Plan C

This is the show, and it's not going to get any better, any time soon, without you. SO STOP WATCHING THE TV AND GET ON BOARD!

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Have you become a natural disaster junkie?  It makes compelling viewing doesn't it?

Check the body count for a few days after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Monitor news daily to see if the fourth nuclear reactor has blown up in Japan, after the recent tsunami.

Did you keep track of how many flights were grounded last year, when the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland erupted?  Shake your head as the Haiti earthquake death toll rose to 250,000 plus. Hold your breath over last year’s Sumatran earthquake and the resulting tsunami; would it be as devastating as the 2004 Indian Ocean quake/tsunami the force of which was helpfully measured by the scientists as being the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, claiming at least 225,000 lives? And what about those Chilean miners and their two months underground?

Be honest, are you secretly pleased by every new distraction that our earth is offering up with increasing frequency?

These are devastating acts of nature – for which we believe there are no explanations and over which we have no control. In many ways it is easier to live with the cold quantification of these disasters, the body counts, millisieverts leaked, the tonnes of wreckage, the cubic litres of ash, hours of oxygen left than it is to feel anything real.

Yet, perhaps, this is to be expected. The natural human tendency to stand like a deer in the headlights, in front of a truck rushing towards us does seem to beggar belief, but should we really wonder?

Afterall, Hollywood has done such a fine job of anaesthetising us to the reality of significant weather and earth based phenomena, with an endless stream of disaster movies, dating back beyond Towering Inferno from the 70s, that we are left unable to distinguish the difference between a tsunami in the film 2012, and the tsunami that destroyed so much of Sendai last week.

Emotionally numb we may at best be moved by one event – but dare we connect the dots and not just consider whether they are related, but whether we are culpable; whether human-created climate change is driving these disasters?

But how could they be?  A volcano in Iceland, surely can't be connected to an earthquake in Japan, or a flood in Australia?  We can relate, perhaps to a hurricane being linked to climate change, but a causal chain including earthquakes, and or volcanoes is harder to grasp and more often the domain of people who knock at your door and invite you into a discussion about the Old Testament.

And yet the possibility that the greenhouse effect causes the earth's tectonic plates to shift is something that serious scientists are now willing to speculate on, see here and, here.

It’s possible – but hey, why wait for the data before deciding what to do?

You know the moment it comes in someone's going to dispute it, and even if they don't, it won't lead to anything more than incremental change on a governmental level, so why not do something completely different as the basis for making your own mind up.

Granted, this something isn't that easy when your head's full of the latest news reportage, so you may want to switch off your TV set before you try it.

What we're proposing is that you listen to your intuition.  That's right.

Undervalued and at best recognised as a so called soft skill in the business world, intuition, or our gut instinct or sixth sense, is probably the most powerful barometer of what to do that we have today.

It takes courage to say, y'know, I don't care whether the idea that Climate Change is man-made is disputed, or whether there are in fact cyclical patterns of extreme weather historically, I'm still going to change my behaviour in relationship to the earth, because that's what my intuition tells me to do.

Today, our hearts tell us that humanity has a reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the earth, and that if we all acted in harmony with Her we would experience a fundamentally different world.

We'd cling less to dramatic headlines and the comfort of our TV experts, we wouldn’t blur the lines between natural disaster and man-made catastrophe, we'd sync into natural cycles and JUST KNOW what our place in all this was.

Humans are the only living things that compulsively live and work against their own natural cycles, and as such against their own well being. Homosapien is an entire race of Homer Simpsons sticking its fingers into a light socket over and over again to see if maybe THIS TIME we get a different result. Intuition cuts through this crazy behaviour.

Our hearts tell us that living simply and closer to the land is not just common sense but ultimately the key to lasting happiness and a fulfilled life.

That individual rights and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive, and that in fact loving service of others is the key to Self discovery.

Our intuition tells us to reject the idea that we are all helpless victims of life. And most importantly that we don't need another extreme weather event to verify our intuition to live in harmony with the earth.

As the earthquake rocked Japan and split open her nuclear reactors, Nick arranged a barter with his neighbour, to acquire his first Bee hive that will soon help to pollinate his family's vegetable plot and increase its yield.

Pat planted seeds. Just three windowsills and some pots – but in the middle of the city this is her Eden, her way of staying grounded and putting something back.

What does your intuition tell you to do?

 

 

 

What do you do when the hand of fate presses pause?

