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Jules Pretty

Jules Pretty is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Essex, and Professor of Environment and Society. He has written and edited several books on the braiding of nature and people, exploring the importance of place and the land for identity and health of individuals and cultures. His research centres on agricultural sustainability, nature and health, and consumption patterns and well-being.

Jules received an OBE in 2006 for services to sustainable agriculture, an honorary degree from Ohio State University in 2009, and was a visiting Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the Society of Biology and the Royal Society of Arts, former Deputy-Chair of the government’s Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, and has served on advisory committees for government departments and research councils. He is Vice-President of Essex Wildlife Trust, the Rural Community Council of Essex and Community Action Suffolk (formerly Suffolk ACRE).

He is the founding Chief Editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability.

His new book, The Edge of Extinction, will be published by Cornell University Press in late 2014. His last book was the prize winning This Luminous Coast (2011).

More details can be found at www.julespretty.com.

Zareen Pervez Bharucha is a senior Research Officer at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. Her research interests include: Water, Resilience (Sustainability), Sustainable Agriculture (Environment), Sustainable Intensification of agriculture, and Well-Being.

She recently completed post-doctoral research on the links between local food and psychological well-being in the East of England. Doctoral work explored the long-term impacts of watershed development projects on agricultural livelihoods in India.

She is currently working on an ESRC-funded research programme exploring the links between food, energy and climate change. She is also Editorial Assistant for the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability (IJAS) and since 2010 has been collaborating with colleagues to collate evidence for the Sustainable Intensification of agriculture with a focus on smallholders in the Global South.