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- [00:00]
A
Okay. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the lse. I'm Janet Hartley, I'm pro Director Teaching and Learning at the lse and our speaker tonight is Tony Juniper. I'll just say a few words before introducing our speaker about this lecture series. This is the lecture series LSE Sustainability in Practice. This is the eighth of nine lectures in this series, which we believe has been a very successful series for the school. But we have been able to have speakers who discuss sustainability, practical world, way in which behaviour can change. And we've had a whole range of very influential, very different speakers as part of this lecture series. Some of you may have been to this series before. I would guess some of you probably have done. So you've experienced what neither of us have experienced, which is the use of these CDs which you've been handed as you come in. We like a little bit of feedback and audience participation in this lecture series. You should have been issued with a CD which has been come from a landfill centre which you could reuse to answer questions positively or negatively by showing one side of the cd. The red side is no, the other side silver or green, I guess, is yes. So this is a test to make sure that everybody who's come here is awake. Did you get here by public transport? That looks good. Great. Second question. Do you consider carbon emissions when purchasing food? Gosh. I can see you've got one or two conversions to make, but most of them are converted. Thank you very much. We might come back to your CDs at some point. Not during the lecture, unless you wish to, but certainly that's during the question and answer session. I'm delighted to welcome Tony Juniper to this lecture series. I'm sure he is known to you, but I will say the blurb anyway in case of somebody who doesn't know him. He's a campaigner, a writer, sustainability advisor, one of the UK's best known environmentalists. And for the last 25 years he's worked for change towards a more sustainable society, local, national and at international levels. At the moment, he works as Special Advisor to the Prince of Wales Rainforest Project, an initiative that seeks consensus on new international mechanisms to slow down tropical deforestation. And he's also a Senior Associate with the King Cambridge University Programme for Sustainability Leadership, which designs new courses for senior executives, and then also works a member of the teaching faculty. He writes extensively. He's editor in chief of the National Geographic's Green Magazine supplement. He contributes a weekly column on greener living for the Sunday Times Home section, and he writes a blog in the Guardian's commenters free website. He was a member of Friends of the Earth, which He joined in 1990, where he's always had a very strong public presence. He was widely recognised for work in elevating environmental issues. In 2005, Country Life listed him as one of the most influential figures shaping the countryside in the uk. He led the Friends of the Earth celebrated campaign against the Newbury bypass. In 1998, he became the policy and Campaigns Director of the Friends of the Earth. From 2003 to 2008, he was the organisation's director in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. He contributed to many of the Friends of the Earth's most important achievements, including legislation to protect the UK's finest wildlife habitats, new laws on recycling and policy changes in transport and farming sectors. Well, Tony Jubiter was the director. One of the great successes of Events of the Earth was the success of the big US campaign, which successfully set out to gain legal controls of carbon dioxide emissions. So somebody who writes extensively, who I think probably is well known to all of you, in fact, and we're very much, very grateful he's come to speak to us tonight and he's going to speak loosely, he says, on education for sustainable development. Thank you very much.
- [04:16]
B
Thank you very much indeed, Janet. Thank you very much indeed. I will make some references to education later on and indeed particularly to the different focuses that perhaps could emerge in academic research going forward and addressing some of these big issues. But before that, I wanted to really just paint a brief picture of the scale of the challenge that's in front of us, because sometimes it's easy to lose focus on that and also to spend a bit of time just describing some of the progress we've made by way of prelude and getting into some of the things that might need to happen next. It's important to register that we're on a journey. This is not something that has been without quite a lot of political and public engagement in recent years. And we are not seeing starting from nowhere. But where we go next I think is quite important to know as different to where we've just been. If that makes any sense, it will later on. So, in terms of sustainable development, what do we mean by this? Well, there's hundreds of definitions out there. The Brundtland one, probably. We've mostly heard about improving the quality of life now and in the future without compromising future generations and all these things. But basically there's a clue in the word. I think it's down to sustaining our ability to maintain a decent society and to sustain our security. That's what it comes down to, really. And if we don't take steps now, we have good reason to believe that we may not be able to sustain certain things that we've become accustomed to. In particular, the way of life that's become normal in the Western countries in particular. So what are the symptoms then of the unsustainable developments that we're concerned about and why we need change? Well, judging by you all holding up your little CDs there, there's a lot of awareness in the room about the question of climate change. If people here are thinking about the carbon embedded in their food, a lot of people are not thinking about that, of course, even though we now have this great wall of science there telling us that we have a really major problem on our hands in terms of the way in which human activities have changed over the last couple of hundred years, the very composition of the planet's atmosphere. And, you know, sometimes people find it hard to believe that humans could affect something as vast as the sky. And I think this is why some of the press coverage that's overblowing some small mistakes and errors in the climate science has been so successful in creating doubt, because it looks impossible for us humans to change something as big as the planet's atmosphere. If you step outside briefly and have the advantage of looking down from space, you'd see that the atmosphere of Planet Course is about as thick as a coat of paint on a football. That's pretty much how much atmosphere we've got on the planet. It's wafer thin. And we have changed its composition, elevating carbon dioxide concentration from about 280 parts per million in the pre industrial era to about 380 parts per million now. And it's going up at 2 to 3 parts per million per year. And we know that certain critical thresholds there are likely to be major changes taking place that are nonlinear. Terms of the warming, for example, going to a certain level before it triggers feedbacks in the Earth system, particularly from forest dieback, permafrost melt, loss of white surfaces on the ice, for example, that could lead to really quite major impacts into how the Earth system works in terms of the water cycle, in terms of the distribution and productivity of agriculture, sea level rise, damage to infrastructure, and all of the things that come with that. In terms of social dislocation and possibilities, future conflict, all that is laid out pretty clearly, but we're finding it extremely hard to respond. And if one looks at the projections made by the IPCC in 2000, in their special report on emission scenarios, there were a range of futures put out for the period leading up till about now, over the next decade, after that first year of this millennium. And we are above the worst case scenario in terms of carbon emissions that were sketched out on the basis of different levels of industrial activity, on the strength of population growth, whether we install renewable energy on a serious scale, and so on and so forth. So we're actually proceeding in a way which is opposite to the science. And we've known about this now, not only scientifically but politically, since 1992 with the treaty signed in Rio de Janeiro that said that humans would cooperate to avoid dangerous climate change. That's what was written into the international consensus back then, nearly 20 years ago. So we're traveling in one direction with our awareness of our impacts on the climate system and traveling in a completely different direction in terms of the actual emissions going into the atmosphere. And as I say, there's a very closely measured series of changes going on which we know are causing temperature change, which we can anticipate will cause impacts. And some of those impacts are already occurring. That has in some respects perhaps been correctly seen as the environmental issue over the last five years. But it's by no means the only one, and there are some others which drove the environmental movement for many years, which temporarily perhaps have gone into the shadows as we've become preoccupied with