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Nick Thorpe on Walking Europe's Last Wilderness

Monday 17th February

Venue
Pilrig St. Paul's Church, 1B Pilrig St, Edinburgh EH6 5AH
Doors Open
7pm
Start Time
7.30pm
nickthorpewebsite

Please note, this is now taking place at Pilrig St Paul's / LARCH on Leith Walk.

Nick Thorpe is central Europe correspondent for BBC Radio and TV and an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. He has written for The Observer, The Guardian, and The Independent and is the author The Danube and The Road Before Me Weeps.

He joins us for Walking Europe's Last Wilderness, an evocative voyage through the Carpathian mountain range and its threatened landscape, peoples, and history...


The Carpathian Mountains of Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Ukraine are Europe's last true wilderness. A landscape of great spruce and beech forests, grass meadows, and ancient villages, its people contend daily with the elements-as well as Europe's last large carnivores. But this fragile ecosystem is now under threat, from climate change and illegal logging.

Journeying from the banks of the Danube to Transylvania, Nick guides us through the history and ecology of the watershed of Europe, between the Black Sea and the Baltic. For a thousand years the Carpathians have been a place of refuge, of identity and belonging, where powerful rulers and dynasties fought to gain control over rich gold seams and the unruly inhabitants of strategic valleys. Today, its inhabitants struggle to protect its vast forest habitat from urban sprawl as well as logging.

Drawing on interviews with shepherds, foresters and loggers, and his four decades of experience in the region, Thorpe sheds light on a neglected part of Europe-where bears, wolves, chamois, and lynxes still roam.

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