AFTRYK Festival: is it human nature to destroy nature?

I’m excited to be heading to Billund on September 29th for a panel debate at AFTRYK Festival, billed as Denmark’s first cross-disciplinary festival for students and apprentices across the building trades. The premise is to put future carpenters, constructors, architects, designers, and engineers in the same field for a day and see what happens – which, given how thoroughly those educations are usually kept apart, is a pretty interesting experiment before anyone has said a word from a stage.

The debate I’m part of is called:

Er det menneskets natur at ødelægge naturen?

(Is it human nature to destroy nature? – a question you might reasonably want more than an hour for.)

The format takes three cuts through human history (the cognitive revolution, the arrival of capitalism, and the arrival of technology) and asks what changes if we invite nature into the meeting room as something other than a raw material. I’ll be talking about technology. Alongside me: Trine Kellberg Nielsen from Moesgaard Museum on cognitive evolution, and Carl-Johan Collet from the real-estate investment side, with Carsten Rahbek from the University of Copenhagen joining for the second half to speak for biodiversity. Anna Ingrisch from DR moderates.

I’ll be slightly outside my natural habitat here … but that’s the place to be :) And the question of whether destruction is in our nature is a question I can’t wait to discuss with smart people from different fields.

Full programme on the festival site.