[Report by Quakers in Britain on the lecture, plus video & text]

– How the love we are will guide us through ecological collapse –

This year’s Salter Lecture, delivered by ecological philosopher Rupert Read during the Big One protests, was a timely and rousing call to action.

A Norwich Quaker and longtime environmental leader, Read led his audience carefully from the horrible truth of the climate crisis to the wonderful truth hidden within.

Feelings of fear and desperation about the climate crisis are not pathological, but spurs to act, he told the audience at Westminster Meeting House and online on 21 April.

Right here is a life’s purpose waiting for anyone and everyone who needs one – Rupert Read

As philosophers from Frankl to Nietzsche have taught us, there is nothing humans need more than meaning. 

“Right here is a life’s purpose waiting for anyone and everyone who needs one and I put it to you that there is nothing that our society […] needs more than purpose,” said Read, at the annual Quaker Socialist Societylecture.

A reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia and former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, Read is increasingly high profile in the environment movement.

He appeared on both Sky News and BBC Newsnight around the Big One protests to discuss growing “the moderate flank” of the climate movement.

More extreme demonstration tactics as employed by Just Stop Oil and others, while useful for starting the conversation, risk alienating the wider public, Read believes. 

Suggesting that one of the major challenges facing us is polarization, Read told the audience that appealing to ordinary people in communities, civic associations and faiths was key.

There are two stages of transformational change, he said, when everyone realizes that we can’t go on like this, and when everyone realizes that everyone realizes it. 

He said: “The love that we are, whether taking form as effort, as ‘sacrifice’, as giving, as joyfulness, as griefstrickenness, as worry, as desperation, as presence, the love that we have for our children, for life itself, this love is an indescribable gift and a truly mighty power

“Friends, let yourself fall deep into it; which means with and into and through all of us. There will be tears, and dark nights, there will be impossible heartbreak and magnificent joy.”

This is the text of Rupert Read’s Salter lecture

At Westminster Meeting House, April 26th, 2023

Laurence Hall, introducing QSS 

Welcome everyone. Welcome all to the Salter Lecture.

This is an annual event organised by the Quaker Socialist Society for the Quaker Yearly Meeting. My name is Laurence Hall, and I’m part of the national committee for the Quaker Socialist Society. 

The Quaker Socialist Society stands for a Quaker presence in the socialist movement and making the insights of socialism central to Quaker social witness. We stand for ethical socialism, social justice, and a peaceful, sustainable and radically egalitarian world. We hope you will join us in making this socialist vision a reality. 

Quaker socialism extends from Civil War radicals to early socialist pioneers, from radical pacifists to advocates of industrial democracy, from the New Left to the municipal socialists such as the brilliant Salters, by whom this lecture is inspired and named after. Quakers and socialism have been so closely intertwined in the past, but the same is true of the present as we join together in solidarity to build a future beyond the evils of capitalism. 

I’m going to hand over to Sheila, another member of the national committee, to introduce this year’s Salter lecturer. Thank you.

Sheila Taylor, introducing Rupert Read

Thank you Laurence. I’m really delighted to be introducing Rupert Read to give this year’s Salter Lecture, though first I do have a confession to make. When our committee proposed that this year’s lecture should be on the climate crisis, I thought oh no, how boring! We all know what needs to be done, and we all know they’re not going to do it, so what is there to talk about? 

But when I looked for a possible speaker, I discovered this extraordinary character: an academic philosopher specialising in Wittgenstein, who happened to be a Quaker, and a Green Party activist, who had helped establish Extinction Rebellion and influence government, who had been arrested and quoted Martin Luther in his own defence in court, and who is now giving up paid work to devote his life to the environment. How amazing! 

And I found his writings unbelievably exciting too. No dry, depressing facts and figures, although the science is there in the background. Instead a world of powerful imagination that leapt back and forth across the millennia, reminding us of where humankind had originated and envisaging where we were heading, comparing us with all the other species that have inhabited our Earth since it began. 

Well, I’m not quite as imaginative as Rupert, but I would like to look back to London 100 years ago and remember the pioneering Quaker couple, Ada and Alfred Salter, and how they transformed the slums of Bermondsey, creating a green environment with decent housing and public health for all. They were inspirational then and remain so still today. We are very grateful to Rupert for helping us promote the Salter vision through this annual lecture. 

The title that he has chosen for the lecture is ‘The horrible, wonderful truth about climate: how facing that truth changes everything’.

As is usual with Quaker events we will begin with a short silence and Rupert will start speaking when he is ready.

[Rupert, they’re saying that they can’t hear very well online, so I wonder if you could just do a little sound test before you start?]

Rupert Read 

Hi, I’m Rupert Read and I’m giving a lecture this evening. The title…

[Can you hear that?]

…the title of the lecture is ‘The horrible, wonderful truth about climate: how facing that truth changes everything’. How are we doing? Great.

Thank you very much.

Times up. We’re in the age of consequences. We are out of the safe zone. Sadly it’s a childish illusion to think that anyone or anything is going to successfully and safely fix this.

