`Author:` Natalie Bennett `Availability:` Yes ## Summary ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes ### Introduction The puppyish technological optimism, particularly about artificial so-called intelligence - driven by extreme financial-ised boosterism - that I attack in Change Everything is now having its day in the sun, much like the dot-com bubble did before the financial crash of 2000. The bloom, however, is visibly overblown, fading, the petals tattered, the whole ready to shatter in the first strong breeze.[^1] I am seeing, slowly, an increasing understanding of the essentially biological, ecological foundation on which human animals on this fragile planet are entirely dependent. That solutionism - whether genetically modified crops or carbon capture and storage - is a failed model of approaching our systemic crises is being highlighted from multiple directions.[^2] The climate has been wrenched out of the Holocene[^3] stability in which our societies developed, into the radical uncertainty of the Anthropocene, in which our actions determine our own fate. Multinationals continue to hunt for new [[Oil]] and gas fields, mining companies eye the deep ocean floor, and industrial [[Agriculture]] slashes away at the Amazon as the sixth mass [[Extinction]] gathers pace[^4]. Half the mass of plants that were on the planet have gone[^5], only a sixth of the wild [[Animals]] remain, while domesticated pigs and cows, kept often in conditions that can only be described as torture, make up nearly half of the mass of mammals[^6]. Domestic poultry totals three times the mass of wild birds[^7]. The 1942 Beveridge Report promised to deliver the nation from disease, ignorance, squalor and idle-ness. That ushered in a period that some economists call the Great Levelling, a slow but steady reduction in inequality in the UK. Despite all of this abusive overproduction, more than 800 million people regularly go to bed hungry, but their number is far over-matched by the number ill from obesity[^8] But what I found, as I started door-knocking in North London with the Green Party, was that my unease was not widely shared... ‘… Gordon Brown has abolished boom and bust, and we will sail as a nation onto the sunny uplands of endless prosperity on the backs of a few clever bankers in the City' The infamous narrative of the then chancellor's Mansion House speech in June of that year did not originate with him - it reflected what was seen as common sense[^9]. Both the largest parties - but particularly the Labour Party - love to talk about 'hard-working families'. Yet we stopped sending children up chimneys and down mines a century ago. They are wedded to the idea that what we have now is '[[progress]]', that history had an inevitable course that was leading, through providence, even when the religious underpinnings fell away, to where we are today. The West' in the twentieth century was, not just for [[Francis Fukuyama]] with his 'end of history' thesis, the pinnacle of human development.[^10] [[Karl Marx]] and traditional Liberals were also entirely wedded to this idea of progress in inevitable stages. If you dig into the assumptions of many politicians today, they are too. It is a racist and ridiculous view. Fallacy 1: We need economic growth 'Mainstream' politics sees economic growth as essential to keep our economic and social systems afloat. As the Financial Times pointed out in 2017, two such disparate politicians as Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn shared the belief in the need for growth; they just wanted to distribute the proceeds differently.® Yet you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. That is an old Green saying, and also a fundamental truth. We are beyond six of nine of Earth's planetary boundaries - climate, biodiversity, flows of phosphorus and nitrogen, creation of novel entities (the 'Three Ps': plastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals), ocean acidification and freshwater use.[^11] Fallacy 2: You must have a job' The second way in which social democracy and neoliberalism are alike is that both see the way in which an individual finds a place in society is through a job: a defined, paid role in an organised place of work that provides the majority of your income. I will never hear the name Rachel Reeves (cur-rent Labour shadow chancellor) without thinking of her declaration for the Labour Party that: ”We are not the party of people on benefits. We do not want to be seen, and were not the party to represent those who are out of work.”[^12] In 2024, with a Conservative government forced to acknowledge that many jobs do not provide enough money to live on, their answer is that people should upskill and find a better-paid job, ignoring the fact that many of the lowest-paid jobs, from social care to delivering parcels, are the most essential of all. Every rise in the percentage of the working-age population in jobs was cause for celebration, a gain for 'equality'. It is telling that it is in access to employment - where more labour was needed for the economy - that the women's movement made the most progress. Fallacy 3: You have got to compete to get ahead This is an idea now wired into international relations and economic theory: if you beat down the other nation, the other company, the other person, and grab what they have got, you will be better off. Call it the Genghis Khan theory of politics. As Greens we know that international relations, as with interpersonal, is not a zero-sum game. A secure world in which everyone has enough is a stable world; a [[Society]] that works co-operatively to tackle its problems is far better off than one where a few are seeking to grab as much as they can while impoverishing the rest. Both neoliberalism and social democracy focus on individual aspiration', each person seeking to leap ahead of their fellows, and the idea that the lack of it is what holds communities and individuals back. And 'aspiration' is explicitly built on the idea of a few individuals getting out of a disadvantaged community - moving up into a middle-class world and leaving their peers, parents and siblings behind. The Green alternative vision is a world in which every job is valued, respected and decently paid. Green political philosophy, as outlined in this book, is built on the security of a universal basic income, the chance to flourish for every individual in a society that values all contributions. What it offers reflects the models, ideas and experiences of individuals and communities around these islands and beyond - including Transition Towns groups[^13] and tenants' unions, repair cafés and Incredible Edible[^14] the Italian Marxist philosopher jailed by the fascists in 1926, are so often quoted now: 'The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.' Promoting doing politics is the purpose of this book. ## Part A - Active Freedom In the Green furre, you no longer work for the man. You do not have to sell your labour to ensure you do not starve. You are not defined by a ‘job'. There is universal basic income: you decide how to use your time, energy and talents. Over the past centuries, food and shelter have been increasingly commodified, made part not of life but 'the economy. individuals' time and energy has been directed by bosses, not left under their own direction. A universal basic income decommodifies time. The most basic level at which it can be set, as the Green Party has done in manifestos in 2015 and 2019, means the total cost is about double what benefits are now. Green support for a universal basic income comes from another direction too, that of belief in the resources of our society being a 'commons', something of which everyone should have a share, just as the people of England once had a right to graze their livestock on common land and collect firewood from common woods, before enclosure took that away. Socialist Robert Owen made the demand for what is still largely our standard day today in 1817: 'Eight hours' labour, eight hours' recreation, eight hours' rest.' (Being a man, and of his time, he did not consider the need for care: of children, of the eld-erly, of relationships.) But the UK opted out of elements of the EU Working Time Directive, even before Brexit, and communications technology has increasingly meant work never really stops. That is the very opposite of freedom. Add in commuting, essential self-maintenance and caring responsibilities, and for many people, particularly women, there is no recreation time left in the week. imagine the composer, poet or cabinetmaker who might produce a masterpiece, but who is instead condemned to employment in call-centre hell (which we all suffer with them whenever forced to deal with our bank or telecoms pro-vider). With a universal basic income, they could use their skills and talents as they choose, use them well, rather than be forced to allow them to wither. If those hideous call centres cannot be staffed, we would have to find other - better - ways. to provide services, such as local, physical offices. We cannot continue as we are, and universal basic income - and the very different society it would bring - offers a way forward. For as anarchist political writer [[Emma Goldman]] said last century: 'No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present exist-ence, and give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.