I think for many years the environmental movement has assumed that if you want to get people
to do something, if you want to engage people, basically what you have to do is to make a
sufficiently depressing film or write a sufficiently horrifically miserable leaflet and get it
into their hands and they'll read it and go, oh my god, that's terrible, I'll go and plant
some carrots, you know, and actually it doesn't work like that, you know, you can look at
people at different stages of change, so there are the people who are just about ready to
make a change, they've kind of thought it through and they want to make a change if
it's haven't quite done it yet, there's the people who are kind of, yeah, well I'm kind
of aware of that as an issue but I'm not really, at some point maybe in a while I'll do something
about it and there's the people who just problem what problem.
The last couple of hundred years have been absolutely unprecedented in all of human
history, of course our population has grown from under a billion to seven billion today,
the rates of consumption of natural resources both on an absolute basis and also a per capita
basis have grown enormously but driving this enormous change in terms of inventing new technologies
and using more stuff and increasing global trade, driving all of that has been energy,
200 years ago we gained access to an enormous treasure trove of cheap concentrated energy
in the form of coal, oil and natural gas and having this energy enabled us to do all these
other things, we invented automobiles and airplanes so that we could use this enormous
treasure of resources to transport ourselves and transport our goods ever further distances
and so on, we built the whole modern world on oil, coal and natural gas.
Before we were using sunlight indirectly as it came through green plants and we fed the
plants to horses and oxen and so on and then used their muscle power to do things but with
fossil fuels we have energy sources that were created by nature over the course of millions
of years, tens of millions of years and we didn't have to put any effort into making
fossil fuels, all we've had to do is dig them out of the ground.
Our lives are completely predicated on the availability of cheap energy at this point
to an extent that we really can't understand and we tend to think that anything we've lived
with for more than a couple of years is normal and this has been going on for hundreds of
years, well certainly for the last several decades in increasing intensification but
really over the last couple of hundred years since we started relying on fossil fuels
to a great extent.
But then there's also the problem that these are non-renewable resources which means that
gradually we're running out, it's not that we're going to run out completely anytime
soon, there still are enormous amounts of coal, oil and natural gas in the ground but
we've extracted them using the low hanging fruit principle, in other words initially
we extracted the highest quality, easiest access resources and we left the dirty, hard
to get, more expensive stuff for later, well guess what, it's later.
With peak oil we reach a situation where we can't continue to grow the economy in the
way that we have for the past few decades because the economy depends on transportation
and if we can't grow transportation then we can't grow the economy.
We're in the situation where a lot of what we have built, a lot of where we have placed
our resources is going to prove to have been a complete waste of money because it won't
function without cheap energy and cheap credit.
So we have growth being constrained both by limits in resources and also by limits in
the environment's ability to absorb the waste of our industrial production system.
At some point theoretically that results in an end of world economic growth.
Now I believe that we reached that point actually in 2008.
I was 12 and I was going through that stage where I just wanted any animal that was on
this world.
My mum kind of got a bit fed up with me asking for these pigs and goats and horses and anything
reptiles in our house, you know, so yeah so she ended up taking me to the city farm
because she does activities for schools anyway, so she took me here on a school day, it wasn't
a day off but she said I've got to take you here right now.
And even though we still see residual growth in a few economies around the world such as
China, most of the expansion that we've seen in the U.S. and Europe since 2008 has been
not a result of increasing consumption and investment such as we saw in previous decades.
It's been entirely due to government and central banks pumping enormous amounts of capital
into the economy in the form of stimulus packages and bailouts, take away the several trillion
dollars worth of stimulus and bailouts and there has been no economic growth since 2008.
So this suggests to me that we have reached the proverbial limits to growth.
My program in a statistical language called R, I wanted to be a dancer.
At the moment tango is my new thing, I've only just taken that up fairly recently but
I love it, really love it.
And so when I'm dancing in fact it is very much that, it focuses you can't, you don't
think about anything else, you think about where you're being led and that's it.
