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REBOOT THE FUTURE JONATHON PORRITT ANNOUNCES, ‘HOW WILL YOU REBOOT THE FUTURE?’

CAMPAIGN TO MOBILISE SCHOOLS FOR COP-26 IN GLASGOW

On Wednesday, 21st April, Reboot the Future, a UK-based NGO, launched ‘How Will You Reboot the Future?’, a multi-media project targeted at UK 14–19-year-old students to stimulate debate and action as we approach the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow later in the year.

Reboot joined forces with Forum for the Future to deliver this major new initiative. ‘How Will You Reboot the Future?’ is a project comprising a specially commissioned book, film and classroom resources inspired by the lifelong campaigning work of distinguished environmentalist, Jonathon Porritt, in his capacity as Founder Director of Forum for the Future. The materials span the individual and collective experiences of young people who reflect on the tumultuous years 2021- 2025, as they map their way toward a sustainable future.

Based on the book, ‘Rise Up’ is a suite of five films which tell the story of five young people as they describe the positive life choices, they make in 2021, which make it possible for them to help shape a fairer, more sustainable world. Each film is designed to be watched individually or as part of whole. ‘Rise Up’ is a first-time film from Director Sophie Austin and screenplay written by Beth Flintoff, based on the original book by Jonathon Porritt. Produced by Becky Burchell, the films will be accompanied by a dedicated school resources pack, freely available to download from: www.globaldimension.org.uk/rebootthefuture

Regeneration – ending the climate crisis in one generation

I came across the work of environmentalist Paul Hawken during my time as Director of Learning at Forum for the Future. In his new book published on the 21 September-2021-at the start of the autumn equinox he espouses a new way of framing the solutions to our climate crisis. It’s title is an alternative twist that might be humorous if our global crisis weren’t so depressing; his latest of nine books is called Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Paul has a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of the corporate and consumer inattention and avarice that has brought the Earth and its human and nonhuman inhabitants to today’s “Code Red” state.

It’s hard to comprehend some of the statistics around wealth and the power it has in influencing policy. The UK for example is now home to 145 billionaires, behind only China and the USA in world rankings. And London has the most billionaires of any city on earth-93 , with New York a distant second. Recent media reports(Pandora Papers) show how their financial sponsorship can seek to adversely influence some political parties on environmental and social issues.

Paul has enjoyed half a century at the forefront of thought leadership, activism, and collaboration with leading brands, all of which lays the groundwork for his advocacy for a critical global shift toward a regenerative economy.

The word “regeneration” has been bandied about increasingly in more recent times by many who sign up to the transformation agenda especially those seeking ways to develop regenerative agriculture and at the University of British Columbia – where they are making great strides towards a “regenerative university”. As one recent reviewer has argued” Hawken isn’t co-opting the word. He has a history, in fact, of creating and promulgating a cementing lexicon that leads to cultural and practical promotion through philosophy and policy. That’s what he did in 2017 with Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, and the impact it created and sustains.”

Regeneration is “a how to do it” book. But what exactly is regeneration? Hawken says. “It’s both simple and complex.”

He correctly states that we must agree on the meaning of our terms because terms like “climate change” are not accurate descriptors (the problem is global warming — our climate changes every nanosecond and always will), or as with “sustainability,” a word too vague and fuzzy to catalyse traction, leading to a movement based on them which does not seem to work.

We certainly need new measures and metrics for growth and success. Along with new parameters and more transparency. And in his view, regeneration is the most rational, albeit ambitious, option available. So, in Hawken’s words : “Regeneration is a radical new approach to the climate crisis, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation.”

A “much simpler” definition, coined by Hawken is: “Regeneration is putting life at the centre of every act and decision … an orientation … looking at what we do; what we think; what we buy; and how we interact with each other, with the natural world, and with the world of goods and services,”

He argues that regeneration is a natural part of our lives. “It’s innate to being a human being. All 30 trillion of our cells regenerate every nanosecond, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Regeneration is what we do as living beings, as a species of life on the planet. We regenerate ourselves, by taking in air, water, or food. We care for our children. We do it with our pets, do it with our garden. We care for others. We regenerate in our synagogue, church, or temple.”

According to Hawken the bottom line is this : “Life creates the conditions for life.”

