July 15, 2025 5:00 PM UTC
Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based author whose writing explores our relationship with animals and the environment in a changing world. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and more. Her acclaimed debut book is Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
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Virginia is a writer and curator exploring social justice, ecology, feminism, and art through poetic, sensorial essays, workshops, and rituals that aim to decondition by highlighting the revolutionary power of creativity and storytelling.
Learn moreBy reimagining our connection to the ocean through the story of the whale, this webinar invites you to feel more deeply, think more expansively, and act more consciously in today’s world.
Humans have long been captivated by whales. Across ancient cultures, these majestic beings appear in myths and stories, symbols of mystery, transformation, and the deep unknown. Their social behaviours are equally incredible, revealing a world shaped by sound, presence, and trust. And yet, we now find their bellies full of plastic—a stark reminder of how profoundly we are polluting the oceans. The whale continues to be a mirror, reflecting both our reverence and our recklessness.
In this webinar, we’re joined by acclaimed author and essayist Rebecca Giggs, whose groundbreaking book Fathoms: The World in the Whale dives deep into the ecological, philosophical, and emotional entanglements between humans and whales. Through her lyrical storytelling and sharp insight, Rebecca invites us to see whales not just as icons of conservation, but as beings whose lives ripple across science, myth, memory, and the climate crisis. Together, we’ll explore what whales can teach us about intimacy, extinction, and interconnectedness in an age of ecological precarity.
For the last century, the whale has stood as a symbol of our evolving relationship with the natural world. In the 1980s, as global movements rose up to end illegal whaling, the whale came to embody conservation itself. A gentle giant representing environmentalism and our collective care for the planet. Because of their size and migratory patterns, whales actually help enhance the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Remarkably, they also act as living carbon sinks, storing CO₂ within their bodies.
Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based author whose writing explores our relationship with animals and the environment in a changing world. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and more. Her acclaimed debut book is Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Learn moreRebecca Giggs is an author from Perth, Australia. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Emergence, New York Review of Books, Granta, and in anthologies including Best Australian Essays, and Best Australian Science Writing. Rebecca’s writing focuses on the natural world and animals in particular: the power animals hold over us and the duties we owe to other species, given the ecological and technological transformations of our age. Her first book was Fathoms: the World in the Whale.
Virginia is a writer and curator exploring social justice, ecology, feminism, and art through poetic, sensorial essays, workshops, and rituals that aim to decondition by highlighting the revolutionary power of creativity and storytelling.
Learn moreVirginia is a writer, curator, and researcher exploring social justice, ecology, feminism, and art through a poetic lens. In the last fifteen years, she has been researching and working on gender, feminism and social justice as an activist, journalist, writer and editor. Her writing exists in the in-betweens and tackles social justice, ecology, and feminism poetically, questioning the paradigms currently in place through an approach centred on the emotional and spiritual as well as the political and logical. In her writing, she often infuses ritual, embodiment exercises, and creative prompts. She believes that deconditioning can only happen if we involve not only our minds and knowledge but also our bodies. She is the voice behind WAVES (https://virginiavigliar.substack.com/), a newsletter with thousands of monthly views that questions existing paradigms through a place of joy and care. Through sensorial essays, interviews, and cultural analysis, she weaves conversations on topics such as beauty, identity, masculinity, rest, entanglement, and feminisms. She offers workshops around an ecological approach to masculinity and creative sensorial workshops, find all her offerings here: https://www.virginiavigliar.com/workshops Her mission is to use words as poetic antidotes to systemic issues and to highlight the power of creativity, inner knowledge, and art in our society. Her words are in _Atmos, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vice, The Lissome, World of Topia_ and many notebooks around the world. Words are her comfort zone, she is working on the rest. You can follow her on Instagram @vivivigliar and subscribe to her newsletter WAVES in the link above.