Transition Culture

20 Mar 2014

Sophy Banks: Climate change – if we were rational, we’d have it sorted by now.

Has the climate debate stalled? Does extreme weather in the UK mean we’re talking about it more or less? When’s a good time to try to make the connections between climate change and floods? And is there anything Inner Transition has to offer to the questions about how and when to have these conversations?

Yesterday the Inner Transition group in Totnes ran a public event called “Weathering Change – a chance to talk about the weather”. We planned the event back in January just as the gales were starting to blow which took out the railway line by the coast, and the lashing rain was starting to build the large sea which still lies over the Somerset Levels. [This picture (left, below) was taken from the train, showing the Levels now more like a sea.]

As the floods and disruption worsened many people I talked to seemed really enthusiastic about the event – and I started to worry about numbers – what to do if forty people come? We offered guidelines for hosting a conversation to the local Transition Streets groups, imagining it might be a conversation others would want to have.

In fact just 8 people turned up, most already involved with Inner Transition. We had a rich and deeply connecting evening talking about how the weather has impacted us practically as well as at a feeling level. As has happened for me before, hearing others and having a space outside my daily life to be heard, enabled me to reach a deeper sense of how much feeling the changing weather brings up.

We also spoke about how we manage our responses in order to go on living. I could let myself feel how much anger I have at the destructive behaviour of our politicians and business “leaders” that I just don’t get in touch with – if I let all the anger through and tried to act on it I would burn out really fast. We acknowledged that we also live in a state of denial some of the time, carrying our lives on as usual.

Last week I was invited to be part of the conversations at a conference called “Breaking the Deadlock: why the climate debate has stalled”. It brought together academics and researchers, “practitioners” – those involved on the ground of public engagement around climate change, and a couple of people involved in energy policy from the UK and Scottish governments. The aim of the conference was to look at whether “psychosocial approaches” can help move the debate on, starting with the interesting question of what kind of thing a human being is.

Underneath most ideas about our world are implicit assumptions about what humans are like and how we behave – and they often reflect our own inaccurate self perception. Two common misperceptions I’ve come across:

In classical economics humans are assumed to be totally rational, so that when they have full knowledge of a (supposedly perfect and fair) marketplace they will make rational choices. While the economic theory relies on this corporations and advertisers make good use of the fact that people are much more swayed by their emotions, identity, aspirations and aversions, and use this effectively to sell us stuff.

The second example is in movements for change which assume that once people get information they will take action based on a rational analysis of that information. “If I show you a film about peak oil or climate change you’ll join Transition to do something about the problem.” Many people who pioneer Transition may well be like this – when I heard about peak oil put together with climate change I changed the direction of my life. But I can see that for most people this isn’t how it works – there’s a long inner process between hearing information that can be shocking and overwhelming, making sense of it, and coming to some new way of acting in the world.

Here is one person’s definition of a psycho-social approach, and the insights it provides about how humans really work:

• Our inner worlds are powerfully determined by emotions and the need to manage them, including defending against things which feel overwhelming.
• We construct our inner world and understand the outer world through narratives and stories.
• Humans are inconsistent and contradictory rather than rational and consistent.
• Our sense of self and our behaviour is largely influenced by our social context and its norms, frames and values.

It was great to meet up with other “practitioner” organisations, including the Climate Psychology Alliance, Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN, who are developing an event to help places affected by flooding talk about what’s happened and link it to Climate Change) and Carbon Conversations.

Carbon Conversations designed an in depth process supported by a trained facilitator and workbook to give information and explore responses to Climate Change in facilitated small groups. Thousands have been through the process, and after the small number who came to the Weathering Change event I wonder whether we really need a smaller trusted group to open this emotional territory.

I read an article by Carbon Conversations founder Ro Randall several years ago, which described its focus on the process of loss, to help people work through the “Tasks of Mourning” as defined by psychologist J Worden from his model of loss. These include

• acknowledging the reality of the loss,
• working through grief,
• creating a new identity in the changed circumstances,
• and redirecting the energy of the old attachment to new relationships.

Looking at my own process I can see that the third task alone involved changing my work, living in a different place, starting a new relationship, renegotiating all my friendships – some of which I’ve lost as well as new ones I’ve found – and learning totally new skills like growing organic veg. All of this happened without a single gram of carbon being saved. It took a lot of time and internal energy. But it’s the foundation for all the changes in the way that I now live.

At the conference I could feel my disappointment that those working with limited models sometimes think that their way is the best. I’ve found that any model you use shows you a different facet of the whole picture. If we focus on loss and grief we may forget that actually the system we’re losing is in many ways more like a self destructive addiction than a beloved friend. Yes it’s supported life for many countries and many people, but only through huge destruction of our natural world, of many other cultures, and the creation of huge inequality. So an addiction lens helps us to see something else – that the end of the industrial growth system potentially has huge benefits if we can find a different system that’s rooted in something more healthy.

I found it really helpful that one of the key speakers at the conference gave us a much more complete overview of ways of understanding and taking action in the world. [It looked to me very like Wilber’s four quadrants, which I’ve also used to help teach a complete and integrated understanding of healthy and destructive human systems.] The four quadrants can roughly be defined as inner / outer and individual / collective. Here’s an abbreviated version of the model:

The Quadrant Approach To Engagement (Renee Lertzman, PhD)

Emotional experience Feelings, construction of meaning, defence mechanisms, denial, narrative, empathy, dialogue, motivational interviewing Activities: conversation / support groups, qualitative research, workshops, leadership development, arts	Behavioural Movitiations, reasoning, probabilities, levers and drivers, cognitive processes, rationality, triggers, shift, switch, incentives, proactive change, quantitative research Activities; Behaviour change programmes, energy efficiency, utlitities, transport (incentives / taxes), employee engagement
Socio-cultural – World views, ethics, ideologies, beliefs, messaging, frames and values based engagement Activities: faith based programmes, public opinion polls Contexts: marketing, political messaging, policy segmentation,	Systems Collaboration, design, social practices, systems thinking, resilience, infrastructure, solutions focus Social innovation projects, pu blic / private partnerships, community based projects, participatory design, piloting Activities; Resource issues (regional / watershed),

Renee, who brought this model suggested that these different modes of engagement tend to operate only within their own set of systems which then limits and weakens their practice, since the reality is that humans are operating in all four quadrants all the time. This strongly reflects what I’ve seen particularly in the two major movements for positive change that I’ve been involved with. In the personal growth movement the focus starts with personal inner experience – “The change starts with what’s inside me, to make positive change in the world I need to heal myself first”. Political and environmental change movements take the opposite view: “We can only act within the systems around us – the systems need to change before people can change”

For me this is a classic case of the need for “both / and” – arguments about which of these is more true are a waste of time. I think it’s part of the rare potential of Transition (some have told me that for them it’s a defining distinction which makes Transition worth giving time to) is that we attempt – despite difficulties – to include both ways of creating change.