carbon. And these things, of course, are not separate, you can't draw lines between them. But the other big one, I would say, which is occurring at a similar global scale with equally profound ramifications, is the loss of the Earth's living fabric, the so called decline of biodiversity. It's occurring as a result of land use change, pollution, the effects of introduced species. And you can see it in certain trends, such as the loss of the tropical forest, which has been quite closely scrutinized by the international community in recent years. And despite of the best efforts of international agencies, of NGOs and of governments, we're still seeing deforestation continuing at something like 60,000 square kilometers per year. In the tropical rainforest biome. This is leading to an unknown level of species loss. It's also responsible for about a fifth of the carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere as a result of human activities. And then of course, we have the impacts on the water cycle too. The rainforests are not called rainforests for nothing. They deliver certain vital ecosystem services, including the generation of clouds, which then leads to the delivery of rain, which of course sustains agriculture. So the Loss of biodiversity has big implications too. And if you look at what is causing both the climate change and the biodiversity loss, it comes back to how we're using natural resources. And I think probably there's three that are critical in this. The first is energy, of course, and fossil fuels. The second is land, and the third is water. And as a result of the impacts we're causing, we're seeing changes in certain system functions. And one that's become more prominent on the agenda lately has been the oceans and the progressive acidification of the ocean ecosystem caused by the rising concentrations of carbonic acid, which is being caused in turn by the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere and into the ocean ecosystem system. That may have some quite big implications later on as that begins to alter the ecological conditions under which bits of the marine food chain operate. So shell forming animals, for example, find it more difficult to form shells in more acid conditions. That has ramifications then for the rest of the food chain, including some of the higher animals, including the fish which we eat. So there are issues there as well. There are also questions in terms of how we're using the natural resource base on top of all of those things. So things which are potentially renewable fresh water and how we're exploiting aquifers and surface water. In many parts of the world, those systems are already very stressed, both because of pollution and also because of overuse. And then there are various ecosystem services which we're depleting very quickly. Fish must be the globally most visible one at the moment where we've peaked fisheries production in most of the world's fisheries. And now there's a major decline going on on the other side of peak production. A lot of this, if you've been paying attention to this over the last 30 odd years, you will have heard politicians talking about this balance that's needed. So these environmental costs have been justified very often in terms of improving human well being. And so we have to sacrifice the environment in order to sustain development. So the we can end poverty. There are some pretty unhappy statistics, however, in terms of the state of the human community, both in terms of levels of poverty that continue across the world, and also in levels of inequality. The poverty statistics are disgraceful. In a world with so much wealth, with 800 billion people, it's gone up this year actually because of the financial crisis. Unable to feed themselves properly, people without access to health care, sanitation, a billion people living on less than a dollar per day, and about 2 billion people without basic access to electricity and other services that we would all consider perfectly normal. But it's the inequality, I think, which is perhaps the biggest symbol of unsustainable development. And, you know, never mind the income inequalities. If one looks at the disparity of impact between the rich and the poor in terms of their environmental impact is truly staggering, I think so. More than 80% of the world's energy and raw materials are being used by the 20%, more or less, of the richest people in the world. So these are the ones living in the west of northern countries, and something like 1.5% of the resources and energy being used by the poorest 20% of humankind. So a great chasm. And of course, the injustice is compounded by the fact that the people who are on the receiving end very often of the worst environmental damage are the very poorest, who weren't responsible for the consumption of the raw materials and energy that caused it in the first place. So there's a really big justice, social dimension linked to the environmental degradation, which goes to the heart, I believe, of how we solve the sustainability crisis. And of course, we go a step further and look beyond the energy and the natural resources being the driver of the environmental trends. Of course, you're confronted with the economic system, which is the principal way in which we meet our needs, which is geared to growth in consumption. And indeed, we measured that as a good thing. And we've become accustomed to a style of economic development that has no means really, of measuring the value of nature in terms of underpinning development and the improvement of human conditions. One piece of work, which I think summed this up admirably, was by a team of academics in the United States in 1998, published a paper in Nature. The man who led this called Robert Costanza, and what he set out to do with his team was to see if it was possible to work out the cost of replacing the services provided by nature, if we possibly could pay for the services provided by pollinating insects, the flood protection that is created by mangrove swamps and coral reefs, the activity of microbes in the soil in terms of improving the ability to grow crops, the recycling of waste, all these things that nature does for nothing. They tried to work out how much it would cost if these things were removed, and then we had to replace them. And so Costanza came up with a figure of something like 32 to 50 trillion dollars per year being the value of these services at a time when global GDP was about 18 trillion. So if you take the kind of lower end of his figures, basically, what he was saying is that the value of nature is about twice the value of the economy which we measure and try to grow every year. And of course, in trying to grow the economy, we're depleting nature. So we've got a set of metrics, it's measuring one thing and not the other. And so the bit we're seeking to grow is at the expense of the bit that we're not measuring, but which is essential for sustaining the piece that we're trying to grow. Kind of a conceptual failure which I think in many respects lies at the heart of all of this. So those are some of the big picture challenges as I would describe them. But as I said at the beginning, you know, we're not starting from nowhere. And on the environmental and poverty side, you know, people have been very active in the NGOs and the think tanks and the governments and the international agencies for years and years trying to put in place solutions to some of these challenges. And indeed we have been pretty successful on some of them. And this whole thing started, I think, on the environmental side at least with pesticides really. I mean, you can go back in terms of like, you know, protection of national parks in the US and elsewhere. But the modern environmental age began with Rachel Carson's book A Silent Spring, which began to portray to people the effects of industrial agriculture and how we were putting in place some really quite major threats to human health, never mind what was happening to the natural environment. A big argument then ensued about the true effects of bioaccumulative pesticides in the food chain, whether they kill predatory birds, whether they were a threat to human health. And progressively some of the worst of these substances were banned. So that was, I think you could count as a success in ecological terms at least. Then there were questions about the impact of development and the encroachment of agriculture in this part of the world. A big discussion took place that led to legislation to protect areas of countryside. I was very closely involved in this for many years. The so called national nature reserves and sites, Special Scientific Interest, another success you can see in legislation, in hanging on to the best bits of what remains of this country's natural habitats. Looking at the global level, we've gone from 1% of the land area being protected in the 1960s up to about 12% now. Massive national parks in the Amazon and Central Africa, across Borneo. So a lot has happened there too, despite the trends I described earlier, which actually are continuing in terms of loss of areas of are not protected. We've done a great deal to Reduce toxic emissions. When I joined Friends of the Earth in 1990, we were still having to campaign against individual outlets of toxic pollution into rivers and into the atmosphere. Lead, cancer causing substances. Most of that has now been eliminated by progressive environmental regulation. During