This is not any kind of problem. It’s so much bigger and more wicked than that. It’s not the kind of thing that can be fixed, it won’t be solved, it won’t be fixed. It’s a new condition that we’re all going to inhabit permanently from now on, and it’s going to keep transforming, and for a long time it’s going to keep worsening. It’s a tragic situation, it’s something that we have to in a very profound way get used to.

They say it’s an emergency, but even that understates it. What do I mean? Well, think about emergencies. Emergencies are situations where there is great urgency, yes, and emergencies are situations where you can do something about that emergency such that the emergency comes to an end. But that is not the kind of situation we are in. Calling it an emergency understates it.

The horrible truth is that the climate emergency or rather the climate more-than-emergency is going to go on getting worse for a very long time to come and that some of us are going to end up being killed by it.

People know this, and more and more of us sense it, and though these are difficult truths people aren’t just curling up in a ball. Why? Well, partly because more and more of us now sense that more and more of us now sense it. They say there are two stages to true transformational change. The first stage is when everyone realises we can’t go on like this; the second stage is when everyone realises that everyone else also realises that we can’t go on like this.

So if you’re feeling it, my guess is that you are or you wouldn’t be here tonight. If you’re feeling it, you’re not alone, you’re not mad. In fact if you’re feeling this already then you are very sane, you are a vanguard of mental health. Mental health now sometimes means feeling fearful, even depressed or desperate. These feelings when evoked by the crisis we have entered into are not pathological, on the very contrary. Partly because what they are is actually spurs to act. Spurs to make real the realisation that there is something profoundly wrong with where we’re at.

So rather than people giving up, serious climate concern and action is at last starting to hit the mainstream as we wake up en masse, not only to our predicaments but to others waking up to it too.

Fed up of business as usual and with our reasonable demands having been thus far largely unmet, people are taking matters into their own hands. What do I mean by that? I mean the kind of thing we’ve seen around London today with The Big One, the new XR (Extinction Rebellion) events, probably the biggest climate and nature happening there’s ever been in this capital city. But more than that I mean things that are bubbling up mostly still below the radar across the country, in fact across the world, things that are examples, crucial examples of as I say people in very ordinary and practical and important ways taking matters into their own hands. 

I mean things like community climate action exemplified for example by the wonderful iFarm that I’ve been to. This is on the Norfolk /Suffolk border, 10 acres of land. Soon there’ll be a lot more bought by a bunch of ordinary folks who’ve got together and bought it and who are now turning it not just into a place for growing food and for rewilding but into a kind of ever-growing community hub. They’ve taken over a local pub for example and are running it as a social enterprise and they’re really trying to reach out to the whole community including conservative-minded people, I think there are plenty in that part of the world, and trying to get them on the inside of this emerging phenomenon. 

I mean things like what’s happening in quite a number of professions now, what’s happening among people who have woken up in advertising, and in insurance, and in the law, people who are seeking to change their corporations that they work for, if they work for a corporation, to make them climate compliant, or who are refusing to take on work for fossil fuel companies, or who are doing pro bono work for climate protesters and others. 

I mean things like the organisation Wild Card which is trying to rewild the royal lands and is inviting huge numbers of people in to a campaign which has in it all sorts of ordinary people and also people like Chris Packham, people who have been thinking for quite a long time, how can we break beyond the usual suspects, how can we get beyond people who self-identify as activists and appeal, well ultimately to this everyone, to the majority?

There is already a majority of people in this country and in most countries in the world who are deeply concerned about this. What needs to happen is that concern needs to be deepened further, and that can happen when we really start to face the truth, and it needs to be thoroughly activated. We need a thousand, ten thousand of these organisations that I’ve just mentioned that are starting to spring up.

The emerging Climate Majority Project of which I’m a director is a rallying point for people, ordinary people, not a small radical flank, not just activists, who understand the depth of the crisis and want to do something meaningful about it. The Climate Majority Project is bringing together those who in religions and civic associations, in neighbourhoods and communities, in workplaces and professions are through with outsourcing, through the thinking somebody else is going to fix this or deal with it, through with asking others to fix this and are instead determined to do our best together to mitigate it and adapt to it, to cope with it, even to flourish through it in spite of it, and indeed because of it. Also because of it, what do I mean by that? 

This crisis is an enormous opportunity for meaning. Right here is a life’s purpose waiting for anyone and everyone who needs one, and I put it to you that there is nothing that our society so full of anomie and nihilism needs more than purpose. Now this centrality to human beings of purpose is something which many have understood for a long time. I think for example of Viktor Frankl who wrote a magnificent book called ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ wherein he explains, for example, the astonishing fact that in the concentration camps in World War II, which he survived along with very few others, there were things it turned out that were even more important than having food or water or shelter, and basically they were having meaning. That people who didn’t have anything to live for would die even if they still had food and water, and the people who did have something to live for would live even without it. I think going back further to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said what human beings above all need is something to will, something that they try to put their determination into. We have been lacking that in this society. Well, now we have it again.

So you see, I started off by giving you in very, very brief, a horrible truth. What’s the wonderful truth? The wonderful truth about the climate crisis that I promised, that wonderful truth that I promised you, is contained in the horrible truth.