[^15] Our current system ensures that most people of what we consider working age have little spare time and energy. Consequently, many essential tasks are left undone. In a universal-basic-income society, most people would seek some paid work - it is, after all, a basic income - but the balance of that and community contribution could for many be turned around. And if you coordinated a community garden - say in the old car park of an abandoned supermarket - the produce would help ensure you do not need to buy much food. And your productivity, and contribution to society, would be far greater than when you were working as an administrator levying parking fines on that very same patch of land. The universality of basic income means this freedom to use your time and energy as you choose is available not only to the few, of the 'right' gender, class, ethnicity or age, as 'freedom' has been in the past. Looking back in history, the Church of England reverend-cum-scientists, from author-naturalist Gilbert White to entomologist William Darwin Fox, relative and tutor of [[Charles Darwin]], were in receipt of something very like a UBI - minimal demands in return for a secure income, the chance to use their time as they pleased. A secure, guaranteed income for all - not just a few middle- and upper-class men - could not just resurrect and create communities of scholars and craftspeople, carers and creatives, but be the basis of a nation, even a world, of them. As Amelia Horgan wrote in [[Lost in Work]]: 'Work under capitalism is arranged, must be arranged, in such a way that workers do not have control over their work.' UBI would enable the many young people now forced to leave deprived coastal towns and rundown industrial centres to make a life for themselves in the communities they value as home. That would be restoration rather than gentrification. ###### People are a resource, not a problem Politics in recent years has often been seen to be - particularly in the hands of the populists and the politicians who have tried to seduce their voters - mostly about migration. 'They are coming here taking our jobs. (While also often, it has been claimed, arriving just for our welfare benefits - the contradictory nature of those two propositions not being challenged.) There has been a lot of work by academics, notable among them in the UK being Louise Haagh, Guy Standing and Simon Duffy. In global politics, Andrew Yang in the United States and Lula da Silva in Brazil (whose Bolsa Família was a conditional payment, but did a lot to spread the idea of cash payments for the poor) have raised its profile. Even tech billionaires, from Elon Musk to Silicon Valley's Sam Altman (if on the unproven premise that their technology would replace human labour) are spreading the idea of UBI. But most crucially of all, movements backing UBI have spread. I know most about the Universal Basic Income Lab Network, now with local activist groups widely distributed across the UK and beyond, as well as interest-based groups - disability, arts, women, LGBTQIA+ and more. But there are many more similar UBI campaign groups around the globe. The idea of trialling UBI has spread fast. On one level, that focus on trials is a bad idea. To repeat the words of an Indian academic I heard speaking at a global UBI conference: 'We did not trial the end of [[Slavery]].' ### Chapter 2 - Education For All, For Free, For Life .. we also need vastly more people focused on making sense of the whole, joining the few now working in fields such as [[Earth System Science]] and social system theory. Marine biology is a glamorous field, yet Helen Scales notes in her must-read The Brilliant Abyss that there are only 500 specialist deep sea biologists for this 65 per cent of the Earth's surface, meaning each has 2 million cubic kilometres of water to cover for an environment of which we have only the faintest of understandings. The beginnings of that knowledge can be dated back to just 1977, when the profusion of life around ocean-floor hydrothermal vents - the possible location of origins of life on Earth, where existence is built around chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis - was discovered. Scientists collecting organisms from these depths uncover species that we struggle to find a place for on the tree of life, and whose mode of existence we have not even begun to grasp. The human race is already causing massive damage to this environment, with deep-sea trawling, and could now be about to destroy much of the rest with deep-sea mining, without ever coming to even a basic understanding of what is there. Lots of people are fascinated by it; very few now have the chance to devote their time to pursuing that fascin-ation. (Such sexy scientific fields typically demand years of unpaid labour and volunteering to gain access; they are overwhelmingly dominated by people able to access the bank of mum and dad.)[^16] ##### knowledge murdered and destroyed There is much more being lost even in languages that are hanging on. 'Native science' has been described by the Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete as 'a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and "coming to know" that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. [^17] (His people developed their culture in what is now the US state of New Mexico.) We are just barely beginning to understand the ways in which peoples as geographically far-flung as the Australian Aborigines and the dAXunhyuu (Eyak) of Alaska managed land and seascapes as healthy, productive ecosystems; not the smash-and-destroy approach of industrial farming, but light-touch agroecology long before that term was invented. Recovering that knowledge, where that remains possible, or recreating it where it is not, is a project of truly monumental scale that should be applied to much of the land surface of this planet. ##### Open access - why not everything? I have just discovered the excellent Environmental Humanities journal. I included on my summer reading list for Parliament's The House magazine, in 2021 Thomas Pradeu's Philosophy of Immunology, not just for its revolutionary reshaping of thinking about the very nature of biology, but also because the freely available nature of this series deserves active promotion, to encourage others to take the same path. Knowledge is now freer than ever before. ##### Where, and when, to start? Inadequately understood information, far too little educa-tion, knowledge and wisdom compared with what our societies need, and could generate, is the context in which I turn to consider the education system. My case study is that of the UK, but there is little difference in approach in most Anglophone countries. (The Scandinavians, as in much else, take a considerably healthier approach.) Energy, spirit and will are tamed just as they are devel-oping. Children must be contained and constrained, directed by others, or else they are sent for medical or psychological treatment. As the emerging, exciting field of critical neurodiversity studies is increasingly uncovering, the range of human possibility is broad, and forcing individuals into narrow behavioural norms deeply damaging. The far too early start to formal schooling has two major costs. First, many pupils are labelled as ‘failures' or ‘problems’ just as their development as human beings is beginning. It is a lie that for many will end in poverty, or prison. Secondly; those children are mobbed of the creative, productive learning opportunities that come through play, socialising freely with their peers and others, interacting with the natural world - touching, feeling, tasting it - and using their energy and curiosity according to their interests and stage of development. Exams test how well a student does exams. They might be necessary to establish a safety-critical baseline of knowledge for engineers or doctors, but not in most roles in life. And they teach the practice of cramming, one it took me years to unlearn and return to genuine building of knowledge. ##### Systems, not silos The phrase 'knowledge is power' is often attributed to Francis Bacon. The origins in the mouth of a man crucial to both the advance of reductive science and extractive colonialism is telling... For systems thinking, considering problems holistically, ranging freely in thought across disciplines and ideas, rather than breaking them down into little pieces contained in silos that apparently can be manipulated like the dials on a machine, is something that has been severely lacking in dominant intellectual traditions since Bacon. Proponents of genetic modification as a technology for agriculture are a perfect case study for the dangers of such reductionist thought. 'Tackle the impact of drought with a single gene change and cure world hunger,' they suggest. They do not acknowledge the potentially widespread impacts of changing the metabolism of plants, or that 36 per cent of the world's crop calories are fed to animals, to produce a tiny fraction of that as meat and dairy products.[^18] Every subject should be underpinned by systems think-ing.. ##### Education for democracy In the UK, the trend is most evident in the arts and humanities - critical thinking, examining the state of our society, our past present and future, either creatively or analytically, are not, the government tells us, 'economically useful'. Instead they want to focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), but mostly in applied rather than higher levels. I see what has been developing for a quarter of a century: informal, supportive communities of people with like interests getting together. The [[New School of the Anthropocene]] is an example of the developing efforts to find alternatives. The University of the Third Age is a longer-running example. Teach-ins regularly conducted by striking university and college staff - available to all who are interested - is another. [[Groundswell]], the annual gathering of the regenerative agriculture community, demonstrates how such structures can be built from - literally - the soil up. We need to end the current dominance of business interests in funding research and scholarship; to take health research out of the hands of drug companies; farming and agronomy research from the seed, chemical and fertiliser multinationals; and research into new industrial practices and materials science from the status quo firms that have little interest in change. (Consider the long-delayed development of electric cars, suppressed by those with interests in existing production lines.) ### Chapter 3 - DIY Politics ##### Westminster in control It was not only the electoral system that provoked the take back control' cry. It was also the - surprisingly little understood - fact that the UK is the most centralised polity in Western Europe. Power and resources are concentrated in Westminster, and what little control local government had a couple of decades ago has been squeezed away. ##### We get the politics they pay for 'He who pays the piper calls the tune does a lot to explain the policies of the larger political parties. That is without adding in the combined effect of the neoliberal ideology of 'business knows best' with the impacts of austerity that have hollowed out numbers and expertise in government departments. I worked with Eduoard Gaudot on the Green European Journal in 2023 to produce a series of articles exploring in much more detail the Green model of leadership: www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/what-is-green-leadership/ ## Part B - True Prosperity ### Chapter 4 - Restoring the Earth #### Turning farms into factories The extreme inefficiency of industrial agriculture is not hard to measure. It now takes ten calories of energy in - think about all those tractor passes, for ploughing and spraying, and spraying again and again - to get one calorie of food out.