Here’s why this inclusive approach is important. People who only see the personal inner quadrant can get stuck in their personal journey. Is it helpful that there are people with great inner peace and even accessing states of enlightenment if their personal practice includes unsustainable consumption of carbon through flying to workshops or particular diets? Surely at some point there has to be a connection between our inner practice and the needs of our community and the ecological systems that support life, or we’re living our own individual version of separation and denial.

And on the other hand, many social and political movements have ended up either burnt out, or split apart by conflict because they didn’t have the inner insights and process skills to deal with their own their unconscious process – which will naturally include unhealthy dynamics around power and privilege which permeate all of us however deep our aspiration to cooperation or equality.

So the strongest and most lasting movements will be those which truly practise inclusivity – by rising to challenge of understanding the different worldviews and language of those who focus on other quadrants, and who can truly embody the quality of peace and resilience that comes from valuing diversity.

A final word about Happiness!

A nice coincidence is that today, Thursday 20^th March is International Happiness day. I’m not sure if the timing is deliberate, but on this day you can listen for free to a discussion between Hilary Prentice – who first dreamt up Inner Transition in Totnes – discussing exactly question. Starting from the perspective of why self awareness and inner disciplines are invaluable for activists – but I imagine also acknowledging that the bridge needs to go both ways.

My final meeting in London was with Mark Williamson from Action for Happiness, part of a growing movement that aims to make Happiness a political priority, the thing governments should focus on growing rather than our material or financial economy. I’m planning to write more about this, but the work that underpins the Happiness movement is key to Transition because it explains how it is possible to create energy descent – a steady, major reduction in our use of energy and resources – while creating a better way of living.

The key to this lies once again in understanding what a human being really is and what makes us happy. Increasing evidence shows that this does not come from material possessions or consumption beyond having our basic subsistence needs met – but rather from things like having happy, close, loving relationships, meaningful and connected work, and knowing that those around us are also in a state of well being.

Have a happy day of happiness!!

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20 Mar 2014

George Marshall on communicating climate change following extreme weather events

COIN, the Climate Outreach and Information Network, recently published a great report called After the floods: communicating climate change around extreme weather, which set out to explore our “complex attitudes to climate change and extreme weather events”.  Why do extreme weather events not necessarily mean that people “get” climate change?  How should Transition initiatives in communities hit by extreme weather talk about climate change with their neighbours? These are just some of the vital questions we explored with George Marshall, COIN’s founder, in a long and fascinating interview. 

I went to Dawlish the other day, where the railway line was washed into the sea recently, and the town took a complete pasting. I met an old man there who’d lived in Dawlish for many years and we sat and looked out over the town together and I asked him about the storm. He said, “it’s the worst storm I’ve ever seen, I’ve never seen anything like it.” I said “so do you make any link between what you saw that night and climate change?” He said, “oh I don’t believe in climate change.” He said, “do you?” and I said “I do, very much so.” He said, “well I do believe that since the beginning of the industrial revolution we’ve poured huge amounts of gases and pollutants into the atmosphere and that that has changed the climate, but I don’t believe in climate change.” Can you explain that?

I can counter that with another quote. I have a book coming out later this year on the psychology of climate change. I started with a quote from Leon Frankfurter who was a high court judge in the US. He was given a presentation by a man who first hand had seen the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis during the Second World War and the herding of Jews into concentration camps. He reported all of this to Judge Frankfurter who was a Jew himself and Frankfurter said “I cannot believe you.” So the guy said “are you crazy, this is an eyewitness testimony.” But Judge Frankfurter says “No, I’m not saying he’s lying. I said I simply cannot believe him and these are different things.” This was interesting from a Supreme Court judge.

I think what your guy in Dawlish was saying the same. He’s saying two things, that he can accept the abstract sense of it but he cannot accept or believe in the moral or personal or emotional implications of it. In other words, when he sees the destruction which is that knowledge manifested, he can’t accept it. I think psychologically we can do this very well, quite consciously. There are things that we know that when we’re asked about it we say “I know that”, but we hold back from accepting or recognising that belief.

Did you think there’s an element to it as well which is somehow that even by now the words “climate change” have become so loaded that somebody who’s very conservative, even though they may agree with climate change, as soon as they use the words ‘climate change’ somehow they feel they’ve put themselves in a box with ‘that lot’?

Absolutely. It’s very clear that that happens.  In cognitive linguistics, they talk about ‘the language of framing’ which a lot of people are now familiar with. Within a terminology of framing you understand that certain words become what we call frames. That is to say that when the words are used they bring into play a whole very wide range of values and attitudes and cultural shapes, and climate change is definitely that, as is ‘global warming’ of course, which is a parallel phrase but actually has its own slightly different separate meaning.

It’s very clear that for many people, particularly people who are conservative, particularly people who are older, they can accept the content of climate science. Many of the people who say they don’t believe in climate change are well educated scientifically but they will not accept the full meaning of it.

When there’s a really big climate/extreme weather event like Hurricane Sandy or what we’ve seen here over the last few weeks, often you hear people saying “what will it take to make people realise that climate change is happening?” But your work suggests that that’s really the wrong question, doesn’t it?

No, I think it’s very much the right question. Let’s go back a step and say, what are the processes by which we form socially held beliefs. I’m aware, by the way, that that word ‘belief’ is a dangerous word. You’ve used it already in our conversation. Let’s just say that the word belief is itself a frame, that when people say “I believe” or don’t believe, that this is a word that has an association with religious faith.

So let’s recognise that there is a process of belief that’s happening here but let’s call it conviction, that’s the word I prefer to use. We can say ”what is the process by which people form their convictions?” There are a lot of things that we know, but we’re not entirely convinced of them and we hold that information at bay.

Information’s a primary cause of that. Scientific information of course is a very important direction towards conviction, but really the convictions are formed by the people around us. Let’s just say that there is a truth that is an objective truth, which might be formed by the data, and then there is a social truth or a social fact. But we depend on both when we form our convictions, so we can say that it’s quite possible for people like your guy in Dawlish to accept the scientific fact but not to accept the social fact.

We need to put the two together. That means, therefore, that what makes it possible for people to accept these things is very clear evidence of a social fact, that’s to say that the people around, the people they know in their networks, their family, friends and community are actively seen to hold this attitude and conviction.

The problem we have with climate change is they don’t. Some people actively refute it. Many people won’t hold it at all, they won’t publicly accept it and they won’t talk about it. We get into a difficult situation where in opinion polls we ask people “do you believe in climate change?” We also have opinion polls saying “do you think that the extreme weather is related to climate change?” By and large you’ll find that the majority of people will say yes on both counts.

The problem is, of course, that that’s the answer that they give when they’re asked by someone in the street. That does not mean that’s the conviction that they wear and share openly within their peer groups.

