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LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE Literary Festival 2017 | The Fight for Beauty: Our path to a better future
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A
Okay, welcome, everybody. Welcome to this Department of Drop In Environment LSE Literary Festival event. Wherever you've come from, you're very welcome. I'm really, really excited about the event we have tonight, and as I'm sure you are, because you're here. It's called the Fight for Our Path to a Better Future. I have to mention quickly, for those of you that like that sort of thing, the Twitter hashtag for this is lselitfest. Okay, I will introduce the speakers briefly. I will want to thank particularly our guests from outside the LSE very much for coming to this event. This is a literary festival event, so I thought I might just start off with a little quick quote from a literary source. Okay. And we'll go from there. This is from an essay written in 1929 by D. H. Lawrence called Nottingham and the Mining Countryside. You might know the quote. The real tragedy of England, as I see it is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely. The man made England is so vile. Okay, fairly familiar quote. But what people don't usually do is look at the whole essay, which we tell you students to do. Look at the whole piece of work. And in that piece of work, you. He talks about observing a collier in a village in Nottinghamshire. Village, in his garden, looking down at a flower with that odd, remote sort of contemplation which shows a real awareness of the presence of beauty. And contrast that with those who go along and pick flowers and put them in a book or display them. Contemplation of beauty from a direct experience of nature, which I think is a good kind of starting point for our discussion tonight. Our discussion tonight. Okay. This is based on a book, the Fight for Beauty. I think I put my copy over there. So I was going to show the copy, but Fiona is showing it there. This book is written by our special guest, Dame Fiona Reynolds, who's Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who very modestly has sent me a very, very short bio before, because if I set out the whole bio, we'd be here all night going through various experiences and achievements. But it includes former directorship at the National Trust and senior roles in the Council, what was then called the Council for National Parks, now the Campaign for National Parks, and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. Now, this book is a great book. I'm kind of breaching my chain partiality there, but it's a great book. It's available for sale in the foyer after the event has finished. If you do not have it already. You have not been paid to say that okay. But one of the reasons I think it's a great book, it's expressing an argument based on lived experience. I didn't realize when I read the book that almost every significant event in terms of UK conservation, landscape protection in past couple of decades, Dame Fiona Reynolds has been involved with it. Okay. In response, what will happen is Fiona will talk about half an hour. Okay. And then we have our two panelists. Okay. The first panelist to speak is my colleague, Professor Giles Atkinson, who's professor of Environmental Policy in my department here at lse, Department of Geography and Environment. Giles is again sent, quite modestly, a short bio. He's a member of the World Bank's Expert Committee on the WAVES Partnership, which stands for Wealth Accounting for Ecosystem Services, is a member of the steering group for the National Capital so Natural Capital Project, led by the UK Office for National Statistics. So after Fiona's talked for half an hour, giving her presentation, Giles will then have 10 minutes responding and then followed by another esteemed guest who I hope some other time we can have a whole lecture to whom event for his work, Nicholas Crane. Okay, who's again modestly sent a short bio? Author, geographer and cartographic expert. He's president of Royal Geographical Society. I'm a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, so in one way, he's my boss, so I should behave myself here. Yeah. He's received the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Mungo Park Medal in recognition of outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge and the World Geographical Society's Ness Award for popularizing geography and the understanding of Britain. Many of you will recognize Nicholas from his various TV series for the BBC, including Map Man, Town, Britannia and Coast. Okay. I can't think of any other person at the moment who's done more to popularize my subject, geography. And it's fantastic that Nicholas can be with us tonight. He will follow Giles to also give a response about 10 minutes, and that will leave us hopefully about 20 to 25 minutes for questions. So with that, first thing I want to do is will you join me, please, in welcoming our guests tonight.
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Well, thank you very much indeed. I am really honoured to be here. I'm a geographer too, by the way. And I'm also really thrilled to be here with both Giles and Nick and just, you know, to give Nick's amazing book a plug. This is. This is it. Extraordinary. It's about three times fatter than mine. Never mind the quality. Feel the wit, though. But it's brilliant. And I wish I'd bought my copy of Hoskins. Actually, because that would have made a lovely bringing it. The two. I'm another geographer who fell passionately in love with Hoskins, the Making of the English Landscape when I was an undergraduate. My book draws very heavily on that too. So what with my passion for Hoskins and my challenge to the economists, Giles, I think we're going to have an interesting evening and I really look forward to your responses. But what I'm going to talk to you about tonight is beauty. And beauty is an extraordinary word. It's a word that we all use all the time to talk about places we love or experiences that have come through just being in an extraordinary place. So whether we're talking about the beauty of landscape, whether we're talking about the beauty of nature or the beauty of our cultural heritage, and those three really are the focus for my book. It's something that everybody recognizes and can respond to. But you know what? It is not a word that you will hear a politician using today. In fact, it's 50 years since the word beauty was used in legislation. The one politician who did give a speech about beauty, Oliver Letchwin in 2005, which is some while ago, said he was rather embarrassed afterwards that people thought he'd gone a bit soft. And it's rather sort of middle class thing to talk about and not very serious. So he didn't say that word again, I can assure you. And instead when we talk about places like this, we talk about beauty. We've invented a whole series of sort of management speaky words when what we mean is beauty, natural capital, ecosystem services, biodiversity. So we've strangled the sheer beauty of the language which draws from our heart and kind of tells us how we feel about something. But the point of my book is really to say that it wasn't always like this. And in fact, there were two great periods of history where beauty not only was celebrated and used, but shaped public policy and created a kind of environment in its broadest sense in which public policy was made. And beauty has suffused our language, our literature, our music, our art, our poetry for many, many centuries. Think of Chaucer, who wrote that it was the beauty of an April spring that longeth folk to go on pilgrimages. Think of those medieval craftsmen building churches and cathedrals not as utilitarian buildings, but as places which celebrated beauty. Think of all those writers and poets and perhaps think above all of the Romantic poets who celebrated the beauty of this country. And perhaps that most celebrated landscape of all, the Lake District. This is the Lake district in the 1820s, painted by John Glover. At a time. This is Thirlmere, at the heart of the central lakes, at a time when debate was beginning not just about the admiration of beauty, but the need for its defence. And the person who, in a sense, tipped the debate from admiration to defence was Wordsworth. Wordsworth, who had written extraordinarily beautifully, it has to be said, about nature and about beauty, he wrote, to recognize in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul.
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Soul.