[^19] Historically, pre-fossil-fuel use, one calorie in produced three calories out. #### Trashing our soils and animal life That this model is unsustainable is only a statement of common sense. Agricultural land covering the size of China and India combined has suffered 'moderate to extreme soil erosion since the Second World War, with average rates from 10 to 100 tons of soil loss per year. That is 10 to 100 times faster than it forms.[^20] And that is only talking about erosion; loss of health in complex soil ecosystems is an even bigger issue. You almost never now see a hedgehog squashed on a road - perversely bad news, since that means there are now few hedgehogs left; a third of the already depleted UK population is thought to have been lost since 2000.[^21] The Yangtze River basin, now an industrial wasteland, was once as rich as the Amazon.[^22] Put humans and our livestock together and we make up 96 per cent of its mammalian bio-mass. That is taking up space once occupied by diverse wild species, and relegating those to tiny areas of refuge such as nature reserves. The people of those fens had a good life, an independent life, and they fought, hard, to defend it, as told in James Boyce's brilliant book [[Imperial Mud]]. Yet the military power of the state, backing the interests of the London financiers and the expertise of Dutch engineers, drained the fens, immiserated the people, and produced the giant, dull, almost lifeless expanses of unhealthy soil we see today. #### ‘Tidy’ cities and towns The impoverishment of the natural world is not just in the countryside. The sterilisation of our farmland is reflected in the cities, particularly in the rampant use of one herbicide, glyphosate, a broad-spectrum, persistent herbicide that has attracted increasing campaigns against it on human health grounds, but which is also, finally, starting to be questioned for its Ground Zero flattening effects on all plant life. What some call weeds, I would call wildflowers. We are starting to see - although still on a small scale - rejection of that dreadful monocrop, the lawn, usually maintained by massive applications of water, fertiliser, pesticide, and fossil fuel for mowing, and attempts to allow wildflowers to bloom. But that frequently produces complaints of 'untidiness' - just ask the Green council in Brighton and Hove. Well, I say we need a war on tidiness. Simply being trapped in a world of rigid straight lines is bad for human health.[^23] #### Animals as machines The seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes' view of animals as mere automata has been pervasive, and hugely damaging. It allowed enormous sheds of factory-farmed chickens, sentient animals living a short life (often just thirty-five days in the case of 'Franken-chickens) of misery and pain. But why, when anyone who has ever owned a dog is likely to have concluded they have a theory of the mind' (can try to understand what we are thinking and seek to manipulate that), has Descartes' approach, this belief, been so pervasive? ### Restoration in East Anglia the brilliant Hodmedods - the name drawn from the local dialect word for hedgehogs (a reminder of another almost lost diversity) - is promoting the growing of beans and lentils. ### Chapter 5 - The People’s Economy The Czech dissident and later president [[Milan Kundera]], in a world much less homogenised than today's, wrote in The Art of the Novel, 'Unity of mankind means: no escape for anyone anywhere.? #### Bioregional diversity The Green alternative is that economies, in their operation and structures, are far more local, not one global whole. The French have the attractive concept of [[terroir]] - flavours, tastes, products, specialities specific to a locality (and not just wine) - fitting its soil, its air, its people. #### Today's model for human and environmental destruction Significant volumes of clothing and shoes never even make it out of their initial wrapping. Burberry, after an outcry, vowed in 2018 to stop burning its own products to ensure they could not be sold too cheaply, but it just happened to be the brand that got caught. Louis Vuitton, Nike and H&M were just some of the others named for the same practice.[^24] The figure on the price tag of every product has to reflect its real costs, be borne by the company that made it, not carried as a huge subsidy for its profits by the rest of us. One way of approaching this would be to change value-added tax to capture those costs. A T-shirt made from hemp grown in Kent, spun into cloth in a local factory with excellent worker and environmental conditions, sewn up by a local tailor, might well be tax-free. That T-shirt starting with cotton in Azerbaijan, with the full costs included, would not be able to compete. #### Advertising misery The Green alternative is to clamp down on this unhealthy, stressful bombardment: there is no 'right to advertise. We can choose what to allow, and a good place to start would be banning gambling and alcohol advertising (which is a public health disaster in promoting addiction), and that aimed at children (those under eleven lack the capacity to distinguish between advertising and editorial). And to replace the bombardment of billboards on our streets and public transport with something better - trees and flowers, and more, far more, public art. (Poems on the Underground in London is a great scheme. Why not have that in every community?) #### GDP - the economists’ false god In the UK we are using our share of the resources of three planets every year. For the US, it is five planets' worth, for Australia four and a half, overall for humanity 1.7.[^25] Of course, there are nations in the Global South who need, who must have, access to more resources than now, and have absolute growth, but we in the Global North cannot. We only have one Earth. GDP is a measure of the monetary value of final goods and services - that is, those that are bought by the final user - produced in a country in a given period of time.[^26] It is, in short, all the stuff where money is involved. If there is a car crash on the motorway, GDP goes up - all that mechan-ical, and human, repair work. The pain does not get counted. If you cut down a forest, the sale of the timber raises GDP ### Chapter 6 - Controlling the Money Financialisation is a key symptom of the disease of neoliberalism. Institutions once run to meet human needs now have as their only goal the generation of profit for the few. The majority of people, and all of the planet, suffer. #### The world’s slow awakening I can pinpoint my understanding of the City of London as the heart of global corruption to the reading of one book, Nicholas Shason's [[Treasure Islands]]: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, soon after its publication in 2011, and listening to a person behind a lot of its research, John Chris-tensen, at the Camden Serious Book Club. #### Corruption is a Global North problem That radical campaigning organisation (not) [[The International Monetary Fund]] (IMF) estimates the annual cost of corruption is $3.6 trillion - about 5 per cent of total global GDP.[^27] #### Unpayable debt At the end of 2022, global total debt leverage - public and private - had reached a new record level, 349 per cent of annual global GDP, or $37,500 of debt per person.[^28] .. in line with a fast-rising heterodox area of economics called Modern Monetary Theory, among whose chief proponents has been Stephanie Kelton, an academic who advised Bernie Sanders during his presidential run. Crucially, in the UK, it is a break from the ridiculously outdated Thatcherite idea that national spending is like that of a single household - that you have to balance taxes in with spending out. The difference is, of course, that a household could try to print its own money, but would find it impossible to get anyone to accept it. Unlike a state. The 'rules' of finance, of markets, are not like the rules of physics. They are an entirely human creation. They can be shaped differently, if we choose. And in turning the financial sector into a tool of the real economy, one long-time idea, known as a Tobin tax, would be a powerful one. That means putting a tax on every financial transaction, gumming up the works of the gameplaying, gambling sides of finance. You might also have heard of a similar idea, the 'Robin Hood tax. Rather than aiming to cut the number of transactions, it wants to take a little of the profit from every transaction and put it towards good causes. That is better than allowing the speculators to scoop up the lot, but still leaves the financial sector to run rampant. ## Part C - Healthy Life The vast bulk of discussion of health, and the overwhelming majority of health funding, goes towards seeking treatments for illness. Only the crumbs of resources, the dedicated and com-mitted, are focused on keeping people well. That approach leaves us with a profoundly diseased society. That personal observation is backed up by the statistics. In 2018, female life expectancy in the UK was 83.1, more than two years below the OECD average, putting the UK twenty-fifth out of thirty-eight nations. For the fifth largest economy in the world, that is poor. But far worse is the inequality. In the poorest 10 per cent of local government wards in the country, female life expectancy at birth was 78.7 years; in national figures only Mexico was lower. By contrast, in the richest 10 per cent of wards, the life expectancy is 86.4 years, below only the national figure for the famously long-lived Japan. That one statistic identifies that the UK has massive health problems caused by inequality.