Autumn Conference 2026 - Healing Our World: From Despair to Repair
Autumn Conference - 2026
Healing Our World: From Despair to Repair
Our Autumn Conference, Healing Our World: From Despair to Repair, is fast approaching, and we are delighted to announce an exceptional programme of speakers, thinkers, activists and artists.
Joining us this year is Mike Berners-Lee, one of the UK's most respected voices on sustainability and climate action. A professor, consultant and bestselling author of A Climate of Truth, There Is No Planet B and How Bad Are Bananas? Mike is known for helping people navigate the challenges of our time with both honesty and hope. His work spans climate science, food systems, technology and practical pathways towards a thriving future.
Also joining the speaker line-up is Phoebe Tickell, biologist, systems thinker, and social entrepreneur who applies complexity and biological network theory to societal transformation. She is the founder of Moral Imaginations, an activist design lab dedicated to driving systemic change and catalyzing regenerative futures through collective imagination.
We are also thrilled to welcome Donnachadh McCarthy, renowned environmental campaigner, author and media commentator. Following a life-changing encounter with Indigenous communities in the Amazon, Donnachadh has dedicated more than three decades to environmental action, social change and ecological restoration. His conference talk will explore the lessons he has learned from combining activism with spiritual practice, offering inspiration for anyone seeking to contribute to healing our world while sustaining themselves along the way.
For the first time to an international audience, artist and iconographer Angela Manno will introduce and demonstrate the use of her Sacred Biodiversity Oracle based on her icons of threatened and endangered species. Live stream and Universal Hall audience participants will take part in a process that engages both heart and mind and evokes a desire to take meaningful action on behalf of our fellow creatures. Central to this process is an exercise in Visio divina (sacred seeing) that stimulates the intuition and emotions. The Action component offers participants a way to connect with specially curated international conservation and anti-wildlife trafficking organizations to learn ways they can help. Be prepared to be informed, moved, and inspired by what we can do together to repair the fabric of life on our beautiful planet.
Together, these speakers and artists reflect the spirit of this year's conference: bringing together practical solutions, courageous conversations, creative expression and deeper connection in response to the challenges facing our world.
For those joining us globally on zoom , we will offer curated experiences and exclusive opportunities for a Q&A with some of our presenters and participants.
For those attending in person, there will be opportunities to join additional events before and after, plus tours of the Ecovillage and Hinterland, beach walks and community rituals & gatherings.
If you have been considering attending, now is the time to secure your place. Tickets are already booking, and there is much more still to come.
Join us for a weekend of insight, inspiration, community and action as we explore together how we can move from despair to repair.
This conference is a fundraising event for Ecovillage Findhorn Community Benefit Society, the democratically-governed stewards of the heart of the Park Ecovillage, including the community-owned Universal Hall.
Useful Information
If you would like to attend our Autumn Conference and need somewhere to stay:
You can book accommodation to stay with us here at the Ecovillage here.
Lineup
Mike Berners-Lee - Chair of the National Emergency Briefing
Mike Berners-Lee consults, thinks, writes and researches on sustainability and responses to 21st century problems. He is the author of acclaimed books, including A Climate of Truth, There is No Planet B and How Bad Are Bananas? The carbon footprint of everything. As founder and director of Small World Consulting he helps organisations of all sizes and sectors to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. He is a professor at Lancaster University, where his research includes supply chain carbon modelling, sustainable food systems and the environmental impact of ICT. He has made numerous speaking, radio and television broadcast appearances to promote public awareness of sustainability and climate change issues. In February 2025, he was awarded the Planet Earth Award by the Alliance of World Scientists for his work on seeking solutions to environmental challenges. He is chair of the National Emergency Briefing on the climate and nature crisis, which was held in November 2025 at Central Hall Westminster and is now being screened across the UK and beyond for communities to move from awareness to action.
Phoebe Tickell - Using the Power of Imagination to Shape Our Future
Phoebe Tickell is an innovator, changemaker and founder of Moral Imaginations, internationally recognised for her work in collective imagination, governance and systems change. Her work invites us to rethink the stories, structures and possibilities that shape our future.