the 1980s, the big core celeb on the environmental side was the impact of so called acid rain caused by sulfur emissions going up through the large combustion plants burning coal. Again, legislation was put in place after a big argument between industry, the scientists and the policy makers. And we've now got to a point where we're 80% lower than we were in the late 80s in terms of emissions of those substances. And then perhaps one of the biggest successes of all was during the late 1980s and early 1990s when humankind became aware of the threat posed by certain chemicals that, that were depleting the ozone layer. And there was an international treaty put in place which phased out certain classes of substances, chlorofluorocarbons in particular, which has led or hopefully will lead to a recovery of the Earth's protective ozone shield to go on. There's quite a few others where you can see actually on the environmental side we've done good. And indeed on the poverty reduction side too, there has been some progress in some places. In Southeast Asia you can see, see the economic growth there has delivered. Big western style development, big improvements. Korea and China now going through a similar process. But one of the things that hasn't happened, of course, is the inequalities which have remained and which I would say are at the heart of the challenge that lies ahead. So we've done some positive things, but we've still got this most unequal world and we've still got this global scale degradation going on in terms of climate change, biodiversity loss and the depletion of natural resources. And I would say that one of the things we need to register in terms of where we've been and now where we need to go is the extent to which the changes that have been put in place so far didn't really require any of us to do very much, very differently. And so if you think about the acid rain, a legislator told power company to fit some flue gas desulfurization equipment to stop the sulfur going out of the chimney on the ozone depletion. The governments of the world agreed they would tell the companies, a handful of them, to get rid of one class of chemicals and put in place a different class of chemicals. We still had fridges and freezers, we still had aerosols, but we didn't have the damage to the ozone layer, the protection of areas of countryside, a relatively modest cost in most countries. Some arguments with resource extraction interests and some landowners. But a small minority of the population had to change their behavior. Often they were quite pleased about it, especially if they received some kind of subsidy and the banning of pesticides. We've got rid of some of those toxic ones, but we've replaced them with new ones. The point I'm making here is just to say that although we've had some enormous progress, it's brought us to a point where we've had some improvements to environmental quality and some improvements to some of the poverty indicators. But neither of these things have required big changes in the behavior or the lifestyle of many of the people living in the west in particular. So we've got to where we've got to without having to do very much. And politically that's really important, because what lies ahead, I would say if we are to be using land more efficiently, and that includes dietary change, if we're going to be keeping climate change within manageable proportions, if we're going to sustain the natural resource base, then this requires not only legislation and technology being put in place by governments and industry, it's going to require all of us to start changing our behavior and our culture as well. I think that's what is implied by the scale of what lies ahead. Never mind if we're going to be able to divide up the Earth's productive natural capacity between 9 billion people, there's 6.8 billion of us right now. By 2050, we're expecting to have around 9 billion. In that time, we're going to have to try and hang on to the remaining tropical rainforests, the coral reefs, which means keeping land use stable in terms of expanding agriculture. And at the same time as we're going to have to do that, we need to expect a demand for economic growth of a style that's occurred in the west for 50 years to now take place in India, China and in Latin America. I mean, I don't know if there's anybody in the room who thinks we can. You know, the arithmetic stacks up. To be able to carry on with business as usual as we've had development now, and to make all these other things fit, I'm convinced we can't. And if we on that scale of change, with human numbers rising, economic growth going up at the same time as reducing these environmental pressures and making a more equal world, I think we have to change the way societies work and the cultural expectations and the economics, particularly in the Western countries. And so this is, I think, where the sustainable development agenda is now going into a new phase where it's not only about technology and engineering and doing things better, it is about those things still. But I think we're going into a new place where there are a set of different issues we need to begin to grapple with as a global human community. And this is where I want to just make a few remarks maybe about the research agenda going forward. You know, I live up in Cambridge and I work with a group of organisations up there called, called the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. And they asked me to speak at a meeting they had, it must have been about a year ago, and they said, come and make some provocative remarks to us. And I thought about it and I thought, well you know, these organizations, you know, they are fantastic and I've worked for some of them over the years. So the World Conservation Monitoring center is part of the United Nations Environment Program, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, the Cambridge University Zoology and Botany departments, Birdlife International, the British Trustful Ontology, Fauna and Flora International, the Tropical Biology association, basically world class NGOs and government departments working together. And I said to them, well, you know, this is absolutely fantastic and your technical expertise and your ability to deliver policy change and to talk about some of the challenges from the point of view of how we might react with technology are world beating. However, I think that the front line for your work now actually is in the realm of the social science. So not to abandon what you're doing, but to start thinking about how you need to be combining your expertise with a new set of disciplines which are about political science and how it's going to be possible to gain consent in a democracy for the scale of change needed. How are we going to reduce consumption and do it in a democracy? That's a really, really big and interesting question and I don't think many people are really looking at it with the attention that it deserves. How are we going to be able to shape public institutions so that we can take a long term view in how we're going to deliver a high quality of life, long life, decent education, decent health care for everybody whilst remaining within ecological limits? What are the institutions that can do that? And I think sociology has a huge role to play that. And then of course, how is it possible to get humans, all of us, to start thinking differently so that our culture can attract adapt to what the science is now telling us is an increasingly urgent position? And I think in the psychology debate we need to understand what are the default positions of humankind. Is it possible for us to be altruistic and to take the broad view at the same time as we've been bombarded with advertising telling us to consume and take cheap flights, get a bigger car and more stuff? I think those are the kinds of questions that now need to be addressed by the social science community. The political one, the psychological one and the sociological one, I think are really where a lot more effort needs to be deployed in terms of how we're going to be able to unpack these issues. This is not an alternative to doing the technology and the engineering and the better agriculture. We need all that too. This is on top of the other piece, I think, in terms of where we put our interaction. Intellectual effort going forward is in terms of economics. And Lord Stern's here now, isn't it? Lord Stern here at the lse? Yes. So there is an unfolding agenda there in terms of how we look at the economics of climate change, for example, and how we can begin to price ecosystem services. A really fantastic piece of work completed recently by a process called the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity run by a chap called Pavan Sukhdev. And this tragically has not yet had the prominence that was gained by the Stern Review or the IPCC reports. But nonetheless some really interesting work going on looking at how we can start to price nature and bring those externalities into the marketplace so that we can start to build a different kind of economics that can deliver the human well being inside the ecological thresholds. And I think also in here is a really exciting piece of work which is being championed by the New Economic Foundations and others about how we can begin to map out an economics that delivers human welfare first and ecological sustainability. And not so much focused on the broad notion of economic