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He was not writing about beauty as just an aesthetic phenomenon, but as something profoundly moral, profoundly spiritual, something which should shape our lives. But even as he wrote those lines, and he wrote his celebrated guide to the lake district in 1810, he was noticing how the beauty of this landscape was already coming under threat. The villas, the suburban villas that were invading the beautiful lakes and valleys, the oars which were going from. Into a major production, the spiky larch which he hated, which was invading and taking over from the native woodlands, and of course, made celebrated of all that railway, that railway from Kendal to Windermere, which prompted him to write in 1843 words that no student of beauty should forget, is then no nook of English ground secure from rash assault. And that sense that these beautiful landscapes were becoming under threat began a movement of campaigning for beauty. But arguably, the real rash assault was going on in our towns and cities. And this very famous cartoon by Cruikshank of 1829 shows the kind of reaction to the pace and scale of industrialization that was going on. Look at the bricks pouring out of the kiln and landing on the unsuspecting hay rigs who are running for their lives. Look at the automatons marching into the countryside and sort of shaking all these. The fields in their park. Look at these tenements, you know, almost falling down as they were built, the speed with which industrialization and urbanization was taking over our countryside. And in fact, the pace was real. In Sheffield alone, between 1817 and 1836, 156 new streets were built, and they weren't good streets. We know that the condition in which people lived in those times, the sort of sheer pace and scale of development. But then the lack of facilities, lack of clean water, lack of fresh air, the crowding, the illness, the typhoid, the cholera, gave rise to real public concern about the kind of invasion, if you like, of industrialization and the way that it was changing the country beyond recognition. There were huge debates, huge Investigations into the state of the poor and into the state of the nation. And out of the cacophony, really, that was raging about why this situation had been allowed to develop came a voice for beauty, a powerful voice for beauty in the form of John Ruskin. Born into a family where his parents were kind of obsessed. He was read the Bible by his mother over and over again as a child. Deeply kind of intense upbringing. But as a small child, he had a cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky because he feared the sky would no longer be blue. He had an epiphany moment in the Alps where he watched a storm break over the Chamonix Valley and felt that mixture, not unlike Wordsworth, really, or the sense of reverence for beauty, but also that sense of deep moral responsibility that rose out of beauty. He gave public lectures up and down the country. He championed the revival of beautiful medieval architecture, the revival of the Gothic, and he hated industrialization, urbanization, and perhaps most of all, he hated the railway. He, of course, was great sponsor of the Arts and Crafts movement, but he inspired many others too. And perhaps above all, he inspired this young woman who was to become one of the people who I have most admired in my career. This is Octavia Hill, who he first met when she was teaching ragged school children in central London. She used to walk those ragged school children out of London 10 miles on a Saturday to feel green grass beneath the their feet, to smell fresh air, to pick flowers, to feel beauty. And she wrote, the need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise, the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs common to all. She believed that beauty was an absolutely essential requirement. She began her career as a housing reformer, buying up tiny tenements and improved. But she didn't think that having a roof over your head or enough food to eat was enough. She wanted to bring beauty into people's lives and she wanted gardens for the children. If she couldn't have gardens, she would have a window box. She was so passionate about giving people access to beauty and she joined in the campaign for the protection of London's green spaces. Many of the places we take for granted today, Parliament, Hillfields, Hillyfields, Vauxhall park was the saved due to the work of Octavia Hill and increasingly her comrades. And these are the trio that worked together. Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, who is the Lake District cleric who picked up the baton of the Defender of the Lakes from Wordsworth. Octavia Hill, much older here, and Robert Hunter, who is the lawyer, the solicitor for the Commons Preservation Society. And together they were campaigning for the green spaces of London. And together they set up the National Trust, the body perhaps best known for its defence of beauty. But I think what's really interesting, when people think about the National Trust, they think about an organization that's protecting the past. Actually, their legacy was not about the past, it was as much about the future. And one of the fascinating things is that a piece of legislation, the very, very first planning bill, introduced into parliament in 1909, owed its words directly to the influence of these people. It said the aspiration of planning should be the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified, and the suburbs salubrious. This is a government bill about bringing, for the first time, planning for the future in a way that embedded beauty in its thinking and at its heart. And that was the beginning of the first great movement. Government responded. They wanted to follow this sort of line of thought and began to legislate for planning. But, of course, the First World War disrupted all its plans and sent priorities and investment and all kinds of other activities elsewhere. But people did not forget beauty. And there are stories, heartrending stories, about young men going to their deaths in the trenches, clutching Copies of A.E. housman's A Shropshire Lad of the war poets, writing both about the terrors of the trenches, but also writing about the beauty of the England for which they were fighting. And I'm sure you know that amazing story about Edward Thomas, who agonized for a long time before signing up. And when asked why he'd signed up, he just stooped and picked up a clod of soil and said, this is what I'm fighting for. This was a big part of the motivation, of course. The government promised those who did manage to survive and were returning, they promised them a land fit for heroes, a home fit for heroes. Very much in the style of that 1909 planning bill. But of course, we all know the First World War ended in chaos. Economic chaos, social chaos, the terrible flu epidemic. Government's promises broken. This sort of cynical view. The government promised, promised you, but it did not deliver the land fit for heroes. And into that void, of course, always into a void, step opportunists. And the opportunists that stepped into this void were the Jerry builders, the speculative developers. And with no proper planning control, no government kind of leadership around the kind of housing, the provision of housing in the way it was originally hoped for, this kind of sprawl started to spread out in all directions, from both central London, but around many of the other great cities of the uk and it gave rise to another campaign for beauty, another fight for beauty. People who were appalled by the uncontrolled nature of the sprawl. Patrick Abercrombie, who was a great very early town planner who set up the Council for the Preservation of rural England in 1923. Clough Williams Ellis, whose book England of the Octopus remains a sort of classic of its time with this tentacles of the octopus strangling the beauty of rural England because of the uncontrolled nature of development. G.M. trevelyan, the Regis professor of History at Cambridge University, writing this polemic rhetorical pamphlet must England's beauty perish? And they all felt that England was being struck strangled by this uncontrolled, ugly development. Everybody hated sprawl, the government hated sprawl. It was wasteful of land, it was wasteful of resources. It resulted in this kind of really ugly, but also wasteful distribution of buildings and unmanageable provision of services. J.B. priestley wrote that the industrial damage of the 19th century was as nothing compared with the damage of the the 20th century where it looked set to change the face of England. And once again pressure began to build for better legislation and better protection for the beauty of the countryside. And again efforts were interrupted by the war. But yet again it was the beauty of England that formed a rallying cry for the government's campaign to get people to enlist and to sign up to fight. These are actually very romantic pictures not acknowledging the sprawl and the damage that was taking place in any shape or form. But this was the sort of call to arms that if you want to be a true Englishman, and it was very much an Englishman in that sense you are fighting for the beauty of England. But of course this time the government was determined not to make the same mistakes as had been made at the end of the First World War. Never again, they said, would people a return to a shattered economy, to broken promises. And so this time, even as the war began, Churchill as leader of the coalition was putting together the post war reconstruction program. And this program in a sense was the next second moment the height of the integration of beauty in thinking, official thinking from government. He commissioned reports from Beveridge, from a whole raft of people to look at the nature of the countryside, the nature of the Indian industry, the nature of welfare and public services and put together a program for the post war reconstruction. Of course it wasn't Churchill that won.
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The war, was it?
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It was Attlee. And my only reason for including this Slide. People say, why should. That is we have to count the number of women in this. There is one. So anyway, this is Attlee's government, Clem Attlee, who came in another enormously passionate Ruskinian. All the early Labour MPs were given copies of Unto this last as their sort of study reading before they became MPs and they picked up, of course, Attlee had been a member of the post war Reconstruction committee. So this was very much a kind of coalition plan in which beauty was central. So as well as of course education, health, social services, jobs and welfare, there were for the first time comprehensive legislation which brought together these non material needs as well as ways of meeting people's material needs. So the National Parks legislation which was 1949, this is the Peak District, the first national park. This extraordinary picture of Tom Stevenson of the ramblers association leading six MPs to three of whom were members of the Cabinet on a three day walk in the North Pennines. I tell you, I would love to get six parliamentarians and three members of the Cabinet to walk for three days in the north to demonstrate the importance of this legislation. So John Silk, in introducing the legislation to Parliament said, the enjoyment of our leisure in the open air, the ability to leave our towns and cities and walk on the moors and in the dales without fear of interruption, are just as much a part of positive health and well being as the building of hospitals or insurance against sickness. So they got it, they got it that actually life was not just about materialism, it was about meeting people's needs in a much broader way and that beauty was central to their thinking. So we also had legislation to protect nature. We also had for the first time proper comprehensive planning legislation. This is Sheffield Green belt, introduced in 1946, the 1947 Town and Country Planning act, for the first