GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
A Hope in Hell, with Jonathon Porritt
This week we talk to the writer, broadcaster and campaigner Jonathon Porritt. For over 30 years, Jonathon has provided strategic advice to governments, NGOs and companies on sustainability.
He founded Forum for the Future, was co-chair of the Green Party and Director of Friends of the earth. He was Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission until 2009. His latest book, Hope in Hell is a powerful ‘call to action’ on the Climate Emergency.
In this episode we talk to Jonathan about his book, Hope in Hell, and issues including ‘climate doomism’, personal resilience and optimism, nature-based solutions, politics, food, and inter-generational equity.
Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of nature-based solutions, the necessity for economic reform, and the unyielding imperative for innovative change amid the climate crisis.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Hello, hello, everyone listening to us today. You are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul and….
Speaker 3:And this is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. So this podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode, we're going to talk to one of the world's leading writers, thinkers and campaigners on sustainable development, jonathan Poyret.
Speaker 3:So for over 30 years Jonathan has provided strategic advice to governments, ngos, international companies on sustainability. He founded Forum for the Future, was co-chair of the Green Party, director of Friends of the Earth and the chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. And after all of that, and on top of all of that, he's written a whole host of books, including his latest book, hope in Hell, which is a powerful call to action on the climate emergency. So, Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Damla and myself.
Speaker 4:Not at all. I'm looking forward to a cheery conversation. We're going to try and keep it as upbeat as possible, aren't we? Steve?
Speaker 3:Well, I think we will try, we'll do our best.
Speaker 2:So you're going to challenge the subject and the heavy subject, and we will be upbeat. Okay, I'm in for it. So, to kick us off, jonathan, would you be able to tell us what you have been focusing on recently and give us an introduction to Hope in Hell?
Speaker 4:Sure. So, as Steve mentioned, I've done sort of nearly 30 years' worth of work now in the space, advising companies and governments and all the rest of it, and that is actually coming to an end by the end of this month. I won't be doing any corporate sustainability work because I want to focus on my campaigning work, because I joined the Green Party back in 1974. So I've been at it for a lot longer than 30 years. By the way, steve, I'm sorry to say but I wrote Hope in Hell primarily for two reasons One, because the idea of trying to balance the despair we feel at the state of the earth and the need to retain authentic hope in the face of all of that shocking stuff is difficult. It's really hard that balancing act.
Speaker 4:And secondly, I also wanted to remind a lot of my colleagues in the sort of climate and sustainability community that it's not about the environment in the first instance. Climate change is not an environmental issue. It makes me mad when I hear people describe it as that. It's about a lot more and you can't do a good job on climate unless you're prepared to take into account that much bigger context, to think about the relationship between climate change and democracy, between climate change and human rights, between climate change and the way we manage the earth to produce the food we need, et cetera, et cetera. It is the classic intersectional kind of challenge that a lot of organizations fail to rise to and are far too limited and reductionist in their approach to how they think about the climate.
Speaker 3:Great thanks, jonathan. So, turning to the book and there's quite a few sections that we're going to stay quite close to the book, I think for the first bit of this discussion, if that's okay. There's a section early in the book called, which is all about telling the truth and facing the reality, and there's a really interesting section where you talk about extreme climate, doomism and how it actually risks being counterproductive, and you have a discussion around whether it's hope or optimism that we're starting to strive for. But, to quote Gramsci, I mean in your own words, how do we continue to live without illusions, but without becoming disillusioned from your perspective?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, I do refer to this phenomenon of extreme climate doomism often captured by those who say the collapse is now completely inevitable and all the work we should do should be to prepare for life after the collapse. To me that's extreme doomism. But on the other hand, I have to admit I'm getting more and more pissed off with some of the completely facile so-called solutionism that is out there, where you talk so much about the easily available solutions, technologies that would help us address climate change, that you don't actually refer to the political backdrop against all of which that needs to happen, and that bugs me a bit.
Speaker 4:Stubborn optimism is probably my least favourite phrase, although I love the way people conjure it up to help maintain their energy and inspirational creativity, but it's not enough.