Yet, “What’s happened is we have created — inadvertently, mistakenly — an economic system that is the opposite. It’s one that extracts life … an extractive economy,” Hawken argues. “If you follow the breadcrumb trail back into any supply chain, anything you buy, any service you receive, you will find that it is extracting life from the living world, from the oceans, from the land, from the forest and the soil — and from people, by the way.”

And “When you take life, you are degenerating,” he says. “Today, with business-as-usual, “We’re stealing the future from our children and their children and generations to come.”

THE PARALYSIS OF TRUTH IN PRACTICE

Epistemic vices which nullify epistemic virtues

In May 2020, I LIKE TRAINS the Leeds based indie band shared a brand new single, The Truth, which was the first single from their upcoming album, KOMPROMAT.

The inspiration behind KOMPROMAT, is a social as well as a conceptual representation of the current and ongoing theme of post truth and the rise of ‘post-truth politics’, epitomised by the increasing trend towards ignoring inconvenient facts if they get in the way of a politician’s ideological commitments or ambitions.

All of which erupted into public consciousness following Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks in 2013. The result is an album about the rise of populism, from Brexit to Trump, Cambridge Analytica to Russian interference, and for this recent release there is no more fitting introduction to this album than The Truth.

The lyrics as Dave Martin belts them out batter the ear with repeated definitions of the Truth, each seemingly taking you further away from actual reality, “the truth is no longer concerned with the facts”, “the truth is I hold all the cards here”, “the truth is I am the truth”.

A week or so ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC)delivered its latest report on the state of our planet. It was the gravest and starkest warning to date. António Guterres(the UN secretary general), called it a “code red for humanity”, adding that the “alarm bells are deafening”. The IPCC found that sea level is rising, the polar ice is melting, there are floods, droughts and heatwaves coupled to massive fires and undeniably it is human activity which is the cause.

But many still deny this truth, the same way that some insist coronavirus is a conspiracy theory hatched by right wing populist politicians or caused by 5G phone masts or aliens. All these groups are guilty of a deep form of denial and repeatedly fail to update their beliefs in the light of the evidence.
As the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland argues:

“There is another form of denial, what the philosopher Quassim Cassam calls “behavioural or practical denialism”. This is the mindset that accepts the science marshalled by the IPCC – it hears the alarm bell ringing – but still does not change its behaviour.”

And it operates at the level of governments and in individuals too. Freedland quotes the White House official who urged global oil producers to open the taps and increase production, so that motorists can buy gasoline more cheaply. And he links it to individuals, who shrug their shoulders because they believe there is nothing a single person can do to halt the climate emergency. According to Cassam. “The practical upshot is the same.”

Whether it’s the Covid pandemic or climate emergency, there is a common human shortcoming at work here. It’s wilful blindness, an intentional act of avoiding a reality that is too difficult to apprehend – and it influences much wider and diverse groups of individuals than those who noisily and publicly demonstrate on our streets. A US poll recently found that a summer of heatwaves, flooding, and wildfires – evidence that the planet is both burning and drowning – had barely shifted the public’s reaction to the climate issue.

The most often quoted definition of the word Truth is the property or state of being in accordance with facts or reality. And one of the core and allied concepts in epistemology is belief. A belief is an attitude that a person holds regarding anything that they take to be true. For instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition “snow is white”

But as we are increasingly finding, particularly in politics and in practice- truth and belief are often at odds and this has significant impacts on how we collectively approach crucial decisions- like how to tackle wicked problems such as climate change or Covid vaccination-we are seeing increasing evidence of what has been described as epistemic myopia or even worse epistemic vices.

The philosopher Quassim Cassam describes the latter in some extremely dramatic and troubling ways, particularly where they have a deeply biased impact on the practice of political and other forms of leadership. He defines epistemic vices, as character traits, attitudes or ways of thinking that get in the way of knowledge. He asserts that Epistemic vices are bad for us as knowers because of the extent that they obstruct the acquisition, retention, or transmission of knowledge. He calls this theory of epistemic vice ‘obstructivism’. Standard epistemic vices include closed-mindedness, dogmatism, wishful thinking, prejudice, and intellectual arrogance. This is a quote from one of his blogs:

“The Washington Post recently reported that President Trump ‘bragged that he made up facts’ at a recent meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. According to the Post Trump boasted about telling Trudeau that America has a trade deficit with Canada even though he had no idea whether that was true.
The dictionary defines insouciance as a casual lack of concern. What Trump displayed in his encounter with Trudeau was a casual lack of concern about the facts. His insouciance was what might be called epistemic insouciance. This looks like a straightforward example of an epistemic vice, though not one that until now has been named by philosophers.”