[^29] The outcomes of that US system are predictably awful. The Commonwealth Fund's 2021 study puts, on a range of measures, its results last of eleven high-income countries, despite it spending nearly 17 per cent of GDP on healthcare. That contrasts to France, Germany and Canada, on around 11 per cent. In absolute spending terms, the difference is even more stark. A comparison is often made with Costa Rica, a high-health, middle-income country. It spends only about a tenth of the money per person on healthcare as the US, and gets significantly better outcomes. Yet the UK has imported, to the highest positions, managers who have worked in, and proselytised for, the US system, and brought in US companies (often with dreadful reputations) to provide services for the NHS. There is nothing in the model to copy, yet that is the path large parts of our political class - Tory and Labour - are set on. #### Social-care disaster Healthcare is following the disastrous path of social care, in both care homes and in-home provision, a privatisation now so fully entrenched that it has become almost invisible. That was until the fragility, instability and danger of the financiali-sation of the sector became evident. The NHS was truly world-leading in the quality of what was called 'geriatric care until the 1980s, when the government began withdrawing from provision of care for older and disabled and vulnerable people, leaving it to charitable and, increasingly, for-profit providers. The number of private residential-home places increased from 44,000 in 1982 to 164,000 in 1994.[^30] #### Drug and vaccine companies The profit motive is equally destructive when it comes to med icines, vaccines and medical devices. New antibiotics ate nor being developed, despite the existentially urgent need fer them, on a planet where these lifesaving drugs are thrown into the environment, particularly on factory farms, with careless abandon. There is no money to be made, But Viagra, well, that was a teal money-spinner, as are drugs for the chronic diseases of the Global North, which patients will take for a lifetime, even if the benefits for some are doubtful, at best.[^31] Some of the challenges facing the NHS are demographic. The ageing population will create more issues, more demand. But it is the level of ill-health, physical and mental, the impossibility of a doctor solving overcrowded, damp hous-ing, or inadequate income and food-preparation time leading to an ultra-processed diet, that is at the core of the challenge to the NHS. It cannot fix much of what ails us, just as we cannot expect schools to 'fix' the attainment gap between poorest and richest pupils. ### Chapter 8 - Unleashing Culture To demonstrate that a different world is possible, we need to imagine it; to allow painters, novelists, craftspeople to help us create it, not just in art galleries and the homes of the wealthy, but in the fabric of everyone's daily life. Culture should be something you do and live, not just buy from a multinational supplier. It was better under Thatcher' were words I never expected to hear at a Green Party conference, but I did in autumn 2018, at a fringe event discussing the benefits of universal basic income for the creative sector. The speaker was referring to one specific policy, the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which provided a payment set slightly above the unemployment benefit, going to people who were starting their own business or developing their career as an artist. They could briefly outline their plan, then go away for a year and try to put it into action. No regular reporting, no hassling to apply for other jobs they were not suited for and probably would not get. And that often came on top of the student grant (not loan!) for university or art college, and with very cheap or free (squat) housing. #### Boring! So many of the high-end cultural experiences now on offer, promoted expensively at every turn - the Netlix or Disney mega-series, the manufactured TV talent-show pop star and the virtual 'reality' series, the latest novel from a star genre writer or the art-gallery blockbuster show - are polished to the point of blandness, even the 'shocking bit' fitting a formula. It is so generic that the sequel, and prequel, and every other frantic reworking of previously successful models is stuck in a zero-sum game. Breakthroughs often come from the fringe, edgy and raw. But that is soon appropriated and smoothed into just another product. It is designed to be addictive, as ultra-processed food is designed, but it is also unsatisfying. How often do you talk to a friend regretting spending a weekend binge-watching the latest hit series, who emerged feeling they have wasted that time? The dominance of Facebook (already fading), Twitter/X (ditto), TikTok and Instagram are not permanent. We can look to shape the regulatory, economic and social framework to ensure something better, more democratic, more open to creativity, less commercial, replaces them. Borrowing the terms of Australian writer [[McKenzie Wark]], that is the hacker class taking over from the vectoralist class - a democratisation of cyber and real spaces, everyone a creator, having a space in the new world. #### Not just a luxury for the privileged But there is a problem with skills, and the development of creative impulses. If you have never - through the education system or later - had the chance to develop them, it is going to be hard to know where to start. I once, as a manager, had to counsel a staff member who was having serious debt prob-lems, which were visibly affecting her work. I sat down to discuss them - and her shopping habit. Most lunchtimes she came back with a bag of new clothes, and spent Mondays talking about her weekend shopping expeditions. I asked her what other things she might do in her leisure time. She could not come up with a single suggestion - a product of a society that has educated its young to think that entertainment is something you buy, not something you create or participate in. #### Creativity is dangerously democratic Thailand in the 1990s, watching as the government slowly, reluctantly expanded the education system in poorer areas beyond primary-only, gave me an insight into why many quasi-democratic regimes in the Global South are reluctant to invest in education. Giving voters more knowledge, introducing the idea of critical thinking, providing the confidence to answer back, often does not seem desirable to the status quo in power, even when the economic advantages are obvious. It is an insight that I have been forced to transfer to West-minster. The desire to make schools into exam factories, to privilege science, technology and engineering subjects over humanities, to make [[Education]] about ensuring pupils are 'jobs ready is not just an economic one. Critically examining social structures, seeing how they could be different, painting (literally or figuratively) images of a different world, are not something our current power structures (of either major party) want to encourage. #### Please hope! One of the few examples of this being attempted - and it is still a 'political work' - is Jonathon Porrit's The World We Made, set in 2050. Its main character, Alex, is a teacher who works three days a week in that role and two days a week as a volunteer, lives in a solar-powered home, and walks and cycles in their fifteen-minute city. Alex sets his pupils projects to explain how society found its way to one-planet, stable and secure living.[^32] The book is a mixture of those, and the story of Alex's life. But I think Jonathon will forgive me for saying he is not a natural novelist, and there is far more to be achieved in this area. Manda Scott's Thrutopia project, a self-study course for writers about imagining a better future, is heading in this direction, seeking to creatively work through models for a generative future. The developing genre of solarpunk contains many works along the same lines. Sci-fi veteran Kim Stanley Robinson's [[The Ministry for the Future]], described by activist Bill McKibben as 'anti-dystopian', is perhaps the most successful book that could be put under this classification. ### Chapter 9 - Recovering Space #### Privatisation of housing One issue on which the Green Party has only just started to win the argument (having always opposed the policy) is Right to Buy, the flagship Thatcher scheme that has seen an average net loss of 24,000 social homes per year since 1991,[^33] at least 40 per cent of which have ended up in the hands of private landlords, charging (often the state, through housing benefit) massively higher sums for exactly the same accommodation.[^34] That is in addition to, with the discounts on purchases, a loss of £75 billion to the public purse since 1980. Accompanying the sell-off has been a failure to build genuinely affordable housing, the combination leading to a great privatisation. It has been a dramatic, but surprisingly little remarked-upon change. In 1979 nearly half of the British population lived in council (public) housing. It was a secure home for life, with affordable rent and some guarantee of living standards, as Lynsey Hanley sets out in the brilliant Estates: An Intimate History. #### Public investment, private profit The sell-off of homes has been matched by a sell-off of public buildings and land that truly deserves to be called a fire sale. Research for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in 2019 showed that between 2015 to 2018, local councils, struggling desperately to meet even their statutory (i.e., Westminster-directed) responsibilities, sold off £9 billion worth of grand old libraries and town halls, playing fields and sports centres, plus any scrap of land they could find.