What do you mean by Nature?

On the 5th of December our ESC volunteer Antón held a workshop in the shape of an open debate around the concept of Nature in Šesnaestica cultural center iz Zagreb

Antón Fernández Pineiro is a young biologist from Spain that joined BIOM this year to help conserving what we call nature. He studied in his own country, in Belgium and in Italy, so he contributed with his international experience to BIOM’s development. Now it’s time for the volunteering to end, but for sure this year was full of unforgettable memories that he tried to materialise in this workshop. For this purpose, a short film was shared with the 20 participants that attended the workshop. This video showed, with a poetic language, the idea of nature that Antón tried to share with the public. You can enjoy it here below as well: After the projection, an open debate started with the meanings that we usually associate with nature. People quickly started participating, offering interesting perspectives around this concept. “For me nature is everything. Everything that exist is natural. (…) There is no need for bifurcation. A little stream, a frog, a forest; they all share the same way of being”, said Antón Fernández.

The discussion got deeper and deeper as time passed, covering subjects such as different philosophical interpretations of reality, the influence of language in shaping our reality, the social implications of this concept in terms of feminism, economy and anthropology.

Finally, the discussion came to an end one hour after the projection thanks to the participants willing to share and a little gift was given to them. This present consisted of a QR code which had a book inside, available here. The book is Everything flows, by John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, and it is a manifesto towards a processual focus in biology and life sciences in general. It offers a different perspective to the one we traditionally think about things, so it turned out to be a very valuable gift in public’s opinion.