Doing More with Less: Ensuring Sustainable Consumption and Production

Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy

Today the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) sent out a relatively short-for them- reflection on how far we have progressed over the past 50 years on the journey towards a sustainable future . It struck me as a prescient and harsh history lesson for humanity as we creep slowly towards COP 26 in Glasgow in November. As this quote from the report highlights:

“Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns has been one of the greatest global challenges over the past fifty years.”

By any measure we have not progressed very far when we waste billions of tons of food globally, whilst at the same time I billion humans are under nourished and a further billion go to bed hungry. Even more depressing is the thought that should the global population reach 9.6 billion, then it is predicted we will need the equivalent of 3 planets to provide the natural resources needed to sustain our current lifestyles.

All is not lost, however, because as the report argues

“With the adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 12, “Ensure sustainable consumption and production,” and rising interest in the circular economy model, there is an opportunity to set systems-wide goals for all societies, recognizing that key drivers and solutions lie in our economic, financial and governance decision-making.”

I have argued along with many others that Universities in all countries bear a special responsibility about sustainability, for the following three reasons:

Higher Education as the ‘nursery of tomorrow’s leaders:’

Universities educate most of the people who develop and manage society’s institutions. For this reason, universities bear profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create an environmentally sustainable future. This clearly implies that graduates of every discipline (whether as engineers, teachers, politicians, lawyers, architects, biologists, bankers, managers, or tourist operators, etc.) will need a sound working knowledge about sustainability.

Universities as role models for society:

The world over universities are – rightly or wrongly – regarded as the centres of the most advanced knowledge. They should therefore, through their teaching and their institutional practice, embody role models of excellence and microcosms of best practice for the future .

Universities enjoy special status which incurs special obligation to society:

Higher education institutions are allowed academic freedom and a tax-free status to receive public and private resources. Society rightly expects from universities in exchange for this privileged position that they contribute as much as possible to the solution of society’s problems. Up until now, though, universities have overall not been at the forefront of implementing sustainability. A UNESCO study noted that ‘it is no accident that environmental education and, more recently, education for sustainable development, has progressed more rapidly at the secondary and primary levels than within the realm of higher education.” The main reason cited for this inability of academia to engage productively in this transdisciplinary endeavour called sustainability is that the frontiers between academic disciplines remain stoutly defended by professional bodies, career structures and criteria for promotion and advancement.

This gives us some clear indication towards what a sustainable university might look like. But let’s be even more honest. David Orr, Professor for Environmental Science at Oberlin College and one of the pioneers in applying sustainability to universities, spells it out: ‘It is worth noting that [destruction of the world] is not the work of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the result of work by people with BAs, BScs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs.’

I have just finished reading a more optimistic interpretation of our global future, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, written by UCL Professor Mariana Mazzucato. Mariana is making waves with a powerful call for a green revolution founded on deliberate and conscious changes in social values: a redirection of the entire economy, transforming production, distribution, and consumption in all sectors in favour of the common good. She advocates that the concept of “value” should find its rightful place at the centre of economic reasoning (and academic reasoning too) if we are to meaningfully respond to the question: “What future do we want?” To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the future cannot be left in the hands of cynics—or economists—who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A couple of memorable quotes from the book:

” There is certainly no lack of challenges that need a mission-oriented approach. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals outline seventeen of the greatest problems we have, from cleaning our oceans, reducing poverty and hunger to achieving greater gender equity…….one strength of the SDG’s is that they engage diverse stakeholders across the world. They identify internationally agreed grand challenges that have been chosen by broad and comprehensive consultation around the world. They offer huge opportunities to direct innovation at multiple social and technological problems to create societies that are just, inclusive and sustainable….They are problems without straightforward solutions, and so they require a better understanding of how social issues interact with political and technological ones, behavioural changes and critical feedback processes.”

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As she argues the SDGs are more difficult to accomplish than “literal” moonshots as they are more difficult to define because they involve global commons such as air and water and are affected by social, cultural and political complexities.

And a wonderful quote at the end of the book from Arundhati Roy(2020)

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”

CULTURE AND SUSTAINABILITY

As Raymond Williams now-famously said, ‘culture’ is one of the two or three most complicated words in English usage

Embedding sustainability into the higher education curriculum has been far from straightforward. Consequently, implementation has been patchy – both in terms of disciplinary spread and in terms of the understandings of sustainability A culture for sustainability can be thought of as one in which organizational members hold shared assumptions and beliefs about the importance of balancing economic efficiency, social equity and environmental accountability, and the failure to embed sustainability in HEIs suggests it has failed to become part of the culture.