Consider the mysterious pronouncement from the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau: the remedy is in the evil. Look inside the evil and there you will find the remedy to it. Or by the great German poet Hölderlin who famously said:

Christ, I’ve forgotten what he said!

[Laughs]

Oh yes, I’ve got it! It’s been a very long day, and I was up very late last night on Newsnight.  Hölderlin famously said: Where the danger lies, there also lies the saving power. Where the danger lies, there also lies the saving power. In facing up to the crisis, in the painful realisations and emotions it evokes, lies our possible salvation. And here is the greatest reason why: when we allow ourselves to actually feel our pain, our fear, our grief, our anger, then we many millions of us are ready to act with determination to ensure that what is coming does not take us all down with it. Our grief, our pain for the Earth, our fear and love for one another, these are brought home to us by the crisis, they emerge, they live, they transform.

How does all this work? So, let me outline very briefly for you how we understand this in the Climate Majority Project. We see our work as having four essential interwoven strands, and they go roughly in this order. So it starts out with fearless truth-telling: telling the truth, facing the truth without reservation, however hard it be. This has been the truth, this has been the secret at the heart of the success in the past several years of totally unexpected phenomena such as Greta Thunberg and the school strikes and Extinction Rebellion. My belief is that this truth, this important fact, is far too important to be kept to just the radical flank of the environmental movement. It needs to and can spill over into millions, into the majority and I think that is starting to happen. 

So you start with the truth, you start with if you will the horrible truth, but that has to be processed, that has to be handled – that’s the second strand. We need to do inner work by ourselves, and more importantly together. We need to build a culture of resilience, we need to talk about these difficult feelings, we need to face them together and work through them together. This is an integral process now to any meaningful social change. It can’t be ignored, it can’t be thought to be something – I don’t know – feminine or uh or marginal. It’s absolutely central. So, first strand: truthfulness. Second strand: shared inner work to face that truth. 

Once you’ve got the second strand in place, then you’re ready for the third strand, which is action, activation. And I believe, and I’m finding, that there are hundreds of thousands, millions, soon many millions, who are ready for or are already into that stage. When you face the truth and when you handle it together, it logically moves into action. You’ve got to do something about it. People are hungry for those possibilities of meaningful action, those on-ramps to things that they can do to make some difference to this situation. 

And then the fourth and final strand is that we need to understand the whole of this process together, we need to – as people call it nowadays – sense-make together about this. And the most crucial part of that sense-making is the understanding that this process is happening, that it is to a significant extent inevitable, that this new moderate flank of mass action, this emerging, deepening, activating climate majority, is happening, is to some significant extent inevitable, is going to go way beyond the confines of activism. For people to look around and see each other and notice that it’s starting to happen, that it’s happening in communities, that it’s happening in workplaces, that it’s happening in businesses and so on and so on. 

And of course this fourth and final strand of sense-making, of coming to see ourselves as part of this emerging wave, this comes back to the two stages of transformational change, right? First stage is everyone realises that everything has to change, the second stage is everyone else gets included in that realisation, everyone realises that everyone else is figuring that out too. As we come to see that together, then we sense-make what we are doing into something massive and unavoidable. This, to vary Antonio Gramsci, this is optimism of the will combined with realism of the intellect. This is an enormously hopeful trajectory. The horrible truth about climate transforms into a wonderful truth.

But before you all go home on a high, just to make sure there’s no excuse in my words for the slightest complacency or false reassurance, take a deep breath and let’s now dive even deeper. It isn’t enough any more to fixate only on slashing carbon emissions. It’s way too late for that, we are in the danger zone.

So we have to take seriously adaptation, we have to take seriously adaptation to the crisis. We have to take seriously how we’re going to cope with the coming droughts, the coming worse-than-ever heatwaves, the coming disruptions to our food supply systems and more and more and more. So the climate question is bigger and more difficult than most people are still conceptualising it as, and moreover it massively overlaps with another question which is even more difficult and in an even worse state and even bigger, namely the biodiversity crisis or the extinctions crisis. I’m sure this is not news to many of you, for example the Amazon, home to so much of the world’s biodiversity and also the world’s single greatest carbon sink. If we try to fix, which is not something we should try to do, but if we fantasise that we could fix the climate crisis without looking seriously at biodiversity too, then we haven’t even really got to first base.

But take another deep breath. You need to go even further. Consider the Ukraine crisis. Anyone who is paying attention can see that what the Ukraine crisis shows us is that there is a multitude of crises and they are all interconnected: the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis, the Ukraine crisis, and the climate crisis are really all just different ways of looking at the same thing right now in 2023 on this planet. It’s for this kind of reason that people are now starting to use this big word polycrisis, we’re in a polycrisis. The climate crisis is the canary in the coal mine of this much bigger, still multivalent crisis, so let’s go further still into the polycrisis.

