It’s only a few weeks now until the amazing, wonderful, clan-gathering shindig that is the Shambala Festival. Futerra has some serious festival heritage and experience from taking our Earthly Sins Confessional Booth to Glastonbury over the years, and last year our Team Human rocked ‘The Wonky Cock’ pub debate -defeating the motion that ‘This House believes that humans are not fit for purpose’.

And this year we’re back with a (genial!) vengeance. Working with a fantastic group of fellow sustainability collaborators in the ‘Emporium of Invaluable Insights’, that I’ve curated for Shambala 2012. And what a selection of talent we have assembled…from Mikey and the gang at The People Speak, to Tom, Dan et al at Good for Nothing, through to the boys and girls at Nice and Serious – this is a crack team of cunning creatives on a mission. So what’s our beef?

Well, we’re all familiar with the growing problem of ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’, particularly in young people as so eloquently described in ‘Last Child in the Woods’. So to tackle this, refresh our increasingly latent ‘biophilia’, and re-engage a generation in the importance, beauty, inspiration and sheer joy of the wild, natural world we’re experimenting with a crowd-sourced people’s movement for nature. This is of course very much in line with Futerra’s own ‘Love not Loss’ message.

Building on the amazing work that Good for Nothing have done with ‘Wild Thing’ (in which intrepid Futerrans Lucy, Heather & Zoe all participated!), we’ll be running a ‘Talkaoke’ session on the Friday canvassing festival punters views on how nature makes them feel. Then Saturday Good for Nothing themselves will be sharing the outputs of ‘Wild Thing’, in conjunction with award-winning film-makers ‘Green Lions’ (who are working on a feature documentary on the very same subject), and allowing Shambalans to throw other creative ideas into the mix. Finally on Sunday we’ll invite the crowd to make a crowd-sourced film via ‘Segue’…promising a sizzling, and quite probably surreal, conclusion to proceedings!

Nice and Serious will of course be capturing the whole (probably wonderful, chaotic and highly energised!) process on camera. So throw in powerful talks from NEF, Tristram Stuart, the Adventurists, and Rebel Soul, dramatic political contributions from Theatre Uncut, and a workshop on ‘Comedy as a weapon of non-violent protest’ plus a stand-up performance from the brilliant Abie Philbin Bowman and we’re pretty sure the Emporium will provide the ‘Invaluable Insights’ it has been set up to galvanise and create! So, come join us in the magical wonderland that is Shambala, and show that we are all more than a little bit rebellious by nature…

Tickets here.