As Director of the Global Environments Network (GEN), Nessie Reid is responsible for envisioning the future of GEN and maintaining a dynamic and productive network. She lives on an organic farm in West Wales, cares for a herd of cheeky Welsh Black cows and is a Spiritual Ecologist with a focus on agroecology, food sovereignty, health, and land connection within both the UK and abroad. She has worked in Indonesia, India, Japan and within Europe on local and Indigenous communities’ rights to land for growing food, as well as the preservation of traditional artistic and cultural practices. She has a degree in Archaeology and the Study of Religions with Hindi from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

She is creator of The Milking Parlour: an ongoing artistic discourse and set of performances exploring our human relationship to food and agriculture’s impact on biodiversity and climate change. Through this, Nessie explores the theme of food as a sacred act and ‘Art-vocacy’: the power of art for shifting perceptions around climate change and behaviour. Nessie is an Associate Fellow of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation and is also Managing Editor for Biodiversity – a Journal of Life on Earth.

Nessie is a trained yoga teacher, conflict-resolution group facilitator and a nature-connection guide. She is deeply passionate about courageous communication and how working through conflict and areas of communication breakdown can also be opportunities for growth and great personal and collective transformation. Via dance and a somatic, trauma-informed approach, Nessie uses the body as a tool for deep, personal inquiry and exploration into the unsaid. She is currently training at the Embody Lab, in ‘Embodied Social Justice’: exploring how we embody unjust social conditions, how oppression affects our relationship with our body, and how we can harness the body’s wisdom in making our social justice work more grounded, responsive, and sustainable. Her current line of inquiry is uncovering tools for personal resilience and grief tending for those working in social and environmental justice, specially within GEN. She co-produced, with Camille Barton of the Collective Liberation Project and Healing Justice London, the Toolkit Weaving Grief, the Body and Transformative Justice: embodied grief practices to support environmental advocacy and transformative justice in the UK context.