Green

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a gentle walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. The National Park is also home to a UNESCO geopark. During this walk, the Park’s Geopark Officer will offer a journey through deep time, exploring the geology of the hills.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

Two gardeners reveal how connecting with their gardens helped them find solace and taught them how to live more sustainably. Poppy Okotcha and Kathy Slack discuss their own gardens, and share tips for sowing and growing your own plants, flowers and vegetables.

Okotcha’s memoir A Wilder Way chronicles her relationship with an ever-changing garden in Devon. She is a trained horticulturist and regenerative grower, and advocates for those who are underrepresented and marginalised in the world of horticulture and environmentalism. A regular contributor to the Royal Horticultural Society podcast, she was the ecological expert on Channel 4’s The Great Garden Revolution.

Slack’s Rough Patch draws readers into the world of the kitchen garden, revealing how she found refuge in a vegetable patch after she was forced to quit her high-flying career in London. She is a food writer, stylist, photographer and kitchen gardener who previously worked at Daylesford Organic Farm, before becoming a full-time writer and recipe developer.

In conversation with Tamsin Westhorpe, the editor of the Horticultural Trade Association magazine and curator and gardener of Stockton Bury Gardens, Herefordshire.

In this temptatious tasting event, two fantastic businesses local to Hay-on-Wye guide us through choice charcuterie and different styles of beer, while explaining how these delicious products are made with regenerative farming techniques.

Wild by Nature practises regenerative farming in the Black Mountains. The idea for the business was born when Jake Townley and his brother-in-law Ed Dickson left their jobs in the city and moved back to where they had grown up in the Welsh borders, with a shared desire to be closer to nature and to grow, cook and share the food from their farm.

Lucky Seven Brewery is an independent family brewery based in Hay-on-Wye, started in 2014 by Luke and Kelly Manifold. Brewing the beers that they love to drink, and exploring the flavours of different styles, they produce beers that highlight the quality of the ingredients.

These bright-eyed assassins of the British countryside, part of the mustelid family, lead extraordinary lives: some in total seclusion, some in large, related groups. The zoologist and the science communicator discuss these fascinating small mammals.

Dr Jenny MacPherson is principal scientist for the Vincent Wildlife Trust. She has authored a book on mustelids for the New Naturalist Library and covers the animals’ physiology, daily lives and distribution, as well as their significance in UK history and folklore. VWT’s Chief Executive, Lucy Rogers leads the VWT team and drives the development and implementation of VWT's strategy to conserve threatened mammals through evidence-led conservation work. In conversation with journalist, writer and filmmaker, Nicola Cutcher.

Join Vincent Wildlife Trust’s Conservation Team for an evening walk to look for bats and other nocturnal mammals. Bat detectors will allow us to listen out for the bats as they fly around, hunting for insects, and thermal imaging cameras will enable us to look for mammals in the dark.

The Trust’s Bat Programme Manager Daniel Hargreaves will tell us about all things bat, while Carnivore Programme Manager Dr Steve Carter will introduce the Trust’s work to conserve threatened carnivores, including pine martens, which are now returning to the Wye Valley after a hundred-year absence.

Come to Andrew Giles’ farm with local vet Barney Sampson and agronomist Jonathon Harrington to see how his herd of dairy cows produce most of their milk from grass. You can enter the milking parlour and help to milk some of the cows. Learn how the cows are fed and find out how their four stomachs enable them to digest grass. You can taste samples of the dairy products, and a local cheese maker will explain the art and science beneath the rind.

With thanks to Andrew Giles for welcoming us to his farm.

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. Learn more about Hay-on-Wye’s iconic ancient and veteran trees.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

Through her unprecedented reading of Homer’s Iliad, a story thousands of years old, award-winning classicist Edith Hall helps us understand the history of the ecological disaster that threatens our planet.

The roots of today’s environmental catastrophe run deep into humanity’s past, and Hall looks at how – under the story of war and its effects – the Iliad documents the environmental practices of the ancient Greeks and betrays an awareness of the dangers posed by the destruction of the natural landscape.

Hall argues the Iliad can inspire activism to rescue our planet from disaster in this eye-opening event, after which you’ll never view the classic Greek tale the same way again.

Hall is a professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She has written over 30 books, including most recently Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me.

Head into the forest with explorer Levison Wood as he shares the profound influence forests have had on our planet and civilisation. Having spent a lifetime exploring wild places and witnessing environmental challenges and conservation efforts around the world, Wood now turns his attention to the forest in The Great Tree Story, and will discuss the book and his experiences of woodlands around the world.

Wood is a bestselling author, photographer and explorer. He has written seven other books, including Walking the Himalayas, which won Adventure Travel Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards.

In conversation with journalist, woodsman, lifelong cyclist and author, Robert Penn.

Mererid Hopwood – the Welsh poet and lyricist, currently serving as Archdruid of the National Eisteddfod of Wales – chairs a conversation with writers from Europe: Maarja Pärtna from Estonia, Gianna Olinda Cadonau from Switzerland and Pol Guasch from Catalonia. They explore the climate emergency’s threat to society, landscape and minoritised languages and how literature can awake ecological consciousness.

