I’ve not posted for a while and feel guilty. I’ve been on holiday and had a smashing time (thank you). Its not that the combination of ideas and internet cafes didn’t crop up its just that I thought for once Id practice what I preach and do nothing. I found it very hard. Doing nothing in a consumer society is tough as we are programmed to work and shop. And before you ask I did almost no shopping.
But I was back with a bang at the weekend. On Saturday I spoke at the Greenbelt festival. Id never heard of it but 20,000 religious and progressive people turn up at Cheltenham racecourse every year to talk, listen and learn. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I confessed to not being religious but being open to spirituality and not liking strict rationalism or militant secularism.
Then on Sunday it was over to the Climate Camp at Blackheath and therefore overlooking Canary Wharf and the heart of finacialised capitalism. I did a session with Tristam Stuart who has written a great book on food waste that you can find out more about here. A tent full of green campaigners kicked around consumption and political change; how can we live in a low or zero growth economy and get people to vote for it?
This could all sound a bit marginal and out there if it weren’t for the fact that just two days before no less a figure than Tony Blair had made a speech saying that the pace of modern life and the restless search for short-term material gain in a globalised economic system constituted a threat both the to the plant and to human identity. It matters much less that this a man making £millions from speeches in very short-term material gain and more that he is about as mainstream, as it gets.
In fact many came up afterwards at the Climate Camp and said they were glad that someone like me was there to make a connection with mainstream politics and that Ed Miliband – the good as we are going to get climate minister breaking his back to get the best deal at Copenhagen should not do as the banner I photographed at the event suggested he should.
Well, well. Tony finally gets it, now that he has spent 2 and a half terms furthering the corporate agenda. Where was he when he actually had the power to do something about it? When we all voted for Labour after years of Tory government, we thought we’d get change not continuity. I’m neither socialist nor anything much. All we want is enlightened government. As one of my teachers once said – “it’s a bit late for bloody tears now, isn’t it?”
I’ll believe in Mr Milliband when I see him listening to his own Sustainable Development think tank. In the meantime, as was pointed out on “Any Questions”, the UK has talked a good game on climate change and environmentalism and done pretty much f-all (though they didn’t quite express it like that….)
Its always better late than never Alex