growth in gdp. That's what we have at the moment. We grow our gdp, we measure it, it's endlessly reported in the radio and on the tv. And we assume that the GDP growth will deliver increased human happiness and well being and will deliver the resources, was the old script from the Economist. Deliver the resources to protect the environment. You look around the world and there is some kind of anecdotal evidence to show that the richer countries get the more money they've got to then protect the environment. But of course what they're doing is protecting the local environment. And as their economies grow, they're trashing the global environment and contributing to that inequality at the same time. So economics has to be at the heart of this as well. And I think there has to be a much more dynamic research agenda moving economics into this new modern place. I fear economics is still dominated by people who look back to the 20th century for their ideas about how we achieve growth and prosperity and are not looking to the middle of the 21st century and anticipate anticipating what lies ahead in terms of how we're going to be able to measure and deliver higher levels of human happiness. Finally, I think both of these things, both the cultural dislocation that we've reached and the assumptions we've made about economics, are down to a crisis of perception, really. And this is really something that's quite hard to describe and quite difficult to nail down. But myself and a few other people, I think are coming to the conclusion that over a period of centuries, humans have come to a place which is very different from where we started in terms of our philosophy and our general approach to how we looked at the world. And you know, it sounds a bit corny and it is in some ways, but humans used to be very much a part of nature. That's how they saw themselves. And our culture until quite recently was to regard ourselves as part of the cosmos and ourselves as connected with absolutely every other living and non living part of the universe. And indeed, this was a core tenet of some of the major faiths, including the Christian faith, until the Middle Ages when people began to change theology to see God on a cloud rather than a sacred presence in nature, and to see humans as lording over the creation to meet their needs. And this has progressed through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and brought us to the point now where we're in the age of consumerism. And I think as a result of that long history in the evolution of ideas, we've reached a quite different place from the one where we used to live in more of a harmonious relationship with the planet. That's a really big thing to say. But I think there's something in there for us as humans in terms of how we challenge ourselves looking forward and finding ways in which we can reconnect with nature, in terms of being able to understand the impact that we have and the place that we might have that would be more harmonious in the future. Because I think the cultural and the economic failures are really failures of philosophy. We've put ourselves outside nature, we think we can do what we want, and our gratification as individuals has now taken precedence over any kind of sense of responsibility we might have had for the earth. But if you compare that perspective with the perspective that still prevails with some indigenous communities living in the deep rainforest, for example, you can get glimpses of what possibly we used to think like several thousand years ago in the Western world, where nature is something to be treated as a sacred presence rather than something which we can consume at our whim. So philosophy, I think, is the final part I would put there in terms of how we might be looking at future research and how we can deploy our massive intellectual capacity to better understand a way towards a more sustainable future. So, just to repeat my core message then. We've got a big problem, we've made some progress. We have a great deal still to do in terms of technology and engineering and finding those technical solutions to this challenge. But I would argue that, in addition, we need to be thinking about our culture, which is about psychology and sociology. We need to be thinking about our democratic organisations and how we can be geared to solving these problems, need to be thinking crucially about economics, and finally, to underpin all of that with a review of our philosophical position. Thank you so much indeed.
- [32:13]
A
Well, thank you very much indeed, not only for giving us so succinctly, and I think so coherently, the background of complainment, but also the same ways in which we now have to move forward. And it's particularly opposite, of course, of place, like the London School of Economics and Political Science, that the social sciences, economics, philosophy, should be cited as the areas in which we should be taking research forward. And, of course, you know, we have a fairly newly established centre here for climate change as well, which we work with, imperial, and it's one of the first examples, in a way, where the LSC social sciences has come to the interface of the science as well. Well, Senator Juniper is very happy to ask questions. I feel there's a very lively and attentive audience, so please go ahead. Okay, Take you first.
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C
My name is Cornelius. No, my name is Cornelius. And I agree with you with regard to the philosophical social side of it. I'm working on a book at the moment, and the subject of the book is what happens when you tell a child what to think and impose sanctions for any slight or serious dissent. And that is basically the fundamental basis of the culture that we are born into is that process of not listening to the natural child. The innate intelligence, the innate ability to read the environment around you. That's inherent in every mammal. And so it's inherent in our own children, the culture we're born into, this college, its roots, the education system, its roots are tabula rasa, the blank Slate that you pour in the information into. We're still struggling with an education system that still does that, a political system that still does that, a marketing system that still does that. They're pouring stuff in all the time. And so it's always the flow of information is just one way. And to me, unless all the groups that are talking about change bring up the fact that we are producing a our children's minds by this process and actually examined in detail and expose it wherever it is, then we're going nowhere. Because unless we change the conditioning or the fact of conditioning and allow actually the children to speak. And I know this because I've got children and I learned to let them speak to me of their own reality. And we both learned so much of that about being human. And I think that's actually key to this because all the other subjects then arise from that experience of the child. So I'm really glad to hear somebody first talking about philosophy and sociology. And I want you to bring it down to. That's what it's about. It's about how we treat children. And the only way you can actually measure a society is how are we treating our children across the board. And it's not being discussed.
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B
No, it's not. It's.
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C
I mean, just one fact. In 2007, three and a half billion doses of Ritalin were issued in the UK. What does that say about what this culture is doing to children?
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B
Indeed, one of the things that I'm doing at the moment, I'm being a candidate for the Green Party in the general election in the Cambridge constituency. And one of the things that we've been talking about a lot is the education system. And I've been making exactly these points about the emphasis that we've now built for one set of measurements, really, in terms of academic achievement and the alienation that comes with this, for the children who don't excel in the academic system is palpable. You can see kids who just fall out of that and they've got nowhere to go in terms of being able to be good or to succeed. And you finish up with drug abuse, crime and then kids being put into institutions. It's costing us. I read a figure the other day from the Economics Foundation. £140,000 a year to keep a child in a secure institution. It's much, much cheaper to send them to Eton, of course, worse fall, probably worse falling. At least they've been locked up. No, it's absolutely right. I think the education system, system, it's gone too far. In one direction, it is rebalancing.
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D
Thank you. Clive Burgatory, lecturer for Cranfield University at the Defence Academy. One of the things I'm looking at is how we embed sustainability in defence acquisition processes and the education process that goes with that. So if I may perhaps drag you back to the title of the lecture of the Loosely, you said right at the beginning, I think where we're going is different from where we've been. So there's a difficulty, isn't there? A lot of our learning is from experience. If what we've experienced and what we're learning is difficult to translate into that future that's unknown, what does it actually teach people? How do we actually train or educate people for that unknown future?