time covering both town and country, designed not only to protect beautiful country, but also to guide appropriate development to good places and to design development well and classically, perhaps the new towns. This is Stevenage in the early 1950s and you can see very contrast to have green spaces, to have trees, to have a quality of life as an integral part of the planning. They sought harmony. There was a wonderful 1944 white paper which said there were good uses of land and bad uses of land. Bad uses of land were sprawl. Good uses of land were those which sought to ensure that every need could be met, material and spiritual, through the proper provision for both people's, if you like, their needs around jobs and housing. To get around, but also for their well being and for their spiritual benefit. But you know what? It's been all downhill since then. Those great words, that great ambition for harmony got lost in the second half of the century. And it got lost in a way because we forgot that vision for harmony, for integration. We became obsessed by growth, by development, by the economy. And that has been the story ever since. And so there has had to be another fight for beauty. And in many ways I've been part of that fight, as you heard, not for quite as long as the 1950s, I hasten to add, but certainly since 1980 when I got my first job in the campaigning movement. And I think it's fair to say that we have seen enormous change in the countryside in the second half of the 20th century. Enormous loss, you know, the figures, enormous loss of wildlife, enormous loss of beautiful landscapes to the point, you know, many argue of crisis. And, you know, it does seem to me that I'm just going to give some few examples of the campaigns that we have through fighting for beauty, achieved some moderation of those pressures, but we have not protected nearly enough. Let's take the first one, farming, very briefly. This is the image of farming in the 1950s. Nobody foresaw that there would be a clash, but of course the clash was very real. This was Exmoor, the site of some of my first campaigns, which the 27% of Heather Moreland was lost between the years 1984, sorry, 1947 and 1984. 97% of Hay Meadows were lost between 1945 and 1980. And 20% of our hedgerows were lost in a single decade in the 1970s. So the kind of pace, of scale, of change and the fights, and we did fight, and we did manage to moderate it because we can and must get it right. And actually with Brexit and all the challenges that that poses, we have the chance to try to achieve again this sense of integration, of mutual benefit, you know, redressing this very commercial form of agriculture which fails to recognize the need for other interests, other examples, trees, which everyone loves trees, but in the wrong place. They too have been the caused fights. This was Ennerdale back in the 1920s, when the new Forestry Commission, looking for quick winds, started to plaster the central lakes with not just the spiky larch that words were painted, but Sitka spruce, which has this. Sitka spruce has this horrible sound to it as well. And again, CPRE actually managed to negotiate with the Forestry Commission to protect the central lakes, but it didn't Stop many other areas being covered with blanket afforestation. And in fact, one of my first campaigns at CNP was a horrible diamond plantation plunked in the middle of the Brecon Beacons National Park. And this sort of completely sort of unmoderated, no attempt to make it in any way sort of sympathetic to the native wildlife or landscape, was a good example. Enormous losses of indigenous native woodlands, which I described actually very well in Nick's book. Under planted with conifers, swept away by development to the point where our ancient woodlands are hanging on by their fingernails. And of course, the great fight. Absolutely extraordinary. The government's plan in 2010 to sell off the public forest. Do you remember that not so long ago? Extraordinary plan. This is the New Forest. I mean, they did, we had some inkling that they were going to propose to sell the commercial forest, but not these ancient, culturally significant landscapes like the New Forest and Forest of Dean. Well, actually, that was an example where the public really did fight back and the government withdrew its proposals and turned very quickly on its tail. Another success story, in a way, is the coast, which Nick probably knows better than anybody else in the early 20s and 30s, you know, no planning control whatever, a lot of caravan parks, bungalows and other development, but again, through a fight. All of this had to be achieved through people campaigning, the introduction of coastal protection mechanisms and of course, the very famous National Trust Neptune campaign, which has meant that our coast, if you think about, if you ever fly over the Mediterranean or many other coasts, you see terrible spoliation. We have actually managed to save large areas of arcades, but only through a sort of determined defence of the fight for beauty by many organizations and people. Roads have been enormously the subject of fights. Not only the sheer damage of constructing roads across swathes of countryside, but actually the complete, in a sense, ignoring of the beauty of the countryside through which it went. This was one of the absolute corners caused celebrities in my time at CPRE, the M3 going through St Catherine's Hill at Winchester, one of the most terrible acts of depredation, one of the most significant sites, culturally, spiritually in this country, just damaged by a motorway. And in fact, that. Do you remember Swampy and the Newbury bypass? I mean, these were really, really dramatic campaigns. And in fact, in about the late 80s, early 90s, the government did stop building these very provocative big road schemes, Although it has to be said, that may have been as much to do with saving money as the environmental arguments. But, you know, do you remember those ratchet arguments that saying that the roads are busy, so we need a bypass or a dual carriageway. So you build it and the road gets busy, so you need a bigger road and it just goes on and on and on. And we know. We know better now, we know that we need different solutions, but. But we have still not addressed the rising pressure of traffic. And, of course, a lot of it comes down to planning that great vision of the 1940s, that we could plan properly in an integrated way, both for our needs, but also to protect the beauty and the integrity of our countryside. And of all the fights I've been involved with all of my working life, I think the most difficult have been about political. Repeated attempts by governments to get rid of the green belt or to relax planning controls or whatever. And in some ways, planning was its own worst enemy because it did make mistakes in the early days. A lot of the very early rehabilitation of town centres were done in this very unsatisfactory way, which I think gave people a lack of confidence in planning, but through all of those fights. And perhaps the most provocative was again my last, almost my last campaign at the National Trust, which was the Government's proposal under the new National Planning Policy Framework, where it had the provocative words that the default response to a planning application should be yes. It's just extraordinary when you think of all that history of planning about being able to balance and integrate and harmonise, not just yes to whatever comes along. Anyway, the National Trust went absolutely into campaigning mode on this, very exceptionally. Petitions at every property, huge press campaign, trustees slightly nervous, but actually, I can remember being stopped on the bus and in the train with people saying, thank goodness you're speaking up for the beauty of our country. And again, we know we can use clients to get it right. It isn't about just stopping development, it is about the quality, the location, the way in which we plan for our future. So whether in rural areas, this is near to my home in rural Gloucestershire, whether in urban areas, this is an example of very dense urban development in Cambridge, which has won many prizes for sustainability, for beauty, for good urban design, and perhaps above all, in our cities. Most of us live in cities, most of us will live in cities. And we have to design and create cities where people can live sustainably, can get around without recourse to the car, can have the facilities and services they need within walking distance. That is our big challenge and we can and must do it beautifully in order to give people a high quality of life, green spaces and all the things that we know make life important and worth living. So, you know, I've talked a lot about the fight. I've talked a lot about banging on about the government, and the government does this problem and policy is wrong. But actually, the real message of my book is that it's about us. It's about us and the values that we hold. Because when politicians stand up and they say, what do the public care about? Well, it's the economy, isn't it? Remember Clinton? It's the economy, stupid. And it's true. You know, many of us tell politics that that's our number one concern. And we're led to think that. We're led to think that partly by gdp, this measure that is said to tell us whether we're doing all right as a society. And yet anyone who looks into GDP at any level at all knows that it's a crazy way to judge whether things are going well. GDP simply measures income and expenditure. It does not have a balance sheet. And I think most people in this room would recognise that a balance sheet is, in nature, is the most important thing of all. So we delude ourselves into thinking we're doing well while we're undermining the very resources on which we depend. And perhaps the other thing we're doing is we're neglecting the next generation. Remember Octavia and her ragged children? Well, children today are not deprived in the way that those ragged children were, but they are not getting the access to nature and beauty that she wanted to see. A child today spends the time six and seven hours a day in front of some kind of electronic device. The area over which we let our children roam free has collapsed by 90% in a single generation. And a child today is three times more likely to be admitted to hospital for falling out of bed and falling out of a tree. I am not advocating children falling out of trees, I should make that clear. But I am advocating children having access to nails. And perhaps this is the really important message of my book, because we have given our children a completely different way of life and it divorced them from nature. And yet David Attenborough says nobody will protect what they do not care about, and nobody will care about what they haven't experienced. So we are setting ourselves up. This focus on the economy is. Is something which it's very difficult to have a conversation about. And yet, back in the 1940s, an American economist wrote these words with which I'm going to draw my remarks to a close. Because he said, economism, this word that just means focusing on the economy, can build a society which is rich Prosperous, powerful, even. One which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well being. It cannot but build one which is lovely, one which has savor and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Because we need beauty. We need the things in life that money can't buy, the things that make us happy, the things that give us a sense of satisfaction. And we also, in a very, very clear way, need a rich and protected nature to. To provide the resources on which we depend. And as we face climate change and many, many other pressures, we must take these arguments more seriously than we have. So I'm going to close with the words of John Muir, that great Scotsman who went off to America and was very, very instrumental in establishing the American national parks. He says, this is not about blind opposition to progress. It is opposition to blind progress. I am trying to revive the fight for beauty. I hope you'll join me. Thank you.