The answer to your question is that we have to get people talking about it, and talking about it as a social fact. Something that’s real within socially held conviction, something which is really out there and talked about in the same way that maybe the economy is talked about. It is something which people openly have views on. Those views can be conflicting views too. There’s nothing wrong with having a situation where you have people saying “well I accept this” or “I don’t accept this”. I think the big danger is that conversation doesn’t happen at all. In the absence of that, it just becomes a set of data, information and facts which people can keep squirrelled away in the intellectual part of their brain without it infecting their emotional part which is the part which makes them want to do something.

Incidentally, just to point out, again going back to your guy in Dawlish, we can do that because we do have separate parts of our brain that perform in different ways. We have parallel processes within our brains and one process deals with the analysis of data. The other deals with the emotional implications of data and the sense of threat, and that these processes work in parallel but can also be kept quite separate.

When we receive our information from the scientific source, we can actively collude with those different processes by making sure that we keep it over there in our scientific part where we go, well that’s interesting, and not allow it to come over into our emotional social side which might compel us to take action. Obviously the answer to how we get people to take action is we have to get it to cross over.

In the paper that you just published, you wrote about how victims of extreme weather episodes are not necessarily more likely to associate those with climate change than non-victims. Why is that? What’s the psychology of that?

Let’s just say that the basis for that is some social research, although this is a relatively new area for social research, but also personal experience of going and talking to people. I did a string of interviews, over 20 interviews in two areas of America that had been severely affected by climate change. One was in Bastrop in Texas which had a combination of extreme drought followed by the most devastating wildfires in Texan history. Devastating by a tenfold order of magnitude compared to anything previously.  Then I did a string of interviews up and down the coast of New Jersey where there are astonishing levels of damage from Sandy. I was there six months after and still there were whole towns smashed to matchsticks. It was incredible.

Interviewing people there, it was very interesting that people would not necessarily make the connection. And strange also when you think, well hang on, this is what scientists have been talking about for the last 20 years. So for 20 years, scientists have been saying that climate change will bring more severe weather events, possibly more and severe storms although there’s a bit of uncertainty around that. Certainly more severe droughts and wildfires. So when something comes along which is off the scale in terms of your previous experience which conforms to that, you would think that you would at least pay some heed to it.

But I think what is interesting is not just that people don’t necessarily accept it, but they don’t even talk about it. There is an absence of conversation in these areas about the weather, that what they’ve experienced is connected to climate change. So whether people accept it’s climate change or not, they’re not talking about it with each other. The reason for this is complex and I have to say that is a big question. It’s one we need to answer. I have my theories.

One thing that’s clear is that when people go through a major extreme weather event, it brings them together, especially if it’s a short-lived one. If it’s a long, protracted one like a major drought it can wear people down, but if it’s a single one like Hurricane Sandy or flooding and so on, people often feel a very strong sense of social unity. Especially in our rather fragmented communities, that can be very validating for people.

That means they can concentrate on things that bring them together, their shared values, their sense of common identity. It also means they’re very wary of everything that might potentially draw them apart, and climate change is that kind of issue. I’d say even more in the states than here. The kind of thing that people avoid talking about within their own families because they know their Uncle Bob is a climate sceptic and they don’t want to have a row over the Christmas pudding, that kind of thing. I think people actively try not to talk about it.

But there’s another thing as well. If you are caught in a major event, if your house has been flooded, you have major concerns with just clearing it out, rebuilding it, especially if the house has burnt down or been smashed apart. Rebuilding your life so you have immediate short term concerns which push out from longer term ones. Then let’s face it, if you are making the decision to invest again in your life, to rebuild your life, the last thing you want to consider is the possibility that this is the start of a major shift that will bring not just more of these events but even more intense ones.

Who on earth wants to hear that? I think there’s a real danger that when people reinvest in their lives, they are reinvesting in a narrative that things are normal and that this was a freak accident and that things will go back to the way they were before. In other words, through their action and their spending, and their desire to believe, people become over-optimistic about the future and what might happen.

We know very well that people who have been through personal accidents often come out with a reinforced sense of their own immunity, and an artificially reduced sense of the probability of something happening again. That’s entirely possible with these major events, but that is compounded by their refusal to accept that actually the odds are shifting. Not only are people not prepared to accept that this is something that might come again, but they’re certainly unwilling to accept that the odds are shifting such that these events will be happening more and more.

If people listening to this who are involved with Transition groups in places that have been affected by the extreme weather recently, the last thing they want is to come across with any told-you-so sort of vibe. What’s the most skilful way to introduce the possibility to people, or is it just best not to go there?

I think that’s the key question. I think the temptation is not to go there. The temptation which I think is reinforced quite strongly through our social interactions is that it’s inappropriate to talk about climate change with people who have been devastated by an extreme weather event. I remember just through Facebook, my wife putting out some comments around the flooding or around Hurricane Sandy and getting some very clear signals from her Facebook friends that it was not appropriate and that somehow it’s almost exploitative to talk about that. This is not the right time. The question is of course, if this is not the right time now then when is the right time exactly?

Therefore the temptation is not to talk about it at all – I think we need to resist that temptation. But the first thing we need to say is we need to tread very, very carefully here. These emotions are raw and people are very upset. We need to find a way of doing it. I’d suggest to people that they try it out carefully and compare notes and use this experience of what’s happened over this winter as a way to test things out. Hopefully we at COIN can work with the Transition groups to try out and share our experiences and test in the real world what might work or might not work.

The answer is we don’t entirely know, but there are some pointers. One of the things we know does not work is to parachute into an affected community as politically ideologically motivated outsiders and try and make those links. We strongly advise environmental organisations for example to not do that, to resist the temptation to run broadcast campaigns saying “da daah, it’s climate change, we told you”. I think that’s potentially quite counterproductive.

At a community level like Transition groups however, you’re in a much stronger position. You are at least speaking from a shared level of experience. I think that’s very important. I think that the most trusted communicators will be people who are seen as being part of the community and people who have themselves been affected. To say, putting it up front, talking about your own experience and what has happened. I think one way to clearly do it, and this has been shown to work quite well in the States has been to talk about this within the adaptation and resilience and preparedness agenda. I think that Transition is very much on the right line with this.

Rather than saying “it’s climate change and it’s our fault”, I think people can make those connections themselves if they’re willing to face it. I don’t really need to spell it out. I think we can say we need to recognise that there is a change underway and we need to pull together and be prepared for that to happen increasingly. How can we be strong as a community?  Also, of course, because communities come together so strongly often around these events, we can validate ourselves and we can feel good, recognise actually that there were things that we did in the course of these events which are very positive, but they’re signs that we’re stronger than we thought; that we can pull together in ways which are really worthwhile.