A culmination of a two-week residency for 14 writers, this event will explore their collective approach to addressing climate change through language and literature and celebrate cultural links between Wales and the rest of Europe.

Furniture restorer Will Kirk and woodworker Callum Robinson celebrate the joys of working with wood and finding hope in longevity in a culture where everything seems easily disposable.

Kirk, who has appeared on The Repair Shop since 2017, is author of Restore, a guide to the principles of woodworking, restoration and maintaining items around your home. Robinson grew up as the son of a Master Woodworker, but lost touch with his roots when he set up his own business and began to chase more commercial projects. In Ingrained, he recounts how he returned to the workshop and to wood, handcrafting furniture and reconnecting with his craft.

They discuss how woodworking brings us closer to nature, the benefits of slowing down, and why working with our hands in the modern age can offer us peace.

In conversation with journalist, woodsman, lifelong cyclist and author, Robert Penn.

Abi Daré is the winner of the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize with her novel, And So I Roar, follows fourteen-year-old Adunni from her life in Lagos, where she is excited to finally enrol in school, to her home village when she is summoned to face charges for events that are in fact caused by climate change.

The Climate Fiction Prize, in its inaugural year, celebrates the best fiction engaging with the climate crisis, offering readers new responses and ways of exploring the biggest story of our time.

The winner of the first ever Climate Fiction Prize will speak to novelist, poet and playwright Owen Sheers. They’ll examine what we mean by ‘climate fiction’ as an expanding literary space, the power of fiction in tackling the crisis, and the vital role the wider arts play in its solution. They’ll explore the ways in which fiction enables society to comprehend the impacts of climate change and manifest responses to combat apathy and doomism.

The short list is:

The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

And So I Roar, by Abi Daré

Briefly Very Beautiful, by Roz Dineen

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

The Morningside, by Téa Obreht

Historian and writer Philipp Blom talks to translator Daniel Hahn about the idea that human beings can subdue nature and rule over it. Born in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation, the idea of subjugating the Earth was included in the Bible, reached Europe through Christianity, and spread to the entire world through colonialism.

It is only with the climate crisis that it has become apparent that the subjugation of nature must be a self-defeating ambition. Blom discusses his new book on the topic, Subjugate the Earth, with Hahn.

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. Two of the Park’s ecologists introduce wayfarers to some of the captivating local flora and fauna.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

The Poet Laureate makes a luminous tribute to the natural world, presenting his new collection inspired by the diversity of habitats found at Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan.

The Gardens are an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery combine. Armitage evokes the reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and ‘jungle’, offering a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit.

Using elements of riddle and folklore, he animates a series of dwellings: the ‘twig-and-leaf crow’s-nest squat’ of a squirrel’s drey, a beaver lodge’s ‘spillikin stave church’ and a hive’s ‘reactor core’. He blurs the distinctions between human and animal, natural and cultivated, emphasising commonality, while also warning of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers.

Our well-being as humans is directly connected to nature on our planet, and the Amazon Rainforest is of vital importance globally. Yet the dangers posed to it are myriad. Our panellists, all with an intimate connection to the rainforest, talk to investigative reporter Jon Lee Anderson about attempts to save the Amazon from illegal loggers and how indigenous knowledge is key to protecting the area.

They also look at the work of late journalist Dom Phillips, killed in 2022 alongside Brazilian Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous peoples of Brazil, while researching a book on the Amazon. Phillips’ wife Alessandra Sampaio launched the Dom Phillips Institute in his memory. The organisation aims to promote and share knowledge of the forest and its peoples.

Eliane Brum and Jonathan Watts live in Altamira in the Amazon Rainforest. Brum is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker, whose latest book Banzeiro Òkòtó investigates the destruction of the Amazon by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. Watts is global environment editor for the Guardian and founder of the Rainforest Journalism Fund. He is leading a team of writers to finish the book Phillips was working on when he was murdered.

Beto Marubo is an indigenous leader of the Marubo ethnic group in the Javari Valley region of the Brazilian Amazon. He worked for 12 years alongside indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the protection of 16 isolated peoples in that vast area, which sits close to the borders of Brazil, Peru and Colombia

Join Phoebe Smith, Welsh author and guide with Inntravel (specialists in self-guided walking, cycling and rail holidays) and the Welsh singer-songwriter, Cerys Matthews to walk parts of the ancient ways around Hay-on-Wye, from the well-known Offa’s Dyke to lesser known cart tracks and paths. Smith’s Wayfarer: Love, Loss and Life on Britain’s Pilgrim Paths has been shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year 2025. Explore with her and discuss how nature and place can be powerful forces for healing, understanding and discovering selfhood.

Led by local guide, Sarah Price, https://www.walkhay.co.uk/

Land is one of our most precious commodities, and yet our relationship and the way we take care of it is in desperate need of a reset. Writers Tom Heap and Guy Shrubsole discuss the damage done to our land, how we fix it to ensure we get the food, energy and housing we need, and the people working to restore the land.