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C
Well, thank you. Thank you very, very much for that. Yeah, I wonder if I'm on the wrong side of the fight here. So I thought maybe I should be coming up here wearing a black hat. Well, let's see. I should say at the outset I thoroughly enjoyed the book. So I would echo Michael's comments about that. I think it charts brilliantly a wealth of developments in UK nature policy from its historical origins right through to the present day. Well, almost right through. There was something that happened last summer that you mentioned that obviously it's useful to reflect about whether that's going to help or hinder the ideas in the book. But events aside, if we can for the minute, I think the central argument of the book is a really powerful message that in many of the policy developments that have occurred in recent years, maybe we've forgotten something. So to give a personal example, I was a member of the UK Natural Capital Committee. Sorry, we were using this kind of terminology as part of this committee in its first phase. I was a member from 2012, 2015. I think the Natural Capital Committee did have a lot of really good arguments for maintaining and enhancing nature. But actually beauty. I don't recall that coming up in much of our discussion and certainly wasn't reflected in the reports that we published. At least it wasn't explicit or made prominent. I think there's reasons for that. But I think the excellent thing about the book is that Dame Fiona gives us a really strong sense of what that perspective might also offer, what other directions that might push us in. Okay, now I need to put my cards on the table and say, I'm an environmental economist, feels like I might be on the wrong side of the fight and perhaps my ilk, my profession, is part of the problem that is talked about in the book. So in these comments, maybe I end up just confirming that view. You have to see for yourselves. But what I wanted to try to do was sketch out some positive thoughts on how this beauty agenda might be related to UK policy. So specifically what I want to do is really think a little bit about how these sorts of ideas might be used to inform evidence based nature policy and maybe show how environmental economic perspective can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. I think one question to ask at the outset is beauty for whom? So Dame Fiona's talked a little bit about that. I think it's crucial obviously to ask that. I'm sure expert views have a place, but I can only imagine that really what we're thinking about in most of this is what people think, the public, in many ways, there seems to be kind of an inherent advantage there because I do think beauty, et cetera, it's certainly a notion which is salient for people. It's surely more salient than ecosystem services, which has dominated the technocratic policy debate. And in fact we can see some of that salience, but not necessarily working in the direction that we might like it to in some of the discussions about developing the green belt in the uk. So in the Economist just two weeks ago, this is an argument which is used as well by some of my LSE colleagues who are working on planning problems, working in housing economics. They say, for example, what the trouble with the greenbelt is that much of it apparently isn't beautiful. Even worse than that, a lot of its golf courses, apparently, according to them. So that rhetoric for them becomes a reason to develop that land and not necessarily develop it in the, in the ways that you described in your Cambridge example, rather than enhance or restore that land's beauty. So I think we do have to think about ways of counterbalancing those arguments. One answer could be to adapt conventional policy evaluation tools such as cost benefit analysis. I'm sort of on home turf here. For those of you that know we do our cost benefit analysis lectures. They'll be tomorrow in this room. I don't know if you can sort of feel it in the walls of the room. Possibly not, but anyway. So I feel sort of familiarity at least standing here talking about that stuff. But do it in a way that accounts for beauty, aesthetics, spiritual values and so on in considering policy options. Now, I think one important Thing to bear in mind here is that this is not something that environmental economists, for example, completely ignore. They used to do this more routinely, consider the aesthetic value of the environment. So environmental economists spent actually a good deal of time in the 1980s and 1990s actually refining ways to try to estimate the value that people place on landscapes, for example. So some illustrations of that, the work that was done on visibility improvements around the in the Grand Canyon in the US in the mid late 1980s, the valuation study that was done of Stonehenge. There's been one more recently as well, in the late 1990s to try to inform some of the road proposal options. There's another example from the uk, but there are lots more examples too. I think one of the general lessons actually of that work was it confirmed the old saying that beauty is often in the eye of the beholder. So people had different views on landscape essentially, and what aesthetically was the best option for policy action. Now, perhaps this isn't surprising out there. If you Google it. There's a pylon appreciation society, there's a road Roundabout Appreciation Society. It truly takes all sorts, as that quick Google might indicate. But the serious point here then is that policy becomes a process of trying to wrestle with those differences of perspective about what beauty is in terms of nature. The other point here is just to reiterate what I said a moment ago, that that work does have a firm, or at least did have a firm basis in what environmental economists did routinely not so long ago. So a strong focus on the aesthetic benefits of nature, albeit filtered through the lens of the economist's way of thinking about the world. So maybe it doesn't go as deeply as. As you might like in terms of spiritual values and so on. But I think it's certainly true to say that we as environmental economists changed direction in this work shortly after that, started to focus on health impacts of ecosystems, and nature started to talk in terms of ecosystem services more and more. And I would agree that the. That this idea of beauty and aesthetics and so on in that work did get a bit lost in favor of actually looking at the nuts and bolts of individual outputs, as we called them, of what ecological systems provided. This is not quite true, actually, because part of that ecosystem services framework was always part of what this natural factory, I'm at it again with the jargon, produces is cultural services, which did include aesthetics and spiritual values. But it's also, I think, true to say that a lot of the practical work in that vein, it tended to forget that element of what those ecosystem services are in favour of looking at things such as regulating services, water purification and so on. But that's a shame because I think it's these cultural elements that actually get closest to what Dame Fiona is tackling in her book within that ecosystem system services agenda. So I think one thing that environmental economists could do to help here is elevate this idea of cultural services to a far more prominent position in terms of what they do. I think this would have two chief advantages. The first is that just looking, trying to at least engage with that economic perspective in relating that beauty aesthetics agenda to policy evidence. I think what we need arguably is to relate that to metrics, whether quantities or qualities, and the way in which policy actions might change those quantities or qualities. So I think it's difficult to sometimes conceptualize beauty in terms of how much the typical economist's response to that. Now, maybe I misunderstand the debate even to try, I don't know, fool's errand, but I would say that the economic perspective is certainly one means of trying to do that, expressing public views on these sorts of issues in a way that's consistent with conventional policy evaluation tools. The second, not unrelated issue that I think is important to bear in mind that while I'd like it not to be the case, case policy entails trade offs and I think this is a crucial thing to remember. So there's an opportunity cost, of course, to any action and enhancing the beauty of nature is no exception. So the question, the challenge for us is how do we deal with those trade offs? We can't ignore them. But what sort of framework, what sort of conceptual way of thinking do we have for trying to engage in seriously with the fact that there are trade offs here? Now, the economic approach, it's only one way of looking at those trade offs. Their emphasis on one way is important. It's not palatable to all. So for some, my suggested beauty treatment might be nothing of the sort. So I just want to conclude my comments then by stressing that while I've kind of narrowed down maybe what people in my profession might do to help this agenda, to try to translate some of this in terms of economic ideas, the idea in Dame Fiona's book, it has an importance beyond simply what it might imply for how technocrats do environmental cost benefit analysis. So I think it is really interesting to ask how these sorts of ideas can inform a high level strategic document such as the government's proposed 25 year plan for the environment which we're promised may appear this year. So I'll end on a conciliatory note. I think that is actually really important too, to think about how it informs that overall thinking as well as the kind of nitty gritty about how we do policy evidence. So those sorts of documents, 25 year plan on the environment that the government's proposing, plans setting out over the next generation what actions it might want to improve nature in the country. Clearly it's crucial. It provides guiding principles, it sets the rules of engagement, setting constraints for subsequent policy formulation. There are those technocrats again, kind of setting bounds on, on the way that they might act. But also I think importantly, it's a way of connecting those plans to the public, emphasizing things which are most salient to them too. So I kind of see this contribution at that high level. But also I think that there's really constructive ways that economic thinking can also advance that agenda through things that we've been talking about, such as cultural services within that ecosystems agenda. I'll leave it there.
- [48:16]
D
Thank you very much. Thank you, Giles, very much. This is actually fascinating. Having gone from beauty into what an environmental economist might, how an environmental economist might work with beauty in terms of policy, I'm going to go in the opposite direction and look at what I see as one of the building blocks of beauty. Last night at the Royal Geographical Society, I asked the director, Dr. Rita Gardner, whether she could label a geographer's response to landscape, identify a common emotive reaction. And without hesitation she said, it's awe. It is all about awe. And I thought, well, that's quite interesting. That wasn't the word I was actually thinking thinking of. So I'm going to step sideways from beauty and dwell for a moment on awe, the power to inspire fear or reverence. Awe, I guess, is the emotional equivalent of what astronomers call the neutral gravity point. I'm sure many of you know what that is. You can be pulled either way. I think it does work as a word that encapsulates the geographical response to the systems at work in forming landscapes, many of which are not conventionally beautiful. Industrial back to backs, abandoned coal mines, nuclear power stations, airports, landfill sites, not conventionally beautiful. But they can be awe inspiring. And collectively they contribute to the story of our landscapes. Sorry. There is an abstract quality to war that's not often apparent in common understandings of beauty, the quality oed that affords keen pleasure to the senses, especially that of sight. To feel awe, you must stray into labyrinths of landscape narratives, those woven threads, the stories that connect a modern place to the deep past. And for this, geography is very helpful in the way that history is less so with its interest in places, people and environments.