I’m just going to offer tiny snapshots now. Climate and pandemics. Pandemics are part of the polycrisis. We all now know this because of Covid, but you may not know that there is research suggesting that there are going to be orders of magnitude more pandemics as a result of the climate crisis, because of the way that it is shifting the populations of, for example, bats which are one of the main reservoirs for diseases that then come to human beings. So pandemics, we are likely to have more and worse pandemics in the coming years very likely, and that is interconnected with the climate crisis. There’s been a lot of talk recently about AI – rightly so. My own belief is that AI is not what they call an existential threat – I don’t think we’re going to be entering into a Terminator scenario, you’ll be glad to hear. I don’t think there will ever occur or if it does occur it’s far, far off in the future, basically because we’re nowhere near producing real artificial intelligence yet. They can’t actually think, they just do unbelievable amounts of computation incredibly quickly.

But make no mistake, AI is going to have disastrous consequences for the world in the coming years, is going to break way more things than Facebook broke. We need to pay serious attention to it. And again, it intersects with the climate crisis in numerous ways, but one of the basic ones is that the sheer amount of energy it takes to train these AIs is absolutely phenomenal and terrifying.

The climate crisis is what they call a threat multiplier. What that means is that multiple threats are made worse by it, and most terrifying of all in a way is the threat of nuclear war – many of us deeply concerned about. I myself am a long-time peace activist with Quakers and others. So again we have an intersection between a potential existential threat, which is a real one of nuclear war, and climate.

This is an outline of the polycrisis. One more big word: there’s also the metacrisis. What do people mean when they talk about the metacrisis? This is useful, once you’ve started to get your head and your feelings – it’s not easy – around the polycrisis, you start to realise actually doesn’t all of this, or at least an awful lot of it, get traced back to some much more fundamental root causes and phenomena. One of those is that there is, I would argue and perhaps I’m in a good position, I mean literally in this room, to make this argument, a fundamental underlying spiritual driver to the crisis. 

This is not just a crisis of political economy, it’s not just a crisis even of how we live in a material sense. It’s certainly not just a crisis that can be sorted by any kind of technological fix. Ultimately I would argue it is a civilizational crisis and a spiritual crisis. So this concept of the metacrisis says maybe these diverse, intersecting crises have some absolutely fundamental common roots. I would say one such root is that we are spiritually maladjusted to our home at this time in history and also to each other. So we are in a metacrisis: we don’t know how to live anymore. And that comes back to the point about meaning, right? There’s an essential, if you will, philosophical dimension to this: we need to re-figure out how to live. And until we do that, this metacrisis and this polycrisis are not going away.

I want to mention three great obstacles to tackling adequately the polycrisis and the metacrisis and the climate crisis, of course. Three gigantic processes stand directly in our way. The first of these is polarisation, which we’ve seen becoming a severe problem in recent years and we in the Climate Majority Project are very, very concerned about this. We are aiming to try to co-create a movement, or a movement of movements, which combats polarisation because it brings people together to face these existential threats.

Extinction Rebellion which I helped to launch was not in a position to do this, partly because Extinction Rebellion deliberately polarised. It deliberately forced a difficult national conversation. It did so brilliantly, but you can’t go on polarising if you want to sort problems that require a post-polarised society, yeah? There is no possible way of making real progress on climate, let alone on other aspects of the polycrisis without societies which are broadly internally aligned. So, incredibly difficult though it is, we have to work to overcome polarisation.

That’s the first obstacle. The second obstacle is perhaps even harder. It’s the simple plain existence with which you will all be entirely familiar of capitalist markets and of limited liability companies, which face quasi-legal obligations to maximise their short-term profits and returns to shareholders. I’m not going to say much about this, because it’s incredibly hard to deal with. I’m simply going to observe: a) This is something which makes it very hard to imagine really being able to handle successfully these elements of polycrisis, including of course the climate crisis; b) Nevertheless we have to try. We have to try to put ourselves in a position through, I would argue, this kind of bottom-up transformative work and the potential change in political culture that could result, to actually start to retame markets and limited liability companies in particular.

The final one I want to mention, the final process, the final great obstacle is arguably the hardest of all. It is great power competition. Because if we imagine making some progress for example on taming AI and on dealing with climate and so forth in say Europe, well how much of a difference will that make to what happens in say China or Russia? And insofar as you’ve got one major power or superpower or power bloc that is continuing to exacerbate these crises including of course climate, there are built-in drivers for others to continue to do the same. 

This is incredibly hard to get around but there are precedents. You know we managed to successfully ban most biological weaponry and chemical weaponry, to some extent nuclear weaponry. We managed to successfully tackle the ozone hole problem in the 1980s, but the ozone hole problem was something like a problem. It was much simpler, much more specific than the climate issue is, let alone than for example the temptations that are on superpowers etc now to allow AI to let rip. Great power competition, geopolitics, is I think possibly the greatest of all the obstacles that we face, and I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t have any answer to it. If you do, I’d love to hear from you.

So this is tough, it’s very tough to face. That’s why we have to do this shared inner work, that’s why we have to face it together. This is all part of the journey that we are now on. And I hope you can see in this whistle-stop tour that climate is really the thick end of a very large wedge. When you see that wedge properly, when you start to bring the polycrisis and the metacrisis into focus, you see more clearly than ever that system change is needed, and also how very hard it’s going to be to have that system change be the kind of system change we want. 