Donnachadh McCarthy - What Drives My Commitment to Positive Change
Following an accident with the Royal Opera Ballet, Donnachadh visited the Yanomami Indigenous people in the Amazon in 1992, with a group of alternative healers. This is where he first experienced the human and ecological devastation being wrought by our ecocidal consumer society. He has dedicated his life since then to ending this destruction and beginning the repairs needed. He is the founder of the Climate Media Coalition and a director of the Media Sovereignty Act Campaign. He was the Weekly Climate Columnist for The Independent and has had articles published in the Guardian, the Times, the Ecologist, Resurgence, Byline Times, etc. He is a frequent national media commentator on a range of environmental topics.He has appeared on The Today Programme, BBC Breakfast, Good Morning Britain, Radio 5 Live, GB News, TalkTV, Times Radio, and LBC, etc. Donnachadh is the author of Saving the Planet Without Costing the Earth, Easy Eco-auditing, and The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought. He is the co-founder of the successful cycling campaign group Stop Killing Cyclists. His Victorian home in Camberwell was London’s first carbon-negative home, with solar electricity & battery, solar hot water, solid-wall insulation, a rain harvesting system and a composting toilet. Throughout these years of campaigning, Donnachadh continued to invest in his spiritual healing and empowerment, in order to protect, nourish and empower his work on behalf of Gaia. " In this talk Donnachadh shares the lessons he learnt from this Two Legged Path, in the hope it might inspire more people to do likewise.
Angela Manno - An Interactive Workshop with Sacred Biodiversity Icons
Angela Manno is a visual artist, iconographer and author of The Sacred Biodiversity Oracle, a book accompanied by 36 full color postcard size reproductions of her celebrated icons of threatened and endangered species. * Angela’s eco-spiritual artwork has been exhibited internationally and resides in many private around the world and in prestigious public collections including NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. In 2022, she was commissioned by the Vatican to create an audio visual program entitled, Responding to the Cry of the Earth to open Laudato Si Week, in celebration of the 7th anniversary of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical, Laudato Si: On Care of Our Common Home. Angela was mentored by the great eco-theologian Thomas Berry and studied Earth Literacy at Genesis Farm. In 2007, at the invitation of New York Quakers, she developed a semester long course, “Eco-spirituality & Action” that led to the Peace With Earth minute, expanding their 1660 Peace Declaration to include all of Nature. She received formal training in Byzantine-Russian iconography from a master iconographer from Russia which she then applied to creating her series of contemporary icons. Angela is a former board member of the American Teilhard Association. Angela’s artwork has been noted in numerous publications, including National Public Radio, Hyperallergic, National Wildlife Magazine, The National Catholic Reporter, The Progressive, Sojourners, ART News, Treehugger, and Smithsonian Magazine. Her art is featured on the cover of numerous books including the volume Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-Human Existence edited by bio-ethicist Melanie Challenger and Come Have Breakfast: Meditations on God and Earth by feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. * The Sacred Biodiversity Oracle is a creative response to the biodiversity crisis that enables readers to have Angela’s iconographic images “in their pockets”, so to speak, and to engage their innate Wisdom, Will and Love on behalf of our suffering Living World. After brief meditation exercises that inform and evoke compassion, readers can connect directly to conservation organizations and wildlife and criminal justice experts through QR codes on each card, to take meaningful action. The system is a valuable learning tool and can be used individually or in a group setting for a powerful synergistic effect.
Jonathan Caddy - Nature Restoration in the Hinterland
Jonathan Caddy is a key figure in our community. Having arrived in the area in 1962 at the age of six with his family , the local land and dunes became his natural playground and inspired a lifelong passion for ecological conservation. Under his stewardship, the Findhorn Hinterland was officially recognized as one of Europe's first Nature30 sites, a global accolade celebrating areas committed to protecting at least 30% of the planet for nature by 2030.
