Alan Rayner: Understanding Trees, Fungi, and the Evolutionary Flow of Life

About the Speaker: Dr Alan Rayner

Dr Alan Rayner is an evolutionary ecologist, writer and artist. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950 and gained BA and PhD degrees at King’s College, Cambridge in 1972 and 1975. He was a Reader in Biological Sciences at the University of Bath from 1985 to 2011 and has published numerous papers and books, the latter including, most recently, ‘The Origin of Life Patterns in the Natural Inclusion of Space in Flux’. He was President of the British Mycological Society in 1998 and President of Bath Natural History Society from 2012 - 2018. Since 2000, he has been pioneering awareness of ‘natural inclusion’, the co-creative evolutionary flow of all forms of life in receptive-responsive spatial and energetic relationship. This awareness enables us to understand ourselves and other life forms as dynamic expressions of our natural habitat, not independent subjects and objects. He has a special interest in helping people to become more aware of the diversity of wildlife in their local neighbourhood, and how this can help us to learn to live together in a more passionate, compassionate and sustainable way than we currently do.