Climate Action: Joining the Fight Catherine Cleary and Michael Kelly in conversation with Jennifer McElwain

In Partnership with Science Foundation Ireland

The environmental and sustainability debate can often feel overwhelming. At this event, Catherine Cleary of Pocket Forests and Michael Kelly, author of The GIY Diaries: A Year of Growing and Cooking (Gill Books) will be in conversation with Professor Jennifer McElwain, as they aim to pare back and look at the small, simple steps we, individually and as a community, can start taking today. Our audience will leave empowered and feeling hopeful about the role they can play in the fight to make our society a more sustainable and environmentally active one.

This event is supported by Science Foundation Ireland as part of Science Week 2023.

TICKETS HERE

Catherine Cleary is an award-winning journalist, author and climate activist. In 2020 with co-founder Ashe Conrad-Jones they set up Pocket Forests, a Dublin social enterprise connecting communities and making space for nature in urban areas. She writes the weekly Game Changers column for The Irish Times highlighting climate and biodiversity actions. She is the author and co-author of four books, has written and hosted several radio and podcast series and is the mother of three sons.  This year she planted more than 6,000 trees with family and friends in a native woodlands project of over 24,000 native trees.

Photo by: Colin Shanahan

Michael Kelly is the founder of GIY, a social entrepreneur, author, TV presenter and grower. Michael co-presented and produced three series of Grow Cook Eat for RTÉ and presented the series Food Matters in 2023. He has written columns on food for The Irish Times, Irish Independent and Food & Wine Magazine. He lives in Dunmore East with his wife Eilish and two children.

Professor Jennifer McElwain holds the 1711 Professorial Chair of Botany at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Natural Sciences. She is currently the Director of Trinity College Botanic Garden and Co-Director of the Environmental Science and Engineering degree programme at Trinity College. Her research and teaching have focused on the development and use of paleobotanical methods (proxies) that use fossil plants to reconstruct the evolution of Earth’s atmospheric composition and climate on multimillion year timescales. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2022 she was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in Environmental Sciences and Geosciences. Professor McElwain has published over 100 papers on the topic of climate and atmospheric change and plant evolution and two books, Tropical Arctic. Lost Plants, Future Climates and the Discovery of Ancient Greenland (University of Chicago Press) and Evolution of Plants (Oxford University Press).