This observation is supported by UNESCO’s call to integrate the values inherent in sustainable development into all aspects of learning and that most barriers to university implementation of sustainability are human rather than technical.

Culture matters in sustainable development. All the planet’s environmental problems and certainly all its social and economic problems have cultural activity and decisions – people and human actions – at their roots. Solutions are therefore likely to be also culturally based, and the existing models of sustainable development forged from economic or environmental concern are unlikely to be successful without cultural considerations. If culture is not made explicit, discussed, and argued over explicitly within the sustainability debates, it does not have power in the decision making. Yet incorporating culture in the sustainability debates seems to be a major challenge. The scientific challenge is that both culture and sustainability are complex, contested, multidisciplinary and normative concepts. The policy challenge is that a broad understanding of culture requires cross-sectoral or even transdisciplinary policies, and innovative, at times even radical modes of implementation that involve re-examination of broad-spectrum issues such as governance, democratic participation, and social equity.

I for one did not fully foresee the success of the idea of ‘Sustainable Development’ when it was introduced in 1987 by the Brundtland publication ‘Our Common Future’. Over 30 years later, the idea is still increasingly being presented as a pathway to all that is good and desirable in society and is widely adopted and frequently advocated. This was clearly illustrated at Rio+20 in June 2012 culminating in the agreement by member states to set up the sustainable development goals. Several subsequent policy commitments have cemented the idea of culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development and even placing culture at the “heart of sustainability”. For some time, the mainstream prioritised the implement of sustainable development in terms of ecological, social, and economic ‘pillars’ as confirmed at the Johannesburg Summit of 2002, which I attended, but often labelled in symbolic ways, such as people-profit-planet. However, attempts to keep these three dimensions in balance and to make sustainability a ‘win-win-win’ solution for all three remain unsatisfactory or in many people’s eyes an outcome to be sought but never found.

During a four-year investigation from 2011-15 an international team explored all three concepts to understand and to embrace their multiple meanings and connotations. The final report can be read here: “Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development” , which summarizes the main conclusions of the network

Its first chapter offers an interesting view of key concepts and presents three important roles they identify for culture to play in sustainable development. First, culture can have a supportive and self-promoting role (which they characterise as ‘culture in sustainable development’). This approach expands conventional sustainable development discourse by adding culture as a self-standing 4th pillar alongside separate ecological, social, and economic considerations and imperatives. A second role (‘culture for sustainable development’), however, advocates culture as a more influential force; it moves culture into a framing, contextualising, and mediating mode, one that can balance all three of the existing pillars and guide sustainable development between economic, social, and ecological pressures and needs. Third, they argue that there can be an even more fundamental role for culture (‘culture as sustainable development’) which sees it as the essential foundation and structure for achieving the aims of sustainable development.

Transformation with a focus on Human Value

If we are to effect transformative change towards a more sustainable future, then the policies which underpin such change must embrace and place human value at the centre of the economic life of society. Yet the adversarial character of democratic politics tends to focus more on the expectations of change than on a cogent reality. In the 2010 general election, in which I stood for the Liberal Democrats( in North Warwickshire) the party wanted “every child to receive an excellent education, to unlock the children’s potential and to ensure they can succeed in life.” Labour’s goal was ”educational excellence for every child, whatever their background or circumstances.” Conservatives pledged to “improve standards for all pupils and close the attainment gap between the richest and poorest.”

The overriding subtext was clearly the objective of addressing the educational systems inability to correct the deep inequalities in British society. The desire for change was palpable and as an educationalist I fully supported it and still do. This should be a policy objective for all political persuasions and is a key principle of the UN Sustainable Development Goals-“leave no one behind”. However, no party was able, with any sense of clarity to clearly articulate what education is for.

An effective and progressive education policy is hard to define without a clear answer. And the reason is because each party is deeply conflicted on the question. In the absence of a clear rationale then policy making becomes an exercise and a diatribe on untested nostrums- at best bright ideas based on a political ideology of change, rather than based on seeking specific human outcomes. This is particularly exemplified by the number of Education Acts passed by the UK parliament in over 50 years. There was an act in each of the following years: 1962,1964,1967,1968,1973,1975,1976,1979,1980,1981,1986(2),1988,1992,1993,1994,1996,1997,2002,2005,2006,2008,and 2011.