- [50:25]
C
Geography.
- [50:25]
D
Geography is well placed to build landscape narratives, far better placed than history. History's reliance on events keeps it on a short temporal leash. In Britain, there are now accounts of events that go back more than a couple of thousand years. And yet this island has been continuously inhabited and its landscape continually modified by humans for 12,000 years. Historians habitually reach for the accessible goodies the Romans and the Saxons, the Normans, the Church as the Georgians and all those associated invasions, wars and revolutions. Geographers, on the other hand, are not constrained by the brief 2000 year span of recorded events. Looked at geographically, there's only one era that makes any sense to me if you're going to get to grips with the evolution of British landscapes. And it's that era that begins in 9,700 BC, when an abrupt episode of climate change, perhaps a bit bounce upward of 7 degrees centigrade in as little as 50 years, opened a thermal window on a frigid European peninsula that had no human population at the time at all. And this geographical era that begins in 9,700 BC and ends today with an island of 64 million people. I viewed through this geographical prism, explored along this 12,000 year timeline. Landscapes assume qualities that underpin beauty. Rannoch Moor. I'm sure many of you know it. Not a place that always calls to mind the word beauty, especially in mist or driving rain. But it's undeniably awe inspiring, especially when the motorist barreling along the A82 considers that Rannoch was the epicentre of Britain's thickest ice cap during the Younger Dryas, the last cold snap we had. A geographical narrative presents Rannoch as a dome of ice 400 meters thick. We can't see it today, but for those looking before beauty, it's real enough. Piled up the top of Buccoletta Moor in a howling plateau, creaking crevasses and ice fall, the Norfolk Broads transcend a beauty once one tracks back in time the medieval peat diggers who created this flooded wetland. In their extractive heyday, the Norfolk Broads were a vast mess of open cast peat quarries. And now the Broads are celebrated as Britain's largest surviving wetland. And that's despite the fact they're entirely artificial. Geography and geology, if you look at their narratives, tell us that the natural wetlands flooded much of England in those Post Glacial centuries 11,000 years ago, when the glaciers and ice caps melted, they left much of that land between the Humber isle of Axholm and Cambridge beneath, finding vast inland seas. And those seas have now been drained to create the rich farmlands of the Fens. Stonehenge. Giles mentioned Stonehenge once. You've read the archaeological papers of David Jaques and thought about the role of the site he's working on at Blick Mead and the famous timber totems that used to be marked in those white circles on the car park at Stonehenge. The image of Stonehenge as a place is turned into something completely different, the kind of place that really does tingle the spark. There's nothing to see on the surface of those Wessex Downs. The evidence exists below the grass that people were congregating there at the same place thousands of years before the stones were raised. And if Jaques is right, we should see Stonehenge as a ritual landscape that stretches way back into the era of the forager hunters, when orochs roamed the plain and flints were napped on the verge of the A303. One final example. Galton Valley 20 years ago. Who's been to Galton Valley 20 years ago? I walked from one end to the other of England following a straight line. It was a geographical transect. I was walking down the line of longitude 2 degrees west and I was constrained within a 2000 meter wide corridor to avoid climbing over too many buildings and cars and so on. It was a genuine geographical transit. Had a point to it. I wanted to to write an objective description of England using a random sample of people and places. It's an attempt to break free of those subjective authorial routes designed to harvest material frequently beautiful material for a book. So 2 degrees west is very high on awe and quite low on beauty. So Galton Valley. I've been walking for a month or so. I've missed all the conventional beauty spots. Holy Island, Alnwick, Hadrian's Wall, Durham, the Yorkshire Dales, Malham Tarn, the Peak District. I missed a whole lot. Then I came to Black country and I just want to read you a short passage from this very ancient book, long out of print, but I hadn't actually looked at this for 20 years. But this is what it says. Beyond the glass recycling plant, the stilts of another motorway shut out the daylight. Under the high concrete ceiling lay a still gray canal and a desert of dry grit. Through the stilts, mangled cars lay in careless scrapyard heaps, the ferrous slaughterhouse tactfully hidden from the vehicles flying overhead. The canal was the old Main line. The motorway was the M5 and beside them both was a second canal. The new main line and the intercity rail line, all on different levels and all woven together in a tangle of road, rail and water. Golden Valley was not a conventional valley, but a line of least resistance. Spotted by James Brindley two centuries earlier, the valley had been cut into the high ground of Smethwick summit between the Black Country's right and left ventricles, Birmingham and Wolverhampton. In Galton Valley geography was to bring together some of the greatest names of the Industrial Revolution. Well, it was perhaps the most ugly place I'd been to in the entire two months I walked the length of England. But it was also one most fascinating because locked into this grimy, messed up gulch were works by Brindley, Smeaton, Telford and Chance. The great Chance. Chance's glassworks are still there, listed the Chance who made all the glass for the great exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. So a very historic spot, but not one very high on beauty. So to conclude, returning to the idea of a geographical narrative for Britain, how much awe can we sum it up? As I said, it's a 12,000 year story and it begins with an episode of extreme climate change. The spread of the wildwood, 20 billion trees, the trees written about by Hoskins and Rackham. And a tsunami, the storiga slide of 6200 BC. And this great wall of water came down the North Sea. Perhaps that was the wall of water that cut us off from the continent. A very hard Brexit probably happened in a matter of seconds, not two years, in a leisurely fashion in 4050 BC, an event of far greater significance for the landscape. That was when the boat people came from the continent with their heavily laden boats, with their panoply of continental traditions. The interring of the dead in massive stone tombs, flint mining, the planting and harvesting of cereal crops, the rearing of domesticated cattle, sheep and pigs. And perhaps most radical of all, the idea that they'd live in the same place throughout the whole year. They were settlers. And while the Mesolithic hunter foragers, our forebears had been very soft footprint types. The Neolithic immigrants, the farmers were rampant terraformers. Terraforming changed up again around 1500 BC. That was the big turning point. Imposing monuments ceased to be built after that. Gods and ancestors were usurped by the plough. In the words of the great Barry Cunliffe, he's written enormous amount about the Iron Age. Communities started to impose themselves on the landscape, not to create monuments to ancestors or the gods, but to take hold on the land itself and to tame it once and for all. That was the beginning of widespread field systems, and that really was game over for the wild with the wilderness. Oliver Rackham reckons that England had lost half of its wildwood as early as 500 BC. By 50 BC we had proto towns. And although the Romans set us back, set back urbanization by about 800 years, it took off again in the 10th century. By 1600, London was a capital city of 75,000 with an urban microclimate 4 degrees centigrade warmer than the surrounding countryside. Between 1837 and between 1730 and 1840, the mileage of navigable waterways and canals in Britain leapt from 1,200 to 4,000 miles. But when steam arrived, 7,000 miles of edge rails were laid in in 20 years. By 1840, more of us were living in towns and cities than in the countryside. The tipping point had been reached in housing. Some of the most extraordinary stories, and not really beautiful stories, always are related to the struggle to accommodate an industrializing society in healthy housing. The 48,000 new dwellings created in Glaswegian tower blocks. And 25 years to 1972, the runaway success of the semi detached house, 4.9 million of them, amounting to 31% of England's housing stock, the most successful housing type ever built in Britain. If Englishman's home was his castle, you could buy a castle in Wembley for 1,200 pounds only with a crenelated front wall. Geographically, Britain is an extraordinary story. A story of people, places and environments that allows us to see beyond those surface brushstrokes and right through the canvas to landscape beyond and indeed beneath the landscape to buried pollen, buried carbon. That allows us to recreate landscapes lost to sight and yet not lost to mind. And once you know that geographical story, the ore automatically follows, because every bit of Britain has a story to tell. Now, I'm not saying for a moment that ore is a replacement for beauty. No, no, no. More, more. That knowledge of geography helps open the eyes to beauty. And I couldn't agree more with Fiona that it is time again to fight for beauty. Should we go straight to questions?