- [37:23]
B
Yeah. Have we ever had to do this before? I've never thought of it quite like that before. I suppose in one sense, I guess it's about confronting ourselves. Maybe the confront words wrong, maybe presenting ourselves with the situation we're in and encouraging people to think through what the implications of it are. You know, it's quite difficult because, you know, the things we're having to grapple with at the moment, the climate thing and the resource depletion thing and the loss of the natural habitats, this has never occurred in human history on the scale. Although, you know, Jared diamond, actually. No, Jared diamond, maybe there's a few. Maybe there's a few pointers in his book Collapse, so that if anyone's ready, Jared Diamond's book Collapse and his analysis of societies that have failed to change in the face of an ecological challenge and have gone extinct. So the Easter island community, for example, who must have seen that the last tree was about to be cut down and they still cut it down. And other societies that saw the ecological changes and they adapted and they thrived and they continued. And so there's five things that Jared diamond said. I can only remember one of them, but I think it's possibly the most important one. And it was about the societies that succeeded and managed to navigate these bottlenecks were the ones that were prepared to change their views and to adapt to circumstances using the tools that were there available to them. And I think the most poignant example for me was the Greenland Vikings. They went to these two fjords in the southern tip of Greenland, I think, in the 11th century. They lived there for 300 years, and due to a combination of circumstances, they died out. And the reason they died out is because they continued to want to wear Norwegian clothes rather than to wear the skins that the local savages were wearing and they wanted to have farm animals like cattle and sheep rather than to hunt walrus. And so they didn't change their views and they died out. And maybe there's a big lesson there, actually, from Sweet. Some of those examples of the need for us to be able to challenge ourselves in positive ways, to look at doing things differently and anticipating the threat that lies ahead. How you do that in an education system, I don't know. But certainly my kids, they're having a very different view of the world than the one I was brought up on. Just because a lot of the things I described today, it's common knowledge to them, they know about it. So maybe that's the first step, is to equip people with the facts and to let them feel, know, absorb that as part of their forming of views and how they then become citizens. I've got to tell you one anecdote about defence acquisition. So years ago, when I worked with Friends of the Earth, we had a call from the Sunday Times and they said, the army's bringing out this electric tank because they want to have a really quiet vehicle for battlefield operations. They said, is that green? And our press officer said, well, to make it truly green, all they've got to do is take the gun off. So maybe there's a tip there to take back to Grenfield.
- [40:35]
E
You touched on psychology, and I think this is key. I think we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. There was a recent poll in the states and fewer than 50% of the people believe that climate change is real. And there's a widespread belief that it's actually a conspiracy with the purpose of bringing in a draconian world government and raising taxes. Now, the problem is, do we wait for people to come around and will it be too late by then, or does the government have to impose strict, serious new legislation that's going to be in the form of taxes in some cases? And will that just prove the conspiracy theorists right in their minds, where they're saying, look, now there is a world government and they are imposing taxes?
- [41:23]
B
Yeah. Yes, indeed, this is a major problem. I think everybody can see this going on at the moment in terms of how public opinion is shifting kind of backwards, as it were? I'm not surprised by this in some ways. I mean, just very quickly, just to describe the nature of the doubt that's now creeping in, I think there's two things going on here. One thing is the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance that psychologists will know about. This is a very uncomfortable state that humans experience when you're doing one thing and you're told you should be doing something else. And the climate thing is the ultimate example of being told you've got to cut emissions and yet you've got to get on a plane, you've got to have a car, you've got to feed your kids, you've got to eat steak, you've got to do all these things you've got to do and you don't want to stop doing them. Therefore, the easiest thing to resolve the internal conflict is to find out that it's not true. Perfect, problem solved, carry on doing what you were doing. So there's a great temptation there, just built into the psychology of people. We all suffer from it, all of us. We know we shouldn't do something, we do it, we feel uncomfortable. And the climate thing I think just creates the perfect conditions whereby a small amount of doubt is taken on board. As you know, very welcome doubt, I don't have to worry about it anymore. So there's a bit of that. And as you say that there are some suggestions that this is a conspiracy. And so there is also an ideological element to this too, in terms of the reason the doubt is being promoted so much by some people who aren't scientists, who are going out of their way to cast doubt on the climate science, which is very strong. And they're doing it because they don't like the idea of world government and controls on capital, personal freedoms, big institutions doing things that should be done by the market. So there's a lot of that stuff going on. It's got absolutely nothing to do with the climate science. But you're quite right, what it's done has led to these changing polling figures, which makes the politics really difficult. So what to do about that if you're a government? I think probably there's two or three things. I think thing number one is, is to look at what your scientific institutions are telling you and then to do what is your first job as a government, which is to protect the long term interests of your country and your citizens. And so governments from time to time do things that aren't popular, but they do them because they think they're the right things to do to protect the country. And irrespective of whether it was right or wrong, I think probably the most recent case in history was the invasion of Iraq, certainly in this country where it was held to be in the interest of national security. And everybody said, don't do it, but they still did it anyway because they believed that. And so it's about how you use your political capital. I think the invasion of Iraq was a very bad idea and said so. But nonetheless it was interesting to see how the government felt it was in a position still to uphold national security by doing something unpopular. Difficulty is, you know, weapons of mass destruction, whether they existed or not, they're kind of more tangible than build up of carbon dioxide. And so there is a question there of how you make the connections between the different things, so the emissions and the controls on them and the impacts and the impacts being spread rather than specific. It's really, really difficult. But I think the main point about the security and government's responsibility to do that is right. So now the thing I would say also is that governments, they need to talk about this differently. And at the moment this is widely received as an agenda which is about pain and suffering and punitive taxation and restrictions on personal freedom. And certainly we will need to have different fiscal structures, we will need to have changed behavior. But I think it's entirely possible to present this as a way of having stronger communities, longer lives, nicer food, more jobs, energy, security, a more secure economy, and ultimately more security if you can gain resources from renewable sources that are going to be less vulnerable to economic shocks of the kind that we saw in the last couple of years. So I think there's a really good news story there that governments can tell, which actually link into a whole load of other things that are going on that have got nothing to do with climate change. So oil and gas depletion, the need to have more sustainable agriculture, the need to create jobs in cutting edge industries, all of these things can be done anyway without having to mention carbon dioxide. And so I think there's a great deal that governments could be doing the other thing as well. You know, all these other things I talked about in terms of biodiversity and water and agriculture and soil depletion, all those things are happening. Even if you believe in climate change or not, and the climate change, you put it on top of that and it becomes a risk multiplier.
- [45:48]
E
There's a.
- [45:49]
B
So a lot of the changes we have to do are necessary anyway. There's a wonderful cartoon. I've got another anecdote, wonderful cartoon that was sent down recently. There's a chap standing in the UN and he's got a list of things that are going to happen as we reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So more jobs, a healthier environment for our kids, better food supply, longer lives. And there's a guy in the audience he says, but if the climate change thing is not true, are you telling us we're going to change the world for the better, for nothing?
- [46:24]
A
Do you think the will exists in.
