Colin Tudge will be hosting a one-week ‘pop-up’ college beginning on 17th September with our host Chisholme House in Scotland. During the week he will be exploring the real meaning of the term ‘Enlightened Agriculture’ and how it can be brought about.
Colin is a biologist by education and a writer by trade. In the early 2000s he coined the expression ‘Enlightened Agriculture’. He founded the Oxford Real Farming Conference and the College for Real Farming and Food Culture.
He argues that there is a ‘perennial wisdom’ which should be the foundation for how we think about food and farming and that any society’s approach to food and farming ultimately rests on its weltanschaung, the way that society sees the world.
He holds that the core beliefs and values that underpin how a society understands and deals with nature explain how land will be farmed and food prepared by that society, and if there are fundamental problems with food and farming they cannot be solved by simply addressing immediate concerns (e.g. reduce water use by designing more efficient irrigation; less reliance on chemical fertilisers) or only questioning current economic systems. Rather it will be necessary to address the metaphysical beliefs which underlie how agriculture is practised and how food is processed, distributed and prepared.
Contact: info@chisholme.org for full details.
