten eco-heroes by the UK’s Independent, and lauded as an environmental messenger by Vanity Fair, Simran Sethi is a journalist and educator focused on environmentalism, sustainability and social change.
Simran began her media career in 1993 as a documentary producer for MTV News, then took the anchor role two years later, before co-creating and running the news department for MTV India in 1996. Simran went to the US in 1999, and now works with NGOs on social media and story development, is a senior communications advisor to the Center for Environmental Health, and has appeared regularly as an environmental commentator on many TV programs, from The Oprah Winfrey Show to The Today Show.
She has hosted a forum on global warming with Nobel Laureate Al Gore and moderated panels for the White House Symposium GreenGov and Clinton Global Initiative. She is a visiting scholar at the Cocoa Research Centre in Trinidad, and an associate at the University of Melbourne’s Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she is conducting research on the loss of agricultural biodiversity in our food system.
She is currently writing a book on agrobiodiversity and saving the foods we love by eating them.
(Image credit: Cem Ersavci for Dumbo Feather)