Because, let me reframe slightly, system change is coming. But before you get too excited or optimistic about that, the way it’s coming is either that we will successfully manage to undertake transformations that will make some significant inroad into the polycrisis, into the climate crisis, or we will collapse. So system change is coming. This civilisation as we know it is coming to an end. The question is whether we can manage to make that end transformational and broadly tolerable and indeed in some ways wonderful, or not.

But to come back in my final remarks to climate. Climate remains the white swan in the room. What do I mean by that. You may have heard of this concept of black swans – my friend and colleague Nassim Taleb famously argued this in relation to the financial crisis, that this was not something that anyone saw coming, or rather not something that anyone except he and one or two other people literally saw coming. I’ll tell you a little anecdote, I hope he won’t mind. When Nassim and I first met, I got him to give a lecture at the University of East Anglia about the financial crisis and black swans and philosophical implications, and at the end of the evening I said to him, “Nassim, we’d better sort out your travel expenses.” And he clapped me on the back and said, “Oh but you know, you really don’t need to worry about that. You do realise that because I saw what was coming, made this huge bet against the banks, I don’t ever need to claim travel expenses again.”

Black swans are things that people don’t see coming, tight? And we can see the outlines all these things I’m talking about, but we don’t know for sure what form they will take and we don’t know for sure if they will happen, but with climate we do. Climate is a white swan, it is coming right at us. We might with luck escape nuclear war, we might with some luck escape these terrible pandemics, but all the luck in the world is not going to enable us to escape climate breakdown. It is what is going to happen unless we deliberately, transformationally change course.

So, don’t be distracted. We need to look deep into the climate crisis. We need to concentrate on what we can see there which interconnects with all the other crises. When we do this, we are looking deep into ourselves. The microcosm is the macrocosm. We need to concentrate on what we can find there, deep in our souls, deep in our failing civilisation, deep in our profound interrelatedness with each other and with all life on this precious planet, and in what we want to avert from. When we look, there is the gift, the very difficult emotions that arise when we look deep into the climate crisis and see the polycrisis and the metacrisis and see deep into ourselves the so-called negative emotions: eco-anxiety, heartbreak, even despair. These will be the making of us – of that I am confident. Note: that they all arise from love. 

Why are we angry? We’re angry because we want to defend what we love and we’re fiercely protective of it. Why are we fearful? We’re fearful for ourselves and for others that we love, of what is going to be coming. Why do we despair? Because we can’t bear to face the situation that we sometimes see or sense or feel when we actually allow ourselves to open to the situation as it is. All of these difficult emotions, they all arise from love, they are forms of love. These difficult emotions are rational, yeah? If you’re not sometimes afraid now, then you’re not paying attention. If you don’t sometimes feel desperate now, then you’re probably not fully facing into what I’ve been outlining here this evening. If you’re not sometimes deeply affected by grief about our situation, then either you haven’t looked at it fully or there’s something missing in you. These difficult emotions are rational, and they are a huge and growing reservoir of energy. Fully embraced, they are all we need. Fully embraced, loved rather than rejected, treated as energy, they are all we need.

The love that we are, whether taking form as effort, as sacrifice, as giving, as joyfulness, as grief-strickenness, as worry, as desperation, as presence, the love that we have for our children, for life itself, this love is an indescribable gift and a truly mighty power. Friends, let yourselves fall deep into it, which means with and into and through all of us. There will be tears and dark nights, there will be impossible heartbreak and magnificent joy as well. Whether or not we survive, whether or not we flourish, the wonderful truth that I have offered this evening, the wonderful truth that I have offered, is in the end greater than the horrible truth out of which it arises. Thank you.

[Sheila] Thank you very much, Rupert, for that – extremely deep and thought-provoking thoughts.

We’ve got some questions that have come through online from the audience who are watching.

Perhaps an easy one to start with, a very practical one anyway:
A short while ago the Transition Towns movement seemed very promising. It seems to have gone quieter. Is it still one way forward?

[Rupert] Yeah okay, so I was just with Rob Hopkins, one of the founders of the Transition Towns movement, today and he and I are both very interested in this important question. So I was involved in a small way in the Transition Towns movement. I’ve been a big fan of it. It’s done great work, it hasn’t vanished by any means. There are quite a number of transition projects which are successfully going on around the country, particularly in centres of strength such as Totnes ,where it started and where Rob is from, also to some extent Norwich which … the Transition Towns movement in Norwich which for many years was my hometown spawned a wonderful community-supported agriculture, which is still going. 

My belief is that there are two things that need to be added into Transition Towns in order for it to be something of a model which is fully relevant to our time and can really flourish more than it is already doing. The first of these is that I think there may be some things that Transition could learn from the radical flank, from Extinction Rebellion, and from conventional politics as well, so maybe there’s three things. 

Taking the radical flank first, quite a lot of years have passed since Transition started, and the situation overall obviously has deteriorated. What I think that Transition Towns could learn from Extinction Rebellion is that there may be occasions when, if you really want to carry on the transition, you have to be ready to take non-violent direct action. And with colleagues in transformative adaptation, which is part of the Climate Majority Project broadly conceived, we’ve been trying to kind of pursue this idea and discuss it, further it and get ready to put into practice. Non-violent direct action to defend for example allotments that are scheduled to be bulldozed, or to resist schemes that are being created which are destructive of say community-supported agriculture schemes. So that’s the first thing. I think that Transition and transitioners should be ready in the environment we’re now in to consider the need for selective defensive or proactive non-violent direct action.