Nick Kettles

It’s a rainy day at a fete in beautiful, rural South West France, near the Pyrenees.  The tannoy system is being manned by a jovial man in his fifties, tasked with the job of announcing the next event, prize winners and parking problems over the crackly microphone.   

He’s doing a Stirling job, not only with his key announcements, but also his charming, running commentary about local history, the minutiae of a typical French village celebration, and what it was like last year when it wasn’t raining.    

One suspects he may be filling the spaces between his key announcements, to keep people interested in spite of the rain, in the same way DJ’s waffle on in between records, or simply to avoid the whine and whistle caused by turning a tannoy on and off, too often.  But then something happens which reveals there may be a different reason for his bubbling banter.   

The generator which has been keeping the tannoy system running, runs out of petrol without warning, and leaves our announcer suddenly severed from his audience. 

Without his banter, the contrast is stark.  It is uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do. Everyone suddenly stops moving and talking, like marionettes without an animator. <

The awkward silence stretches on, people shuffle disorientated, heave and sigh, talk in muffled voices, avoid each other’s gaze, before finally, like a clarion call that life has once more commenced, the generator roars into life and after a long whining noise signalling the tannoy is back in action, the announcer reanimates us, and we shuffle on to resume our pre-interruption tour of the fete.

Could it be that even in rural France, where many still rise in the morning to the sound of the cock crowing people have become so conditioned to aural blight through different media from an early age, that they need a constant stream of background noise, in order to feel comfortable with themselves?

Or, more likely, that they are just like nearly every other human being in the Western world, who feels naked, exposed and vulnerable, when the system they have invested so much faith in temporarily breaks down?

I would venture that this is exactly how the many thousands of people left stranded by the grounding of thousands of air flights across Europe felt.

I wonder if any of them, saw it as an opportunity to reconsider their place in the world, and whether another way of living in relation to the earth and each other, is possible?   

How many will have considered what their lives might be like without the pineapple chunks form Ghana or baby sweetcorn from Thailand or cut flowers from Africa, which arrive on their supermarket shelves via air cargo freight plane?    

If some of them had stepped out of the airport waiting lounge, for a while will they have noticed that in the sky free of contrails, the birds were singing louder – no doubt appreciating the opportunity to call for a mate in daylight.   

Previous reports suggest that  London birds had taken to singing at night, because they couldn’t get a tweet in edgewise above the noise pollution to which air flights contribute significantly.

Or, might they have taken the opportunity to be curious about the people sitting next to them, beyond the fact they were waiting for the same flight.  If they had struck up conversation, how many would have reached the same conclusions Corrina Gordon-Barnes explores in her incredibly prescient blog post “When All The Planes Are Grounded.”?    

Or will people have simply associated these moments of quiet reflection as synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and, more worryingly, the fear of being out of touch with what the next ‘new thing’ is? 

Always on, comfortably numb by degree, and completely oblivious of our place in the world, until the hand that turns the wheel of fate presses the pause button momentarily and we are forced to reconsider our raison d’etre for existing?   

We don’t need to wait for further Nature inspired interruptions, such as Iceland’s volcanic eruption, to wake us from our stupor, and knock us from our Hamster wheels, but that may be the only way we learn to reconnect with the web of life, where our inter-dependence is self evident in every choice we make.

If they do come, the first step will be to recognize that our fear and sense of vulnerability is not a sign of impending doom, but instead a powerful emotion which can be used to raise our awareness of not just how to deal with contingency, but to also consider a new way of being and relating with one and other.

Breeders of the world unite..

Nick Kettles

Statistics damn statistics. 

Without them they’re would be no environment debate. 

They set the parameters of where we’re at, and where we’re heading, and, at the same time, their ability to objectify the beauty of human relationships as a series of mathematical formula is simply spectacular.

At no time has this been more clearly illustrated, than in the environment movement’s very own bête noire, the debate about population growth and its impact on climate change.

The facts are in. 

Today, there are nearly 7 billion people and rising. It's estimated by 2050, there will be upwards of  9 billion. The UK's Optimum Population Trust estimates the world's sustainable population is 5 billion. 

According to the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, Population growth, "contributes to water shortages, cropland conversion to non-farm uses, traffic congestion, more garbage, overfishing, crowding in national parks, a growing dependence on imported oil, and other conditions that diminish the quality of our daily lives."

Join the dots: More people equals more carbon CONSUMPTION.  Less babies less carbon CONSUMPTION.  People who have them are selfish, so stop having them.  