You don't think and you don't anticipate, again you don't think into the future if you
anticipate then things will go wrong and you don't think about what you were doing previously
otherwise things will still go wrong.
So I think actually the tango is a very, very good thing, almost a very good analogy for
meditation of how you should do it is that you're very much in the moment.
Ecologically we use technology to do the same thing, to delay crisis but as in economics
when you use technology to delay ecological crisis you amplify the crisis that when it
eventually comes.
And this is all based on the idea that you can grow forever, that you can have an infinite
growth on a finite planet.
The absolute mess humanity is in today and it's symbolized in these multiple crises
we are engulfed in, each of the crises in each fear feeds on each other in a positive
feedback loop.
So when you have non-sustainable economies based on greed alone and maximizing returns
to investors you also then build a culture of not caring.
Those who are disenfranchised stop caring because they can't.
Those who have the past stop caring because they only bothered about being driven by greed.
And when you have too much concentration of economic power you have that concentration
starting to influence political power and it leads to a structural change in the way
we govern ourselves instead of being democracies by the people, of the people, for the people
it ends up being by the corporations, for the corporations, of the corporations.
And we see the emergence of a corporate state.
I started singing in about 91 but then had two children so it was kind of an on off thing,
worked with some songwriters.
Then I did a couple of musicals, I do love singing, I don't like some of it, it's some
of the business side of it that goes along with it.
But actually singing and performing and all of that is brilliant, brilliant fun.
I never even thought about singing when I wanted to be an author, when I was a kid.
Write books.
I actually did write one, I sent it off to Lady Bird and they sent me a very polite message
saying you couldn't have it.
It was all about a table that ran away with the dinner and hid in a zoo and gave all the
food on the table to all the animals for hiding in.
I thought it was really good, I was about 14, 13, 14 or something.
That was the end of my authorial career but both my kids have written books funnily enough
or are in the process of doing it, I hope they'll have more success than me.
If you also look at the tragedies of poverty and hunger, one billion people are going without
food not because the earth could not produce enough for them but because an industrial system
has to rob the soil of food, it has to rob communities that produce food or food, half
of the hungry people of the world today are producers of food because the system must
suck every grain out to sell it and half of it goes to feed animals who are then tortured.
Large part is going for biofuel, it's an absolutely insane situation.
I can't seem to make any sense out of destroying your primary asset in an effort to generate
wealth.
It doesn't make any sense.
So really we are talking about a challenge to capitalism and I think that that does
need to be said and sometimes I think we talk about growth so that we don't have to talk
about capitalism, that it's easier in some ways to talk about growth than it is to talk
about capitalism and that's seen as maybe two left wing but I do think we have to talk
about the economic system that demands that endless growth and that has demanded colonial
and ecological expansion that has created the crisis that we're in.
I've spoken to my client who's returned into the office and I have the authority to proceed
at £63,000.
I'm in funds, I can compete as soon as you can.
I don't remember wanting to be a train driver or a fireman or any of those sorts of things.
Nothing comes to mind that that's what I was going to be or that I had any particular
costumes that I used to dress up in or anything like that.
It's a panoramic province and I called his Britain full.
For the last 40 years I've been a solicitor.
I really don't look to the top level of political organization for solutions at all because
the top level is peopled by the very people who have been the most significant beneficiaries
of the status quo and they have tremendous vested interest in that status quo.
They're the people least likely to change anything plus they tend to be very reactive,
not very proactive.
They are looking backwards and extrapolating trends forward.
They don't see trend changes coming and they don't act in a timely fashion.
So even if there were things that they could do, I don't think they would be doing them.
I think they would be trying to look into the same old bag of tricks to do just more
of the same.
And as Einstein said, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome
is the definition of insanity.
But humans are notoriously 12 minutes or 1 minute and midnight aren't they?
It's when there is no option, I think that's when it will possibly change.
The current system obviously cannot be fixed in the sense that a system that is based on
growth and without growth collapses, as we see now, creates unemployment, creates poverty,
creates exclusion, creates inequalities.
