‘Meet the Writer: Geert Buelens’

Fifty years after the Club of Rome sounded the alarm, we look back with Geert Buelens. We see how deforestation of the Amazon rain forest began, we travel with Jacques Cousteau to the threatened South Pole, we discover the plastic particles in the guts of fish with biologists and we witness how the crew of Apollo 17 took the first colour photo of the entire globe. Using films, TV series, novels, comic strips, news bulletins and official reports from the year 1972, Buelens shows us what we already knew back then about the exploitation of the earth, what we have learned from it – and what we have not. Archive fragments of the time are the starting point for this evening of debate. 

Prof. Geert Buelens (born 1971) is Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University and guest Professor of Dutch Literature at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). In 2018, he published The 1960s: A Cultural History. Geert Buelens is also a poet.