 Secondly in terms of conventional politics, something that happened in the Transition movement and that discouraged a lot of people was that they came to realise that various things that they wanted to do to help transition work were illegal or were voted down by their Local Authority or by Parliament in some cases. And I think there was an element of political naïvety in some cases there, and that there is a need for a consciousness which I think is now risen more. You see some of this in the rise of the Green Party in recent years, you see some of this in Flatpack Democracy, which some of you might be aware of – interesting movement of sort of independent councillors which is growing. That sometimes in order for things like Transition to flourish, it’s important to work with local authorities, with politicians etc who get it, and if they’re not there you may need to replace them with ones who do get it. 

And the third point and this comes back to what I mentioned briefly in relation to community climate action as an important wing of the emerging climate majority is that something which Transition wasn’t always very good at was reaching out beyond certain kinds of conventional bubbles of activism, hippydom etc. In community climate action there’s a deliberate emphasis, as I said, on engaging as much of the community as possible including outreaching to small-c conservatives and even big-c Conservatives. And I think that’s gonna be part of part of the future, this is part of the depolarisation agenda that I mentioned. We need to make sure that it is possible for small-c and indeed big-c Conservatives not to feel excluded from this agenda and there are people even within the Conservative party who understand the kind of thing I’ve been talking about here this evening, perhaps much more than some of you in this room might think. I get to talk sometimes in private with top politicians from all parties, including the Conservatives. There are people in that party who get it. That’s my answer.

[Sheila] Thank you. Now a larger one but maybe there’s a…

[Rupert] Oh gosh, well that one was already quite large!

[laughter]

[Rupert] It can get a lot larger.

[Sheila] Might be an easy yes/no! Could a law criminalising ecocide under the International Criminal Court help?

[Rupert] Yep. Quick answer: absolutely. There should be an ecocide law. There should be a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. There should be a climate and ecological emergency bill – there’s a campaign for that – it’s broadly a climate majority type of campaign. There should be a law which says companies do not have to maximise financial return to shareholders and can consider longer term issues even if they conflict with shareholder value etc. The issue is this: how do we get these laws made into law? Right? 

Now one possible answer to that is obviously political action through the electoral system etc, and I’m in favour of that method. It’s very important for example you’ve got upcoming local elections, I urge everyone to vote. I think these are going to be quite interesting, important local elections. I think the government’s going to take a terrible beating. I think we’re going to see a lot more Green councils elected – all of these things are good. But when do we actually get to the stage, not just at local elections but at general elections, where you have a government elected that is actually going to put into place the laws that I mentioned before, including the ecocide law? And I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but it’s not going to be at the next general election in this country. That is for certain.

We have a political system in this country which is, and in most countries in the world, which is deeply inadequate. It’s profoundly undemocratic in all sorts of ways. That makes it difficult to affect change through the system, so that suggests you need to change the system, but how do you get to do that? You see, then you’re in a catch-22. So here’s my answer, and I already hinted at it in the body of the lecture: we need to fundamentally change the political culture of this country and of countries like it, and of countries unlike it for that matter. How do we get to do that? 

We get to do that by changing things from the bottom up, by giving people experiences of a different way of doing things, giving people experiences of what it’s like to actually make some local achievements or change things in your profession or make your, the company that you work for one that is more participatory, and to have more and more of this happening and to start to scale it up. You see what I’m getting at? If there is a deepened and activated climate majority, eventually that changes the political culture, then it becomes possible to change the political class – maybe they’ll be replaced altogether, maybe we’ll have a system of sortition and citizens assemblies and so on. Or if we don’t have that and we carry on having some kind of system of representative democracy, different politicians, really different politicians will get elected, and when that happens, that’s when we can pass an ecocide law, that’s when we can pass a climate and ecological emergency law, and so on and so forth. There is no shortcut.

 Now at this point some of you will be thinking, yes, but we don’t have time, we don’t have time to make all those changes, we don’t have time for that long, that slow process, that long process of changing particular culture, and you’re right, we don’t have time. So there is going to be enormous suffering and devastation – that is the horrible truth with which I started. It’s going to be much worse than most people have yet realised. It’s going to go on for a long time and we have to find our way through and we have to find a way of leveraging all of that into what we into what we need. But through that horrendous difficulty and pain and suffering and devastation that is coming in the next decade or two or three, there is the possibility for these kinds of systemic shifts that I’ve been talking about and gesturing at and when we start to get those, that’s when we can get these laws in place and then they can help us actually turn the tide.

[Sheila] Thank you. The next one comments on you having touched on the huge and growing inequality, but especially as this affects access to media with its ability to influence people. You’ve touched on this inequality. Can you comment further? Particularly in relation to the media.