A system like that is unsustainable in the sense that it's sustainable in its own terms
only if it grows, but if it grows, it's not sustainable in ecological terms.
So this system obviously has to change.
I want to carry on doing what I'm doing as long as I can because I enjoy what I do.
But at the same time, I have a growing awareness that not all of the things that I do and
others do are going to be possible.
At what point you draw the line or where that line comes, at the moment I don't know, they're
working five days a week, at the moment I don't want to spend my evenings being involved
heavily in something else at all.
So I'm in my nothing phase at the moment, I'm not going there.
More recently, obviously, I'm just worried what the future is.
Ten years ago I would have said it's all clear and mapped out, now I don't know what ten
years is going to be like.
I think there are two key mistakes, if you like, in the way we Westerners are trained
to see the world since childhood through our schooling system and our educational system.
One is that we humans are totally separate from nature and that we are superior to nature
and that the whole of nature is there for us to exploit and also that it's an infinite
set of resources that we can exploit without limit.
So that's one little sort of package.
The other one is that we see the whole world as a dead machine that has no intrinsic value
at all.
It's only valuable or bits of it are only valuable if you can extract them from wild
nature and convert them into products which can then be sold in the marketplace.
Then nature has value, but it has no value if it's just being nature by itself doing
its thing, then it has no value at all.
Nature, the natural world, is a type of dynamic infrastructure, it's alive and it wants to
do everything in its power to live and to reproduce and everything we do with our technology
which is static and it's dead and it's quite dumb.
I mean, again, I think there's a certain technical branch that's required to create
it in the first place, but when you look at it comparatively to what you find in nature,
I mean, it's just a really bad imitation, it's a really poor imitation.
Do you know what my main concern is?
My eldest son's diabetic, so he counts, when we've had this conversation, he depends upon
society being able to be maintained as it is so that his life-saving medicine can be
produced.
So that is personally my biggest fear, it's like part of me thinks it can't carry on
and things need to almost go back to a more self-sufficient way of living, for everybody,
more subsistence living, but on the other hand, if that was to happen, the chances of
my son surviving that are quite minimal.
So yeah, it's a bit of a quandary and they both like to go and have children.
What kind of future is there for them so it does worry me?
When one recognizes that what makes the earth makes us and the most important link between
the earth and our bodies is the food that the earth gives us, then food of course is
the beginning.
Under here I'm bringing beetroot, fennel and carrots.
I've got peas down here, I've got two different types of peas, so I've got sugar snaps and
I've got just kind of normal peas.
The way we grew food decides how we distribute it.
If we grow it with fossil fuels, then the fossil fuels come in particular places, fertilizer
factories are in particular places, there's already a centralized control.
And when agriculture is done through industrial systems, then a centralized input system also
gets linked to a centralized distribution system and you get the walnuts, the Sainsbury's,
the Tesco's controlling the food chain, ripping off farmers as well as cheating consumers
at the same time.
I think there are many people here who wouldn't want to break out and do anything different
possibly.
I mean even I felt that for a long time, I say for a long time, maybe two or three years
I thought this is where I want to be, this is what I want to do, this is where my life
is going.
And I guess it took a little bit of waking up to me to realize that actually I was kidding
myself.
So I think this is also part of my process that I'm going through, that I'm realizing
what's standing in the way of me doing things is my own fear and it's me not having the
courage to do things and I think probably the hardest thing is going to be overcoming
that.
There is an anticipation for the afternoon, you've done everything that you can do and
you are going to leave it, which is not to say that I don't like my job, but I suppose
it's the old thing, I work in order to live rather than living to work and that's not
a balance that I always get right sometimes.
At the moment I'm in college studying animal care and looking at universities and I just
know what I want to do, you know, it's great.
We have the illusion that intensively produced food is cheap when in fact it's really expensive
for the environment, but what we're doing is treating earth capital as if it was income
and that's what has happened with all our food systems for about the last 50 or 60
years really since the war.