Speaker 4:So for me, there is a real sorry to come back to it but a real balancing act there. I want to hear people tell the truth, and the truth is deeply painful. If you're not just a bit downcast by the truth, then your brain isn't working or you don't want to hear what the implications of that truth really are. But once you've done that, then get into the whole story about how we need to address this now with a completely different sense of urgency, fully aware of the political realities, fully aware of the power of the fossil fuel industry that we're up against. So for me, solutions still. Of course, that's been my life's work for the last 30 years, but contextualised much more realistically in terms of understanding the nature of the forces that are now trying to do us down. Sorry if that sounds like a little bit of paranoia about being done down by the fossil fuel incumbency, but frankly that's what's going on in the world out there.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe we can also connect this with our next question, because when you say we actually don't see or don't talk about the politics behind it, we also don't talk about the economic system behind it. We have to face it right up front and deal with it. And in your book, nature-based solutions feature extensively in hope, in health, offering the brilliant win-win of reducing emissions and addressing the biodiversity crisis at the same time. Yet some still shy away from pushing them to the fore. So this will be a rhetorical question after we've talked this. But why do you think some are so recite about using nature as part of our climate toolkit?
Speaker 4:I think we probably all know the answer to that, don't we? The truth is that nature-based solutions do allow for proper economic return, but they don't allow for the kind of crazy profit-driven business enterprises which so much of our current capitalist system depends on. So if you talk about the engineering solutions or engineering answers to some of these problems, businesses love them because that's all high tech. It's engineering. It's putting stuff in the ground, it's pouring concrete, it's sourcing raw materials, it's building complicated supply chains tons of good opportunities to cream off those profits to keep shareholders happy, whereas nature-based solutions don't really carry the same level of economic cloud. They don't lend themselves to that kind of crazy profit-earing economic activity.
Speaker 4:And that's, I think, why nature-based solutions are still something of a neglected portfolio when you think about ways in which we need to address this especially as we know, in the not-too-distant future we're going to have to start thinking about ways of dragging some of that CO2 back down out of the atmosphere, having put it up there, and that's going to be a really difficult challenge for us to face.
Speaker 3:Damla didn't take us down the whole restructuring capitalism in a whole dynamic new way, and we could do that. But if we could measure the economic impact of all the co-benefits of nature-based solutions, and they used to help pretty amazingly, don't they?
Speaker 4:They do, they do. And if you want to put a money value to them, okay, go ahead and do it. It makes you feel better, as a kind of God, to say, in capitalists. That's good. As long as the dollar sign is big enough and you're happy enough, fine, I don't care. It doesn't make the case for nature-based solutions any stronger, but it does provide some reassurance, I guess, to those who can only think with a dollar sign in front of their eyes.
Speaker 3:Mind you, it does remind me, jonathan, of a piece of research WWF did, I'm sure you know, where they tested different messages to potential donors amongst the public, and when they put a financial value on biodiversity, the level of donorships went down rather than the level of the public.
Speaker 3:So it's really interesting, so I wanted to ask you a question about a section in the book that absolutely I had just never heard it before. It totally threw me, and it was where there was a draft speech from Margaret Thatcher that talked about energy efficiency of all things, and planting trees and needs combat deforestation, and it was spiked by the then Chancellor, nigel Lawson, which I was amazed at. I had no idea that had happened, but it just shows that organized climate denial goes back a long way, doesn't it? And I'm sure it's something you've tracked.
Speaker 4:Yes, now it does go back a long way back into the 80s, and you can see it's malign influence from that point on. There is a really fascinating chronology here, because Jim Hansen sort of very famous scientist who was one of the first climate scientists to speak out and give evidence to Congress and so on when the oil companies realized the implications of that becoming the scientific norm, as it were, and decision makers being increasingly persuaded that this was going to require significant interventions on behalf of the political system, the oil companies mobilized themselves at that point to spend the next 20 years obscuring the science of climate change, casting doubt upon it, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to leave people more confused. And if you track it back, that's the process that we've been living through. I think most of that's gone away now. There are some people and populist politicians, unfortunately prominent amongst them, but by and large, people now understand that we've got a serious challenge on our hands which we have to address.
Speaker 4:But that denialism in those early days very powerful In fact, that was Nigel Lawson, as Chancellor, telling his Prime Minister it would be dangerous for her reputation to lend her authority to that kind of lefty stuff, and from his perspective, of course, what that meant was markets would be more constrained by governments needing to intervene to regulate, to deal with climate change. That would be the case if they were just left to their own devices. So it's a very powerful pro-market neoliberal. The whole story about the nature of today's capitalism. They're nakedly for us to see in terms of the comments on her speech. It is fascinating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I've just come back in Dalton for a second, and then over to you. It reminds me also, Jonathan, of the quote I always used to love to use about Margaret Thatcher. Hence, we might drift into painting her as an environmentalist. There was this quote that she said on the start of the Falklands War, where she said, after you've been dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's good to have a war to get your teeth into.