[Rupert] So this is of course the trouble when you talk about something like the polycrisis, but there are so many, it’s so, it’s so vast. I mean I’ve hardly even touched on the inequality crisis. I’ve hardly touched on the decrepit nature of our media and of course these things are interconnected, and we know for example from the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and for example their book The Spirit Level, which some of you will be aware of, that inequality is a disaster for any society. It’s a disaster for everyone in the society. This is a surprise to some people when they first come to understand this research. There’s a sort of quick and easy bit of common sense that says, well if you have an unequal society, then obviously it’s bad for the poor but it’s good for the rich, right? It turns out, it isn’t. It turns out that everyone, including the rich, is healthier and happier in more equal societies. It makes more difference for the poor than for the rich, but the rich too benefit if the society becomes more equal – wonderful, really important, counter-intuitive results. 

And of course one of the dangers of the situation we’re moving into is that the climate crisis as it unfolds could worsen the inequality crisis which we’re in the grip of, and you know yeah, I hardly touched on it but it is absolutely vast. It is so absurd that we live in a world where, in a society like this one, there’s a certain sense in which most of us have roughly as much power and riches and fruits of decadence as Roman emperors did, but that the really rich and powerful are completely stratospherically in another league – the level of difference between an ordinary Roman citizen and a Roman Emperor is so much less than the level of difference between me, let alone a really poor person, and Jeff Bezos. There’s an amazing website which I recommend you to look at if you’ve ever got a bit of time to spare and you want to get really angry which this website visually represents Jeff Bezos’s wealth relative to that of an ordinary person and the way it does it you have to scroll page after page after page to see this enormous line just going on and on and on and you start, you’re going you’re going it’s like, well how much time is it going on for and it goes on minutes pass, minutes pass, you’re like, this is impossible! The level of disparity is so, it barely can be conceived. 

What do we do about this? Well, I’ve touched on the fundamental ways in which we need to try to address this: it’s by getting this kind of political culture shift happening. But it’s another of the obstacles that I could have mentioned. It’s a very, very severe problem that we have people that are so stratospherically rich that they feel somehow insulated from the stuff which is coming to destroy our lives and that of the lives of our children. It’s a very severe problem, it’s a very severe obstacle. I think, by the way, that they are operating under an illusion. I think that those who are the super-rich who think they will be able to evade what’s coming are not taking seriously enough the climate crisis or and the polycrisis, and in particular they’re not thinking about how things are going to be for their own children and their own grandchildren. So, it’s quite important I think, not to assume that it actually is the case that the super-rich are going to be able to outrun or outgrow the rest of us. There are some among them who think they will be able to and who are even thinking of you know leaving Earth altogether and so on and so forth. And that’s a problem in itself, but I think they’re under an illusion. 

Now that’s only the inequality part of the question there’s also the media part. I’ll be a bit briefer here. We are starting to make some progress on some of the stuff that I’ve mentioned in terms of this emerging new mass moderate flank, this climate majority. There’s good stuff happening in advertising, there are organisations for example like Purpose Disruptors and Clean Creatives, who are trying to change the enormous harm that advertising does. There are studies suggesting that as much of a third of all carbon emissions are caused by advertising because of the way that they give people a false sense of their own needs and prey on their desires and weaknesses and narcissisms and so forth and massively continually expand our consumer economy. Something is starting to happen in advertising which is good. There’s quite a lot of good stuff starting to happen in the law.

 In relation to the media I think we’ve got an awful long way to go, and it’s another one which unless there’s a real transformation, then it’s very hard to see any future for us other than collapse. And that getting the transformation is going to be very difficult to do but it’s going to be things like making citizen media much more of a reality. It’s much more possible now for ordinary people to be citizen journalists because of technology than it was a generation ago – that needs to be massively supported and expanded. And it’s going to mean things also I think like actually finding some friendly multi-millionaires or billionaires who are prepared to see the importance of this and create new media stations to rival things like Talk TV and some of the other you know really, really horrible new media that we have on the hard right of the political spectrum. There’s much more we can say, we could talk about there, perhaps we will.

[Sheila] Thank you. I think we’ve just got time for one more question from the online audience, but perhaps there are two here that I can maybe combine into one. One question is about our western society being built on individualism and the freedom of each of us to lead a happy life – as long as we can pay for it, we can have it – how can we transform this to a society where we will look to the love for our children’s future instead of our own present? And then another one which is perhaps rather similar: you’ve mentioned the negative energy, the grief, despair, loss and pain – what have you seen within the climate movement or your own experiences as ways to move beyond these and turn them into a wonderful energy? So I think those are perhaps linked questions, asking for the way to move forward that you’ve suggested.

[Rupert] What was the first one again?

[Sheila] Does that make sense? How can we transform the society that we live in, that’s built on individualism?

[Rupert] Oh yes individualism, yes. Okay, so let’s start with the second part. Well, I hope I said some things in my talk about this. I’ve also written about it a lot, about the transformation of the horrible into the wonderful, for example in this book: ‘Why climate breakdown matters’. And I’ve also written about it quite a lot online. Briefly it’s to do with working, with others typically, not just by oneself. For example, I’ve done a lot of this with my teacher Joanna Macy, some of you will be aware of her ‘Work That Reconnects’, which I think is a really powerful way of doing this. Working typically with others to face these feelings and fears and so forth, and then what you find is that they just do start to transform.