23 in total and many more acts with education in their title ! And over the same period there were 13 general elections and only 6 changes in government. A similar picture is possible for primary legislation on health. All of which exemplifies the increasing desire of governments to micromanage these key areas of social engagements. And a conflict of political aspiration to leave teaching to teachers and medicine to doctors.

All of these acts of parliament were clearly ineffectual substitutes for “intention and purpose” in relation to services that education and health professionals are naturally motivated to provide. A more transformative approach, left to them, might bring more benefits than those policies based on crude numerical targets.

Ireland is in the news again!

But it’s not only about the ongoing border dispute over Brexit this time, important though this is. It is about the future of universities, and the impact of marketisation.

Headlined- Irish president: ‘market-driven’ universities face ‘ruination’.

Michael Higgins warned last week that universities ‘have suffered attrition of range and depth, loss of interdisciplinary exchange, leading in too many cases to a degradation of the very scholarship and teaching for which they were established”.

The president of the Republic of Ireland has issued a stark warning that the “ruination” of the university tradition is “at hand”, with scholarship and teaching threatened by both authoritarian politicians and a subservience to the “utilitarian reductionism” of market ideology.

Speaking at a conference on “Academic Freedom and Intellectual Dissent” on 8 June, Higgins warned that it was a “perilous juncture in the long history of the academy”.

“Universities as sites, sources and experiences of learning, have for several decades now been under continuous attack”. He argued that free inquiry has been under pressure for decades from a drive to turn universities into “market-driven” organisations.

“Such adjustments have usually been rationalised as an inevitable search for relevance, often in the name of market forces and the inexorable drive towards a utilitarian reductionism that is now so pervasive”.

An ideology of “unrestrained market dominance” has taken hold, he said, and significantly diminished the space in universities to ask any questions “beyond ones of a narrow utility”.

The teaching of economics, for example, had degraded from questions of “moral economy”, through “political economy”, to now merely being a “technical training in measurement”.

He took aim at university presidents and rectors who “often describe and introduce themselves as CEOs of multimillion-euro enterprises rather than as academics first and foremost”.

Whilst universities had for centuries spearheaded new movements of thought, new paradigms of human existence – this raison d’être was now being undermined and under threat.

Higgins also made an important suggestion which in my view all universities should adopt:

“Teach a module on the nature and role of the university, including the cornerstone of academic freedom, to every incoming university student, raising awareness of the importance of such freedom.”

Sustainability needs new approaches to adult learning: a role for citizens’ assemblies.

Adult learning for citizenship needs to respond to rapid global change which is economic, political, social, cultural and ecological. The destruction of the environment, and the various initiatives and actions, by individuals, communities, organisations and movements like the Climate Change school ‘strikers’ and Extinction Rebellion, set a bold and urgent context to repurposing adult citizenship education and lifelong learning.

Political parties of all colours are using the citizenship debate to define not simply our rights as citizens but, more significantly, our responsibilities as active agents of change. This is set against a background of declining participation in the democratic process in both Europe and the USA. Yet our political systems seem incapable of responding at scale and urgency to this democratic deficit and the planetary existential crisis.

How should adult education respond?

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals and associated targets represent an unprecedented opportunity to learn how to tackle the root causes of climate change, biodiversity loss, extreme poverty and put the world on a more sustainable path. And their implementation is central to the reform of our concept of citizenship and adult learning. But how should we learn about them and put them into practice as adults?

We all expect our citizen’s rights to include such things as access to clean water and air, along with high-quality education and health provision. However, I suspect for many who sign up for adult education in art appreciation or horticulture (or, in my case, who are struggling with Italian classes and ballroom dancing) it means very little. Indeed, there is much evidence that any mention of citizenship issues when we are enjoying our leisure activities tends to be unwelcome.

Nonetheless, no matter how we might feel about these existential issues, humanity is increasingly and often unknowingly, faced with a widening array of complex issues in the 21^st century; issues such as racial and religious intolerance, disinformation and fake news, aerial pollution, terrorism and widening inequality and poverty. And when we vote on such issues as responsible citizens in national elections, we have relatively limited understanding about how such issues are contributing to an unsustainable world, and how they can be resolved.

Sustainability needs new approaches.