Speaker 4:Yes, Well, we didn't have any illusions about the depth of her greenness when I was director of Fremzy Earth back in the 1980s. I can tell you we celebrated it while it was there and it was quite useful, but it was very short-lived.
Speaker 2:Well, what I hear from you, Jonathan, was a little bit more hopeful tone, that's saying that denialism, climate denial, is not with us that much anymore, but let's come to the day and talk about the present time. Is it really? Because maybe it's not that much blunt anymore, but I kind of feel like it just turned itself into a more sneaky position. So the denial is still solid in there, but it's not the denial of climate change, but about who causes it or how to tackle it or what we've done. So this may be harder and harder to combat with. So it is a signature of populists like Millay and Trump climate denial. But also it is a signature of all the oil industry, Erdogan in Turkey, I mean. They all talk about that Like something that we still have time, like something we can just change. Ok, we can just give more carbon emissions in the coming 10 years and then we will change and everything is going to be fine. But that's not the case. So what is your assessment of the politics of climate change as we enter 2024?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's not a happy picture, is it? Damla, I must admit. And that whole link between populism, right wing xenophobic, misogynistic, nationalist populism and anti-climate is very dangerous. And the real proof point for that this year is going to be the elections to the European Parliament. You can just see how many right wing parties are lining up now to build campaigns which will, in part, attack the current policies of the EU to address climate change, amongst other things. So I'm worried about that.
Speaker 4:But what I'm very worried about it but what I put into the scales, as it were, to give us a bit of comfort on the other side, is what's happening with public opinion. I mean, our Prime Minister here in the UK has tried to make a bit of space for himself by posturing as a more climate-skeptic Prime Minister. There's been no pickup of that amongst the voting public here in the UK. They just think he's a bit of a knob, and the idea that this anti-climate positioning is going to appeal to lots and lots of voters is very misjudged. If you look at the opinion polls in America, which has, after all, experienced a pretty astonishing number now of climate-induced disasters, the opinion polls in America show quite clearly that they're not persuaded that climate change can just be waved away with a kind of crazy rhetorical flourish from Donald Trump or DeSantis or whatever else it might be. So I think you've got to set these two things side by side to try and work out where we can get encouragement about shifting perceptions of climate change.
Speaker 3:So switching tack a little bit, jonathan, and we're recording this just after Christmas, so people will have overindulged quite a bit Food, and you've written a lot about food and a huge amount actually. In fact, I remember I think it might have been your second book oh, I don't know, it's definitely when you were friends there but you've talked about dietary change, regenerative farming, the global commodities market you and I've talked about before, and in your book and hope in hell, you also reference the space where new technologies are coming to play and novel proteins, and it's just a fascinating space, I think, the future of food. So, from your perspective, what does humanity's future diet look like? And also, just out of interest, to what degree is that a space where the market is playing quite a significant role?
Speaker 4:Yeah Well, as we head into the January I think the January, how will you pronounce it Some of the sort of signals are a little bit downbeat. People are expecting fewer people to accept the challenge of the January than did in 2023. This year. There's a bit of a sort of trope developing, which saying that we've seen the whole vegan thing burst into life, achieve a certain amount of cut through, and now it's going into a verse again. I don't think it's like that.
Speaker 4:Personally, I think a lot of people have come to the conclusion that our diets are a major contributing factor to so many of the difficulties the planet is up against now. Not just the climate story because of the 30% of emissions that come from farming, but so much of today's environmental problems. If you look at pollution of our rivers in particular, so many of the welfare issues which are hugely important to many, many millions of people around the world, there are so many reasons for us to reduce our consumption, in particular, of meat. But to look at the nature, the more balanced nature of the diets that that would entail, and if you look at the responses from young people, I think it's fair to say that there will be much greater readiness to move away to less meat intensive diets and to embrace some of the amazing new quality plant-based foods which are now on the market. And, as you say, steve, people have spotted that and they won't give up on that.
