Summary of talk – The travels of corn and stone

This talk follows the journey together of corn and carved stone over thousands of miles and years from the Fertile Crescent to the present time in Scotland. Carved stone turned corn grain to food, giving people resilience and stability; and that stability in turn allowed people to create massive stone building and monuments. Yet where are we today … is the corn-stone link breaking and with what consequence?

Speakers

Amy Wilson

PhD Researcher, Robert Gordon University

Amy Wilson has over 20 years’ experience of architectural projects both in practice and education. Since completing her Post Grad Diploma in conservation with distinction at RGU, she has worked for renowned practices in Scotland. She has also held directorships in both property development and specialist design companies. Amy is currently conducting her PhD at RGU titled ‘Stone voices’, gaining knowledge of the stone-built heritage in both Scotland and Canada. She has an ongoing part-time teaching position at the university, which she has held for over 10 years. She enjoys the tutoring engagement afforded through design studio projects and the opportunities for combining research and teaching.

Geoff Squire

Hon Emeritus Fellow, James Hutton Institute

Geoff Squire is a biologist specialising in plants and their interactions with the wider world. Early education at state schools led to university at Oxford (BA) and Lancaster (PhD). Then began a long period of employment and later collaboration with the environmental physics group at Nottingham University, studying the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Continuum (SPAC) in various managed ecosystems the UK, Africa and sou-east Asia. Continued work on the SPAC developed into a ‘whole systems’ approach to questions of sustainable land management and food security.

Following a decade in freelance research on land, soil and vegetation, also stretching to the tropics, he joined the Scottish Crop Research Institute in the mid-1990s (a forerunner of the James Hutton Institute) to apply the ‘systems approach’ to land use, combining the biophysical with the economic and cultural and where possible the political spheres of sustainability. Work at SCRI/Hutton included cross-institute coordination in vegetation science, major UK- and EU-wide projects on environmental risk assessment and geneflow, periods in senior management and collaboration with a range of international organisations. He established agroecology as a long-term research topic at the Institute, again based on the SPAC and its wider connections with people and society. He continues to analyse and model biophysical processes, publish scientific papers and work on ecological design with groups including Bioregioning Tayside and SEDA Land.