Sally Bogale - Education that Serves the Planet
Sally Bogale has been part of Ecovillage Findhorn community since 2024, and lives nearby with her husband, daughter, and dog. She has served as Co-CEO of Gaia Education, an international NGO supporting the transition to regenerative cultures, since 2022. She joined the organisation in 2016 as Project Development and Fundraising Manager, where she worked with pioneering partners on the frontlines of climate change and ecosystem degradation, helping communities to strengthen their livelihoods, restore ecosystems, and build resilience in the face of environmental change. Before joining Gaia Education, Sally worked across the international development and humanitarian aid sectors with organisations including Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Ecologia Youth Trust. Sally loves exploring and promoting the many ways humans can thrive whilst re-establishing ourselves as a happy, healthy, keystone species on this beautiful planet.
John Talbott - The Evolving Ecovillage
John L. Talbott (JT), PE is a professional engineer, ecovillage pioneer and sustainability practitioner who has spent more than three decades helping to develop innovative models for sustainable living. As Director of the Findhorn Ecovillage Project for over twenty years, he played a key role in advancing green building methods, ecological infrastructure and renewable energy systems, helping transform Findhorn into one of the world's best-known ecovillages. He was also instrumental in founding the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and is the author of Simply Build Green. From 2012 to 2021, JT served as Project Director of Narara Ecovillage in Australia, guiding the development of a pioneering cooperative ecovillage community. Since returning to Findhorn in 2021, he has supported several major community initiatives, including leading a Scottish Government-funded project exploring pathways to carbon neutrality. A co-founder and current director of Ecovillage Findhorn CBS, JT continues to work at the intersection of sustainable development, community building and regenerative futures.
Alan Watson Featherstone - Restoring the Natural World
Alan Watson Featherstone is an inspirational public speaker, ecologist, nature photographer and writer based in the Findhorn Community in the northeast of Scotland. In 1986 he founded the award-winning conservation charity, Trees for Life, which works to restore the Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands. He cares deeply about our planet, and has dedicated his life to protecting its biological diversity and sharing the beauty and wonders of the natural world through my photographs, talks and writing. Alan has been vegan for over 40 years and lives with his wife, Pupak, in an energy-efficient ecologically designed house in the Findhorn Community and Ecovillage in northeast Scotland. He is a trustee of three locally-based charities: the Findhorn Hinterland Trust, Trees for Hope and ‘Wild things! environmental education in action’.
Pupak Haghighi - Restoring the Natural World
Pupak Haghighi, co-founder of Trees for Hope, envisioning restoring the Atlantic Rainforest in Moidart, the West Coast of Scotland, and Rewilding the Fertile Crescent. A native citizen of Iran, and belonging to Japan and Scotland at the same time, Pupak bridges cultures and networks worlds and worldviews. Pupak has been living in Findhorn since 2013, and has been holding the focus for Fire Rituals in the community to purify our hearts and heal our life-stories.
Galen Fulford - Ecological Water Restoration
We're also excited to welcome Galen Fulford, Managing Director of Biomatrix Water, whose pioneering work in ecological water restoration and sustainable urban design is transforming how communities work with nature to create healthier, more resilient environments.
Beth Ginter - Learning from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed
The Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council (CCLC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring the Chesapeake Bay watershed by educating and certifying landscape professionals in sustainable landscaping and green infrastructure practices. Through our Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional (CBLP) certification program and additional trainings, we equip professionals with the knowledge and skills to design, install, and maintain landscapes that improve water quality, support biodiversity, and build more resilient communities. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Beth Ginter, MPSLD, CBLP Executive Director, Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council (CCLC) Beth became CCLC’s first executive director in January 2020. Based in Silver Spring, Maryland, and working across the mid-Atlantic, CCLC educates and supports professionals to implement conservation landscapes and green infrastructure practices for a healthy and resilient Chesapeake Bay watershed. She helped develop, and also directs, CCLC’s Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional (CBLP) certification initiative. Previously, Beth was the founding principal of a landscape consulting & design firm, and she led scientific communications programs in the corporate sector. She earned a Masters in Sustainable Landscape Design at The George Washington University and a B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Jason Caddy - Sustainabile and Regenerative Construction
Jason Caddy is co-founder and director of Green Leaf Design & Build, a Moray-based company specialising in sustainable architecture and the construction of high-performance, energy-efficient homes and community buildings. For nearly two decades, he has helped pioneer practical approaches to low-impact construction, delivering projects that combine ecological responsibility with thoughtful design. Deeply connected to the Findhorn community, Jason has played a leading role in a number of significant local developments, including the rebuilding of the Light of Findhorn Sanctuary following the 2021 fire and the West Whins affordable eco-housing project. As the grandson of Findhorn founders Eileen and Peter Caddy, he brings both a personal and professional commitment to creating places that support community, sustainability and regenerative living.