The act of pulling together and the act of individual care and concern and heroism and altruism that people show is something that builds barriers across political and social boundaries. I think that’s something to really put up front, to say, we did really well here. There were some really powerful things that happened in our community around this event which showed how strong we are or how strong we can be, and let’s recognise and prepare for stuff coming in the future.

It’s very important to resist the temptation towards the protection of the individual property. There’s a temptation on this to say, I’m protecting myself, I’m making my house flood-proof. Obviously people do that, and that’s fine, but I think the emphasis has to be on how we can protect ourselves collectively. What can we do to pull together? Particularly what can we do in the case of future events, recognising that they might happen, to protect the vulnerable. People who might be old, people who might be disabled. It might be hard for them to get out of their homes. How can we offer protection and services, community support services lined up for them, maybe an emergency phone tree or a network which snaps into gear when it’s needed.

Because, I’m stressing that, because we know from the values work that’s been done, particularly by people like Tom Crompton at WWF who’s done great work on this, that if we reinforce people’s sense of collective and caring values, that we make people more willing to accept the fact that we need to pull together in the face of a common threat. In other words, through reinforcing our sense of pride and identity and caring for each other, we lay the foundation for being able to feed in those arguments about climate change.

Just to end on this point, saying this is why I’m stressing to start by talking about the positive experiences of how we pulled together. To say that it’s clear from a lot of research that people are far more receptive to challenging arguments like climate change if it’s in a context where their values and their sense of their own identity has already been validated.

But what they are not receptive to is a direct challenge that therefore brings up all of their defences, “don’t tell me what to do” and “who are you anyway”, “you’re a hypocrite” and all of that.

It’s been very interesting to see the response to Nigel Lawson’s appearance on the radio and how the climate sceptics at a time when you thought they would climb off under a rock and take a long hard look at themselves, have actually been coming out and talking about it and getting quite a lot of publicity over the last few weeks. I read recently, there’s a video I watched by Naomi Oreskes who wrote Merchants of Doubt, and she does an interview there with a guy called Nick Minchin who’s an Australian climate sceptic. She says to him:

“It makes me wonder if the reason you want to reject the science is that it has consequences. It has consequences for us about how we live our lives, how we run our economy, what our taxation policies are. I think what you don’t like are the implications, the political, social and economic implications. But what you’ve done along with a lot of other people is to say, let’s shift the debate, let’s argue about the science. Let’s keep the debate about the science going, because as long as we argue about the science we don’t get to the question of what that means for us politically, socially or economically.”

This time, how people have still gone back to arguing about the science just seems completely ridiculous. Is there any sense of how we input into that process to move it on more to the policy?

The problem we always had with the floods is that no scientist is going to be prepared to come out during the floods or any climate event immediately afterwards and say, “aha, that’s climate change”. Of course, they should be saying, well this is a pattern consistent with climate change. This sense of uncertainty tends to pervade the debate.

I’d go back again to what I was saying earlier about how there are scientific facts and socially held facts. If people in their own minds see that there is an association between an extreme weather event and climate change, that becomes the fact that they hold. Similarly, if people in their own minds come to think that all of the scientists are conspiring in order to get larger, fatter, government grants for their research, which of course is this outrageous and ludicrous lie which is paraded by some of these professional deniers, they will believe that. These views can become deeply entrenched and very immovable.

But of course the thing which moves them is not arguing directly with them about this not being true, or this is the evidence. It’s actually going back to this idea of socially constructed facts. What will shift a climate change denier, not the professional ones of course but the general public, is citing the evidence that people like themselves who share their values happen to believe in it and happen to accept it.

The big problem we have, I think, in terms of the issue is that Naomi is correct there. Many people, particularly of Conservative or free market values are deeply suspicious of the solutions. And of course the people who are keenest on the solutions and therefore the ones who hold climate change most readily are their sworn political enemies.

The entire thing becomes polarised around political lines. The way to shift this is to have more and more people of Conservative values being seen to openly hold on to the science and to say, yes, we want to be part of discussion and debate about what the solutions are, which I think might be a very useful debate.

There’s nothing, by the way, intrinsically in Conservativism that would say that Conservatives cannot make personal sacrifices or pull together in the face of a threat. In fact, you can certainly believe that if climate change was being caused by North Korea, that the Conservatives would be on the front line saying “we’ll do whatever is necessary to stop this threat or anything similar”. In fact there’s no doubt in my mind that if climate change was going to be caused by a meteorite that Conservatives would be right on top of it.

But there’s nothing intrinsically in it. It’s the way that these threats speak to people’s world views. Even the most hardcore Libertarians, going right back to the writings of Friedrich Hayek after the Second World War, would recognise that you sometimes need to pull together and you need to maybe interfere with the free market in the interest of facing a collective threat. The question is, how does that threat come to be perceived, and again I go back to that sense that threats are perceived not through the data but through the public perception of them.

I will say something, by the way, about this whole climate change denial thing, which I think Naomi is touching on there, which is important. People hold attitudes on climate change because of their values and their world views and their politics. Not because they’re necessarily bribed to do so. There’s a common view, especially amongst environmental campaigners, that all this denial stuff is a huge public relations scam generated by fossil fuel money.

Whilst it’s certainly true that some of the oil companies have been utterly reprehensible for funding what has been sometimes very professional misinformation campaigns, the reason that the vast majority of people do not believe in climate change is because it’s a direct challenge to their sense of the world and how the world is. And because they personally really do not like or trust the people who seem to be most eagerly telling them about it. But it’s not just about corruption.

It’s about stuff which speaks very much to people’s values. And of course, the reality which is that none of us really, in our hearts, ought to accept that this thing is happening. Nobody really wants to believe it. We’re all very keen to find reasons that it’s not happening, and I’d say maybe for people who are Conservative or people who are doubtful of environmentalism, that’s somewhat easier for them to do because they’re starting from a position of being doubtful of the people who are telling them.

My last question is, the thing that we’re looking at this month is living with climate change. What’s your sense of the next 20 years or so? What’s our experience of that going to be, both in the outer world but also for us internally, how are we going to experience that, do you think?

I’m fascinated by this question. I don’t think there’s any clear direction. I think we can maybe predict that there are certain pathways. One thing we know, as I said earlier, is that people do have a remarkable capacity to put on one side and to compartmentalise things they don’t really want to deal with. I think we have to recognise that this skill is deeper than we recognise.

Those of us who work on climate change really like to believe that there is some revelatory moment, when the lights go on in people’s heads. Some point when they read something or hear something or some major storm hits and they go “aha, yes, now I get it!” For some people there is. I think we should really be encouraging people to have that kind of moment. But I also think it’s pretty clear that people can keep that at bay for a very long time. I fear that for some people, that might be so long until they realise what’s going on that they get into a very different state.

All of these are going to be fighting themselves out by the way, it’s not as if everybody follows one pathway. Different people are going to respond in different ways. There’s clearly going to be one direction in which people just do not accept it. Not that they deny it.