- [60:35]
B
A couple of things. Yeah. Very brief again. Yeah, I don't want to delay the questions, but I just thought a couple of. I thought those fantastic responses and thank you. And I. Just one thing I want to say, I suppose, is just that beauty to me is not about aesthetics. And I hope I made that clear. It's A kind of state of mind. It's a way of looking at the world which respects the kind of deep moral, spiritual questions, but that also give us, I think, a kind of sense of responsibility and a sense of wanting to protect. Not just the kind of physical, aesthetic, sort of superficial things, but what lies behind that. So for me, beauty is a way in to those deep moral questions about how we deal with climate change, how we deal with Brexit, for heaven's sake, you know, how we deal with the really big issues. It gives us an alternative argument to the economistic kind of determinism that so easily dominates the destination. So I just like to just, you know, it's not just a thing, beauty, it's a way of being and seeing and feeling.
- [61:40]
A
Thank you. I don't think I've been at an LSE event, certainly not recently, with such an extraordinary breadth of coverage of historical, geographical, imaginative space. So I can't believe there aren't questions, in other words. So what I'm going to do is we'll take two questions at a time. All I'll say is we have some. Have a roving mic over here. Wait until the mic comes before you ask your question. And please be relatively brief, or brief, I should say, so that we can get as many questions in as possible. I have one question here already and the lady with the glasses up there. Second question. So we'll do those two now. Yeah, I think.
- [62:27]
B
Hello. Yeah, it will directly be related to what Fiona said. I'm very interested in knowing your views on mental health and appreciation of natural.
- [62:38]
D
Beauty, because it's off lately.
- [62:39]
B
I read that, and it really determines the human behavior.
- [62:43]
A
Thank you. We'll get the second question.
- [62:57]
B
Hello.
- [62:57]
D
Thank you very much for the presentations.
- [62:59]
B
I would like to ask how we can fight better for beauty while we are losing our connections with nature and we are living totally different world.
- [63:09]
D
Thank you.
- [63:12]
A
So these questions will be to the. To the panel generally, but Dame Fiona.
- [63:16]
D
Well, very.
- [63:17]
B
Drop the dame, please. I can't say. Just call me Fiona, please.
- [63:21]
D
Sorry, I'm so embarrassed.
- [63:22]
B
I should have said right at the beginning, actually. Giles, Will, this is where we come together on mental health. Because it seems to me that there's a phenomenal economist's case for giving people access to green space. You know, all the work that's been done about the way that green space does, you know, without question, benefit people's mental health and well being. And I would argue that that, you know, is in a sense where the two arguments come together, where there's a Kind of spiritual benefit, but there's also a tangible saving of health budgets and all the rest of it. On the question about losing our contact with nature, I mean, that is exactly my fear, that if we have a generation of children growing up without access to nature, they won't fight for beauty. They won't be aware of the vulnerability of our natural resources, of the species that we're losing, and the kind of sense of responsibility. So that's in a way the urgency.
- [64:16]
C
Of my.
- [64:18]
B
Desire to revive the fight is partly to open up that kind of next generational challenge.
- [64:25]
A
Nick Charles, any responses?
- [64:27]
D
I'm certainly chucking a thought on the, on the, hey now, how do we fight for beauty when we're losing touch with the countryside? I think that was a question, wasn't it? Did I understand.
- [64:39]
A
Yeah.
- [64:40]
D
The National Ecosystem Assessment. Is that what it's called? Yes, 2011, I think a completely extraordinary report. Should have been a blueprint for the next 50 years. Do read it to get near one in the library. Many, many extraordinary statistics in it. One of them was that 98% of the UK is green space. 98%. Of course, that's not what you think when you're traveling around in a bus or a tube or a car. What you can is something that's almost entirely built up, even in the countryside. You're going down a tarmac ribbon rimmed with lay bys and street furniture and all the rest of it. 98% of the country is green space. And what that tells you is we're never very far from it. There's much more of it than we actually think. And local reconnections with green space are the way forward. I'm absolutely convinced of that. It isn't about having to pay a fortune to take a return train fare to a national park at the other end of the country. It's probably no more than five minutes from a front door, even in the city. And that's a great starting point. And that's true for primary school children being taken on year six field trips when they start studying geography, for example, in year six, first time the G word crops up. But that's a great starting point. Urban parks, even though we're largely urban society these days. So I've chucked that thought out there, that green space is much more prevalent than we might think.
- [66:12]
C
Giles Eda yeah, I just make a comment on the mental health side because I certainly think that there's some sort of complementary thinking there, but there's also some caution as well. So certainly it's the case that if we look at studies which have been done about the costs of mental health problems to the uk, you see the numbers are enormous. So the kind of the prize there, the opportunity from tackling that problem, just from that perspective, there's clearly other reasons why you'd want to as well. But from that perspective, clearly there's huge benefits. There's also, I think, quite a compelling literature which is starting to emerge on people's ideas about their subjective well being. So asking them about their own well being and the link between that and mental health and the link between that and green space. However, I think the caution comes in in terms of we don't know necessarily that providing more green space or green space of a particular kind might lead to improvements in mental health in the way that intuitively we might, or at least some of that evidence, there's a need to look at sort of causal mechanisms to do some proper policy evaluation. So I think we have a sense that probably there are some benefits here, but this is actually where the economics can help by setting up the tests that actually get us further in thinking about whether there's actually a proper causal relationship between those two things and what sort of shape that relationship has.
- [67:50]
A
Thank you. Next two questions. Gentleman here. Wait till the microphone comes to you. Yeah, so I'm making the mic run around a lot and the gentleman up there with the glasses to the left. Yeah.
- [68:07]
C
How much do you think a fight.
- [68:09]
B
For beauty is the same thing as.
- [68:10]
C
A fight against ugliness?
- [68:15]
A
If you put your hand up the next question. The microphone will come to you. Thanks for your talk. So beauty is clearly important to talk to a certain group of people. And in some sense environmental economics is useful to talk to another group of people, such as business or politics group. And I'm wondering to what extent are these not just two different languages to talk to different groups of people? And it would be important to start understanding each other instead of fighting each other on ideological grounds. Okay.
- [68:54]
B
Blimey.
- [68:55]
A
Thank you.
- [68:57]
B
I think the first one is completely brilliant and I don't know the answer to it except that intuitively I just think I'm a positive person. And I think fighting against ugliness has a kind of spiral down feel about it. Was fighting for beauty has all that kind of aspirational sense that the world could be a better place. And I'm really, you know, I do see beauty as a way of articulating our kind of aspiration to, you know, unashamedly kind of restore that sense of integration, of harmony of, you Know, when we do meet our needs, this isn't about stopping things. It is about how do we provide for our needs in ways that respect the environment and the kind of resources and also give us as high a quality life as we can have without having all the material things, things we might conceivably want because we know we can't have them. So I think that's all I'm doing, really. It's a very perceptive question there. Thank you. The thing about languages is absolutely right, but I suppose one of the motives of my plea for beauty is about a language that appeals to everyone. And I work quite hard in the book to kind of demonstrate the democratic roots of the debate. I definitely kind of rail against the. The idea that beauty is for the middle classes or for the, you know, the kind of people who've got lots of possessions and just want to protect them, you know, so to me, beauty is. And Octavia Hill and Ruskin and everybody else meant it in this way. It's something that is an entitlement for everyone. I think the economist's argument and the kind of policy wonk argument, and believe me, I've been a policy wonk in my life, you know, I know what it's like to know all the ins and outs of bits of legislation. Legislation. You're talking to a tiny number of people, and in a way, that's one of the problems and that's why you get captivated by this sort of techno language and, you know, all these words that don't really mean anything. So I think what I'm definitely doing is saying we need a language that unites people and doesn't marginalize people. And beauty is a way for me, of opening it up.
- [70:52]
A
Thank you, Jasmine.
- [70:56]
D
I would like to agree with Fiona about the need for a common vocabulary. And, you know, we've seen what happens with Brexit when people speak different languages. And beauty as a shared aspiration is a word of genius. It speaks so much to so many of us, and I think it's something. Something. It's interesting to hear an environmental economist tackling beauty.
- [71:30]
B
Just going for the aesthetic.
- [71:32]
D
So far, only one politician seems to have been able to wrap his head around it, but hopefully there'll be many, many more once they've read Fiona's brilliant book.