We've been consuming the accumulated resources of our mother planet which have been laid
down over millions and millions of years, not replenishing them and pretending that
this will go on forever.
The processes that made me start thinking about change really came into their own when
I started trying to grow my own food and the challenges that I faced and how you know,
you go out there and you're protecting everything and hoping and thinking and then something
else comes along and you think, wow, okay, and it's all very much a learning experience.
It's easy when you live in a city and you buy food at the supermarket or you go out
to a restaurant and the food appears and it just seems as if it's just going to keep
on coming and since people who live in urban lifestyle are literally physically disconnected
from agriculture, how would they know about this fragility unless action is taken urgently
to address climate change, resource depletion, the world's growing population, the inevitability
of a shrinking land area and is taken in a tremendous hurry.
Actually we could be facing a global food crisis within the next perhaps 10 years.
Well, like a lot of other people, I've got an awareness that things are in quite a precarious
state, the way that the world is working and I think it's very important that we start
to grow food.
So I started to grow food, so I thought, well, I'm going to look into a course that will
help me to grow food and saw this one which was just down the road which I could cycle
to and so I just applied for that and sort of see if I can gain a bit of extra knowledge
on how to produce food, really.
Whoa, you so need to come out.
So much to learn, so much.
So what I want to do and what I'll actually end up achieving, you know, I've got visions
of being vegetable self-sufficient, I'll probably end up with three bent carrots and two cabbages
with holes in, you know, it's just, it'll be like sparse pickings this year, my dear.
By the way, that word sustainability, most people just associate with some kind of ethical
or moral ideal, you know, we want to be more sustainable for the sake of the seventh generation
in the future and that's a good thing, I mean, it really is a, you know, it should be the
foundation of our collective ethics, but it's gotten beyond that.
It's to the point now where doing things that are sustainable are not just ethical, they
are necessary for our survival.
Well, if you go to a restaurant and the food appears and it just seems that it's just
the only people coming, I want to make sure that I can survive.
I think there's a certain technical branch that's required to create it in the first
place, but when you look at it comparatively to what you find in nature, I mean, it's just
a really bad invitation, it's a really poor invitation.
It's much greater than what people realise, of course, it's easy when you live in a city
and you buy food at the supermarket or you go to a restaurant and the food appears and
it just seems that it's just a very predictable change and so you get people saying, oh, that
would be wonderful for England, we'd be able to grow wine.
It's made me realise that what I'm thinking is further, it's more than what I was even
thinking, but in terms of worrying me, I was already worried.
Yeah, I was already worried.
For me, I feel at the moment I get a bit overwhelmed because I feel like I'm one person and that's
the hard thing, when you feel like you're part of a community, you can do things together
and that for me really came through and I thought, wow, wouldn't it be wonderful if we
were all in this together and actually feeling that together and going through it.
So seeing people that are putting their blood, sweat and tears into actually finding out
what is going on, how we can fix it and how much time we have and seeing them say, you
know, people need to know this, like I want you to help me and help me put this out, like
I'm worried, so yeah, I think that watching it from these people rather than on the news
or in the newspaper, it makes such a difference.
So every day, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down and after watching a programme
like that, I'm up, there's the positive side of things.
Yes, we've got a big change coming, but it's not a disaster, it's an opportunity and the
more we keep hearing that, the more confident I can feel about it, the more I can become
engaged in the opportunity.
But if we think about how we get off this disastrous economic and ecological path, which
is really the same crisis, different sides of the same crisis, then we have to believe
that we have a past and also that we have a future, that we aren't in this sort of perpetual
adolescent present where we never have to deal with the effects of our actions.
There's too many people out there for whom the food system is the supermarket.
And if that's their thinking, then to say that there will come a time when there's not
no oil but very expensive oil and that has a knock-on effect, there just isn't a connection
there.
That I think is an area that is going to have to be explored and expanded so much more on.
I don't know whether government information broadcasts are the way forward because I don't
think anyone pays attention to them anymore, that's part of the problem, but that sort
of information needs to be taken out there.