I will say that there are people who right to the very end will deny stuff, but I think there’s a more dangerous form which is that people, as the psychotherapists call it, ‘disavow’: they know it but they don’t know it, they keep it on one side. I think we can therefore expect a continuation of what in COIN we’ve been calling ‘climate silence’, this condition of socially constructed silence where we don’t talk about it and that people roll their eyes and go “oh, here we go again”, “this is so depressing”, and so on.

There are other forms of response where people, as a way of avoiding it, go deeper and deeper into avoidance processes.  I’m afraid, and I’m inclined to predict this, that there will be a tendency in the short term for people maybe to go deeper into consumption, to go deeper into short term pleasure activities, to have a bit of that ‘live for today because you never know you might get hit by a bus’ kind of attitude.

I anticipate that there will be an ever growing and ever more vocal group of people who say “no, wake up”. But I don’t think that there will be any real change on climate change without a very strong and vocal popular movement and I’m reassured to see that that’s starting to pick up weight, I think that that can grow.

There is evidence that social change can happen extremely rapidly. We’ve just seen what’s happened in Ukraine for example, there’s stuff flashing up all around the world. This is clearly a time of major political tectonic shifts. We’ve seen over the last few years that there has been change coming from popular movements on a scale which has been quite exceptional, so I’m feeling reasonably optimistic.

But there are other paths too where people accept that there is a problem but go into aberrant coping mechanisms. One form of that is to actually seek to give power to people to make decisions on their behalf, and this is well supported historically. We can always fear that people will respond in the worst possible way. Unfortunately it may be very well versed people who have said for years “we don’t want the government to interfere in our lives” but can just very readily switch over to going to a war mode and giving a great deal of power to governments to take control.

There are other aberrant forms whereby people don’t deal with the problem at all but they process their sense of anxiety in other ways, for example through conflict, through warfare, through scapegoating, through turning inwards.

All of these patterns have been mapped out for us by the way that we’ve responded in the past to collective and personal conflicts. It’s our responsibility as social change activists, as I think we are, to look at and anticipate those and to really try and make sure that we steer this whole thing in a direction towards positive coping mechanisms where we recognise and we face up to things and we deal with them; but we also anticipate that we might go slipping off in any number of aberrant directions because climate change in the end is not one of those problems like North Korea where you can say “all we have to do is pull together and fight this thing”. We are all participants in it. We cannot objectify what goes on, we have to find a way of pulling together.

I will say in answer to that that therefore the solutions always lie in ways of talking, ways to behave that would involve pulling people together. Drawing people together rather than pulling people apart, which is I think something we need to be very careful with in climate change movements, that we always seek to try and build those movements across boundaries rather than on the basis of it being us versus you.

And just to say there’s also the wild cards. The thing we don’t know is what is actually going to happen with the climate. We really don’t know, and having spoken to a lot of the climate scientists on this, as you have, the overwhelming feeling is that they don’t really know what’s going to happen as the North Pole goes and that huge reflective ice mirror disappears. We don’t know. Some of what’s happened over this last winter really has people scratching their heads. They can see how it’s acting out but it’s not really how they thought that things would work.

So we have got the uncertainty on this that things might move extremely fast. I still remain optimistic that this problem is hitting us at a time when we are exceptionally well connected, well informed, well educated, when there is an exceptional level of international co-operation. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying it’s exceptional. We don’t have a Cold War which is running at the moment. Despite all of these national snipings, we do seem to have the capacity, more than any time in the past, to pull together. So I guess I’m reasonably optimistic that things might turn out alright. But we’re going to have to push it and prod it. 

George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change is published in September. 

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18 Mar 2014

Living with Climate Change: Lisa Coons of Transition Mankato

Those of us living and transitioning in the Upper Midwest of the United States have experienced climate change as “global weirding.”  In Minnesota, summers have gotten hotter and  more humid while formerly predictable summer rains have become nearly non-existent. When a single rain barrel once would suffice to water gardens from one rain to the next, smart gardeners are installing multiple rain barrels to avoid using and paying for municipal water to irrigate gardens.  Some communities are experiencing “100-year floods” every few years at the same time as neighboring communities are in severe drought. It’s tricky figuring out when to plant gardens and how to manage them under the conditions of unpredictable weather. Winters have also gotten warmer and with less snowfall.  Adapting to these swings has been a challenge, indeed.   

This winter has been no exception. Noted for our severe winters in Minnesota, the winter of 2013-14 was a record-setter. The multiple and prolonged instances of the polar vortex shifting from its usual place at the North Pole and wobbling southward brought historic and potentially life-threatening cold to us. It was a challenge for most everyone and most harshly felt by our rural neighbors who use propane gas for home heating.

In February, our state governor declared a state of emergency when the prices for propane spiked and our area of the country experienced a “shortage” of the fuel. Warming stations were set up in rural areas to prevent people from freezing or risk fires by attempting to heat homes with ovens or a multitude of space heaters. Families were taking extreme measures to conserve what little fuel remained in their tanks and to avoid purchasing the fuel at nearly 4 times the usual price. (The price to fill a tank was running at $2000. This amount of fuel was expected to last 3-4 weeks in the extreme cold we were experiencing.) One family in our area moved to the basement where temperatures were warmer than their barely heated home.

Transition Mankato decided to do something. Partnering with a local college and other community groups, we pulled together very quickly a DIY SOLAR AIR COLLECTOR workshop. We recognized this crisis was an opportunity to have an impact on the immediate situation facing rural people and to impact our future resilience by providing the knowledge to build a renewable source for supplemental heat for all of us.

On a deeply cold, snow-blowing kind of night that kept away many, we had nearly 100 people turn out for this workshop!  Many were from rural areas but some were from our small city. All were interested in learning to build this surprisingly simple and affordable means of making heat from the sun. Workshop participants worked together to build a collector over the 2 ½ hour workshop. Many left with notes, pictures and recordings of the workshop prepared to build one, two or more of their own solar collectors!

As a co-sponsor of our area’s inaugural Sustainability Expo, Transition Mankato is hosting another Homebuilt Solar Air Collector workshop in early April at the Expo.  Needless to say, these severe weather situations and an unpredictable fossil fuel supply will make adapting to our new reality and utilizing these homebuilt technologies and other renewables more necessary and appealing.  

Lisa Coons is a founding member of Transition Mankato which is in the process of moving from a muller into an official Transition Town.  She is Co-Director of the Center for Earth Spirituality and Rural Ministry. Interests include: Local food production; community empowerment; spirituality of transition; re-skilling and alternative education; energy descent and adapting in place. Contact here at lisacoons@yahoo.com. Follow the work of Find Transition Mankato on Facebook here and on the web here.