In Land Smart, Heap tours the British countryside meeting the people who are solving the most pressing challenges facing our countryside, and transforming our world. He is a regular presenter on BBC1’s Countryfile, and has made many BBC Panorama documentaries on food, energy and the environment.

Shrubsole’s book The Lie of the Land looks at how a small number of landowners have laid waste to some of our most treasured landscapes. An environmental campaigner and writer, he is author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which won the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation.

In conversation with Phoebe Smith, journalist and author of Wayfarer.

The Guardian’s global environment editor Jonathan Watts shares his exploration of James Lovelock, environmentalist and inventor, industrialist, NASA engineer and spy. Watts (author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World – or Destroy It) has drawn on hours of interviews, personal papers and scientific archives to paint his portrait in The Many Lives of James Lovelock.

Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory (that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environment for a habitable ecosystem). Pulling together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, Watts discusses this fascinating, often contradictory man.

In conversation with Tom Bullough, journalist, award-winning author of Sarn Helen and screenwriter on Mr Burton.

Mercury Prize-nominated singer Sam Lee has shaken up the music scene. His latest album Songdreaming (a Mojo Album of the Month) breaks boundaries between traditional and contemporary music. It’s rich in musicality and invention, building on the backbone of double bass, percussion and violin with a world of instrumentation including the Arabic Qanoon and Swedish Nyckelharpa.

His lyrical focus on the perilous state of the natural world informs all his work, and his arrangements relate to a modern audience, moving from identifiable acoustic songs to drone soundscapes, electric guitar and gospel choir. He is a co-founder of Music Declares Emergency.

Lee is also a film soundtrack composer and has provided songs for several major feature films, from Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

José Eustasio Rivera’s classic Latin American novel The Vortex is widely recognised as one of the best novels written in Colombia. It follows young poet Arturo Cova and his lover, Alicia, as they elope from Bogotá and embark on an adventure through Colombia’s varied and magical landscapes. When Alicia disappears, Arturo and his unstoppable ego must follow her. In pursuing her, Arturo becomes an inadvertent witness to the appalling conditions suffered by workers forced or tricked into tapping rubber trees.

Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez (The Sound of Things Falling, Retrospective) and Erna von der Walde, a specialist in Colombian and Latin American literature, culture and politics, have written a new foreword for the book. They talk to Daniel Hahn – one of the translators into English of The Vortex – about this inventive, funny and wildly prescient novel about the human and environmental costs of extractive systems.

Hedgelayer Paul Lamb takes us on an enthralling journey, celebrating the benefits of hedgerows in our countryside and a way of living that has all but disappeared in recent decades.

From the end of summer until the birds nest in the spring, Lamb lives in his wagon and travels the south-west corner of England, maintaining the ancient boundaries of the British countryside. He gives an insight into his life on the road, explains why traditional management techniques of our hedgerows are essential, and why he chooses to preserve our heritage for future generations.

Known on Instagram as the westcountry_hedgelayer, Lamb has over 180,000 followers.

In conversation with the writer and editor, Kitty Corrigan.

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. You’ll be joined by local experts who will give their insights into this treasured landscape.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its landscape.

Discover how rainforests are at the centre of our universe, and what can be done to save them, and in turn the human race, from destruction. Writers Eliane Brum and Guy Shrubsole engage in a passionate discussion with Ayisha Osori of Open Society Foundations about reforesting and the communities – human and otherwise – who live in and around rainforests.

Brum’s Banzeiro Òkòtó recounts her move to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. A Brazilian writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker, Brum is one of the protagonists of global movements Amazon Center of the World and Free The Future.

Shrubsole is an environmental campaigner and writer who has worked for Friends of the Earth and the Right to Roam campaign. His The Lost Rainforests of Britain maps the spectacular lost temperate rainforest that may once have covered up to one-fifth of the country.

A revolution is taking place: around the world, ordinary people are turning to courts seeking justice for environmental damage. Join journalist and activist Nicola Cutcher, pioneering barrister Mónica Feria Tinta, lawyer Paul Powlesland and international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands as they discuss whether the planet can have legal rights, and how to defend those in a court of law. Could recognising the Rights of Nature and making ecocide a crime in the UK transform the future of the River Wye?

Cutcher is an investigative journalist, writer and documentary producer. Feria Tinta is author of A Barrister for the Earth, and advocates not only for the people fighting for their homes and livelihoods, but also for those with no voice: rivers, forests and endangered species. Powlesland, founder of Lawyers for Nature, fights for justice on behalf of those threatened by people with more wealth and power. Sands is Professor of Law at University College London, author of East West Street and co-Chair of Stop Ecocide.

Writer Michael Malay tells the story of making a home for himself in England as an Indonesian Australian, and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines.

In his new book Late Light, through four ‘unloved’ animals – eels, moths, crickets and mussels – Malay looks at the economic, political and cultural events that have shaped the modern landscape of Britain. Late Light is a rich blend of memoir, natural history, nature writing and a meditation on being and belonging.

In conversation with Tom Bullough, journalist, award-winning author of Sarn Helen and screenwriter on Mr Burton.