[^35] Brett Christophers in [[The New Enclosure]]: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain estimates that 2 million hectares, or 10 per cent of the UK landmass, was sold out of the public sector between 1979 and 2018. #### Streets for people Pocket parks are another initiative that Greens have successfully supported around the country. Even small spaces - sometimes those colonised by the brilliant guerrilla-gardening movement - can become play and leisure spaces for young and old, and everyone should have one within an easy walk of their home. Or, ideally, outside their house, as in Ghent in Belgium, one of many places in continental Europe where a lot of Green ideas have already been put into effect, rethinking the city for the benefit of its people. What is more privatised, after all, than a parking space, a private car, typically stationary for twenty-three hours a day? Usually it is occupying what is ostensibly public land in a city, town or village that could be being put to far better use - as a children's playground, where the young could take their first steps to independence still in view from the family front window, or as a community vegetable garden helping feed the neigh-bourhood, or simply as a site for a bench, where older citizens could sit and watch the world go by. Instead, for when a car is really needed, it could be hired by the hour - one or two per street instead of a neighbourhood clogged with them. #### An enclosed land Activist and researcher [[Guy Shrubsole]] has been single-handedly responsible for exposing much about the long-term inequity of land ownership, particularly in England, estimating that half of England is owned by less than 1 per cent of the population. #### Right to roam Before progess on ownership, there are likely to be advances to access. For growing fast in England is the right-to-roam movement, which is seeking the same access to land as people have had a right to in Scotland since 2003, when a long-existing customary right was codified into law. Norway, Sweden and Estonia have essentially the same rights. That does not mean you can wander up to someone's back win-dows, or trample their bean crop, or scatter litter into a stream, but it does mean access for responsible use of the countryside. By contrast, in England only 8 per cent of land is available for people - much of it in remote areas like moorlands - and 95 per cent of the rivers are closed off, at least theoretically, to swimmers, kayakers and picnickers.[^36] The right-to-roam policy is enthusiastically embraced by the Green Party. ## Part D - Shared Resilience ### Chapter 10 - Repairing the Broken It is little known that Britain has the highest rate of imprisonment of Western European states, and the number of prisoners has doubled since 1993, despite the crime rate going down significantly.[^37] #### Victorian policies in the twenty-first century It does not have to be this way. Take, for example, the Nether-lands, which has a rate of imprisonment half that of the UK, and which has been closing and repurposing prisons over the past few years at the rate of about one a year. That has been attributed to investment in youth-intervention schemes, electronic tagging as an alternative to imprisonment, and residential care for offenders with addictions and mental health prob-lems. That is a summary of the common-sense alternative to our present policies - to acknowledge that many of the people in jail should be getting help, rather than being punished. The effects of [[ACEs|adverse childhood experiences]] (ACE) on young brains and emotions are well known and yet the criminal justice system fails to acknowledge this reality. More, the economic and social policies being pursued have been multiplying the likely future impacts of ACE. Building more prisons is no answer, but it seems to be the only one our continuing nineteenth-century British political ideologies can come up with. With the state struggling to keep up with the growth in the prison population, with a degree of sad inevitability, this is one more area - like health - where we have been increasingly following disastrous American models of privatisation. Fifteen per cent of prisoners are now held in private prisons - including institutions set up under the Labour government with the dreadful Private Finance Initiative.[^38] They are demonstrably worse than their public equivalents - unsurprising, since profit is being taken out of the funding, rather than being put into staffing, facilities or decent food. But there is an even bigger problem with private prisons: it is obviously in their interest to keep up prisoner numbers, not to cut recidivism by rehabilitating their inmates. In the US they have also been a significant force in promoting carceral policies through political lobbying. The figures are reminiscent of the collapse in social hous-ing: in 1949 80 per cent of Britons had access to free or affordable legal help. By 2007 this was 27 per cent, and after the slashing of the legal-aid budget in 2013, the figure is much lower still.[^40] The budget for criminal legal aid in 2020-21 in England and Wales was barely a third of what it had been - in pound terms! - in 2005-6.[^39] The first non-conference speech I gave as Green party leader that got any media attention was on migration. Speaking in the Romanian Cultural Institute in 2013, attacking the race to the bottom on immigration rhetoric, I made the same argument that I'd been making on doorsteps around the country to voters who had told me they were concerned about immigra-tion. When I asked them why, typically they said, 'Low wages, crowded schools and hospitals, lack of housing provision.' I pointed out to them, as I did in the speech, that all of these issues were caused by government policy, not migration - an inadequate minimum wage, inadequately enforced; failure to invest in public facilities or fund local government; and the privatisation of housing under Right to Buy. As I said in the speech: 'The Labour Party has not apologised for taking Britain into the Iraq War, has not apologised for failing to regulate the bankers, has not apologised for the fact that inequality rose in its thirteen years in power - but it has apologised for its immigration policy while in government.' ### Chapter 11 - Rebalancing the World #### Dark history Before we regard this as an inevitable descent into international anarchy, it is worth looking back, reassessing the actual role of the US since the end of the Second World War. This white-settler empire - built on a foundation of geno-cide, with a significant element of religious fanaticism and a recent history of slavery, that had engulfed giant former colonies of Spain and France - emerged from the Second World War, having used nuclear weapons as no other nation has, as an unmatched superpower. It had economic and military muscle even two adversaries combined could not match. Vincent Bevins gut-churning [[The Jakarta Method]] is, in this tale of abusive foreign policy, even higher on the scale of horror, going beyond the destruction of democracy to the mass murder of civilians at US direction. In 1965-6, in the fourth-most-populous nation on the planet, the unarmed, non-violent PKI, a communist party with only loose links to the Soviet Union, much more like the UK Labour Party, was the target of mass extra-judicial killing and an epidemic of torture and abuse. It is estimated that 1 million Indonesians were murdered. This was US foreign policy. #### Democracy did not have a chance Where the US has been successful is in spreading its economic system - and the market for its companies. This is usually called globalisation, but Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad has suggested, with acuity, it should instead be called 'Americanisation. The deeply ironic, and sad, reality is that the triumph of that system has produced disastrously high levels of inequality, poverty and hopelessness in the state that drove it, as elsewhere. Real wages in the US for most workers have been stagnant for decades, while the wealth of the richest has soared. Infrastructure built in the post-Second World War boom of redirected military capacity is now falling apart, bridges collapsing, water supplies poisoning whole communi-ties, half the country trapped with snail-like internet speeds. The US is the home of an epidemic of 'deaths of despair, opioid addiction paralleling the wave of alcoholism that for-lowed the collapse of the USSR. One in twenty-five American babies born today will not live to their fortieth birthday.[^41] For institutions to truly develop, for a functional polity and, hopefully, democracy to arise, internal political forces in a nation have to be allowed to balance each other, to develop mechanisms to deal with each other, to achieve some form of harmony without an outside, overweening force preventing such evolution by putting its weight behind one side. Such a development, of course, is what happened in most of the currently successful states in the world. What develops is a model of organic strength, institutions with strong roots. It is only common sense that will work better than an outside imposition. #### Not always a role model I draw hope from Finland, now seen as one of the most stable and best-governed states in the world. Yet when I visited the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas in its second city, Tampere (which has a lot of similarities to Manchester in industrial history and politics), I learnt about Finland's tragic early twentieth-century history, when the civil war between the Whites and the Reds saw massacres of political, economic and social leaders, of unarmed civilians and surrendered fighters. The horrific photos reminded me of images from the Rwandan genocide. #### A century of progress I begin with an agreement unlikely to be familiar to any but the most dedicated international-relations afficionados: the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, also known as the Paris Pact for the city in which it was signed. It outlawed war. Obviously, it did not have the desired effect. And it is most often referred to by those mocking efforts at peacemaking and peacekeeping. Yet I am very taken with the reading of it offered by Yale law professors Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro in The Internationalists: that it set out the foundations of an international legal order that meant states could not expect to