Our degree of oil dependency is a vulnerability, is a key, key vulnerability.
And so my sense is that we can either look at that as a disaster and as something dreadful
and as something that we need to bury our head in the sand of believing that economic
growth will somehow be pulled out of the fire and we'll still be able to have more and
more stuff forever and ever and ever, or we can consciously and compassionately and creatively
redesign where we go from here and rethink many of the things that we've come to take
for granted.
If we can learn how to be stated, if we can learn how to even say we have too much, then
that does create space for some growth, for growth that needs to take place in parts of
the world that have been the places where we have extracted the wealth and left a little
behind because that needs to happen.
And I think a lot of the discussion around sort of end of growth tends to treat the whole
world as if it's the same and it's not the same.
There are places that need to grow and there are places that need to stop growing and even
contract.
It's a very difficult thing to discuss this publicly because in a way people expect the
language to be used and the science based decision making framework to be absolutely
connected to the current paradigm and yet I think we are on the threshold of a paradigm
shift.
The most important thing is moving that knowledge, moving that individual attention to actually
accepting what's going to happen, that's the first step and that takes the paradigm shift.
Otherwise it's panic and all of them are saying we don't need to panic.
We need to plan but we don't need to panic.
That's very hopeful in circumstances where you could panic.
I think there is a great need to encourage everybody to be in transition rather than
to be in expectation, which is what we've had for the last 10, 15 years, this feeling
that I have a right to have a refrigerator, a dishwasher, a cooker, a new bed, whatever
I want, when I want it.
That's not how I grew up and that's not how we're going to be living in 10 or 15 years
time and I think the sooner everybody comes to a realisation of that then the easier it
is going to be to live in that new world.
Lots of my lifestyle probably have to change too and it's quite scary because that's what
you've grown up with but seeing that it can work and that you can be well and enjoy a
life like that is I think really important.
You can be the change, you can take individual action as a citizen and your action at a local
level in your family, in your household, in your community and then finally in the world
can actually deliver the change and we don't have to wait for politicians.
And actually what does it look like if we start to first of all try and imagine where
we want to be going and see that as something that we all get excited about that resonates
for people that they think, yeah actually that's the kind of world I'd like to wake
up in in 10 years time.
It's difficult to say we've got this top down structure which we need to make bottom
up but how do we, we actually need an approach from both sides because I think there are
probably a lot of people who feel like this is something they'd like to be able to do,
they maybe like to be able to work part time, work part time doing, growing their own food,
being part of the community but because of financial restrictions and responsibilities
whether it be the fact they've got to pay more mortgage, they've got a family to look
after and they feel locked into doing, carrying on doing what they're already doing.
Work out ways to reduce your dependency on oil, just even if it's just you and yourself,
your immediate family and that then inevitably spreads out to possibly your neighbours.
You inevitably kind of have an impact on people and they go oh I might try that as well and
it's from that point, you know, sitting around waiting for governments and big corporations
and whatever they're not going to, they're going to milk as much as they can for as long
as they can.
What transition is about really is about designing for resilience which is the ability of a settlement
to weather shock from the outside when it encounters that shock.
I guess the idea of resilience is being able to have a system where you can respond to
larger perturbations so if you had something that might shift here, what's the next term?
So you want to be able to be such that you can stabilise around your point or the perturbations
such that you can work again and so you're not getting something that's going crazy just
because one little perturbation just sends it off, it's something that you want your
system to be able to adapt to.
Resilience is the ability of the system to maintain its function despite an imposition
of a change and we know in science that the more biodiversity you have in any ecosystem,
the more resilient it is, overall we will need to have a lot of wild land to help regulate
the climate, not just land also, ocean systems, undisturbed ocean systems, incredibly important
for taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
So lots of places that are not disturbed, very important, that's not to say that we
can't interact with them and do some harvesting, of course we will be able to do that but we
have to do it very, very carefully.
That means we're going to have to find ways of growing food on the land that we do have
now for agriculture in new ways that are quite intensive but not intensive in a conventional
chemical sense, more intensive in a sort of permaculture sense.