- [46:25]
B
The government to vote changes even if it's not logical? Well, it depends. I think at the moment I'm a candidate for the Green Party, but I have to say that the Labour government in this country lately has been doing rather well on these subjects and they have stuck to their guns. And, you know, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, I think we should be quite pleased with how they've managed to rough out, you know, tough out some quite rough conditions, economic conditions and so on. There's massive new offshore wind farms coming that were approved a few months ago. The feed in tariff comes in next month. A major announcement yesterday on fuel poverty and energy security and well being. Good, positive stuff. I mean, it has to go so much, much further and it isn't yet backed with a credible program of culture change and economic reform yet. But I think, you know, in terms of where they are at and how easy it might be for them to walk away from this now with the opinion polling how it is, I think, you know, it could be much worse here. The United States has bigger problems because of the political system and poor old President Obama who wants to do things about this, he's got all the state interests lined up against him and the Senate now is not in a good position with the Massachusetts senator now coming from the other side, as it were. I think more importantly for this country is, you know, what's going to happen after the general election. I think the ideal situation would be to have, well, irrespective of how it goes, we need a few greens in there. So just bear that in mind. Three or four greens to talk about this stuff is what we want. Anybody in Cambridge, please vote friends in Cambridge that are still friends. I think part of the problem here.
- [48:02]
D
Is that going back to what you were saying, nobody really or people that are going to vote, which is what governments are interested in, aren't necessarily sure that climate change is happening. Is there some sort of tipping point, some really obvious thing like coral reef completely destroying itself or Antarctica spirit in two or something that will actually get people to realize that we are in the shed.
- [48:27]
B
Yeah, I know. Well, I don't know. I mean, what could be the kind of iconic thing that would do this? You know, the Amazon rainforest catch fire, you know, a large part of Borneo goes up in smoke. Excuse me, the mouldies disappearing. Yeah, I wasn't going to Say that one. So all the things I was going to say have actually happened already. I was just kind of making a big point. So, you know, a big bit of the Amazon rainforest burnt up in 2002. I think it was in Borneo a couple of years before large areas went because of a prolonged drought. As I say, you know, the rapid disappearance of the Arctic ice, that happened as well. You know, in 2006, 2007, major loss of ice. These things are in the newspaper. People instantly forget. And the heat wave in and 22,000, 2003, it killed 30,000 people in Europe. And, you know, it was hardly noticed by the news media because it was like, you know, the data comes out a month later when the French authorities say, actually During July and August 2003, we had 20,000 excess deaths. And like, there's more in Italy, more in Switzerland. It was a lot of people who died as a result of that heat wave. You go out there and talk to people in the street. You know, how many of them knew that a weather event that is consistent with the trends on, on climate change actually killed that many people on our doorstep? 20 billion euros lost on farm incomes that summer as well. And then, as I said, the other thing I was going to say is the loss of an entire major city like New Orleans. All these things have happened in the last few years and yet we find it possible to put them aside. And so, you know, maybe the thing, maybe the Maldives disappearing, is it actually. Maybe that's the kind of thing when an entire country suddenly ceases to exist, we become. Begin to pay some attention, although I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope on that, actually, because there will still be people to say, well, there's nothing we can do about this because it's sunspots or something, they will still be those people. So I don't think the disaster scenario works. I mean, the more I think about it, in addition to the things I said earlier about a better understanding of the psychology of this, a better understanding of what kind of institutions might help us, a better understanding of the political structures and processes, a better understanding of the philosophy, on top of all of that, I think we need a credible, positive vision that people are going to want to go towards, rather than giving them catastrophe and saying this is a cause of something else that is several steps removed in terms of their behaviour, like driving the car and disappearing to the Maldives. These two things are kind of hard to relate. So we will see more, we'll see more extreme events. The TV is full of them. Whether it's excessive drought, rain, whatever it is, storms. But I fear that our ability to put that to one side, unless it affects us here right now, is quite remarkable.
- [51:17]
A
Can I just ask the audience with your CDs, how many of you are going to vote greed in the next election?
- [51:27]
B
That's pretty good, isn't it? I think, I think we could form a government on that basis, actually. Can I just, can I just ask you then maybe we want to up the ambition from 3 to 350.
- [51:36]
A
Can you, in your political statement of no less than two minutes, try and.
- [51:42]
B
Convert one or two people to vote Green? Why should they? Why should people vote Green? Well, I think I'll be very brief. I think that in the next parliament we will. Obviously, you know, the greens are not going to form a government, but what we could do with two or three of us in there is to change the nature of this discussion, to start bringing in this more joined up approach to solving some of these challenges. Because at the moment I think the disastrous disconnection is particularly with the economy, both in a negative and potentially positive sense, and, you know, the pursuit of economic growth to build runways and motorways which are going to increase emissions at the time when we should be cutting them. We need a different approach to that discussion about how we can have economic development at the same time as meeting these goals. And I think, you know, a couple of greens could make a huge difference on that, especially if we have a finely divided parliament, possibly a home parliament. The thing is, however, is that, you know, with a system isn't proportionate the proportion system, and we're going to have to win in a couple of seats in the first past the post contest. And so there's only three or four places we could do this. So if anybody is interested in seeing greens in the next Parliament, think about your friends in Cambridge, in Norwich south, in Lewisham and in Brighton Pavilion and encourage them to think about the constitution of the next parliament. You know, what difference will another jury make or another Labour MP think what you might get with three or four greens? I would say, yeah, sorry about that, I wasn't asked. David, thanks very much.
- [53:14]
F
My name is David Solomon. I was intrigued by your idea. You were sort of proceeding from the particular as the general, and you ended up with philosophical underpinnings which you saw as an essential part of the sort of long term changes that we need to bring about. But I was particularly intrigued to think, well, what are the mechanisms precisely by which philosophical investigations and redefinitions of our relationship to nature in what way, concretely, might those feed in over the longer term to changes in society that might be necessary in order to stem the ecological disasters you've talked about?
