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September 2009 Archives

September 11, 2009 - My debt to Teddy Goldsmith

Teddy Goldsmith, one of the most important and original thinkers the Green Movement has ever had, died on August 21st 2009.

In a funny kind of way, I’m where I am today because of Teddy Goldsmith. I wouldn’t have joined The Ecology Party (now the Green Party) if I hadn’t read ‘Blueprint for Survival’ in 1972: I probably wouldn’t have stuck with the Green Party were it not for the radicalism and intellectual integrity of the Ecologist magazine; and without all of that, I probably wouldn’t have been the right person for the Friends of the Earth Director’s job in 1984 (from that point on, I think Teddy can be absolved of further responsibility!).

I was completely bowled over by the ‘Blueprint for Survival’ in 1972. Despite the odd spasm of late sixties-60’s student rebelliousness, politics had played little part in my life before then. Indeed, I had hated student politics at Oxford.

But ‘Blueprint for Survival’ was a ‘get real’ summons like no other. I promptly got my hands on all the back copies of the Ecologist (which started publishing in 1969) and pretty soon joined the Ecology Party – just after Teddy’s highly entertaining campaign in the 1974 General Election in Suffolk, where he rode around the constituency on a camel – to alert prospective voters to the imminent threat of desertification elsewhere in the world, as well as in Suffolk itself!

I got to know him well after that – usually via the medium of passionate debates and arguments about every conceivable aspect of green politics. His virulently anti-establishment views constantly entertained, his depth of knowledge was daunting, and the way he pursued the ‘inner logic’ of a particular issue, even into the depths of political incorrectness was very stimulating.

The obituaries have wrestled with the difficulty of placing Teddy on any conventional political spectrum – which is a fairly crazy thing to want to do anyway. He could be withering about every political persuasion, and seriously loved getting people worked up as he challenged their complacent orthodoxies. Was he intolerant? Not particularly. Xenophobic or even racist? Absolutely not. He just advocated a particular kind of uncompromising sustainability that inevitably made things uncomfortable for friends and foes alike.

And thank God for that.

He was an extraordinary man. And I owe him a huge amount.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on September 11, 2009 2:32 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 15, 2009 - NHS 'Fit for the Future' Report

Last year, the NHS launched its first ever Carbon Reduction Strategy. Apart from a few mischievous media comments (homing in on the gentlest of hints that hospitals might in the future be serving less meat as part and parcel of providing lower-carbon meals), it has been very well-received both within the NHS and beyond.

But a strategy is just a strategy, however good it may be, and there are an awful lot of senior managers inside the NHS who are going to take some persuading that climate change now needs to be moved rapidly up their agendas.

With the prospect of serious cuts in health spending from 2012 onwards now looking like a certainty, I’ve already come across a number of people who are convinced that “the environment” is going to be on a downward rather than an upward curve as managers focus on “getting the basics right”.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But from their point of view, all the threats associated with accelerating climate change are “out there” somewhere in the future – and even the combined threat of rising energy prices and the Carbon Reduction Commitment (the price to be paid for every tonne of CO2 emitted by the bigger NHS Trusts), still leaves many unpersuaded about the need for radical change now.

It’s not just that short-term target-driven mandates always trump longer-term discretionary initiatives. Behind this all-too-familiar dilemma lies a much more profound problem, an inability to think very much at all about the future – with or without accelerating climate change. The vast majority of health professional and politicians, for instance, know that the current model of healthcare (more money needed, year on year, to address seemingly limitless demands for improved services) is broken. But it’s very rare indeed to hear any of them talking about this in public.

I’ve come to the conclusion that a fairly generalised lack of imagination about the shape of the future is one of the reasons we make so little progress on key policy challenges. Not least climate change.

Together with the NHS’ Sustainable Development Unit, Forum for the Future is hoping to do something about this, with its “Fit for the Future” project – examining four different “scenarios” for low-carbon healthcare in 2030. All four are pretty challenging (it’s not, after all, as if climate change isn’t going to be a dramatic or painful part of our lives in 2030, come what may), but “Service Transformation” obviously sounds a great deal more manageable than “The Environmental War Economy”!

You can check them out on our website - a bit of provocation, not just for health professionals!

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on September 15, 2009 2:28 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

September 22, 2009 - Sarkozy launches crusade against obsession with growth

I can’t help it, but I love seeing the Treasury discomfited. Through my nine years with the Sustainable Development Commission they set up so many barriers to promoting more sustainable economic growth, did so many foolish things, and missed so many opportunities, that I can’t help but feel a little bitter.

They were particularly obstructive in terms of the work the Commission did on economic growth, seeking to open up the debate about the completely irrational way in which the pursuit of GDP has come to dominate all economic policy debates.

The Commission’s report, ‘Prosperity Without Growth?’ was met with a combination of disdain and indifference that only the Treasury is capable of. The Commission was told, in no uncertain terms, that this just wasn’t the kind of advice that the UK Government needed.

So I had particularly good reason to celebrate the publication of a new report, authored by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen on the 'Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, commissioned personally by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, questioning the continued obsession of nations with conventionally measured economic growth.

“For years, statistics have registered an increasingly strong economic growth as a victory over shortage – until it emerged that this growth was destroying more than it was creating,” said Sarkozy, endorsing the report. “The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so”.

President Sarkozy has instructed France’s national statistics body to update its gathering and reporting of economic statistics in line with the report’s recommendations. Better yet, he will invite other world leaders to join his crusade against what the report describes as “GDP Fetishism”. “France will put this report on the agenda of all international meetings, including next week’s G20 Summit,” Sarkozy said.

I fear he’ll get very short shrift from Gordon Brown, who will see it as an irritatingly Gallic distraction from the serious business of getting the global economy back on track.

Inconveniently, that’s precisely the same track that has caused such devastating damage to the Earth’s life support systems that sustain us, has unleashed what could still prove to be irreversible climate change, has left between one and two billion people living in conditions of dire poverty, and has ruthlessly promoted private greed and avarice over social wellbeing and community cohesion.

In other words, exactly the kind of growth-based economics that “destroys more than it creates” – to paraphrase the French President.


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on September 22, 2009 12:09 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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