Carolin Waldmann - Healing Through Music
Carolin is devoted to guiding people towards nourishment, presence, and a sense of wonder through sound, song, yoga, and community. She creates spaces where people can reconnect with themselves, awaken their senses, and remember their innate belonging to the Earth, to their own voice, and to the deeper rhythms of life. Her work is rooted in the belief that each of us carries an inner wisdom and a unique song waiting to be heard. Through her offerings, she invites people to rediscover the beauty of the natural world, reconnect with the wisdom of their own soul, and re-attune to the cycles of nature that sustain us all. Raised in southern Germany, Carolin's musical gifts were nurtured from an early age, allowing her creativity to flourish across a wide range of musical settings. At the age of 19, she moved to Scotland to join the Findhorn Ecovillage, where life within this creative and spiritually grounded community profoundly shaped both her worldview and her way of holding space. Here, she cultivated an approach founded on deep listening, compassion, and a reverence for the interconnectedness of all life. From this home base, Carolin's journey has taken her across Europe and beyond. She has worked with the Global Ecovillage Network and the European Ecovillage Network, collaborated closely with community musician Barbara Swetina, and travelled to India to deepen her practice of yoga, sound, and Eastern spiritual traditions through dedicated study and training. Ireland has become another significant home in her journey. While studying at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, she expanded her understanding of music in its many cultural and expressive forms, weaving together artistic practice, academic inquiry, and community engagement. At the heart of Carolin's path has always been a profound devotion to voice, sound, and the art of listening—listening inwardly, listening to the subtle guidance of creativity, and listening to the living world around us. This practice of deep listening continues to inspire her work, inviting others into experiences of connection, healing, and belonging through music, movement, and shared presence.
Ross Jackson - Using Money to Heal Civilisation
J. T. Ross Jackson has been described as a man who always seems to be thirty years ahead of his time. He has written a number of books on a variety of topics, including his spiritual journey, needed economic and political reforms, the ecovillage movement, visions of a regenerative future, and the Shakespeare authorship debate. His most recent initiative is a website where he blogs on topics related to geopolitics, economic reforms and global governance in a world that is slowly coming together as a regenerative society in harmony with itself. Ross has for many years been an innovative leader in both the business and NGO worlds. He has functioned as a management consultant in several industries and financial institutions. In 1970, he co-founded SimCorp, which is now a major European financial software company listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. In the period 1988-2000, Ross founded and ran the first international hedge fund based on OTC currency options. From 1995-2015 he was major owner and board member of Urtekram, Scandinavia’s largest organic foods wholesaler. In 1987, Ross Jackson founded Gaia Trust, a Danish-based charitable entity, to promote the transition to a more sustainable and spiritual world. Gaia Trust has financed hundreds of sustainability projects in over 50 countries as well as several “green” start-ups in Denmark, and has supported two major international NGO initiatives—the Global Ecovillage Network and Gaia Education for over thirty years. Ross’ undergraduate degree was in Engineering Physics in Canada, followed by a Master’s degree in Industrial Management at Purdue University and a PhD in Operations Research, the science of problem solving, at Case Western Reserve University in the USA. Born a Canadian, he has since 1964 lived in Denmark, and became a Danish citizen in 1972. Ross lives with his wife, Heather, on a regenerative farm, Duemosegaard, north of Copenhagen, where they together run a local cultural center with exhibitions, guest speakers, music and a “common garden” project with 20 families producing organic vegetables and fruits together.