Indeed, a recent study at Oregon State University has concluded that in the US, the carbon footprint of having an extra child, is almost 20 times more important than any other actions a couple might take in their entire lives: things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs. Moreover, they conclude, the long term carbon footprint of a every child born  - along with all its descendants – is likely to have more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

So, there you have it. 

Children, like commodities, carry their own carbon rating, and therefore parents should, where possible, think before they make their purchase decision.

However, based on logic like this, for those of us who are already parents, there’s little place to go.   

The chances of breeders like me ever achieving the same moral high ground as eco-heroes such as Cameron Diaz, who claims she may never have children, on the grounds the planet doesn’t need anymore, or the woman who actually decided to have herself sterilised to ensure she would not overburden the planet any further, are slim indeed.

My partner and my carbon rating will remain lumped alongside Hummer drivers, Lear Jet riders, and other eco-criminals, while my daughters, and in particular my second daughter, will inherit the carbon debt burden our hasty decision to expand our circle of love has created.

Who ever said mathematics wasn’t an emotional subject?

But, is this narrow view truly representative? 

This debate is possibly wider and more complex still. 

Of course, it’s is true that the world cannot sustain a larger population at business as usual levels of consumption and waste, but by the same token, taking a ‘Round Up Ready’ approach to population control does nothing to address the economic system which impoverishes the third world in the first place.

One reason why people in the developing world may have more children is that a lack of sanitation and general healthcare means they die in greater numbers.  Children are part of the workforce in some countries and not to have them means not to have enough hands on the farm.  In short it’s cash not copulation we should be controlling. 

Of course, Oregon University’s statisticians neglect to say what happens if someone in a Western country adopts a homeless Bangladeshi child, to help them relieve the burden of over-population.  Presumably, some kind of carbon credit or trading scheme will be on offer to assuage the impact of bringing up this child in the bosom of the capitalist West.

Like I said, it’s complex.

And, while not having children to save the planet is a noble act, it assumes, that we are already doomed.  There is little we can do, because that’s what climate science tells us. 

Based on what we know about human potential, this is a fair assessment, however, based on what we don’t yet know about human potential, it risks condemning the current and future generation of children hopeless to effect change. Thankfully human potential is not like oil: it doesn’t have a peak point where it starts to run out.  We may not have found the resilience, courage, creativity, and resourcefulness to create the world anew, but future generations might, if we are willing to instil these qualities in them. 

Maybe developed countries actually needs more parents who conceive children, for the purpose of instilling strong values in a new generation who may yet, change the world,  and not those who have children because they forgot to use contraception, got drunk, wanted a house from the government, or to please their parents eager to be grandparents.

Oh, yes, and then there’s those countries like France who are not ashamed to say children are our future.  Compared with the rest of the developed world, they recognise their declining birth-rate means they will soon face problems paying for the pensions and care of their ageing population.  France’s unofficial ‘third child policy’, implicit in their tax system, guarantees exponential tax breaks for larger families. 

Shoring up a system doomed to bust anyway, or ensuring a big enough labour pool to take over all those beloved but at risk, artisanale Boulangeries, Charcuteries, and Cafés which lovers of sustainability believe should be at the heart of every community?

And while it may appear that adoption is the middle way solution, excluding our right to procreate, also denies fundamental choices, which remain intrinsically political.

I applaud Cameron Diaz, for speaking out about her choice possibly not to have children, and right that she should, but she has no less moral fibre in my mind, than my wife’s decision to have our children awake and naturally, because she wished to affirm her ability, which she shares with every other woman on the planet, to give birth free of the control of male dominated obstetrics. 

Which is greater?  Neither.  Both rightly assert a woman’s right to choose – the same choice that has been suppressed by the same forces of progress which delivered this sorry mess we’re in, in the first place.

While statistics often paint a bleaker picture of what’s possible, the human spirit is far stronger and deserves a chance to fully show itself.  This can only truly happen if we recognise that the continuity of our race is really about human connection, and especially the sharing of wisdom and love from one generation to another.  This more than anything needs to be at the heart of a sustainable society.

And for those who rightfully assert your right not to be parents, on environmental grounds, feel free to step in and enjoy the role of being extended family to some children in your community. 

When Words Fail Us

David Key

On Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so fast that the Inuvialut inhabitants do not have the words to describe what they now see around them.

So often words are the first and most obvious companion for a journey to the edge of Being, but sometimes they fail us.