Although the concept of sustainability relates to the whole biosphere, at its core it is concerned with sustainable human lifestyles. To achieve such lifestyles, we all need to make decisions about a whole complex of interacting requirements, for food, housing, livelihood, health, transport etc., where decisions about one aspect can have unexpected, and perhaps undesired, effects on others and on our wider biophysical environment. Choosing to work from home can save transport fuel, but could use an even greater amount of extra fuel for home heating. To be effective, we need to learn to consider our whole lifestyle system, not just separate activities.

The journey towards sustainability is a ‘wicked’ problem involving complexity, uncertainty, multiple stakeholders and perspectives, competing values, lack of end points and ambiguous terminology. In a word, dealing with sustainability means dealing with a mess and most people avoid messes because they feel ill equipped to cope.

The health, agricultural, financial and ecological problems we now face are qualitatively different from the problems for which existing scientific, economic, medical and political tools and educational programmes were designed.

Without the right tools, learners faced with these wicked problems may fall back on the same old inappropriate toolbox with at best, disappointing outcomes. These approaches are as much about ‘problem finding’ and ‘problem exploring’ as they are about problem solving.

Why citizens’ assemblies could be important forums for adult learning

My contention along with many others is that learners cannot deal with the wicked problems of sustainability without learning to think and act systemically. This is also supported by the growing use of Citizen’s Assemblies (a form of deliberative democracy) as a means of supporting decision making in complex areas of social and environmental concern.

A citizens’ assembly:

is formed from the citizens of a modern state to deliberate on an issue or issues of national importance;
has members who are randomly selected;
uses a cross-section of the public to study and learn about the options available to the state on certain complex questions;
proposes answers to these questions through rational and reasoned discussion and the use of various methods of inquiry such as directly questioning experts.

These assemblies aim to reinstall trust in the political process by taking direct ownership of decision-making and could, if used more frequently and sensitively, support active citizens as agencies for change. They could also enhance wider learning and understanding within civil society based on empirical evidence rather than being based on political dogma and ideology.

https://epale.ec.europa.eu/en/blog/sustainability-needs-new-approaches-adult-learning-role-citizens-assemblies

HOW ALL LIFE IS INTERCONNECTED AND WHY IT MATTERS

There is currently a burgeoning literature on our life support system-the biosphere. Moreover, it is coming at a time when we are being alerted to an eco-apocalyptic countdown but with little understanding of how and when a global tipping point will impact on our very survival. For the first time in our history, we can now draw on a compendium of scientific research that not only warns of this impending crisis, but which also tells us how to deal with it. Yet political inertia coupled with limited understanding of the biophysical limits to our life support systems puts a massive obstacle in the way.

Tom Oliver, an Ecologist at Reading University explores this issue in a new book –The Self Delusion-and explains why we need to grasp that we are part of this eco system and not independent individuals. The idea of the self as a relatively closed system is a delusion that has often conferred advantage but is now a dangerous trap. Moving through advances in science with valuable clarity, Oliver tells us why.

Bacteria and fungi inhabit our bodies, their 38tn cells outnumbering ours. A human mouth contains over a thousand species. Genes pass between them. New species invade. Many are part of the functioning of our bodies. Even inside our cells there are mitochondria, energy-generating organs inherited from bacteria that fused with our single-celled ancestors two billion years ago. Even feelings and actions, which we might think define our identity, are not necessarily simply our own. Bacteria make a difference to moods and depression. Alarmingly, there are parasites that assist their own life cycles by modifying their hosts’ behaviour, for example toxoplasma, which makes rats behave recklessly and expose themselves to predation. People who carry this organism are more likely to be involved in traffic accidents.

Oliver argues persuasively that science now demands this change but is a little less convincing on how we transform our current belief systems. Many of which are currently deeply dependent on the consumerist idea of self. An idea spread via the dominant western capitalist ideology across the globe. Advertising presents consumers with visions of their selves enhanced by the possession of each new commodity or ability. The structures that reinforce this kind of self are formidable; nevertheless, Oliver hopes that we may be approaching a tipping point. The science that finds the outside world at work in all our components of selfhood is pulling us that way, as is the immensity of the ecological crisis.

Oliver however seems somewhat exasperated that humanity seems incapable of falling into line with the science. To Oliver, initially, this stubbornness resembles that of the flat-earthers who refused to accept the Copernican revolution.

