Plan C

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2

Find Your Reset Point

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Amidst the turmoil of debate, the successes and setbacks, the hope and despair in creating a more sustainable society – and set against the backdrop of protesters actively occupying the financial districts of the world – what is the value of retreat? 

What is the value of actually pressing the pause button completely to disengage from the world, including your quest to make it a better place? Of learning how to turn the mind inwards, and take refuge within the silence, the reset point, at the centre of your very being? 

How any of us achieve this is personal and unimportant. Some people like to meditate, others engage in mindful activities such as making bread. Still others like to walk in Nature and contemplate its beauty. What’s important is that you do it.

At first blush, the benefits seem profoundly individual, even selfish. But a choice to prioritise your personal peace, taking a retreat from the inherent madness of the modern world, is not a way of escaping our responsibilities. It is, instead, a profoundly revolutionary act.

Once the surface noise of our angry or despairing thoughts about the environment, or modern world, begin to quiet down, we begin to detach from the outcome we want to see and a more reflective and creative state of mind can emerge, one that can be applied, once again, to our quest for a better, fairer more sustainable world. 

Once we begin to trust the silence within as a source of nourishment, our fear and sense of vulnerability about the planet can be embraced as confirmation that we are, in fact, deeply connected to the web of life everywhere.

Above all, each time we turn inwards and retreat we challenge the prevailing paradigm that wants us to believe that moments of quiet reflection are purposeless and self-interested, that disengaging is synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and the greatest sin of all: being out of touch with the next ‘new’ new thing. 

When we affirm that the emptiness inside doesn’t need to be constantly filled with the ephemeral whims of consumption, we give permission for others to also discover it as a resource rich in energy. In the silence, ideas which can galvanise our sense of purpose have space to grow.

Try stopping for 20 minutes, 3 times a day, to reflect and quieten your mind, in your own unique way.  In what ways do your thoughts and feelings about the environment change?

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 3 ‘Adopt a new aesthetic’ coming soonish. 

 

 

 

 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 1

Accept Your Pain About the Environment is a Reflection of Your Own Suffering

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

 

When the Earth is seen as sick and dying, we position ourselves as in charge, and the Earth subject to our will. Humanity is in charge. Humanity caused the problem. Humanity will fix it. Humanity has misused the earth’s resources, now humanity will redistribute them more fairly.

Taking responsibility for our impact is an essential part of our evolution as a race, no doubt, and yet our awareness of who we are, in relation to what we are taking responsibility for, can make a big difference. Our perception of the Earth's suffering may actually reflect our own deepest feelings. It’s not the Earth that’s dying but our worldview.

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own deep sense of fragility and of loss; of the pain that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, and no longer systemically sustainable. Our belief that we can 'fix' things with a lot of angry, unexamined, frenetic activity is just one example of the need to control that sense of loss. Indeed it's the kind of meddling that got us into trouble in the first place.

Consider for a moment, the possibility that the Earth is in charge, and we as a species, subject to Her will. Consider what it would be like if we knew intrinsically, that we were a part, an intimate part, of Her whole? A dynamic part of an ecosystem which includes all Her species?

If we recognised this, we can as Satish Kumar says move from an egocentric worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours, to an ecocentric worldview, where my comfort doesn’t come at the expense of another, and who I am is determined by my ability to relate to Other, including the Earth.

This may sound like the ramblings of dyed in the wool greenies, like a touchy-feely paean to deep ecology – like that made popular by the blockbuster movie Avatar – and yet, it is absolutely necessary if we are to rediscover our integral place within the web of life.

Rather than play the hero and act to rescue a dying planet because, yes, it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, but also maybe to glorify ourselves and our resourcefulness as a species, do we have the courage to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature instead?

Can we take the time to accept Nature as a teacher, by observing Nature’s cycles, by growing our own vegetables, making our own bread, staying long enough in Nature to see it with new eyes, until its interconnective web, of which we are a valued and important part, is revealed?

The act of saving ourselves may in the end be a passive one, one where we do less not more. And having stepped back in that way, would we then, secure in the knowledge that we truly belong, act less from fear, and instead with greater awareness of the best use of our time, energy and resources?