Speaker 4:The quality of produce becoming available now, products becoming available now, improves all the time and for me that's really important and that will lead to a more balanced debate about how do we stop some of the worst excesses of modern industrialized farming, particularly the meat-based side of it. Intensive factory farming is something that we ought to eliminate from the face of the earth altogether. How do we move away from that towards better diets that are now available to us? And, final point, sorry to bang on about it how do we do it in a way that is just, is fair, because unfortunately, a lot of the alternatives to today's fast food, ultra-processed diets that we have are more expensive than the available product lines available to most people in the supermarkets, the corner shops and so on. So we've got to make this an issue of social justice as well as an issue of more sustainable land use patterns.
Speaker 2:Well, when you talk about this in this context the food eating it is also kind of about our relationship with life itself. I mean, how do we consume food, how much some are consuming and how much some are not? And it's also about something that triggers the consumerism debate and in our DNS agency network, we'd like to think, is we are showing that creative communications is about moving beyond consumerism to communications for good. So what role does communications play, and are we destined to have to move to a post consumer society to achieve genuine sustainable development, including our food?
Speaker 4:Well, that's about the number of it, damla, I must say. And yeah, I did a film for TV nearly 20 years ago now which had the title Beyond Consumerism. So I've been thinking about this for a long time and of course, the trouble is that we haven't been very smart about distinguishing between patterns of consumption, which we're all involved in and can either exercise responsibly or not, and consumerism, which is essentially an ideological construct which has served the interests of capitalism very well for the best part of five decades, and it's a very, it's a critical part of the whole capitalist economy. Without those consumerist drivers, some of the profits that accrue through that consumption driven economy wouldn't be there. So again and I think you were hinting at this before, damla we have to be much more realistic about the economics that lie behind consumerism.
Speaker 4:It's nothing to do with making people's lives better or happier or healthier or brighter or whatever else it might be. It is just simply a way of ratcheting up the profit opportunities for people in a consumption driven economy, and it doesn't matter whether that consumption is for good or for bad as far as their concern, as long as you can turn it to good effect in terms of the capitalist precepts. So, again, strip away some of the naivety in this debate. I suppose I've come back to this two or three times now. There's a lot of naivety in the green movement about what makes different systems tick, what makes the meta system of capitalism tick and how we have to engage with that if we want to get any serious progress on so many of these different issues.
Speaker 3:Brilliant Thanks, Jonathan. So with that ringing endorsement of the work we do every day, Damla, hanging in the air, I've almost got the last question. There's a great line in Hope and Hell, Jonathan. Which is the best place to find hope is inside yourself. So we're almost at the end of this discussion, but can you explain that line for us a bit more, Maybe to give us all a bit more hope as we go into the future?
Speaker 4:I do think this is really important, steve, because there are a lot of people who say, oh gosh, you're so gloomy, jonathan, and I say, no, I'm not, but we need help here. We need to know why we can still be hopeful, and my answer to that is you can only be hopeful if you've genuinely done the hard work to understand the nature of the predicament we're in, if you genuinely looked at the contributions that you yourself might be making to that, and if you have genuinely understood that the only reason why you're entitled to hope is depending on the action that you take. If you're not taking any action, or you're not taking the portion of action, then you don't deserve hope, because otherwise those who would have us continue pretty much as a business as usual rush to the edge of the abyss, where I know we're trying to end on a hopeful note shouldn't bring in the abyss at this stage, but at least if we don't do this through action, then hope becomes a rather dangerous and possibly escapist illusion.
Speaker 2:Well, so to end with a positive note, final question Our network is ironically called Do Not Smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:The name of your, of this initiative. Do Not Smile. That made me smile because I thought good, good Lord, irony in an international network of communications agencies. I love it. So what makes me smile is when my sense of good communications persuades me that this is a doable transition that we're facing, and I'll just give you one tiny example. So my favorite book of all time is the Lorax by Dr Seuss. That book was part of my early induction into Green Ideas 50 years ago. I love it to bits and every time I see people referring to it and hear about parents reading it with their children, I think to myself there's another little bit of the Lorax magic getting people to think differently.
Speaker 3:Jonathan, that's a wonderful close. We were on the edge of the abyss, but the Lorax has brought us back wonderfully, and I just want to thank you so much for talking to us today. I mean the idea, in particular, of looking inside yourself to figure out whether you deserve the hope that you've written about in the latest book. I think it's really powerful actually, and I think would look quite nice on a t-shirt. Just thank you again so much and Damla over to you.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, jonathan, to be with us today, and so thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile Network of Agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes while we're talking to more amazing people like Jonathan about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. See you, Damla.
Speaker 2:See you, Steve.
Speaker 1:Good Guys, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Conner, brought to you by the DNS Network.
