Understanding Our Living Planet: A Journey Through Marshmallows, Doughnuts and Metabolism

Understanding Our Living Planet: A Journey Through Marshmallows, Doughnuts and Metabolism comes to the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Saturday 7 November. It's a talk that brings together art, science and economics to ask what the biosphere means to us as humans and how we might learn to flourish within a living Earth.

Three very different voices lead the conversation. Barney Steel, from the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, looks at how data, art and immersive experience can help us connect with the living world. Yadvinder Malhi, Professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Oxford, explores the metabolism of the biosphere and humanity's own metabolism within it. And Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, asks how we might rethink the economy as something embedded in and dependent upon the biosphere.

The session is presented by the Schwarzman Centre and the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery as part of the 'Utopia Now!' theme, with Marshmallow Laser Feast serving as the Centre's Cultural Fellow for 2026/27. It's an hour and a half with no interval, and the age guidance is 14+.

It runs from 12:00 at the Cinema, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG. Tickets are free, but registration is essential.