It presents a very interesting opportunity to take a very different approach, a different
way of living in the world, of being in the world because if you know how the natural
world produces things and what it needs, if you can put those pieces together in a manner
that leverages the best that each of those components has to offer, then you have a pretty
potent tool and not only being able to supply for your needs in relation to producing food
or if you live in a place that has a damaged landscape, being able to rehabilitate the
landscape so it becomes useful to you.
We're now gaining mutual benefit and really I think whole systems natural design, a whole
systems design in general is about identifying ways in which all of the pieces that are in
the system can gain mutual benefit and unfortunately right now, the way the world is arranged,
it couldn't be farther from that is that we have, we create systems that are technically
very impressive, strategically they're completely bankrupt.
Of course here starts becoming, which I find is a little bit problematic with the idea
of resilience, which is the sense of what do we want to return to, do we want to always
after a sock to maintain things as they were or is it about moving to a new state that
it's desirable but it's different from where we were because I think in the sense if our
concern is about maintaining the current system resilience can turn into a conservative idea.
What we need is what I've called earth democracy, recognizing that we are citizens of the earth,
therefore the issue of grounding ourselves on soil, building economies of the soil which
means both recognizing that life on earth is the most important thing, not the fossil
fuel that lies buried underneath but through the economies of the soil giving power to
people on the ground so people start making their decisions about economic affairs, people
start changing the way they consume and produce and this changes the culture, it changes the
culture of people's relationship with the earth because now you care for the earth but
it also changes the culture of people amongst themselves.
When you are in a globalized economy driven by greed you too become part of that culture
of greed, you become part of the culture of fear, you become part of the culture of competition.
Once you're building local economies based on sustainability you become part of a culture
of cooperation with nature and among people.
So what we emphasize as part of the growth is not just conservation at the level of individual
but political action and political will to change the bigger structures and the bigger
picture of things.
You know there's been discussion within Detroit City government about basically cutting off
a third of the city to municipal services because they no longer have the funds to be
able to maintain the infrastructure so you have a lot of land that's not being used
so some people are just going out and just claiming it for themselves, in some cases
the city is giving land to people to be able to tend.
Very lucky up here on the side of a hill looking down on Topnes they got this land about two
years ago to turn into allotments, this is the second year of growing and we were very
lucky to get hold of one in April of this year.
What we have here is a measured piece of land and our next door neighbour has a measured
piece of land, the land is owned community by an association, the allotment association,
we pay an annual rent, the advantage that we've got although it's not our land as long
as we cultivate it then we have it for life.
If we move away then the next person comes in and they make a promise to cultivate it
and as long as they cultivate it they've got it for life.
The point is every step that nature has of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
is the creation of living carbon.
Plants take the sunlight, the chlorophyll molecule through photosynthesis, takes the
carbon dioxide out of the air and releases oxygen that we need and thus cleans up the
atmosphere constantly giving us our vital breath.
That living carbon needs to be maximised in order to deal with climate change both in
mitigating it as well as in adaptation.
In mitigation the more green you have on the planet the more absorption out of the atmosphere
is taking place and the more plants are able to absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
the more carbon they are able to return to the soil so the soil ends up being the biggest
sink of carbon but a carbon rich soil is also a more fertile soil so it gives us more food.
It's also a more resilient soil because it can hold 10 to 20 times more moisture than
a carbon depleted soil as a result of which when a drought comes we can deal with it,
when a flood comes the soil will absorb more of the moisture and therefore make the impact
of floods less no matter which way you look at it maximising living carbon is vital as
a climate solution and it's vital as a food solution and I think it is time to recognise
that life is carbon.
It's fantastic because you see everybody talking about carbon emissions and trying to sequester
carbon or you know whatever and people driving for low carbon and I think it's a wonderful
way to think about it and that we want living carbon and we want life and I think it's a
wonderful way to see everything working together again it's not just us and the environment
it's this constant connection between us.