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17 Mar 2014

A quick trip to Milano

Well, I say a ‘quick’ trip…  Not flying, and living in a town whose train connection to the rest of the world was severely nibbled by the Atlantic, recently means that a day in Milan requires a full day to get there and a full day to get home again.  In spite of once living in Italy for 3 years, I had never been to Milan before.  I didn’t see much of it on my arrival, arriving at 9.30pm (after leaving home at 6am and a train journey which, in part, included travelling through snow-topped mountains in the Alps), it was as much as I could do to wander round the corner from where I was staying for a quick pizza before turning in.

The next morning, after a walk through a great park called Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, I was the guest of Fondazione Cariplo, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in Italy, who fund lots of sustainability, local food and related issues.  Their current call for applications is focused on “Resilient Communities”.  I had been asked to talk particularly about Transition in the urban context.  The Fondazione’s offices are in an amazing palazzo, an incredibly beautiful space.  I was speaking to a mixture of Fondazione staff, representatives of local initiatives who have been funded by them, and some other key people from the city and surrounding regions.  My presentation led into some fascinating conversations about the challenges of doing this kind of work in Italy.

After a delicious and locally-sourced lunch there, I had a couple of hours until I was due to give my main public talk.  I sat in the park in the sun for a while, then wandered down to La Scala, the city’s famous opera house. It was an area full of shops selling Versace and other ridiculous and vastly expensive fashion gubbins.  My favourite was this ridiculous suit in one shop window.  Never mind the comical stance of the mannequin, but who wants a see-through suit?  Call me old-fashioned, but I have never met another man who has pined for a see-through suit. 

I wandered into an incredible shopping precinct that is quite breathtaking in its elegance and beauty.  I had a rather disappointing straciatella icecream (usually the King of Italian Icecreams).  I saw, for the first time, Il Duomo, Milan’s extraordinary cathedral, which is really quite something.  It was let down only by the huge TV screen on its side playing adverts.

The plaza in front of the Duomo was buzzing with tourists, basking in the sunshine.  It was time to head to the venue for the talk, at Centro Congressi Fondazione Cariplo.  It had been well publicised, with quite a lot of advance media in the Italian press (for example, La Provincia, Avvenire, and Valori).  I did a couple of interviews and then it was talk time.

About 300 people had shown up, not bad for 3.30 on a Thursday afternoon, and the talk was also being screened live online, which was viewed by nearly 1,500 people.  After an introduction, I spoke for about 40 minutes, giving an overview of Transition and where I see the potential in scaling it up.  Managing to not repeat my mistake from my last visit of speaking so fast that the translator had to signal me to slow down, it all went very smoothly. You can watch the talk I gave here.  

We then had a long questions and answers session where I tried to understand the questions asked of me in Italian (I speak it pretty well, but nowhere near as well as I used to).  Topics included how to do Transition where people don’t have a sense of community, the skilfulness or otherwise of engaging with mainstream politics, the role of ecopsychology and how cities might reinvent their relationships to their rural hinterland. 

All went rather well I thought.  Then I headed off into the evening with members of various Milan or near-Milan Transition initiatives (there’s a fair few Transition initiatives in Italy, check out the map).  A fine bunch of folks they were too.  Equipped with Brompton bicycles, impressive electric bikes with a box on the front that can carry goods or people, with tales of initiatives to restart local wool production, vegetable gardening, brewing and much more, they were the usual eclectic, friendly and inspiring bunch you find doing Transition around the world.  It was a great pleasure to spend the evening in their company.

We went to Upcycle, the “Milano Bike Cafe”, a cafe cum centre of bicycle culture in the city cum shared workspace cum all round rather groovy spot.  About 20 of us sat around a long table (see above) and were treated to some rather delicious local food, whilst also working our way through a selection of local craft beers from a couple of local breweries.  In particular I was very taken with the beers from La Buttiga brewery in Piacenza, in particular an American Pale Ale called Sogno Doro (“dream of gold”) and an Imperial India Pale Ale called Psycho.  Both were exquisite. 

It was an evening of great company, good conversation, lovely people and some fine beer.  The next morning I was up at 5 for the train home, finally getting home at 9.30pm.  Tiring, but great fun.  Lastly, I’d like to send ‘Get Well Soon’ greetings to Cristiano Bottone, who was going to join me in Milan but who was laid low with the flu.  

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16 Mar 2014

Guy Watson on how Riverford Farm is living with climate change

Perhaps those for whom the notion of ‘living with climate change’ is most acutely felt are farmers.  Their business models depend on the weather obliging them with good growing conditions, something it is increasingly failing to do.  We talked to Guy Watson, the founder of Riverford Organic Vegetables to hear his thoughts and experiences.  His main suggestions?  We need perennial cereals.  And to develop a love for kale.

We’ve had a few weeks of very extreme weather over the last little while. How has that manifested at Riverford?

It has rained pretty relentlessly since early December.  We’ve had 10 weeks of rain which seems to have come to an end now. We’ve actually been very lucky in that it’s happened at the dormant time of year where we’ve finished harvesting roots and we would be planting a few things by now and preparing the ground for planting in an ideal year, but hopefully we’ll be able to start doing something next week. A delay of a month in planting sometimes means absolutely nothing when it comes to harvest, because growing conditions in that month can be so variable, what you plant in late March can come earlier than what you plant in late February.

So we’ve been very lucky, but I suppose.  We’ve got livestock that we overwinter on some pretty light draining land and it’s all been poached up, meaning that the grass has all been turned to mud. But actually, that was land that we were going to plough and grass up this spring anyway and it won’t damage the soil significantly because it’s quite resilient ground.

We have been lucky. I can see on neighbours’ land, people who sowed autumn cereals late, they just haven’t grown. The ground’s been waterlogged and there’s been a fair amount of soil erosion, and it’s been a pretty sad sight. I think our ground has stood up. I’m quite encouraged actually, walking around. Over the last 5 years I suppose we’ve adopted a more extensive rotation, by which I mean there’s more grass and less cultivation, which has meant that the structure of the ground is better.

There are probably more earthworms, more organic matter. The ground is more open, meaning that water can enter the soil and percolate through it faster so you get less run-off, better drainage and more air in the soil. Where we haven’t driven over it with a tractor – sometimes you have to drive into fields to get vegetables out – or poached it up with livestock, it’s in a pretty good state. I think it will drain and recover quite quickly.

Our winter crops, yes we’ve had to go in there and harvest leeks and cauliflowers and so on. You have to get them out of the field with a tractor and that has made a mess, but it’s in fairly small areas and the crops have been OK. It’s been miserable for our staff but actually it’s been OK.

One of the most striking images of the recent floods was a picture of the UK from space where you could see this brown stain around the South, these plumes of soil being washed out. Can organic farming be seen as a solution to that?