To run out of words is to stand at the edge of the unknown, at the cusp of The Mystery. There is something both frightening and exhilarating about this: The excitement of an impending adventure, the fear of formlessness.

Where the words finish and the white page is left, where the blizzard-filled sky meets the pure white of a snowy horizon: at this edge we can choose either to enter a dead end of desolation and nihilism, or a space filled with infinite possibility – the ‘potential space’ for creating a new form of consciousness altogether.

Language has it’s limits, just like the human beings that use it. When we reach these limits, the words run out. Now that we are experiencing the unsettling symptoms of global climate change and of the Earth’s finite capacity to support us, should it be any surprise to find ourselves speechless?

It’s not just the Inavialut culture that is lost for words.

While we have been busy evolving our post-modern languages to communicate the onslaught of technology and the giddy ecstasy of our own apparent cleverness, we have missed the fact that the world we have learned to describe – the world we have apparently evolved to live so well in – is increasingly a virtual world created by seductive marketing and the haphazard structural violence of our post-industrial culture.

A language unhitched from the simple ecological realities of life.

English has been abused, it has been moulded to fit an arrogant, abstract, disconnected, technocratic, dominating and violent culture. It is less now a language from the land, more a trade-marked and branded servant of industrialism: from text to txt.

We are left unable to articulate the complex ecological danger we are in – a bewildering experience for our seemingly sophisticated species. Our intellectual separation of mind from matter and of body from spirit, has led to a chasm between our contemporary description of selfhood and the blood and soil of our own Earthy existence.

Language emerges through humans from land, an expression of our connection to place.

To be lost for words is a call to reconnect with home.

The Inavialut language’s short comings in describing a rapidly changing human ecology point not to its inability to evolve, but to the way it connects a specific place with a specific language. When the exotic curiosities of another land suddenly arrive, the language cannot cope.

Lightning, Barn Owl, Hornet, Robin, Elk, Salmon, Wasp, Thunderstorm

These are words in English that the Inuvialut have no equivalent for in their own language; English words that describe things that have been displaced by climate change – change that is exceeding the speed of industrial evolution.

Some languages are still connected, still embedded. ‘The Okanagan word for ‘our place’ and ‘our language’ ‘, writes Jeanette Armstrong, ‘is the same. The Okanagan language is thought of as the ‘language of the land.”

In Siberia, it’s a shift in emphasis that reveals the ecological change:

‘In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on.’

There is less ‘umughagek’ , less safe ground: We’re all on thin ice.

Many contemporary indigenous languages connect to concepts in ways that are geophysical. In modern European languages, Kenneth White calls this ‘geopoetics’ and suggests that poetry is the path to re-engage with land.

‘More than ‘poetry concerned with the environment’, more than literature with some sort of geographical content… Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.’

This is the way home: Opening through poetry to a new consciousness. A new language of the Earth, born of the Earth.

Poetry sits at the periphery of language, the last linguistic outpost before silence, before blank white space.

William James wrote in 1902 that one of the four characteristics of a mystic experience is, “Ineffability – its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”

Poetry is the metaphysical edge of human language, a conduit to the mystic, a place along the continuum of expression just before the point where experience becomes ineffable.

A loss of words indicates the presence of powers beyond human control, powers that contain human Being, along with the collective unconscious of the whole Universe. When we meet these forces in the physical realm, we are humbled – in any language.

Our wordlessness is testament to this threshold and at this point the balance of power in the socially constructed dualism between humans and Nature is dissolved. We go, as indigenous Australians say, “back in”.

In poetry, it is not so much the words themselves, but the whiteness around them, the spaces between them, where the possibility of a new language lies. It’s there in The Void, in the linguistic wilderness, that form can start to take shape around the nuclei of a new ecological consciousness.

It’s in the physical wilderness too that the same ecological consciousness can take root.

It’s fascinating that in the vast white snowscape of the arctic, where the language of the Inavialut embeds them in their oikos, their home, there lies a similar parallel ontology of white space.

Nothingness, no-thing-ness.

To transcend the numbing complexities of human existence, the philosopher Martin Heidegger would take his students skiing. The ski tip breaking track in the snow, he proposed, was the closest he could get to a description of human Being. He called the space created as the ski tip broke the snow, ‘the clearing’.

Poetry signs the way into the clearing. Entering the whiteness of the page parallels a journey into wilderness, deep into the choice between nihilism and infinite possibility.