And I think of necessity we will rediscover community and we will discover that that's
actually a very valuable thing.
Part of the challenge that we have over the next 10 years is about learning to meet each
other again because one of the side effects of the oil age and the age of cheap energy
has been the reality that you can live on a street and not know anybody on that street
which is a very dubious luxury really only of the last 20, 30 years.
We've always depended on each other and needed each other and supported each other and we're
mutually dependent but we've been able to just do away with that completely and I think
that coming back together again and relearning how to engage with each other, how to work
with each other, how to speak kindly to each other and co-operate is something which will
be tricky for some but hugely beneficial I think.
The only way of getting anyone who's in a negative kind of atmosphere or environment
or frame of mind into a more positive way or maybe unless thinking the same way that
I do or feel the same way that I do is to throw yourself into the deep end and try and get
into some kind of voluntary work or some kind of community based organisation because it's
not only about kind of doing all this free work, it's really about working with people
and it's people on your own boat as well, it's people in the same stage as you and in
the same way and you kind of work with each other unconsciously getting into this positive
frame of mind.
I don't know the specifics, I'm open to the possibilities, where it actually goes, what
I'm going to do tomorrow I don't know, what I'm going to do next week I don't know, what
I do know is that I need to do other things, we all need to do other things, we all need
to do other things together.
Quite how it works yet I don't know but I'm ready to take the steps, quite knowing which
direction to walk at this moment.
I think the thing about critical masses is great so that you can start seeing how it
is working and how you're not just going saying right I'm going to leave everything and just
hope that something is going to happen, when you start to see people doing it and living
it you think that's something I want to be part of.
It seems to me that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of meaning and of being and
it has its sort of spiritual counterpart, if we're going to encourage millions of people
to go on this journey it has to feel like a journey towards something where what we
put in the place of this materialistic age that we've been part of will feel actually
better in terms of quality of life and relatedness to our planet and what comes in the place
of what we're giving up will make us feel that we've actually traded up rather than
gone down.
I mean I'm definitely very much in a big transition period where I don't know where
I'm going next necessarily, I've got lots of ideas floating about in my head and I
think it's partly just trying things and not being afraid to get things wrong.
I don't know in some respects I feel like I've gone, I've had to go quite far in not
necessarily a wrong direction but in a different direction before I realise which one I want
to go in and perhaps that will happen again as I'm making more transitions and thinking
how to make changes.
I think if we could shift our worldview so that we could really connect with the magnificence
of biodiversity, the sheer miracle that there's any life at all, the extraordinary wonder
of a tree, of a bird and the even greater wonder of their relationships with each other
then we'll have the right worldview from which to develop a truly sustainable world and that's
where the spiritual dimension if you like of resilience and biodiversity comes in.
And the truth is we don't know whether our actions or our collective actions can make
the changes in the time but we have the responsibility to act whether or not we're successful and
in that respect I'm optimistic because I believe that that is our citizen responsibility
and therefore if we act that's all we can do and if enough of us act then we can.
I feel like I was very much that rational science approach until I didn't know what
it was that unlocked the feeling of right wow okay and it became my experience and it became
not just facts and figures and actually this is important we should do something it became
a wow this is my responsibility kind of I am in the same way that you care for people
you love you care for the earth and you care for its future.
The earth makes us she shapes us and if we've made the earth toxic then the earth makes
our bodies toxic in my view agriculture is the taking care of the earth when we farm
in the right way we are caretakers of the earth just as you can have a caretaker of
a house and that is the real role we have as human beings so for any society to say
we need less caretakers it's been careless in its functions.
I have been thinking quite a lot actually and I think that everyone covers they isolate
themselves some way whether it's an iPod so music there's never any silence anywhere
there's noise even now I can hear cars go by buses but no one ever sits down and thinks
right this is where I am where do I want to be and what do I want to do and this is not
just for anyone my age this is for just everyone just sit down and just think what is going
on and I think it comes to you like I just I honestly do I think that if you sit down
and listen then you get it you get it.
you