This individualistic idea of self has had great advantages, in both evolutionary and moral terms; care for the self is a primal motive for ingenuity in finding food, shelter and reproductive success. But Oliver calls it a white lie, an adaptive delusion. This also reflects some of the cognitive science studies which are now beginning to influence our understanding of human behaviour.

We are facing an existential crisis; a pending Armageddon which threatens our very existence on planet earth because of our unsustainable lifestyles. And, yet humanity has so far failed to respond to this threat at scale and with urgency. Rolf Jucker’s recent book- Time to Live Complexity: Reflections on science, self-illusions, religion, democracy, and education for the future.
frames this issue from the standpoint of future proofing our education systems. Its premise originates from the fact that intelligence and rationality are far from perfectly correlated. This cognitive dissonance between intelligence and rational beliefs and action is a major issue for how we perceive the world. Our education systems need to develop our understanding of how intelligence can be a tool for both propaganda and truth-seeking based on the ground-breaking work of Kahneman (2011). Cognitive scientists like Kahneman divide our thinking into two categories: system 1: intuitive, automatic, fast thinking that may be prey to unconscious biases; and system 2: slow, more analytical, deliberative thinking. According to this view, called dual-process theory, many of our irrational decisions come when we rely too heavily on system 1 thinking, allowing unconscious biases to cloud our judgment. Studies by the Canadian psychologist Keith Stanovich (1993) have elucidated that these cognitive biases are often more prevalent in those with higher intelligence quotients than those with lower ones. Stanovich calls this dysrationalia: this raises some fundamental issues about our conceptions of intelligence and helps explain the huge divides in our opinions and beliefs on climate change and our inchoate relationship with the deteriorating biosphere. As Harold Glasser(2018) has concluded:

The upshot is that as a species, we tend to overestimate our own rationality and vastly underestimate the role of chance . When System 1 is well suited to the environment this marriage between the two systems generally functions symbiotically. When this is not the case, as when the Dominant Guiding Metaphors do not fit the current state of the planet or our highest aspirations, the relationship can be toxic or even antibiotic.

As Gandhi presciently noted, “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” Meeting these exalted goals for our species, however, requires learning more about how we think, learn, and make decisions.

Carbon Choices

The common sense solutions to our climate and nature crises

Guest Blog by Neil Kitching

Geographer and energy specialist Neil Kitching has published Carbon Choices on the common-sense solutions to our climate and nature crises. Here Neil outlines five common-sense principles to tackle climate change and considers the community and social implications of the changes that are required.

In my book, I identify five common sense principles to tackle climate change:

Be fair across current and future generations
Price carbon pollution
Consume carefully, travel wisely
Embrace efficiency, avoid waste
Nurture nature

Community is a theme that runs across these. Climate change can be tackled by governments, business, or individuals; but communities can aggregate individual action to place pressure on, or support, action by government and business.

For example, when the rush to erect wind farms was at its peak, Local Energy Scotland helped the village of Fintry to negotiate with the multi-national developer. The community now owns one of the 15 turbines erected. This far-sighted decision brings a steady flow of income into the village – to refurbish community owned buildings, give energy advice to householders and to install home insulation. The wind farm developer benefitted from engaging with a supportive community. But community energy requires time, money, effort, and patience, and is not always successful. Its growth has been hampered by constant changes in the available subsidies.

Not everyone has the time, skills, or inclination to develop community energy. But most schemes also need financial support and one way of raising this is through crowdfunding campaigns. These can be promoted to provide people with a vested interest in local developments. The best schemes also return some of the ‘profits’ to local communities.

In my local town of Dunblane, a social enterprise has set up Weigh Ahead. Its aim is to eliminate the need for packaging, particularly single-use plastics. The shop weighs the customer’s own containers, fills them with goods such as rice or pasta, and then re-weighs them to calculate the amount due. A charity runs the shop and local people contributed to its start-up costs through a crowd funding campaign. Again, the aim is to provide a socially beneficial service.

In my view, community environmentalists are well placed to put pressure on politicians and businesses and to mobilise local people to do things that impact their lives and local environment. Examples include community litter picking, tackling invasive species, local food projects, and encouraging local biodiversity through woodlands, ponds, and gardens.

Amidst all the bad news, these community initiatives demonstrate that there are grounds for hope – this popular science book concludes with a green action plan for government, business, and individuals to make better Carbon Choices.

Carbon Choices can be bought on Amazon or direct from the author – further information can be found at www.carbonchoices.uk