Nessie Reid

She has worked in Indonesia, India, Japan and Europe on local and indigenous communities’ rights to land and food growing, as well as the preservation of traditional artistic and cultural practices. Her interest in the link between agriculture, ecocide and climate change emerged during field research in West Kalimantan where she witnessed the catastrophic ecological damage caused by large scale intensive agriculture – principally palm oil – and the displacement of local and indigenous communities as a result.

She is creator of The Milking Parlour: an ongoing artistic discourse and series of interactive events and workshops exploring our human, spiritual relationship to food and agriculture and its impact on biodiversity and climate change. She believes farming can be a sacred act, if done properly and with respect, and continues to advocate for this. Her work uses the principles of spiritual ecology - interconnectedness, reverence for nature, compassion, service and stewardship - to re-wild our relationship to the food we eat, the land it is grown in and the natural world.

Nessie is manager of the Oxford Real Farming Conference: one of the main organic and agroecological farming conferences in the UK and is a research fellow at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation.

Some background about the Spiritual Ecology fellowship that Nessie part of can be found here