Audicia Lynne Morley - Nature Based Eco Somatics
Audicia has spent over 35 years working in the fields of the performing arts, somatics, health and wellbeing specialising in nature-based eco somatics, experiential anatomy and embryology, creative process and ritual. Her lifelong passion for learning and body orientated research have guided Audicia’s studies which bridge both Eastern and Western approaches to BodyMind-Spirit-Nature consciousness. This research led to the establishment of Alive Arts, a creative social enterprise company dedicated to supporting Arts for Peace practices. She developed The ARC Process, a somatic practice in support of health, wellbeing and creative living inspired by her work with Anna Halprin’s Planetary Dance Tamalpa Institute and First Peace Circles EHAMA Institute. Audicia relocated to Forres in 2023, where she established a private bodywork practice alongside her work as Front of House Manager and Lighting Technician for Universal Hall Promotions, Findhorn. Audicia also works freelance in Arts event management and stage production and teaches her work internationally.
John Seed - Conservation Author, Songwriter, and Film-maker
John Seed is founder of the Rainforest Information Centre. John is an accomplished bard, songwriter, and film-maker. In 1995 he received the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in 1995, for services to conservation. He co-authored 'Thinking Like a Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings' and has written and lectured extensively on deep ecology. He has been conducting Deep Ecology workshops around the world for 35 years to help us strengthen our felt sense of connection with the living Earth. John spearheaded s endangered RIC's species, climate change, Asian elephants, Ecuador and Cambodia campaigns.
Ann Amberg, M.C.S., M.A. - Depth Consciousness for a Changing World
Ann lives on Whidbey Island, WA and is a long-term guest at the ecovillage this winter. She is a writer and PhD post graduate student of depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, currently researching her arts-based dissertation. As a long-time leadership consultant, Ann has worked with non profits training global caring economy leaders and K-12 teachers to meaningfully contribute to culture change, evolutionary eco spirituality and social justice. Since 2013 she has taught her signature immersion course, Archetypal Earth & Cosmos that explores how we can apply a holistic archetypal awareness of earth’s foundational patterns to our everyday lives. Ann is committed to revealing beauty in transformational change particularly in the coherence of inner experience with outer reality. In this participatory presentation, Ann will introduce ten foundational patterns, articulated by evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme as cosmogenetic experience, and ask “what are some emergent evolutionary capacities that can nurture the world soul and enable us to stay present in times of deep change?”
Draeyk van der Horn
Draeyk is Moray’s first Green councillor, elected in 2022, with a strong record of community, climate and nature action. He has championed the Climate and Ecology Bill, declared a Nature Emergency, supported winter warm banks, secured the phase-out of glyphosate, opposed a damaging hydrogen facility, and helped unlock funding through the £500 million Just Transition Fund. As Moray’s first Climate Champion, he continues to push practical local action on climate, nature and community wellbeing. A chef, regenerative farmer, writer, director and registered celebrant, Draeyk has spent much of his career building communities — developing local food networks through Incredible Edible and Tasting the Future, directing a local community enterprise, and now serving as director of the Shieling Collective in the Highlands. He has also established a gallery and makers’ space celebrating nature through Pictish, Celtic and Norse culture and mythology. At the heart of everything is a deep connection to nature. Whether hiking in the Cairngorms, running the dunes, swimming, cycling or working in the forest garden, that connection shapes both his life and his approach to public service.
FAQs
- Where can we eat Lunch and Dinner?
Core to the purpose of this event: highlighting local produce and food, critical to our local economy and creating community. You have at least a half dozen choices within walking distance:
Ecovillage: Phoenix Cafe, Phoenix Shop
Findhorn Village: Bakehouse, Captain's Table, Crown & Anchor, Kimberley
Kinloss: Abbey Inn
Book ahead for a table as it is a Holiday weekend!
Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity
