‘Restlessly curious’ Ed is a Norfolk boy who left with an itch at 18 years old to spend a transformative year volunteer teaching in rural Jamaica. He studied and worked as a marine biologist in Wales, Orkney, New Caledonia and Australia before a frustrated epiphany led him into a deeper calling as an environmental activist and sustainability consultant. He co-founded Futerra, one of the world’s first specialist sustainability agencies, and worked with governments, businesses and organisations all over the world, but left after 18 years due to the ‘constraining cage’ of consultancy.

 

Since then Ed has become a successful global public speaker known for his creative ‘insultancy’ – being cheekily and playfully rude to clients to inspire them to up their ambitions and aspirations. He works as a facilitator with the Forward Institute on responsible leadership, and he co-presents two leading podcasts ‘The Great Humbling’ with author and social commentator Dougald Hine, and‘Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts’ with comedian Jon Richardson and fellow ‘reluctant futurist’ Mark Stevenson.

 

In 2007/8 Ed circumnavigated the globe without ever getting on a plane and wrote his first book ‘Only Planet - a flightfree adventure around the world’ about his adventures. He has also published two volumes of poetry, ‘Songs of Love in Lockdown’ written as a daily practice during the early stages of the covid pandemic, and ‘Small Dreams of a Seahorse’.