The Grimond Lecture

Are the challenges of climate change so great that we should leave them for the world’s leaders, meeting in November in Glasgow? Not at all, says Dr Bobby Macaulay, of Perth College UHI’s Centre for Mountain Studies. Communities can take actions that make a difference, ranging from developing renewable energy schemes to planting woodland, and particularly if they have been able to acquire land of their own to work on. Taking such action, he says, has additional benefits for individual and social wellbeing.

The annual Grimond Lecture commemorates Jo and Laura Grimond. and their love of bringing forward fresh ideas for society. During his 33 years as Orkney and Shetland’s MP, Jo led the Liberal Party to a national revival with a distinctive radicalism and flair that reached across party boundaries. On retirement in 1983 he was appointed Baron Grimond of Firth. Laura, herself a dynamic campaigner with a long family political tradition, shared the enjoyment of seeking new solutions, at community and national level, an approach we seek to highlight in each Grimond Lecture.

“Each age nurses the seed which comes to the surface in its successor. I do not think the immediate past has been Britain’s finest hour, but there is some vigorous seed germinating which could blossom into a harvest of brighter and above all more variegated flowers than we have seen in the last decade.” – The closing words of Jo Grimond’s Memoirs (1979)

You can watch this free event from here, through the YouTube link below, or if you’d like to join questions and discussion, you can also go to the Science Festival’s YouTube channel