Is the poetry of the wild then, the clearing into which the new languages of the Earth can manifest? Is our loss of words not a loss at all, but the opening of a window into a new Earth consciousness?

David Key is a founding director of Footprint Consulting.  A longer version of this post, inc references first appeared at EcoSelf.Net

David thanks Mary-Jayne Rust in creating this post.

If you meet a climate scientist on the road, kill him.

Pat Thomas

 

MPs’ expenses, Tony Blair’s illegal war, obscene bonuses for bankers, Tiger Woods, John Terry and Climategate. The characters change, but the story remains the same.

It’s a story of arrogance and ignorance, selfishness and greed, laziness and lack of foresight, and when we read about it we are outraged, we demand resignations that (usually) never materialise and life and the media lurches on in search of the next outrage.

Now Climategate has morphed into Glaciergate with the revelation that the last IPCC report included bogus information about the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting. For me the most outrageous aspect of the ongoing story is the naivety of those who believe that all scientists are rational, infallible, incorruptible and above using clever ‘tricks’ to make their point.

Climate sceptics and holier-than-thou environmentalists have joined together to rail against the use of ‘grey literature’ as if this was an ‘offence’ on a par with genocide and paedophilia. Everyone seems to have forgotten that many significant discoveries begin life in the ‘grey’, as intuition, anecdote and hypothesis. Endless pages are being devoted to the call for more and better peer review, the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri and new leadership of the IPCC.

I have my doubts, particularly when it comes to peer review. So many atrocities which have blighted our world and our lives – nuclear radiation, dioxins and PCBs, GM, thalidomide, the green revolution, to name but a few – have been ‘proved’ to be effective, progressive and safe through peer review. Conversely, some momentous scientific discoveries – for instance those by Albert Einstein and Watson and Crick – were never peer reviewed. Most recently a group of 14 stem-cell researchers published an open letter charging that the process delayed or denied the publication of truly innovative scientific discourse.

In truth, for more than 200 years, peer review has been an old boys’ network where some reviewers are more equal than others and which broadly functions as a way of keeping dissent and views that challenge the status quo out of the public arena. On such foundations is the belief that science will save us built.

The overaching narrative reveals a battle not about who is right but about who is less wrong. And the struggle of the average man is not so much about who you can believe these days, but whose lies or errors of judgement you feel most comfortable living with. It’s a precarious place to be.

What becomes clear is that our view of science suffers from the same distortions and hero worship as our view of sportsmen and celebrities. The Tigers, Terrys but also the Pachauris, groups like the United Nations and professions like bankers and scientists are so often blank canvases onto which we dump all our hopes and aspirations, our desires to be ‘right’ and ‘best’, all our unused potential, but also our darkest, most unconscious stuff, and our deep frustration with life. And perhaps what frustrates and angers us most is that these figureheads are failing to be the type of people we are not willing to be ourselves.

It’s not peer review but personal review that is most needed.

One place to start would be with the Zen koan about killing the Buddha on the road – as apt for climate gurus and environmental heroes as it is for other types of figureheads. Wherever we are on our journey, when we look for enlightenment ‘out there’, often in the form of some person or group who is going to think and act on our behalf, you can bet it will end in disappointment. The most effective thing we can do is ‘kill’ the misconception that these ‘others’ are our salvation.

Yes, the media preoccupation with tearing down figureheads and 'idols' is tedious. But looked at in another light it could also be an instinctive response to this deeper truth. The problem is, because so much of what drives this effort to reveal what lies beneath is unexamined and is happening on an unconscious level, it comes out looking more like a brutal fox hunt than a sincere search for truth.

I’m not saying that we need to deny ourselves heroes – heaven knows so much of environmentalism is already framed in the language of denial. But would it kill us to raise our awareness of how much these figureheads carry that really belongs to us, and reclaim it for ourselves?

Like Corporal Jake Sully, the hero in Avatar, it may be time to ask ourselves: ‘How far out there am I willing to put myself to live in a better world?’ – and then come up with an answer that doesn’t involve the miracle of CGI.

What if, for instance, voters decided to boycott the next election unless politicians could demonstrate a greater sense of environmental awareness? What if we actively encouraged alternative economic systems like LETs schemes and local currencies or took our money en masse out of big banks and put it instead into small community or cooperative banks (harder in the UK than in the US but still doable on some level)? What if for one month we all didn’t use supermarkets, or for two months we all didn’t buy petrol?

