James Borrell is a biodiversity scientist and science communicator researching how people and nature can adapt to environmental change.

Mountains and Molehills

If you’re tired or hungry or fruitlessly laboring, it’s easy to make mountains out of mole hills. Take a baking hot climate, the bitter cold, or just a busy office, and your tolerance threshold might be lower than normal. That’s why on the top of any expedition kit list is a sense of humour, with several spares. It’s saved the day on a number of occasions.

With temperatures topping 36 degrees even by 9.30am, and half a lake left to survey, emergency measures were called for. An imaginary Pimm’s O’Clock.

A camel willing to wear my cap might raise the odd ethical issue, but brought much needed comic relief after a hard mornings hike.

Sometimes the situation demands you take a dung beetle to the face.

Book James for a speaking event:

James is a highly acclaimed public speaker, delivering keynotes, lectures and debates to a wide range of audiences including students, the public, conservation practioners and scientists. Rather than further polarizing already divisive conservation topics, James aims to explain the complexity and nuance of conservation. What we choose to do over the next five decades, will profoundly influence the diversity of life on eath for the next 5 million years. It’s never been a more important, or more exciting time to be a conservationist.

“You gave a splendid talk – cogent, passionate, clear and compelling.”

Fellow of the Royal Society,

“You had the audience hanging off your every word.”

British Exploring,

“It was refreshing to have a speaker who talked with such passion”

City of London Freemen's

“Interesting, informative and pitched at exactly the right level for our students.”

Academic summer school