maintain international legitimacy if they went to war simply because they wanted a neighbouring state's land or resources. The alternative has come from something civil society has developed, campaigned for, winning increasing implementation of an alternative approach: what are known as Magnitsky-style sanctions, targeted at the individuals responsible for decisions rather than whole societies. Their development follows a common pattern; it is in civil society rather than governments that the bulk of an entire framework of international law has been developed and put, at least theoretically, in place. That starts with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It runs through seven major treaties against racial discrimination and torture, and for civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights, women's and children's rights, refugee rights, and the rights of migrant workers. Conventions against chemical weapons, cluster bombs and landmines have limited their use, and civil-society-led work on the international offence of ecocide is well advanced. All we need to do in the twenty-first century is implement this framework. #### Respected states It is worth thinking about what makes a country truly respected in the world. You might be feared as a military force, or counted as an economic heavyweight, but that is not what makes countries rank as 'good global citizens'. I confess this was something I had not thought about until a few years ago, when in the unlikely setting of the Glastonbury Festival - in the Green talks tent long curated by sadly now gone Green Party stalwart Penny Kemp - I heard Simon Anholt speaking about his Good Country Index. It takes a data-based approach to examining the purely external impacts of each country on the rest of the globe - starting from the assumption that nations have a wider responsibility beyond their own residents, to all of Earth's people, nature and the ecosystems of the planet we all depend on. You can disagree about details of weightings and calculations but, broadly, the Scandinavians are at the top of the pile. The Netherlands and Germany also rank highly. The Reputation Institute has taken a different approach, taking a representative sample of people from G8 nations. This is less globally focused, more a view of the life offered to citizens but, interestingly, rankings come out more or less the same.[^42] The 'Scandis' are already widely regarded as steward states', a concept developed by University of California San Diego law professor Emilie Hafner-Burton. Her very useful book [[Making Human Rights a Reality]] sets out how the past few decades of international civil society and government effort have developed a comprehensive, normative set of human-rights rules - and entirely failed to deliver them. But the Scandis and other steward states, like Costa Rica and New Zealand, are working at it. ### Chapter 12 - Making Reparation The genocidal, extractivist, exploitative mechanism of colanialism continues to wreak havoc on this fragile planet and its people. Rethinking the past is crucial for restructuring the present for a sustainable future. #### True development I am often challenged, when I talk about UK communities becoming largely self-sufficient in food: 'But what about the jobs and the development in Global South nations if they are not selling us agricultural goods?' It is not a difficult point to answer. If, for example, Kenyans were not growing cut flowers to be flown to UK supermarkets - for extremely low wages, with disastrous exposure to pesticides, and hunger in their own families - they could be producing healthy food for their own communities. If Peruvians were not using irreplaceable 'fossil water', from underground stores that are not being renewed at anything like the pace of use, to provide us with asparagus and avocados, they would be able to try to find a local balance of inputs and outputs while meeting their own needs. Despite decades of debunking the idea that 'development' means other nations following in the path of the Global North, and failure after failure by institutions like the World Bank and IMF, the same mistakes keep being made again and again in development assistance. Coffee was a crop introduced to Vietnam in colonial times, and its growth proceeded modestly until the World Bank suddenly thought there was a massive development' opportunity, pumping in loans (which of course had to be repaid). But then, since coffee was seen as such an opportunity, global production soared, and the price tanked. Meanwhile, a massive amount of soil erosion and destruction of biodiversity had accompanied the clearing of land, and small farmers were left in the wreckage. In total about 32 million hectares, an area the size of Por-tugal, has been seized in such landgrabs. A study from the Wilson Center in 2008 found that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi controlled more than 7.6 million cultivated hectares overseas - funded, of course, chiefly by Global North oil and gas purchases.[^43] With food security becoming an increasing global issue, when these farms do actually produce food - all too often it is for biofuels, or simply landbanking for the future - it can only be by force that it will be taken from hungry local communities and shipped to far-off lands. This is human-rights abuse and relies generally on foreign funding for the authoritarianism regimes that enforce the dispossession. Sometimes it is not land that is being stolen by the new colonialists, but rather ideas imposed. Work in Africa by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - particularly through the Cornell Alliance for Science - is a classic case study. It has worked to promote GM seeds and industrial farming meth-ods, while actively attacking agroecological approaches. It has, however, encountered staunch resistance, particularly from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which promotes small-scale, environmentally sensitive methods using indigenous knowledge and inputs and cutting-edge science to increase the variety, nutritive value and quantity of food available to local communities. Funders such as the World Bank and IMF continue to be instrumental in seeking to impose the Gates approach on communities. How else will they pay back the loans if they are not exporting the products? #### Green alternatives At COP and other international meetings, there is one organisation's speakers I always try to catch. That is [[La Via Campesina]], a global peasant movement that seeks to empower its own members to take control in their own busi-nesses, their own communities, and to work towards a global model where they get a fair return for their labour. They focus not just on the damage done by industrial agriculture, but the existence of alternatives, all kinds of sophisticated local technologies, many of which still persist, at least in isolated corners, and can be restored, or recovered and recreated. One example: a traditional practice in Niger known as tassa. Farmers dig small pits uniformly across fields to collect rainwater and place manure in the bottom of each pit to increase soil fertility. Seeds are then planted in the long ridges of each pit. Particularly in dry years, yields are massively increased. In 1911, in a book honestly titled [[Farmers of Forty Centuries]], Franklin King, who had visited China, Japan and Korea, showed that their organic manuring methods produced better results than the artificial fertilisers then being introduced at home. The human ecological footprint is a product of the number of people multiplied by their consumption, their impact on the planet, yet as discussed earlier in the UK we are currently collectively using our share of three planets. We all have to get to one-planet living, Fast. You could halve the UK population and we still would not be at one-planet living under our current systems. Consumption is the problem, not people. To get a sense of what one-planet living might look like, Costa Rica - which tops the Wellbeing Economy Happy Planet Index with excellent health and wellbeing scores at about 1.5 planet consumption - is heading in the right direction.[^44] Reproductive rights are crucial to a fair, just society. One in six people in the world are affected by infertility - and treatment for that should be available to all, something that feminists from minoritised communities are right to say has not always been sufficiently acknowledged by the feminist movement overall. Everyone should have access to the resources to care well for their children. The hideous history of coercive attempts to control reproduction - from forced abortions under China's one-child policy to forced sterilisation of indigenous women in the Americas, Australia and beyond - should be warning enough that no state should be trying to control reproduction. ### Conclusion: Greenism: A Complete Political Philosophy As the philosophical basis of the Green Party of England and Wales says, 'economic and environmental justice are indivisible. Virtually all Green parties around the world are on the left of the political spectrum in traditional framing. But Green political philosophy goes much further from the status quo than socialism. It is built around the realities of the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. > [!info] > ![[Change Everything_5348.jpeg]] #### Further Reading Not all of these books are direct sources for Change Everything. They offer routes into deeper, different thinking, both about the past and the future. It is a personal selection, not a textbook one. Lots of other books are mentioned in the preceding chapters. I have not relisted them all. General Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth If you read one book to understand what our economy needs to do, this is it. Kate also has a very accessible website: www.kateraworth.com Post Growth: Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson A mainstream economist by training, Tim has been on a journey from Prosperity Without Growth, which started as a report for the Blair government and set out clearly how you can reduce the carbon intensity of GDP growth, but not decouple them. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson A classic: two health economists show, with a multitude of figures and graphs, how even the rich are worse off in more unequal societies. Here on Earth: A New Beginning by Tim Flannery Australia's foremost public intellectual, and former head of the Climate Commission, blends examination of non-human and human nature, and ideas, to offer hope. Chapter 1: Decommodifying Time The Case for Universal Basic Income by Louise Haagh An accessible, informative introduction, written by the former chair of the Basic Income Earth Network, the international organisation for UBI. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow A wonderful exploration of just what human creativity has been capable of over 100,000 years and more. Reminds us just how narrow and limited today's society is. The Case for a Four Day Week by Aidan Harper, Alfie Stirling and Anna Coote A manifesto for a campaign fast being put into effect, it is a little prescriptive in its title - the three-day week that the New Economics Foundation was exploring a few years ago is my aim - but this is a book setting out action already being implemented now. Chapter 2: Education For All, For Free, For Life School Wars: The Battle for Britian's Education by Melissa Benn Written more than a decade ago, this is now both description and prophecy - of how a system built on competition, focused on exams, and heavily influenced by business interests, is failing our children. Universities Under Fire: Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education by Steven Jones A professor of higher education at Manchester University explains the forced marketisation of universities, and the need to restore them as collaborative communities of scholars at all stages of their development. Herodotus in the Anthropocene by Joel Alden Schlosser What can academia do for us? Rediscover and reformulate our understanding of the past and apply it to the present. Schlosser is clearly a fan of the Father of History, and makes a real case for rereading him. Chapter 3: DIY Politics Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience by Stein Ringen One of the books I reference most often. It demonstrates that majoritarian political systems, like those of the UK and US, produce a far worse quality of governance, irrespective of ideology, than proportional ones. The Social Instinct: What Nature Can Teach Us About Working Together by Nichola Raihani The human animal evolved using the building blocks of every species that came before us. Nichola provides many examples of the case I often make, that if we'd been 'by nature' selfish, our species would never have survived. And nor would many other species. White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea by Tyler Stovall Still-dominant Western ideas of freedom developed in a period of slavery, industrial misery and racist ideology. We could learn from children and pirates about how to find genuine 'savage' freedom. Academic in structure but hugely important. Chapter 4: Restoring the Earth Food (Resources) by Jennifer Clapp Our food system, as so much else, has been financialised, and put into the hands of a few. Competition? There is a show of it, but no reality. Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World by Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer How do we eat healthily and sustainably? This is not the complete answer, but a big part of it. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Wonderfully readable; an exploration of the amazing complexity of the systems we are only just beginning to understand and that we must work with. The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life by Jaimie Lorimer Bringing together microbiology, immunology, ecology, Earth Systems science, sociology, philosophy and conservation biology, Lorimer's work is founded in the understanding that [[Symbiosis]] (co-operation) is the key to maintaining life and stability, as Lynn Margulis understood well before the genetic analyses proved her right. Chapter 5: The People's Economy Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story of Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal As a judge I did not vote for this for the 2015 Bread and Roses Award (sorry!), but it is a brilliant, highly readable exploration of the understandings of feminist economics. And an excoriating demolition of mainstream economics. Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Alice Mah In the depths of the pandemic, I gave an online talk for Speakers for Schools about plastics, and the invention by Coca-Cola and others of the term 'litter bug', blaming the individual for the prob-lem. This is a detailed, powerful account of the corporate push to keep fossil fuels in our lives through plastics. The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments from Blackburn to Bangladesh by Jeremy Seabrook Another book I did not vote to give the 2015 prize to, but a highly readable explanation of the unbearable human and environmental cost of fast fashion. Chapter 6: Controlling the Money Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson • The book that taught me about the City of London, and the long-term and continuing dominance of its financiers. Sets out the shape of what the Panama Papers and so many other leaks since have made crystal clear. Debt and Austerity: Implications of the Financial Crisis, edited by Jodi Gardner, Mia Gray and Katharina Moser Making the poor, the disadvantaged and the young pay for the greed of the bankers - that is the story of the past decade, and this collection of papers is horrifying in its account of some of the human costs. The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources by Jack Farchy and Javier Blas In 2006 the multinational trading company Trafigura was responsible for the dumping of 540,000 litres of toxic waste in Ivory Coast. After the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, another similar firm, Glencore, was a major player in stopping the Russian economy collapsing. Only now, with concern about oligarchs and dictators growing, is the story behind this being told, by brave writers and publishers taking on the injunctions. Chapter 7: Enabling Wellbeing Health is Made at Home, Hospitals are for Repairs: Building a Healthy and Health-Creating Society by Nigel Crisp Does exactly what it says on the tin. A practical exposition that sets out the case for putting public health at the centre of government decision-making. Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr Gavin Francis Widely, glowingly reviewed, this little book reminds us that we are biological beings, that cell repair and muscle restoration take time, space and peace. Something available to the few now. Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones Contact with nature is crucial for our mental and physical health. Grounded firmly in peer-reviewed science, rich in stats, yet highly readable and memorable. Why do children now spend less time outside than prisoners? Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel Disease is rooted in inequalities of power. The rates of death and suffering in ethnic minority communities from Covid-19 are not an accident. Read it and weep. And get angry. Chapter 8: Unleashing Culture Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta In the UK, we're struggling to implement systems thinking, to get beyond siloed academia and government. Yunkaporta demonstrates that joined-up thinking - a consistent, coherent way of understanding the world and humans place in it - is the foundation of Indigenous Australian philosophy. The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin We need artists and writers to imagine different ways of doing things, their possibilities and pitfalls. Le Guin, one of the great authors of all time, in my view, in this novel presents utopia/dystopia and more. A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner Grounded in the politics of the decade, the author sees that as shaping the culture - the Spice Girls fitted right in, 'Cool Britannia was art all about the brand. If you were not there, it will help you understand your parents and teachers; if you were, will make you wince about how it all turned out. Chapter 9: Recovering Space The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes One of the founders of the Right to Roam movement sets out the case, and walks the walk, all across our privatised landscape, showing what we have lost, and what we can achieve with citizen science and watchful eyes. All That is Solid by Danny Dorling There are now more bedrooms per person than ever before in the UK. What we need to do is tackle the distribution and accessibility of housing. Dorling is one of the few commentators who does not say 'build, build, build'. And he is right. Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Land and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole A compelling argument for land reform (one of my favourite phrases in the House of Lords, which makes the hereditary peers squirm), starting with a basic provision - transparency of ownership. Chapter 10: Repairing the Broken Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry by Laura María Agustín I have long been campaigning for the decriminalisation of sex work on the New Zealand model. Agustín places sex work as part of a far broader trend in the global economy that forces the marginalised, the immigrant, the dispossessed, to make commoditised performances of care. The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees by Matthieu Aikins A powerful, personal account of one journalist's choice to journey as a refugee with his Afghan friend across Europe in 2016. The Little Book of Prison: A Beginners Guide by Frankie Owens I think it was Frankie himself who gave me a copy. It sits on my shelf still. You never know when your life might demand it. Even if you do not need its practical tips, it serves as an exposé of the pointlessness of our carceral system. Chapter 11: Rebalancing the World The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah A memoir by the young British Afghan maker of the 2001 documentary Beneath the Veil, which told the story of women's lives under the last-but-one Taliban regime, this gets under the skin of a place too often seen only in the grainy footage of a killer drone about to strike. Blood River: A Journey to Africas Broken Heart by Tim Butcher Reading this in 2008 sparked my continuing interest in the enor-mous, overwhelming tragedy of peoples never given a chance to find stability. When I have been able to, I have been pursuing Congo issues ever since, from sexual violence to children working in mines. This is a classic crazy journey story. But one with a real purpose. Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us by David Whyte I have worked closely with those campaigning to create an international crime of ecocide, securing the first parliamentary debate on it soon after a new, carefully worked and deliverable legal definition was released. This book sets out the necessity for it, and the way forward. Chapter 12: Making Reparation Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis A classic; the London Library copy is worn down almost to its bindings. As an explanation of how the Global South was underdeveloped (the process of colonial destruction that is still ongoing), this is hard to beat. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal We are often told that we cannot judge the past by the standards of the present. But from slavery to colonial exploitation, there were plenty of voices through recent centuries saying the exploitation was not acceptable. Priyamvada uncovers crucial history. The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker There was strong, determined, creative resistance to the colonial projects, which fed ideas, and people, into struggles for freedom in the colonising states. This book makes the links and uncovers many voices that deserve to be remembered. Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood A powerful - if quite technical - demonstration of the shared destructive error of liberal and Marxist thinking; the idea of a fixed, inevitable progress of history. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` [[Books index]] [^1]: Cade Metz and Karen Weise, "A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse," New York Times, May 6, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/technology/ai-hallucinations-chatgpt-google.html [^2]: The inadequacy is set out beautifully in [[The Problem with Solutions]] by Julie Guthman (University of California Press, 2024) [^3]: The Holocene is the geological period that began about 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. The Anthropocene is a term that has come to be widely used this century, defining a new geological epoch in which human activities have changed the Earth's geology and ecosystems. There is a huge debate about when it should start, and suggestions of alternative terms, such as 'Capitalocene' (referring to the effects of capitalism), and [[Donna Haraway]]'s Chthulucene. I use Anthropocene as the most known term, and will go with the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy's 1950 start date. [^4]: Gerardo Ceballos et al., 'Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass [[Extinction]]', Science Advances, 19 June 2015, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv. 140025 [^5]: Y. M. Bar-On, R. Phillips and R. Milo, 'The biomass distribution on Earth', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (25), 2018, 6506-6511, www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 [^6]: 1. L. Greenspoon, et al., 'The global biomass of wild mammals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (10), 2023, e2204892120, www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120 [^7]: 1. Bar-On et al., 'The biomass distribution on Earth'. [^8]: The Obesity Paradox: An Excerpt from Nourished Planet', foodtank. https://foodtank.com/news/2018/08/obesity-paradox-nourished-planet/ [^9]: https://www.ukpol.co.uk/gordon-brown-1997-mansion-house-speech/ [^10]: 1. Fukuyama saw after the fall of the Berlin Wall the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism'. [[Francis Fukuyama]], 'The End of History? The National Interest', 16 (3), 1989, Center for the National Interest. [^11]: 1. Katherine Richardson et al., 'Earth beyond six of nine planetary bound-aries', Science Advances, 13 September 2023, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458 [^12]: 10 Roisin O'Connor, Rachel Reeves says Labour does not want to represent people out of work', Independent, 17 March 2015. [^13]: A now global movement of communities coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world' that began in Tones, Devon, in 2006: transition-network.org/ [^14]: A movement that started with growing food in community spaces in the West Yorkshire town of Todmorden, which now has groups around the world: www.incredibleedible.org.uk/ [^15]: Quoted in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 1: Made for America, 1890-1901, University of Illinois Press, 2008, p. 158. [^16]: 1. Anna N. Osiecka et al., 'Unpaid Work in Marine Science: A Snapshot of the Early-Career Job Market', Frontiers in Marine Science, 20 August 2021, doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.690163 [^17]: 4 G. Cajete, 'Native Science and Sustaining Indigenous Communities.’ In M. Nelson and D. Shilling (Eds.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability, Cambridge University Press pp. 15-26, DOI:10.1017/9781108552998.003 [^18]: [# How much of the world’s cropland is actually used to grow food?](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed) [^19]: 1. Melissa C. Lott, '10 Calories in, 1 Calorie Out - The Energy We Spend on Food', Scientific American, 11 August 2011, blogs. scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the- energy-we-spend-on-food/ [^20]: David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations, University of California Press, 2008, p. 174. [^21]: 'The State of Britain's Hedgehogs 2022', Natural Biodiversity Net-work, 2 March 2022, nbn.org.uk/news/the-state-of-britains-hedgehogs- 2022/ [^22]: 1. Samuel Turvey, Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin, Oxford University Press, 2009 [^23]: 1. Arnold J. Wilkins, 'Looking at buildings can actually give people headaches - here's how, The Conversation, 1 June 2017, theconversation. com/looking-at-buildings-can-actually-give-people-headaches- heres-how-74565 [^24]: 1. Chavie Lieber, 'Why fashion brands destroy billions' worth of their own merchandise every year', Vox, 17 September 2018, www.vox. com/the-goods/2018/9/17/17852294/fashion-brands-burning-merchandise-burberry-nike-h-and-m [^25]: 5 'How many Earths? How many countries?', www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/ [^26]: Tim Callen, 'Gross Domestic Product: An Economy's All', IMF, www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Back-to-Basics/ gross-domestic-product-GDP [^27]: Andrew Laing, 'Costing Corruption and Efficiency Losses from Weak PFM Systems', IMF, 3 April 2023, blog-pfm.imf.org/en/ pfmblog/2023/04/costing-corruption-and-efficiency-losses-from-weak-pfm-systems [^28]: 1. Terry Chan and Alexandra Dimitrijevic, 'Global Debt Leverage: Is a Great Reset Coming?', S&P Global, www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/featured/special-editorial/look-forward/global-debt-leverage-is-a-great-reset-coming [^29]: 2 'UK health system comes out on top in new report', NHS England, 14 July 2017, www.england.nhs.uk/2017/07/uk-health-system-comes- out-on-top-in-new-report/ [^30]: John Lister, 'The History of Privatisation', The Lowdown, 16 March 2020, lowdownnhs.info/analysis/long-read/the-history-of-privatisation-second-in-a-series-by-john-lister/ [^31]: * For much more on this see Ben Goldacres Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm. [^32]: In contrast to our share of three planets that we're consuming now. See more at: www.bioregional.com/one-planet-living [^33]: 1. Joe Bradbury, 'The housing deficit in 2023', Housing Association Magazine, 19 January 2023, www.hamag.co.uk/The-housing-deficit-in-2023 [^34]: 1. Benjamin Kentish, 'Forty percent of homes sold under Right to Buy now in the hands of private landlords, new analysis reveals, Independent, 8 December 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ right-to-buy-homes-sold-private-landlords-latest-figures-rent-a8098126.html [^35]: 1. Gareth Davies, Charles Boutaud, Hazel Sheffield, Emma Youle, 'Revealed: The Thousands of Public Spaces Lost to the Council Funding Crisis', The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 4 March 2019, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-03-04/sold-from-under-you [^36]: 1. Nick Hayes, [[The Book of Trespass]]: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us, Bloomsbury: London, 2020. [^37]: 1 'Prison: the facts', Prison Reform Trust, prisonreformtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/prison_the_facts_2023.pdf [^38]: 2 Calum Rosie, 'Private Prisons have shown a Lax Approach to Human Rights', EachOther.org, 26 April 2021 eachother.org.uk/private-prisons-have-shown-a-lax-approach-to-human-rights/ [^39]: 1. D. Clark, 'Resource department expenditure limit (RDEL) of criminal and civil legal aid in England and Wales from 2005/06 to 2021/22', Statista, 20 July 2023, www.statista.com/statistics/1098628/legal-aid-spending-in-england-and-wales/ [^40]: 1. Rachel Makinson, 'LASPO: How a near-decade of legal air cuts has affected Britain's most vulnerable, Lawyer Monthly, 26 August 2021, www.lawyer-monthly.com/2021/08/laspo-how-a-near-decade-of-legal-aid-cuts-has-affected-britains-most-vulnerable/ [^41]: John Burn-Murdoch, 'Why are Americans dying so young?', Financial Times, 30 March 2023, www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303 [^42]: 'The Most Reputable Countries in the World', Knoema.com, 11 October 2022, knoema.com/infographics/axgsdxc/the-most-reputable-countries-in-the-world [^43]: Ernest Arycetey and Zenia Lewis, 'African Land Grabbing; Whose Interests Are Served?', Brookings, 25 June 2010, www.brookings.edu/articles/african-land-grabbing-whose-interests-are-served/ [^44]: 'How many Earths? How many countries?", Earth Overshoot Day, www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/, accessed 9 October 2023