We could constructively tear down a system that is killing us by degrees. But we better make sure we have something in place to support us if we do. Therein lies the problem. We have become very skilled at tearing things apart, but frighteningly deskilled at being builders and co-creators.

The first step away from endless exhausting outrage and towards practical and creative ways of building a better future is to claim back all the stuff that we have projected onto these ‘others’ and stop waiting for them to make the world right for us. Instead we need to make it right in our own lives and encourage our families, friends and neighbours to do the same. We are, as the poem goes, powerful beyond measure.  Isn’t it time to stop being afraid of our own light?

 

Will a barefoot politician please step forth?

Nick Kettles

It’s quite possible the Copenhagen Climate Change summit is doomed to failure before it has even begun but not for the reasons everyone expects. 

Copenhagen will fail for the simple reason that none of the delegates from the 192 countries represented will truly be able to represent the interests of the earth.  Even if the delegates are genuinely concerned about climate change, their overriding and narrow objective will continue to be how to leverage as little negative economic impact on their own country as possible.

The fact remains that having a concern about the facts of climate change, doesn’t always translate into a deep and lasting concern for the continuity of all life on earth.

It’s true that intellectual discourse can provide the basis for a deeper awareness of our intimate connection with nature, as Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpets, eco-epiphany clearly shows.  Ray Anderson claims the impact of reading Paul Hawken’s “The Ecology of Commerce” literally felt like a “spear to the chest” and awoke him to the urgent need to set his company on a new course toward sustainability.

But there is no guarantee that it will always be so.

Abstract concepts based on data sets and statistical analysis, are just too easy to disconnect from the world they represent.  If scientific facts could emotionally move politicians sufficiently to take decisive action, then they would have already taken such action a decade ago. 

What kind of action might the delegates at Copenhagen take if they felt as deeply about the planet as the indigenous tribes people, who met in Anchorage earlier in 2009, to make their own declaration on climate change?

“We reaffirm the unbreakable and sacred connection between land, air, water, oceans, forests, sea ice, plants, animals and our human communities as the material and spiritual basis for our existence.”

Of course we hear of Obama and Gordon Brown ‘growing their own’ in the gardens of the White House, and 10 Downing Street, but just how often do they actually get on their knees and get their own hands dirty to till the soil?  Or harvest the fruit of their labour with their own hands, and then prepare it for their family to eat? 

What’s more likely is that they are like the vast majority of the human race, who environment writer David Nicholson Lord suggests spends less than one day in a lifetime in sensory contact with Nature.  If this is the case, then it’s likely these forays into the garden, are little more than PR exercises designed to mollify the green lobby they hope will keep them elected.

Politicians, mostly male, middle class, wearing their immaculately groomed uniform of suit and tie spend most of their time disconnected from the earth, gathered around synthetically made conference tables, sitting on pump chairs, in largely synthetic environments, where the air, according to German Chemist, Michael Braungart, co-founder of cradle to cradle design, is likely to be more toxic than a smog filled city.

Will the conference centre in Copenhagen be any different, or are we more likely to get more sick solutions from men in sick buildings? 

The fact is that we desperately need our politicians and leaders to get out more.  We desperately need them to forge a deeper and more authentic relationship with the earth, because it’s clear that when they do, they act decisively. 

It’s claimed that after camping in the open air in Yosemite Valley with naturalist John Muir, in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt was more receptive to addressing the state mismanagement of the valley and rampant exploitation of the valley's resources.  Snow fell on them the night they camped there near Glacier Point.  It was, according to President Roosevelt, the greatest day of his life:  “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”

Being emotionally moved by nature’s beauty, can awaken the same instincts to nurture and protect that we might feel for an infant or a child.  This is the kind of instinct that is infinitely harder to deny, than the rationale of hard science.

Living in mud huts and wearing hemp trousers is not my personal vision of what a sustainable society might or should look like, but when it comes to our world leaders and Copenhagen delegates, this might not be a bad thing in helping them develop a more authentic relationship with the earth.

What kind of discussions might unfold when if Barack, Gordon and other members of the G8, gathered round the camp fire they’ve made themselves? 

An end to oil as soon as humanly possible?  The radical transformation of urban landscapes into green sustainable cities? The possibility that we might frame our sense of well-being, by the depth of our relationship to the earth and all its creatures?

What chance an eco-epiphany at Copenhagen?  Will a bare footed politician please step forth to lead the way?

Nick Kettles is a freelance writer and co-founder of Plan C.