Take time to consider from what perspective you are viewing your relationship with the Earth?  Is She broken?  Are you the saviour? Is She able to heal Herself?  And if so, is our part in that active or passive, or both? What have you to learn from Her? 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2 ‘Find Your Reset Point’ coming soonish. 

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?

 

 

 

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?

 

To rescue or to restore..

Nick Kettles

How we talk about the Earth and the language we use probably determines and influences our relationship with the Earth more than we think.  

Contrast the idea of the earth being sick, the subject of a brutal rape by the forces of progress, with the view offered in the draft resolution, entitled Harmony with Mother Earth  (A/C.2/64/L.24) which Bolivia presented to the United Nations in November last year (2009). 

“One of the greatest discoveries of civilization was the realization that the Earth is not flat and that we live on a globe. Today we are in the midst of a much larger discovery regarding the nature of our home. To know that Earth is not only round but it is a WHOLE.”

Yes, you read that correctly.  WHOLE.  Meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, complete, in an unbroken or undamaged state, with no part removed.  

Take a moment to consider this.  If the Earth is Whole, how can it be fragile, raped, dying? 

Is it possible She can be both of these things at the same time? That may be possible in the realm of theoretical quantum mechanics, but what’s more likely is that we perceive that the Earth is suffering, because that’s actually how we feel.  It’s not the Earth that’s dying but us.   

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own sense of deep hurt about our place in the world and perceived sense of impotence in our ability to make a difference and play our part.  Our sense of disempowerment by the relentless drive of progress that insists we sacrifice well being for wealth, and our health for happiness. 

Perhaps for some, these feelings are rooted in a deep sense of loss, that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, dying; no longer systemically sustainable.  

When the Earth is seen as sick and dying, we position ourselves as in charge, and the Earth subject to our will.  Humanity is in charge.  Humanity caused the problem.  Humanity will fix it.  Humanity has misused the earth’s resources, now humanity will redistribute them more fairly.   

But who really is in charge here?  Is it really us?   

Taking responsibility for our impact is an essential part of our evolution as a race, no doubt, and yet our awareness of who we are, in relation to what we are taking responsibility for, can make a big difference.     

Consider for a moment, the possibility that the Earth is in charge, and we as a species, subject to Her will.  Consider what it would be like if we knew intrinsically, that we were a part, an intimate part of Her whole?  A dynamic part of an ecosystem which includes all Her species?    

With such a view, would our approach to addressing the impact of climate change be any different?   

Rather than act to rescue a dying planet, because it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, would we instead act to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature?

Where once the idea of rescuing fair maiden Mother Earth, provided the clarion call the environment movement needed to mobilise itself, today it’s more likely to impel the kind of evangelism which can and does cause people to switch off and disengage.  It is not that the urgency of those who want to rescue the earth is misplaced – it’s better to act than do nothing – it’s just the idea of rescuing anything suggests that the perceived victim cannot help themselves, and that in turn can leave us feeling helpless at the enormity of the task at hand. 

What’s more likely, in fact, is that without us (humanity) the Earth would do just fine and recover to a relative state of Harmony quite quickly, with the number of species that benefitted significantly exceeding the number that suffered.  Even genetically modified crops would, in the absence of spraying (for which they are resistant at a metabolic cost to the plant), be disadvantaged and probably die out.  

It may be the idea that the Earth needs us and cannot survive without our intervention is perhaps another projection of our own deep seated and egocentric need to be needed.  Not only to be seen, heard, and useful, but to feel that we matter, that we can play an important role, and fulfil our part in the Whole.  This too, is a perfectly human urge to have, and yet, again our point of view makes all the difference.

As Satish Kumar has often said, it only takes one letter to move from egocentric with an individual worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours - to ecocentric, where my comfort doesn’t come at the expense of another, and who I am is determined by my ability to relate to Other, including the Earth.

It's quite possible that an ecocentric world view is what emerges when we see that the best role we can play in combating climate change, is not to take up arms on the street, but to actively seek to restore our relationship with the Earth. 

Take the time to accept Nature as a teacher, by observing Nature’s cycles, by growing our own vegetables, making our own bread, staying long enough in Nature, to see it with new eyes, until it’s inter connective web, or which we are a valued and important part, is revealed.

Would we then, assured in the knowledge that we truly belong, act less from fear, and instead with greater awareness of the best use of our time, energy and resources? 

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.