Live event featuring catwalk display of environmentally friendly and fairly traded fashion from Orkney's independent shops.

Refreshments and Raffle.

This event is organised by the Orkney Fair Trade Group and is free to attend. Booking is required as space is limited, please use this link to book.

Join Greener Orkney for a talk which explores the Issues around Food Waste in Orkney and the progress of their community fridges.

The event takes place within The Orkney Theatre, Kirkwall Grammar School from 7pm on 6th September.

Since early childhood, nature and animals have been naturalist/author Polly Pullar’s passion. She tells us about the joys and heartbreaks of hand-rearing and rehabilitating numerous wild creatures, from tiny naked squirrel kits to tawny owlets and hedgehogs. She also highlights the pressing need to care for nature in all forms, from the smallest insects and plants to habitat restoration. Polly speaks too about her newly-published memoir The Horizontal Oak, and her wonderful, feral childhood in Ardnamurchan where numerous animals, from pet sheep to a kestrel, shared her life. But always, she says, it was the natural world and a sense of humour that helped to provide solace when family secrets and tragedies became hard to bear.

Tickets £5/£3
Book now to attend using this link

Take the first step in developing your wildlife garden by joining biodiversity specialist Eileen Summers in looking for wild seeds in the park, which was transformed from an area of open space by community effort. There’s still some wildflowers in seed, and she will also bring folders of pressed flowers to help recognition at other times of year, along with small packets of seed she has collected earlier for you to take away.

The development of the park has been covered by a series of stories in The Orkney News, and we’ll hear about it from its designer, Paul Green. Ethnobotanist Anna Canning will provide information about the varied uses of the plants, and artist Lin Chau will show how seeds and leaves can be incorporated into paper. Bring along some small containers to store seeds in.

The park is across the road from the hospital, and there’s a small car park in Scapa Crescent, alongside the park. You can find out more in advance about creating a wildflower meadow of your own from this article by Eileen Summers in Frontiers magazine.

Numbers limited, booking essential. Cost: £8

Book now using this link.

How the salt fish trade connected Shetland with the rest of Europe for more than two hundred years. John Goodlad, who has worked in the seafood industry all his life, describes how salt fish from Shetland became one of the staple foods of Europe and powered the economy of the islands.

The story ranges from the wild waters of the North Atlantic, the ice-filled fjords of Greenland and the remote islands of Faroe – to the dining tables of London’s middle classes, the bacalao restaurants of Spain and the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe.

Tickets £5/£3.

Book to attend this event using this link.

Is green hydrogen the fuel of the future? How does electrolysis generate it? And how is it used to power cars, boats and planes? Join EMEC’s hydrogen team at the Kirkwall Pier hydrogen fuel cell to find out about the process of producing hydrogen from renewable energy. They will describe how Orkney is becoming a focal point for green hydrogen developments and the varied uses of hydrogen for decarbonising heat, power and transport.

Admission free.

The Grimond Lecture

We’ve emerged from two years of lockdowns into a world of massively rising energy prices and warnings of food shortages, exacerbated by climate change and war. The real limits to business as usual are becoming harder to ignore. Is there any way to shift from our current self-destructive path to instead a stable environment and a balanced economy, and even a vision of a world with work and housing for everyone?

Yes there is, say the pioneers in the new field of transition engineering, developed to tackle big complex global problems in a systematic way – to try to think our way out of each crisis. To find out more about it, we are joined by the co-founders of the Global Association for Transition Engineering – Daniel Kenning of the company Splendid Engineering and Dr Susan Krumdieck, Professor of Energy Transition at Heriot-Watt University.

Tickets £5/£3.

Book now using this link.

This event will also be livestreamed.

In addition to this event taking place in Kirkwall, the Sanday Development Trust are showing the livestream as part of the Sanday Climate Festival.