I think organic is probably less likely to result in soil loss when we do get these extreme weather events. The reason for that is I think the soil is in better structure, and more open so you get more percolation and less run-off. I think if you go to the Environment Agency, that’s what they’ll be wanting to encourage farmers, the farming practices that lead to those sorts of things. I can look around at neighbours’ ground where there’s been intensive cereals and you can see the run-off is appalling.

You can see the water just does not soak into the ground, and I think the adoption of autumn sown cereals rather than spring sown cereals, some of the cultivation techniques that are used now – people using power harrows rather than traditional harrows. You can plough and plant cereals in borderline conditions but probably damaging the soil quite a lot. I think I can see the effect of that. Good agricultural practice would be to bring sowing dates forward to ensure you’ve got a good ground cover before winter. People are still sowing well into November.  I seem to remember we did have a very dampish autumn and then it dried up in late October- November and I think that’s when most of the cereals were sown this year, and it was too late for a lot of them.

I think organic practice, by virtue of having better soil structure, is likely to result in less erosion. You get virtually no erosion off grass fields. We tend to have a lot more grass in our rotation. Of course, you might argue that that’s not going to feed a population that’s hungry for grain and hungry for animals that eat the grain, chickens and pigs and increasingly dairy cows now, but I suppose one might argue that we shouldn’t be eating so many of those foods. I feel very strongly that it would take more than a shift to organic agriculture to solve the looming problems that we have.

I think we need to look very carefully at the balance. Most of our food crops are annual crops. Wheat, barley; if you look around the world, wheat, barley, maize, rice, potatoes to some extent. So they’re annual crops which require intensive cultivation, which inevitably means damage to the soil. Some cultivations are worse than others and you can grow with less cultivation, but annual crops are bad for the soil there’s absolutely no question about it. If you have any sensitivity to it, if you go and look at a permanent grass field you’ll see it’s absolutely teeming with life, earthworms and invertebrates. It will have ten times the population of earthworms if not a hundred and that’s probably reflected in all the other soil species as well.

You then compare that to somewhere which is growing intensive cereals and there’s land in the South West which has probably been in barley and wheat virtually continually for 30 years, and you’ll struggle to find an earthworm. The soil is in a pretty desperate state with very low organic matter. It’s bad for the soil.

But how can we feed ourselves when we’re so dependent on it? We need to develop perennial growing crops. It’s a bit of a bugbear of mine, but wheat, barley, maize, maybe rice, originally they’re all derived from progenitors which would have been perennial plants. Maize certainly comes from perennial ancestry. We’ve bred them to be annuals and to produce big seeds that are easily harvested, which will all ripen at the same time, which is great for farmers and great for seed companies because we go to seed companies and buy the seed every year. What we need is a grain crop that you can harvest and let it recover without cultivation, and go back and harvest it again the next year. If we were harvesting grass seed, when you are harvesting grass seed that’s what you do.

I’m sure if a fraction of the money that’s gone into developing GM crops had gone into perennialising some of our major crops, we would have perennial crops now. You’d be sequestering carbon in the soil because you wouldn’t be cultivating it. You wouldn’t be using fossil fuels to cultivate the soil. We wouldn’t have the run-off problems. The benefits would be just huge, and I’m sure it would be much better for wildlife and I think even potentially it could be more productive. If you think that the soil in this country, from July, August, September, October, so a third of the year, even into October, November, December, there’s no ground cover so for half the year the ground is not photosynthesising, not producing anything. If you can have a crop that is photosynthesising all the year, I’d have thought there’d be the potential for it to be a lot more productive.

But there’s no incentive in our current capitalist system for anyone to develop a perennial seed for anything, because you’d only sell it once. I would like to see some. Maybe Bill Gates would do it, put some money, not looking for a return, into perennialising some of those crops?

That’s my current bugbear. It’s quite interesting in Uganda where I’ve just been. Their main starch source in bananas, which is a perennial crop. It just keeps coming back over and over again and you see them growing mixed up with other fruit crops; mangos, papayas, jackfruits, all major food sources. They tend to be grown in a mixture with the bananas, sometimes with coffee underneath. All perennials. It’s a very healthy system. You get very few pest problems because it is all mixed up.

At Riverford over the last 10 years or so, as the pattern of more changing weather and extreme weather has become more pronounced, how have you adapted?  From outside Riverford one of the things you notice is the number of polytunnels that you have has increased exponentially. How else have you adapted?

The overall policy is to mitigate and avoid risk. One way that we’ve done that is to put up polytunnels, which have been very successful financially and in terms of our customers, they like the products that come out of them. It means we have to import less and have interesting salads throughout the year. Another thing is that I spent 15 years pushing into what we call the shoulders of the season.  It’s easy to produce a lettuce from the end of May to mid-September. With the use of fleeces and early planting you can be producing them the first week in May and can carry on producing them into November and even up to Christmas by using different varieties and going into growing escaroles and radicchios and whatever.

We’re just retreating from all that because those are the ones that tend to fail more often. Indeed all the growers we work with are doing the same. We’re not growing strawberries at all any more. I used to be very dogmatic that I wanted to grow my strawberries outside, that it was unjustifiable to put up polytunnels to grow a crop which historically had been grown perfectly successfully outside and I carried on for 10 years being dogmatic about it and consistently losing money, letting our customers down, frustrating them saying they were going to get strawberries this week, then it rained and we couldn’t pick them. Then we just had to pick them all off because they had botrytis by then, throw them away and hope they’d be better next year.

We were losing money and pissing our customers off. In the cropping year of 2012 we lost half a million pounds growing vegetables, which I would have thought was hardly possible. It was an absolutely staggering sum of money. It was absolutely diabolical, we lost all the strawberries, all the onions, lettuce. All the early crops failed, spinach etc. It did get a little bit better towards the end of the season, but then I think the winter was pretty ghastly as well. We just can’t afford to lose that amount of money, so we just drew back from anything that carried risk, so strawberries have gone and quite a few other crops.

Is there any way, as a farm business, that one can build in resilience to a summer like that?

(laughs) You’re not going to like what I say! Polytunnels, just growing what grows comfortably at this time, and importing, actually. Economically and environmentally I would like to have some research done on this. Is it better to grow something in the South of France and get a full yield fairly reliably, and possibly use lower inputs because wherever you’re trying to grow a crop outside it’s a climatically suitable range. You inevitably end up using higher inputs. For a conventional farmer that would be pesticides to try and fight off disease, because crops that aren’t comfortable are vulnerable to disease. For us it might be finding ground covers or spending more on weed control.

The biggest risk is just not getting the yield at the end. Crop failure or having a reduced crop, or having reduced quality. I suspect there are quite a few instances where it would certainly be economically better and quite conceivably environmentally better just to grow it 200 miles further south or 500 miles further south. It would be quite interesting to do a carbon footprinting exercise on that. Perhaps we need an environmental studies student to do that for us.

