Robin’s Environmental Politics
In 1861 John Tyndall realised that our world was made habitable because we had an atmospheric ‘blanket more necessary to vegetable life than clothing to man’. In 1896 Svante Arrhenius showed that carbon dioxide played a pivotal role in the blanket. Thanks to the work of Charles David Keeling we now know that the CO2 concentrations in our blanket have risen from 315ppm in 1958 to 415ppm today. Over the same period, global temperatures have risen by 0.8 degrees celsius. It is now incontrovertible that humans burning fossil fuels have caused both these changes.
This burning of fossil fuels also underpins the explosive consumerism of the past 50 years, with the consequence that not only have we provoked the crisis of global heating, but a wider ecological crisis. Humanity has breached four, and come close to breaching 4 more, of the nine planetary boundaries (species extinction, climate change, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, land use change, freshwater depletion, nitrogen and phosphorous flows, atmospheric aerosol loading and stratospheric ozone depletion) identified by Johan Rockström at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The safe space in which humans and other than humans have flourished for the Last 100,000 years is rapidly shrinking and the very survival of life on earth is at risk.
Robin was acutely aware of these crises, and recognised that the reformation of our socio-economic system had to be evolved within these planetary limits.
He articulated that effective action to tackle global heating and the environmental crisis in an equitable way will both mitigate future problems and do much to improve the present health of humanity. A population wide move to conserve energy, to generate renewables, to prioritise active transport, to growing food with minimal fossil fuel based inputs and to produce a no-waste, largely vegetarian diet, to care for agricultural land so that it becomes a significant carbon sink, are documented ways in which planetary and human health will improve in synergy. The mental health benefits of once again breathing clean air, eating unadulterated foods and enjoying a flourishing ecology are also considerable. But most important is the need to change our present mind sets to reconnect individuals to each other and to the natural world we live in and depend on.
We never discussed whether this disconnection between humans and our natural environment is at the root of many of our problems, a harbinger of many other disconnects which assail us. The disconnect between us and food which started with settled farming, between urban and rural, the disconnect imposed by technology-watching rather than acting. A disconnect between health and the health system, between learning and the education system. Are all these rooted in the fundamental disconnect between humans, other than humans and the natural environment?
I think this was implicit in Robin’s thinking. Indeed one outcome of the collaborative convivial and associative reforms underpinning the social and economic changes which he proposed is that the necessary changes are all ways of enhancing connectedness .
I like to imagine us discussing other ways of enhancing connectedness in low resource and low carbon ways. Walking in green spaces, growing our own food, energising our communities with local groups coming together to enhance local conviviality. Examples might include street parties and theatre, common gardening projects, local history societies, group walking for pleasure, reading groups, choirs, community ownership of land and facilities. Putnam’s work suggests that these activities increase the level of trust in societies, with the wellbeing benefits that gives.
And can we learn from many indigenous societies, who reinforced their connectedness with their natural environment with the use of ritual, a ritual that is further reinforced with the use of psychedelics? What role might both ritual and psychedelics play for us now?
I don’t know of any research which validates either the notion that disconnects are so important, or on the best ways of reconnecting and ensuring that the reconnection persists .
Robin would have a view and seek to test it. We should follow his example.
December 2019