- [53:55]
B
Oh, I forgot. I was going to say something else. Maybe I'll remember it in a second. I have three things, but I'll do the first two. I just remembered. So the first thing I think is to recognize that humans actually have a hardwired piece in our makeup which is to affiliate with nature. And so this is why people walk on mountains and think it's beautiful. It's like they like to sit by streams and watch the river flowing. They like to commune in quite a deep, almost meditative way in nature. Fishing is a thing that I do personally, which is like that. You kind of just like, you know, you come, your mind goes into a different place and you're utterly connected with the water, the fish and the birds and the animals, and that is deep inside human beings. And so I think one of the things we could do to create a different kind of philosophical outlook is to encourage that side of our nature to come out more. And I think there's all sorts of other wonderful things that would come with that which actually are quite tangible in terms of what policies policymakers might decide to do. And the first thing is health. There's a ton of evidence out there now that shows that being in nature reduces blood pressure, reduces stress, and helps recovery from things like heart problems and stuff like that. It's very closely documented. So there's every good reason why our society would want to do that anyway, never mind wanting to change the philosophy. So I think that would be one way in terms of being able to reconnect, kind of. Second point I'd say goes back to the one a second ago is about politics. You know, a lot of our lives are shaped by political priorities. And, you know, whether we go to war or whether we're going to grow the economy or whether we're going to have regional development agencies or have a national curriculum. You know, there's things that could change in politics that could start to create a different kind of expectation in society. And so I think we've got different politicians there as well. Two, for example, say that the national curriculum needs to include the least 10 days a year when children are in wilderness. You know, that kind of thing could be really quite helpful as well. And there was a third thing that I was going to say that I've now forgotten, but. Well, I can't remember. But there's two things which I Think could be a start. But I think the most powerful is to really put people in a place where they're naturally disposed to engage. I don't know what it's like where you all live, but where I live there's this massive long waiting list of people trying to get onto allotments to grow food. People want to, you know, they want to connect with soil and growth. I think so, Yeah, I think so. And I don't think it's hard because most people get it instantly. You know, why do you want to be out with your dog walking on the common? Why do you want to be down by the river fishing? Why do you want to go bird watching? Exactly. I think it might be easier to articulate than we think, but we need to find the right way of doing it. And actually now that was the other thing. Thank you. Is some of the research that tells us how environmentally beneficial behavior is much more likely from people who've actively participated in nature. And so to solve these problems, research from Cornell University, and it's about people who've done wilderness tracking and who've had to look after themselves in a really wild area. It does something quite profound to how they look at life and their behaviour later on. If it's children who do this, they're much more aware about the environment and nature, much more prepared to take responsibility for it. This then brings us back to the culture piece talking about earlier on. In terms of how we encourage people to think, think differently about their expectations is that kind of stuff really works and it's partly philosophical, it's partly cultural related, but there is something that's kind of in there. Edward Wilson, the great biologist, calls it biophilia. He gave a name for it, our innate attraction to nature.
- [57:37]
A
I will let you ask another question, but there's other people who want to ask questions.
- [57:43]
G
Tony, thanks. The title is On Education. I want to just kind of pick.
- [57:48]
B
Up on the point.
- [57:50]
G
One of the things that we know as ecologists and scientists about nature, it's immensely complex, it's non linear, it's full of all complex feedback mechanisms. I'm slightly worried by a conversation that goes down the route of kind of listening to chalk and listening to the simplicity of things. I can see it in place and I can see it tuning in mechanism. But actually the problems that we an order of complexity that require a level of complexity in their solution. Part of that is looking at nature biomimicry and seeing that, I just wonder whether or not you can just reflect a little bit on if you like, and it's probably business and commercial and university education to embrace some of the complexity that we have. Myriad of interactions, if I can give a tiny example of that, recently working with the body shop and take that situation. The body shop has taken 10 years to get to know every one of its supplies, farmers and their communities and what their communities need on a personal level. So they can not only stay, it's massively complex to do that. So they can not only say it's fair trade, know what we're doing when we invest back into those communities, specific names, people and projects. L', Oreal, bigger business just can't do that.
- [59:12]
B
Yeah.
- [59:12]
G
And it has to embrace that level of complexity. That's what it's potentially trying to do. So it's magnitude of information.
- [59:23]
B
Yes, yes, that's right. I mean, there's a tendency towards monoculture that has gained traction over the last 30 years. In particular, it's in agriculture, it's in brands, it's in corporate structures where everything is kind of modernized and we move towards an industrialization of pretty much everything. And one alternative to that is to see the diversity that's in business and in nature as something we should embrace. And that does lead to more complexity, I think, you know, however, there are some ways in which we can create simplicity out of the complexity in a way which is useful. If you make things too complicated, it's paralyzing. And I found this at Friends of the Earth, trying to run campaigns where the job very often was not to dumb down or become simplistic. It was about finding the right way of expressing the complexity, which was understandable. And what you said, I think, you know, where you were going, that. I mean, the simple way I would start talking about that is to see, you know, nature as our tutor rather than a resource. And if you go down that route, then biomimicry, organic farming, recycling, natural resources, renewable energy, all these things become very obvious. And it's very much more complicated way of approaching our needs than we do so now. But it's like a relatively straightforward way of looking at it. You see what I mean? Do you see what I mean? And so, you know, nature works through cycles. There's no waste. Everything's interrelated and interconnected and those connections are understood. And, you know, if we copy that, rather than try to test it to destruction and use it up as quickly as we can to grow our economy, it's a completely different approach and it does lead to more complexity. But I think it's about having a different mindset to kind of take you in certain directions. Making any sense now?
- [61:35]
H
Thank you very much, Mike Hoyle. I've got a son who's working in East Africa trying to save the coastal forests and the coral reefs and so forth. So I understand very much what Dr. Gillispie was saying. You've spoken a great deal about the questions about the problems and people understanding.
- [61:56]
B
The problems we're in.
- [61:58]
H
Could you say something about the solutions? What interests me, I, I got statistics here, so perhaps I'm numerically minded, but what is the magnitude of the change that's required in the average economic unit? What do I have to do or what do we each have to do or each economic accompany. What sort of is the magnitude of change? How do we measure that? What are we trying to target? If someone. We talk about cost, reduce cost by 3% when we want to. What are we actually talking about? It seems to be if people knew what the scale was of the change that was necessary, we might begin to see we have some benchmarks against people to measure people indeed.
- [62:38]
B
We might also make them quite depressed, actually. Well, maybe, but I don't know if.
- [62:43]
H
You say that, but at least if you know the scale of the problem, you know what you've got to do.
- [62:47]
B
Exactly.
- [62:48]
H
No, I know it may take 20 years.
- [62:52]
B
No, I'm all from that. The point I was making earlier on was not to dismiss the need having a clear idea of where we're going, how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost, what the efficiency gains are and everything else. My point is that in order to do this we have to have some deeper change to build upon because we've reached a point where we are now running up against the buffers of what you can do through regulation and technology. That's my principle point. I wasn't arguing that we shouldn't have that. I'll just give you some numbers for in my notebook that I probably can't find, but I'll just make some guesses if I can remember them roughly as they were. Tim Jackson, you may know, is an economist. He's been working with the Sustainable Development Commission and he put some figures together looking at the carbon savings we have to make in relation to GDP. So the amount of carbon per dollar going forward to 2050, assuming that we go up to 9 billion people from 6.8, assuming that those people want to have Western lifestyles, assuming that we continue with economic growth in the west and assuming that we are going to have high levels of material consumption linked to those lifestyles. And he came to the conclusion, and the other thing was an 80% global cut at the same time. So we're going to cut emissions growth, the number of people, grow the size of the economy and grow the western economy as well as the developing ones. And so he reckoned that we need a 300 fold efficiency increase. I think that's what he said in the end, in terms of the amount of carbon we emit now compared to the amount of carbon per dollar created in wealth going forward, assuming we want to have the same kind of growth economy we've got at the moment. So you can go into the specifics of electric cars and organic farming and engineering and waste recovery and a more localized economy, all that stuff. I think, however, it's a more profound transformation that has to occur in order to enable the scale of change necessary. And I think it comes back to quite a major shift in, in the history of our thinking from seeing nature as a natural resource that we use to grow the economy, to seeing nature as the ultimate context in which we live and using it as our tutor rather than simply as something we abuse to destruction. And you know, I'm getting very general again.