- [71:42]
C
So on this is that issue of communication. So, yeah, I think there is. So there is a sense in which there's different ways clearly communicating ideas to different audiences. But I think it is right to say it's far more than that. Because there is basic differences in philosophy between these different perspectives about theories that we might have about conceptualizing the world. So it's not just a difference of language. So my friend focus by saying essentially what environmental economists have done in the past, which does focus on aesthetics. So it's a somewhat shallower take on that beauty, but it then allows that argument to fit within more straightforwardly in the economic framework. The deeper conceptualization that Fiona has, that's more of a challenge for the economic way of thinking. And in fact, I think what you're doing there, that's constraining essentially what economists might do for better or worse. But certainly I think it's important to recognize that. So essentially, rather than giving us ideas and saying, well, how do you fit that within your framework? Actually you're constraining the framework and then making that, say, if we're doing cost benefit analysis, that has to be subject to those constraints, that there's this overall sense of beauty informing our policy challenge. I think that's a good way, a reasonable way of thinking about the problem. But it is, that's what it is.
- [73:10]
B
But if I'm honest that, you know, what you've described is exactly the problem that I kind of lived with throughout my campaign life is that everyone frames, you know, the trade offs, for example, are framed against the norm that accepts, you know, degradation of natural resources to the point where, you know, we're undermining them beyond, you know, a sustainable way. So, you know, I think that the whole point about the risk of framing is that it accepts the kind of econometric norm of today. And I suppose one of the reasons for trying to get a word like beauty out of that language is that you start to ask yourself quite deep moral questions about where we're going as a society. And I think that's the kind of. It's reframing the norm.
- [73:55]
A
Who can be against beauty, eh? I'm going to go here, I'm trying to remember where the arms are, but here first, this gentleman here and the lady on the end there. And I've noted the other, some of the other questioners.
- [74:09]
D
My question's inspired by Fiona's photograph of the caravan park, so called park, and perhaps also by the picture of the forests we planted earlier.
- [74:20]
A
Can we.
- [74:21]
D
Is there some public policy device by which we can either tax or legislate or coax these coastal caravan parks, which are such a blight on the landscape, out of you possibly relocating where they're surrounded by the trees we planted earlier?
- [74:39]
A
And maybe there are different Ideas, legislate.
- [74:44]
D
Against, tax them, or just make it no longer advantageous for the people who.
- [74:49]
B
Are making money out of them now.
- [74:51]
A
To go on doing so. Any ideas from the panel? Okay, thank you. We'll just take the second question in.
- [74:59]
B
A rather different tack. In this quest for reconciliation between the two languages, if you, for example, consider that the health of children is paramount, that to combat obesity you need to go sport, and yet more playing fields have been sold in the last six years than ever before. That's a mark of the irreconcilable language, the short termism. Is there any value in something closer to what's replaced the Hippocratic oath, which is do no harm, which despite the horrors in the nhs, that is the covering, the mantra, the thing that dictates all behavior in medicine. Is there something that could be devised that could be a guiding principle that would reconcile the two languages?
- [75:43]
A
Thank you. Very good questions, Charles. Me first. Yes.
- [75:51]
C
So I put you on the spot there. Yes. Okay. Yeah, I mean, well, in terms of, you know, your suggestions about policy, I mean, I suppose it could be all of the above. I mean, essentially your policy response maybe would be framed by how serious a problem you think it is, whether you think it's necessary to legislate and outlaw these, you know, particular caravans being in one particular place, it might be better to sort of levy something. I think this is where the evidence comes in. So the economist would go about gathering evidence about how serious the problem is. If it's a truly serious problem, then you ban it. If it's something that you could tolerate but you'd like to have less of it, then you think about pricing it, taxing it and so on. So I guess that would frame our response.
- [76:38]
D
Having spent a wee bit of time going round and round the coast actually, till I was dizzy. I've seen quite a few of those caravan parks and they are all embedded in the local economy. So you'd be surprised how many local people derive a critical part of their income from working on them. And of course, by their nature a lot of these locations are seasonal, so they don't have access to year round income. So they're quite precarious. I very much doubt there are many caravan park owners making a fortune and it's quite difficult, particularly in parts of the coastline, away from the well known champagne coasts of Britain, for people to make an income in the winter. So that's a very tricky one and I, I think that's where we'd have to go to the common language and Find a way forward. Obviously, it's difficult to set new ones up because there are now all sorts of planning constraints and so on in place. But this is really the existing ones. And I guess there are local mitigation policies that can be put in place, like tree planting and screening and that kind of thing. And that's often done quite effectively, but they are invariably critical parts of local.
- [77:55]
A
Economy.
- [77:59]
B
Just on that point. I mean, actually, climate change is doing a certain amount of invading at the coastline. So actually a lot of these places are not only precarious economically, they're precarious physically as well. But we can remodel. I mean, I think one of the great hopes is that we can improve. If we are committed to quality and to improvement, we can make these places either more beautiful by landscaping or whatever, or actually, over time, plan to move them to locations where they don't have the same damage, but they still benefit the local economy. I'm not against economic activity in the countryside at all, but I am very clear about doing it in a way that enhances as many attributes as we can. I love your point about the Hippocratic oath, actually. I think there is something. I really feel there is a kind of moral question we're facing here, and whether it's do no harm or whether there's a positive. Just go back to the earlier question, a positive way of framing it. You know, William Morris, you know, have nothing in your house that you do not know to be beautiful and useful. I mean, that was a beautiful way of saying, you know, we can create beauty in the most utilitarian of activities. And that's the kind of principle which I think is very relevant to what you're saying.
- [79:17]
A
Thank you. Next two questions. Julius. Yes, and let me make you run around the whole lecture theatre again. I think the gentleman with the glasses at the back has had his arm up a long time, so.
- [79:36]
C
I can't help feeling you're almost talking past each other.
- [79:40]
D
This is Fiona and Giles, because I.
- [79:42]
C
Think there's a huge danger, Fiona, in you throwing out the economic.
- [79:47]
D
The.
- [79:48]
C
The terms ecosystem, natural capital.
- [79:51]
B
And it's almost a very advanced or.
- [79:53]
D
Wealthy country type notion that you're taking forward. And certainly if, if, if, as I have done, I'm working in Kenya or.
- [80:05]
C
Somewhere else and I argue for beauty.
- [80:08]
D
I'd be left out of it.
- [80:09]
B
But if I want to protect the.
- [80:11]
D
Environment and the living, then you can certainly argue about the importance of natural.
- [80:17]
B
Capital and the importance of ecosystem services.
- [80:20]
C
So I think you need all of these arguments and you Just can't just.
- [80:24]
D
Throw them away as lightly as I thought you did.
- [80:28]
A
Thank you. And this gentleman at the back.
- [80:38]
D
Hi.
- [80:38]
C
I just wanted to ask about potentially.
- [80:40]
D
One aspect of beauty, which is the idea of the packaged or the unpackaged.
- [80:48]
C
And maybe the difference between imposition and harmony vis a vis a landscape or a particular place. Something that might be conventionally beautiful, might.
- [80:59]
D
Maybe experience in a less beneficial way if it's got artificial viewing platforms, for example, and you're ushered from one place to the next. I was just wondering about that.
- [81:10]
C
Regarding the discussion we've had generally about.
- [81:13]
D
Beauty, but also in the sense that.
- [81:15]
C
Maybe by asking questions about evaluation and.
- [81:21]
D
Policy questions, the framework that we're using.
- [81:23]
A
There.
- [81:26]
C
Is naturally an imposition. You're automatically going, you're very easily going.
- [81:31]
D
To fall into that trap and whether maybe that's a clue to do with the different languages that we're using here that people have already spoken about.
- [81:40]
A
Thank you. Who'd like to go first?