Cultivating land is an environmentally expensive.  Anything that goes with cultivation is actually bad for the environment, the energy used in doing it, the CO2 that’s given out as a result of cultivating the land. If you square the equation with what it costs to import it, I don’t know.  Of course, one might argue that people should eat just what grows in season…

I saw you were in that local food roots film that came out, and said the main thing we need to do towards a local economy is learn to love eating cabbage.

Well that is true. I have been at it for nearly 30 years now. I was having an argument with one of my managers yesterday about the virtues of kale compared to spinach. We can be producing kale, even now going into March and April, and just have it there for when we’re short of greens. We’re desperately short of greens this year because it was so warm earlier in the winter, and now we have very little left. We’re even using Spanish cabbage which is embarrassing and a lot of Spanish spinach. You can’t grow spinach in this country at this time of year.

People, on the whole, would much rather eat spinach than cabbage. It takes a lot of persuasion. Personally, I would rather eat cabbage and kale, but that does require quite a lot of cajoling. Geetie Singh’s pub in London is absolutely hard line UK only produce, most of that local to London and they do produce bloody good food consistently, but it does require a skilled chef and quite a committed team to do that. It is about skills, largely. I think we could eat a 90%, maybe even 95% UK diet without any significant loss of utility in the kitchen, as an economist might call it, but we could still eat bloody well and have varied, good food.  But to do that does require quite a lot of skill and commitment.

I can say after 30 years of trying to persuade people to eat seasonally, you can only go so far. If we put out boxes with just cauliflowers, cabbage, onions, swedes, potatoes, parsnips, throughout the winter, especially when you get into February, March, April where you get this first whiff of spring and certainly go off those vegetables, I wouldn’t be in business.

What’s your sense of the impacts, psychologically, of living with climate change? Of that added degree of uncertainty it has brought to our lives. How does it impact on you and the team around you, trying to design a business into the future when it’s so uncertain?

If I go back to 2012-13, you were going into February and March with an expectation that the Spring is going to arrive and the sun is going to come out and the birds are going to start singing, just like if you’re lying in bed and wake up before dawn, there’s an expectation that dawn will arrive. I’d start losing confidence that that would ever happen. It’s just so much part of our culture, the seasons. I suppose there was a good deal of anxiety and depression that went on with that.  I guess we’ve had similar this winter although it hasn’t gone on for anything like as long. We’ve had 10 weeks at what is normally a pretty bleak time of year anyway, so I don’t think it’s been anything like as bad.

But it is psychologically pretty disturbing. Farming is part of culture. All our agriculture is based on an assumption of weather patterns. That’s what it’s all based around. My whole experience of growing vegetables has changed.  I used to log planting dates and harvesting dates and record temperatures and so on, and I had a whole spreadsheet developed on the assumed harvest. A day in June was worth 14 days in December, and I worked out various things, but it’s all just gone completely out the window.

Trying to plan things has become very, very difficult. It’s made it bloody difficult to run a sensible business, and it has made it particularly difficult to source locally actually. If we agree with a farmer that he’s going to plant a crop and we’re going to sell it, everything is very carefully planned that it will be sold in those weeks. Then when it comes earlier or later or doesn’t come at all, that does throw our plans onto total disarray.

As I mentioned earlier, all the greens, it was a very mild autumn this year. Prior to it starting raining in early December, it was actually a fantastic autumn. We had plenty of sunshine, it was warm. All the crops romped away and came very early.  Then we had an absolute deluge of green crops through the early winter and now we have virtually none. That’s been quite difficult to cope with.

If you look forward 10, 15, 20 years, what’s your sense of where you’ll be as a business, where farming will need to be?

I’d be very surprised if fossil fuels weren’t a damn sight more expensive. They might possibly quadruple in price. It would take something like that sort of increase in price to radically change transport patterns. Were they to double in price, I think you’d see air freighting of food drop out fairly quickly. You’d see heating of greenhouses drop out fairly quickly. Neither of which we do anyway because they’re complete insanity.

I think probably if you go up to something like 4 times, trucking and shipping would start to become prohibitively expensive. At that point you will see … I have become rather cynical I’m afraid. Most people are pretty damn selfish and what they eat and how they behave is largely dictated by their own selfish thinking.  Maybe they just feel powerless, but when things become more expensive people consume less of them. There’s no doubt about that. If we want people to consume environmentally less damaging food and support their local economies we want imported food to be more expensive and hothouse food to be more expensive. An increase in fuel prices is what will bring that about, and I see very little doubt that that’s going to happen.

Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary recently said that climate change “is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting”. There’s this sense with climate change that we can just adapt. For yourself and smaller farmers, to what extent can farming adapt?

To some degree I do absolutely loathe Paterson with a passion, but he does have a point. I do think capitalism does unleash a creativity that planned economies just cannot access. I’m very reluctant to admit to that, but it does seem to be true. People will adapt, and they will adapt surprisingly quickly. They will find different ways of doing things.

But there is a whole infrastructure which I think will take quite a lot of time to change. We’re relying on a capitalist, Adam Smith model, a laissez-faire market based approach to agriculture. So many of the costs of agriculture are actually externalised. You mentioned the wash of the run-off and the flooding. The flooding we’ve just experienced, I’m sure a good part of it could have been avoided with different agricultural practice.

If you go and look at a grass field, a field of permanent pasture this winter, there would have been virtually no run-off this winter, and any run-off would have had virtually no soil in it. If you compare that to a field of late-sown barley, sown in November. It’s the field of barley that’s caused the flooding. Most run-off, a bit of it has come off roads and so on, but most of it’s come off land. That’s where it’s come from. So there’s the effect of growing those crops which has an impact further down the line but which farmers aren’t paying for. You might say that those who are growing the grasses aren’t being rewarded either.

That’s the problem with the Owen Paterson approach, and I think you could apply the same thing to wildlife, landscape, pollution of water. There is no reward for the value of good agricultural practice and virtually no penalty – under Owen Paterson’s regime they had talked about giving penalties, people not getting single farm payments if they didn’t follow good agricultural practice, but I think that’s been largely abandoned. So that’s the problem with leaving things to the open market.

Things like perennialising crops will require a government or an NGO to take the lead, because you’re not going to get that from the free market, and I do see that as very important. I’ve argued for 20 years that if you want to nudge people in the right direction, just put a bloody great tax on fossil fuels. Forget about all your carbon trading and everything which has just been totally ineffective.

But it’s just politically unacceptable isn’t it? Every government that’s tried to do that has even backed down from the relatively modest attempts to.  What it would do is nudge you towards a state that we’re going to have to get to anyway, and probably develop technologies which we would possibly be leading in. Technologies which are going to be needed in 5 or 10 years’ time. Oil price has just stabilised at just over 100 dollars a barrel, but I would be very surprised if the world economy picked up a little bit if that didn’t shoot up to 150 fairly quickly

Or if Russia turns the taps off?

Well that would be interesting, wouldn’t it… 

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