 You see, it’s a funny thing. There’s quite a few people out there now who say things like, oh you mustn’t despair about the climate, you mustn’t despair, that’s the worst thing, to despair about it. But what are those people really doing? I think they’re afraid to despair. I think they’re trying to keep this despair at arm’s length. I think they’re trying to desperately keep it at arm’s length. Hang on a minute, that word desperately is a bit of a clue here. They are in despair. They are the ones who are actually desperate. You see what I’m saying? If you’re desperately continually trying to keep fear, depression, despair at arm’s length, you are already in despair, because despair has already got you, without you even realising it. 

And I’m drawing here on the work of the great theological philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, who argued this, and this was the foundation of the philosophy of existentialism. Despair is fine, despair is okay, provided you don’t run away from it, provided you face it, provide you work with it. I felt despair, real, terrible despair on quite a number of occasions – I’m certain that some of you in this room have but we’re still here, and we’re still working, and we’re still fighting precisely because at some point, typically with the help of others, we were willing and able to face it and to work with it and to process it. 

And what I was trying to say in my lecture was, and when you do that, you find that it turns into energy, you find that it turns into new determination and excitement and joy and of course, as I said in the lecture, it all really comes from love. But we have to do it together and that comes to the first part of this question. So, yes individualism is a cancer in our society and across our world now and above all most extremely in the United States and in the images and the cultural ideology that they purvey. Although I would like to say just in passing, and it’s quite an important point, but while we think of ourselves as a society which is individualistic, and that’s very much the way they think in the United States, there’s a certain sense in which even that is to give each other and ourselves too much self-congratulation. A genuinely individualistic society would be very open to mindful mavericks, would be very open to people who really were willing to think differently and break the mould and so on. 

I don’t know about you but I don’t actually find that our society’s very like that, and when I lived in America I didn’t find that they were very like that either. I think that the one thing that we think we’re really good at – individualism – we’re not even really very good at that. I don’t think our schools actually do a very good job of encouraging students to be individuals. I would like to see a society in which people were more willing to think differently and break moulds and so forth, and go up against tradition and so forth, but that they did it in a spirit of cooperation for the common good and for a better future and so on. So you see, actually we need in a fundamental way really to transcend this, this very illusion of a potential divide between individuals and other people, and of course that’s really the point right and that’s where the question I think was coming from. We live in let’s call it a pseudo-individualistic society which has its apogee in the United States, and that is a disaster for us. 

And you know what? It’s an illusion – the pseudo-individualism – it’s an illusion which we’re able to kind of live in and inhabit because we have all these fire slaves working for us all the time. I’m talking about burning fossil fuels and you know, you’ve got a car, it’s like you know 200 horsepower whatever. Think about that. You know 200 horses in the form of fire working for you, whenever you want, you just go outside, turn the engine on, you’ve got all that fire. That era is coming to an end. As I say the likelihood, as it seems right now, is it will come to an end and collapse. 

The way it might not come to an end and collapse is if we manage to make these kinds of transformations we’ve been talking about. The more people try to perpetuate it, the more they try to perpetuate this illusion that we can carry on living separated from each other and depending on all these fire slaves, the more we do that, the longer we do that, the more certain it is that the collapse will be hard and devastating and perhaps final. So there really is a very profound sense in which we must overcome this individualism, or rather pseudo-individualism, and I hope and believe it is possible that what will come out of it the other side will be a society which is actually more rich and diverse, but much more fundamentally egalitarian and much more fundamentally solidaristic.

[Sheila] Thank you, Rupert. One final question which I really must take, because this is supposed to be a Quaker Socialist Society meeting, and somebody has asked, how can socialism help to tackle the problems you have mentioned? Or perhaps we could say, can socialism help to? Maybe in two minutes, Rupert?

[Rupert] I’d like to be able to do that, yeah. All I’m going to say is, I’m going to kind of duck it slightly, and I’m just going to say I don’t have a great deal to offer in response to that, except the stuff that I sketched before in relation to egalitarianism, which obviously is an important thrust in socialism. There is no future in which these absurd levels of inequality continue to persist for very long. Again, if they consist for very much longer, that just makes collapse certain. There could be all sorts of horrible futures in which there are extreme wealth disparities, for example forms of war-lordism, new forms of feudalism etc. That’s a possible way in which the possible collapse of our civilisation could play out. 

I think that what is, well what is for me, what is most alive in socialism is some kind of fundamental sense of the pre-eminence of society which I’ve been getting at in the last few minutes and the importance of some kind of fundamental impetus towards human equality and towards some kind of shared sense of human inner radical dignity and that’s all I’m going to try to say in answer to that question. There may be others in the room who have more to say on it.

[Sheila] I think that’s a lovely way to end with more equality and egalitarianism.

[Rupert] We are now going to go to questions from the room, is that right?

[Sheila] Yes, yes. That is actually ending the Zoom, the online meeting which was supposed to last for one hour…

[This was followed by questions from the floor of Westminster Meeting House from the live audience.]