- [81:42]
B
Well, I need to respond to Judith, because you're absolutely right, Judith, and I'm always very provocative when I speak. The book is much more balanced about recognizing that the natural capital arguments represented a huge step forward after the ecosystem assessment, because before that we had no way of capturing those arguments at all. I think my worry, as I've made clear though, is that beauty has been written out of the script, frankly. And as a result, with everyone embarrassed to use it, we are missing out on a huge way of capturing, you know, what I have evidence of as being the kind of things that motivate people and they're not motivated by natural capital. So of course, if you're dealing with the policy tools, you need every inch of those ecosystem assessments and natural capital. But if you're dealing with what do we value as a society, I think you need to reinstate beauty as an argument. The only slight caveat I put about the international argument is because I, I do a lot of work with the International National Trust and in a place like India, where rampant development knows no bounds, but there is actually a movement to protect Indian heritage, which is very much about beauty. But it has to be from their heart. It can't be Western imposed view. It's got to be something that they do feel passionately about, their cultural heritage, their intangible cultural heritage, as well as their tangible. But it's, you know, at a time of crisis. I agree with you. You can't just go in from outside and use. Use that word. Your point is just a really interesting one. I mean, we've been moulding beauty throughout history. You know, the Claude Glass and the, you know, sort of descriptions of tours, you know, for the people who are visiting the countryside. I mean, there's been a huge kind of packaging of beauty. But I think what moved me most was there was some work done by Cabe, the Commission on Architecture in the Built Environment, now defunct in just about five years ago. Talking to kids in Sheffield about what they felt about beauty, and they were incredibly articulate about the beauty that they found in their local environment and how much it meant to them. And it just reminded me that actually, you know, there is a place for packaged beauty and there is a kind of tradition of it, but actually there is also there are languages and motivations that seem to be pretty universal. So I kind of draw great inspiration from that.
- [84:18]
A
Thank you, Nick.
- [84:19]
D
Yeah, I'd quite like just to check if I understand the gentleman right about the packaging. Unpackaged. We have a very strange duality in Britain at the moment, where at one extreme you have places like Lundy island or the Blickling Hall Estate, National Trust property, where if you go to Blickling Estate or you go to Lundy island, you will not find any signage at all, but you will be given a map and it's up to you not to get lost. So it's actually a genuine adventure once you set foot in these places, and there are many other places like that. And then we have, when we all know them, theme parks, where, you know, there are so many, so many signs that you're colliding with them the whole time. And I'm personally a fan of the former. I think, you know, we don't live in the Serengeti. There are no wild animals who are going to get you if you take a wrong turn. And, you know, getting lost is the quickest way to learn. So I'm a great fan of freeform exploration in any green space, and I think we can learn a lot. And I think it's also that dichotomy between the gilpin, picturesque approach to beauty, where the beauty has to be framed with the right proportion of river in the foreground and the elm or the oak in the right position and a receding perspective and so on, and turning up somewhere like Galton Valley that I described earlier, which is, on the face of it, is a complete mess, a hideous mess. And yet, if you go there with a book about the history of Smeaton and Brindley and Telford, it turns into actually quite a wonderland. And in fact, I've been so mesmerized by. I've been back two or three times, so I've only ever been on the only tripper there. But it's a very interesting place indeed. And actually I find it quite beautiful in the deep sense that Fiona's talking about. I now find a deep beauty in that place because I can see so many eras overlapping, all tangled up together within 100 meters. It's also now, incidentally, it's the SUS Transnational Cycle Network route runs right through the middle of it now, straight way out to Wales. So it has this kind of linear connection with the Greenway. So, yeah, I'm not sure whether you view one way or the other packaged, unpackaged.
- [86:40]
A
Do you have a view?
- [86:44]
D
Just really talking about there's something about experiencing beauty which is usually raw and.
- [86:49]
C
Organic and not planned and not something.
- [86:52]
D
That someone's given to you and whether the framework of looking at things in terms of benefits and their costs loses that almost automatically.
- [87:05]
A
Thank you, Charles.
- [87:12]
C
Not all as intrepid as Nick, so hopefully there's kind of there's a balance in this portfolio for what different things we might want from our nature, recreational experiences, hopefully all of that.
- [87:25]
A
I'm going to take two more questions. A lady here has been had it for a long time here and anybody at the back? Have I missed anybody at the back?
- [87:33]
C
No.
- [87:33]
A
Then we'll go to this gentleman here on the left.
- [87:35]
C
Thank you.
- [87:39]
B
Thank you. I live in London, but I am a Democratic voter from Wyoming and I don't know are you aware of Kathy Young and I wish I could remember what ROAR stands for, but the artist Christo, who decided he was going to put fabric over miles and miles of a wild river in Colorado, and Kathy and her group, R O A R in small town Colorado, fought it and fought it and fought it and took him to court and fought it and took him to judges and the judges kept siding with him. And I mean, to take a beautiful wild river and cover it over with fabric and put pylons down into the earth, it was just nuts. But everybody said, oh, but it's beautiful, it's art and it'll bring tourism. Well, I don't know. What's so ironic with this hideous man who's just been elected president is that when Trump was elected, Christo decided he didn't want to fight Trump on anything. He didn't want anything to do with that administration and he's given up the project. So Trump's. But what Kathy and Rohr did was they slowed it down and with all of their taking him to court and not giving up, he found another reason to quit. And he's probably blaming Trump, but he probably doesn't want to fight them anymore because. But it worked okay.
- [89:12]
A
And.
- [89:21]
D
Fiona talked about growth and GDP being the enemy of beauty.
- [89:26]
A
And there was a time before the.
- [89:28]
D
Age of Enlightenment when societies didn't aspire towards growth.
- [89:32]
A
But in the current global environment, where.
- [89:34]
D
There'S such inequality between societies, I'd like.
- [89:36]
C
To ask the panel if they can.
- [89:38]
A
Envisage a time when societies might not aspire for growth as their overarching objective. Good questions, lse.
- [89:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, very quickly on your question, and I have a friend here in the audience who we worked together at cnp. And I mean, I would just say that was the story of our lives. Not necessarily on your case, but you just fought and fought and fought, didn't we? Again and again and again. And that's really what the environmental movement in this country has done. And I think, you know, they deserve a huge celebration because. Because they've often seen as a nuisance and fighting against something that other people think is good. But actually, that's why someone said to me the other day, why do you call it the fight for beauty? That's such an aggressive word. I said, because it bloody is. I mean, it just is. And I really wanted to tell that story as someone who's kind of been involved in it in a very direct way. So, you know, what you say is a reminder of all of that, this idea that, will we ever aspire to anything other than growth? We have to, don't we? But how are we going to make that adjustment? This is where Giles and I will hold hands and walk into the sunset. The environmental economists and Judith will make that happen. You will find, I hope, something we can genuinely say, this is how we should run our national accounts. This is how we should. It won't necessarily mean meet my complete aspirations for beauty, but I'm deliberately being, as, you know, very, very ambitious for that. But, you know, we've got to stop using gdp. We've got to stop thinking that success equals more material things. Climate change is, you know, just one, but probably the biggest force that is going to force a major reevaluation of priorities. But at the moment, we've got nowhere to go. We don't know what the. What a kind of stuff sustainable economy looks like. I mean, Nick, you picked this up at the very end of your book, don't you, about can we make that transition? You leave it in the air Hoskins actually thumped the table right at the end. I noticed you were a bit more restrained than him. But I think that's the question of our times. I think we have to. But how we'll get there, I think is a big question.
- [91:50]
C
I think one thing is we might aspire to growth but we can't assume our economy is going to deliver it. It's so. I mean there is some sense amongst some of the macro economists that the sort of growth that might have led to some of these problems that Fiona's been talking about in the latter half of the 20th century, those conditions may not repeat themselves to deliver that sort of growth. So there's all sorts of directions of attack that you can make as well as just thinking about, well, does a statistic that was developed in the early 50s to measure things and the amount of stuff that we make. I mean there's all sorts of reasons why that's not as relevant as it once was.
- [92:38]
D
I hesitate to distract from the lovely image of Fiona and Giles walking into Sustainable Sunset because that would be the perfect way to end the evening. What I can really add is that when we look around modern Britain, there are quite a few examples now of small local communities making enormous difference, a hugely proportional difference within their community. Think of topnest and transition towns or I think which market town it was that first gave up the plastic bags. One woman, where was it? Thank you. Yeah, and there's one woman, wasn't it? One woman in Modbury started that and look how that spread through now. Every supermarket in the country. Quite extraordinary idea that just took off. So it's the old Acorn story that it could well be that these initiatives are going to have to come from the bottom and spread upwards, not from governmental policy where we know they don't trickle down very well.
- [93:39]
A
Good. I'm afraid we can't take any more questions because we're out of time. I'm sure we could carry on all night. Good Questions being a beautiful audience, but I would like you to join me in thanking very much all our panel, Nick and Giles, but especially Fiona for that wonderful, fantastic, thought provoking presentation. Thank you.