GRASPING THE NETTLE OF CHANGE: activist-turned-author's insights for our city
<<"Nature is not decoration" - activist Alan Trevethan is now sharing his central themes in print and presentations, in addition to his planetandpeople.online blogs and support for CAN's stalls and events. >>
In September 2026, I gave a talk at the People & Planet Health Conference at Newcastle University. Two days in the Curtis Auditorium on the idea that healthier people and a healthier planet go hand in hand.
The keynote was from Professor Sir Andrew Haines, one of the founders of planetary health. I was there to talk about nature in the city. The presentation was called The Art of Living with Nature: The Symbiotic City. It opened with nature's two mass extinction catastrophes: Moss and Trees. Both occurring eons ago.
But what of the data today? - because events that are not counted are easy to ignore. The Newcastle University Campus Biodiversity Network is counting it. Students and staff are logging the wildlife on the campus, pin by pin, species by species. The picture it builds is of a campus that is not a set of buildings with some grass left over. It is a living place that can be known. Northumberland Street can be known the same way. The whole city can.
And then imagination, because data alone does not move anyone. I showed a picture of a bus stop with a green roof. The slide said: just imagine. A bus stop is a small thing. If a bus stop can carry a living roof, the argument that nothing can change here is answered.
The line that I hope the audience took home was this:
A city becomes truly alive when nature is no longer treated as decoration, but as the foundation of human life. Not decoration. Foundation.
The talk itself was an extract from a book I am writing now, about symbiosis: how the living world and the human one can hold each other up, instead of wearing each other out. The city is where that argument is most visible.
Grasping the Nettle of Change, my book already in print, made the same journey in the other direction. It starts on the land, with the fields and the soil and the fires we no longer sit around, and it asks how change actually happens when the problem is this large. The answer it reaches is not that a few people must do everything. It is that all of us can do something.
After the talk, I was given the chance to share and sell the first book in the foyer. That was the right room for it. The people who stopped at the table understood my voice. A talk is one way in. A book is the other. Both were in the building that day, and some of the people who listened went home with the argument in their hands.
The nettle in the title is the point.
The problem stings if you brush past it. It only yields if you take hold.
*** Grasping the Nettle of Change is available here: https://planetandpeople.online/
*** People & Planet Health conference videos and slides presentations will be added here once available.
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