- [65:19]
H
So you're saying we as individuals can't.
- [65:21]
B
Do anything because we've consistent. Oh no, no. But there's a limit to what we individuals can and will do given the scale of the challenge in the context we're living in, the philosophically economic context we're living in. And so, you know, how are we as individuals going to make a 300 fold, I mean even a tenfold, let's say it's much less serious than Dr. Jackson says. Professor Jackson says, But it's only a tenfold saving we have to make. It's not true, it's much bigger than that. But even that, you know, a 90% cut in impact by us collectively, you know, that means utter travel transformation in how we're living. And I can't see it happening simply through, you know, the kinds of tools and policies we've used to date in terms of, you know, planning certain chemicals and making things a bit more efficient. It's much more profound, I think. Hopefully, you know, the tipping points are near hand in terms of that change in perspective that we need to do this. But you know, just in answer to those questions about numbers, do look at Tim Jackson's papers and if I'm sitting in, I find the numbers, he goes through some really compelling logic and I know some of these numbers quite well. And I was convinced that he's got it about right. I mean, it is truly staggering in terms of the efficiency gains. If you want to carry on with the same kind of GDP led economy, GDP growth economy we've had for the last 50, 60 years.
- [66:42]
A
I'm aware that lots of want to.
- [66:52]
I
Could I just return to the politics? Tony, you talked about supporting the Green Party and intrinsically I would support the Green Party, but as a Labour Party supporter too, I'm quite concerned about in a close election split into vote. I just wonder how do you see the sustainability agenda shaping up should the Conservative win the next general election? We have that famous slogan, vote Conservative, go Green, which seems to slip off the edge. More question of go greedy, get Lord Ashcroft perhaps. So I just wonder how you think how it's shaping up, if that happens.
- [67:24]
B
Yes. So during my Friends of the Earth days, I got to know David Cameron a bit. In a period we were encouraging him to support the climate change bill, which actually he did and it became the Climate change Act in 2008. And that was good. And the conversations I had with him and indeed with people like Oliver Letwin, who is his policy kind of supremo, I was convinced they got it actually, and that they knew, you know, some of these challenges, some of these numbers, you know, we exchanged these conversations and they understood it. And I think, you know, from the point of view of David Cameron at least there was a sincere willingness to do something about this. There was, however, a change of tone. I think it was in October 2007 when they published their Quality of Life Commission report, which had all the things in there that you need to do in order to meet the emissions reductions targets. And so there were things in there about charging people to park at supermarkets, about fuel taxes on aviation. And they got some terrible headlines. And as of that moment, they never talked about it again. And I think what happened in the Conservative Party is that David Cameron had a lot of people saying, why the heck are we going out of our way to get pilloried by the media when we don't actually have to talk about this stuff? And so the policies became much less specific and they stopped talking about it. And that was an internal party thing, I think, driven by the headlines. Now. Since then, of course, there's been not only a worry about the electoral prospects coming with talking about these things in an honest way. There's also now the climate skeptics who appear to be quite resurgent in the Conservative Party. And there's a piece published a few weeks ago, can't remember the Numbers. But a proportion of the prospective candidates for the Conservative Party are pretty openly skeptical about the climate change science and some of them are on the record. So Ken Clark, I think probably is the highest profile. One of them who was talking about carbon neutrality nonsense the other day and saying how this isn't really something that's a grown up concern for a national political party. And then of course, you've got the Lord Lawson effect, possibly now the most high profile of the so called skeptics, who is of course a former Conservative chancellor. So with lots of traction inside the party now, my fear is you've got two elements then. So you've got those people in the Conservatives who you might say get it and who want to do the right thing. And you've got those people in the Conservative Party who you might say probably are going to be resistant about making the kinds of changes we need to make should they win the election. And the balance between the two probably will be determined by the size of the Conservative government's majority, should they have one. Now, if you imagine a wafer thin Conservative majority with David Cameron trying to keep discipline in his party, trying to get tough legislation through, is he going to come out there and try to make his party do things that potentially are going to be very unpopular in terms of, you know, climate change action, whether it's building wind turbines or intervening in the aviation sector. So I think, you know, the bigger his majority, the more likely he is going to be able to stick to this. It looks like he's going to be a hung parliament or a very narrow majority either side. And you can work out for yourself which way you think we might go with environmental policy, you know, in the different scenarios. But I think two or three greens are. So be a good thing. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, there we are. So. Yeah, exactly. And you know, it kind of brings me back to the point in terms of like, you know, how certain kinds of political ideology don't lend themselves to the solutions of climate change, which, you know, are about governments and institutions being bigger and controlling certain economic actions or having an influence on it.
- [71:01]
A
This may be the last question, but you've got it.
- [71:05]
I
I'd like to return to education. I work in HE as a design tutor. So this difference between education and training strikes me as interesting. Is it values and philosophy and, or skills and employability? Is there a model that we can point to right now, maybe globally, education for sustainable development that we could all learn from, do you think?
- [71:30]
B
Probably the one I know best, just because I've been There I know the people who run it is Schumacher College down in Devon near Dartington, where they have a philosophy of teaching which they describe as hand, heart and head. So they encourage people to engage in practical activities, to make food and to make things. They do a lot of philosophical, spiritual work. And they do the headpiece as well in terms of understanding science and issues. And they try and put all these things together to create a holistic view of human progress and human development. And that's a really good example. There's others around the world. I think Schumacher is the only place I know of where they do an MSc in holistic science, they call it, but they call it holistic science. This is great. And, you know, it's not to abandon, you know, the value we can get from empirical investigation, but it's to see it in its place and to not see science as the only truth and the only reality, but to link it to other truths and realities too. And that ultimately is what being a rounded human being is all about. Surely what we've done, what we've allowed to do since the Enlightenment, some people would say, is allow the empirical and the scientific and the mechanistic view of life to be the only view that we tolerate in terms of how we decide to run societies. So we focus on technology rather than philosophy as the solution to the problem. I don't think it's sufficient. Yeah, Well, it's eclipse. I think the origins of science, certainly the Islamic view of it, was it was about knowledge, but it was about all knowledge, spiritual knowledge, emotional knowledge. Yeah, you did that, did you? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the trouble, isn't it? It's the economics cutting in again.
- [73:33]
A
I think there are other people who would have liked, have asked questions, but I think we're running out of time.
- [73:37]
B
And I know that you have to.
- [73:38]
A
Get a train, but I think the quality of the questions, the quality of debate after the talk is it's a reflection of just simply how wide ranging it was and how stimulating thought provoking it was. So thank you very much.
- [73:50]
B
Well, thank you all for coming. Thanks very much.