"The world we made"

Jonathon Porritt's new book envisions the world as it will be 37 years hence, in 2050. It's a fictional memoir, looking back to yesterday, today and the intervening years, and postulating that we have responded to all the warnings that he amongst others have issued to date: that unless we alter course sharply, our world then will not be a pleasant place into which to be born.

It is getting on for 37 years ago that I first met Jonathon, in the heady, fairly early days of the Ecology Party: with the eloquence and passion he showed at Party gatherings, he stood out from the pack. I admired, not least, the way he used his experience as a comprehensive school teacher for tackling conference hecklers; but more significantly he was amongst the first to join me and others in recognising that God and his creation were the elephant in the room. As a result, we went on to establish what is now Christian Ecology Link. (I took this photograph of him at our annual conference last year, where he was a keynote speaker.)

Nobody has worked more unrelentingly for the green cause. Not that we have always seen eye to eye. In sending me my copy of The world we made Jonathon expressed the hope that what he has written about population "won't be too infuriating." "Hostile to addressing population issues," the book says, "was a great army of environmentalists and left-wing politicians in Western countries," arguing "that the real issues were poverty, injustice and over-consumption in the West." Mea culpa. The book goes on, "This kind of approach was not just stupid, but cruel." As Jonathon envisages in his inscription, my question remains, does the end then justify the means?

Various turns in Jonathon's career have been marked by his publishing a new book, but none will - I guess - have brought great riches through royalties. The world we made may just be different. "For me," Jonathon says in his postscript, "writing this book has been a big deal." And indeed an immense amount of research and imagination has gone into it. As you expect from a Phaidon publication, it is beautifully produced and presented. Comprehensive, authoritative, easy to read, and aimed at an international non-specialist market, I foresee it selling well. The question here is, will it release the energies in its readers that are needed to produce the change it predicates? And as a supplementary, how much flying will the author have to do to promote those sales?

Population matters

In the evening yesterday, Caroline and I biked down to a meeting in our Town Hall put on by the NGO Population Matters: its Chairman, Roger Martin was on the platform with Jonathon Porritt, whom he introduced as "Britain's leading campaigner on behalf of future generations". Jonathon (speaking of himself as a sustainability activist) boasted that he'd been described by Ann Widdicombe as "completely bonkers" for suggesting that the time would come when having more than two children might be regarded as irresponsible.

He quoted the 2009 report by Murtaugh and Schlax of Oregon State University, looking at the relative benefit of decisions which have an impact on one's carbon footprint. Based on then current figures, doing an aggregate of "good" things like driving a fuel-efficient car, introducing energy-saving measures at home etc. might save one individual a maximum of 500 tonnes of CO2 in a lifetime. Deciding not to have another child, however, would save nearly 9,500 tonnes - six times the average US citizen's lifetime CO2 use.

It was our wedding anniversary: this is one of the few images we had of us on that sunny day 36 years ago - there were no group photographs. Since then we have acquired four children and three grandchildren...

An Oscar at the RCE

Yesterday, I related unnecessary packaging to incipient climate chaos. Today, the RCE Severn Christmas Lecture by Michael Wadleigh related consumerism as a whole to unsustainable development by means of the simple equation:

H+P = -R

where H = the human population, P = manufactured products and R = resources. It's hardly an original thought, but he put it across well by means of excellent slides. They imagined our world was encapsulated in a space station with ten occupants - one of whom enjoyed half the available resources, the other nine sharing the rest. Result: of course, revolution.

What makes human beings happy? he asked. Products? No: nature, other human society and activities leading to fulfilment. Truth and finit-ism were his watchwords.

I commend Michael's presentation, called the Homo Sapiens report: he offers it free of charge to secondary schools and universities. And he'll bring along his Woodstock Oscar for a talking point!

Love of wisdom

It's rare to hear two quite different lectures in the same day, each so full of wise words, and so well delivered. I would have been glad to read either "The Choice of Hercules" by A.C. Grayling, or "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet" by Jeffrey Sachs, but knew realisticaly that it was unlikely. The appearance of their authors - both renowned speakers - therefore made them easy choices out of the 26 events on offer at our Literature Festival yesterday.

The philosopher Grayling had virtually a full house at 10 a.m. in the Everyman Theatre. Though he spoke from the lectern on stage, such is his fluency that it represented no sort of barrier. The success of a lecture can often be judged by the quality of questions posed to the lecturer at the end: all were good, and Grayling answered with skill and humour. But he was flummoxed when asked, "Were you assuming we had come along as a duty or for pleasure?"

Hercules chose duty above pleasure, but, Grayling asks, where is the conflict between them today? What do we think about reading novels in the morning? Conventionally, the answer is "guilty", but insofar as they are an excellent way of our learning much-needed toleration - allowing other people to do things you don't like - maybe we should look upon a couple of hours with our novel as our morning duty.

From Jeffrey Sachs' viewpoint as a development economist, working for the Earth Institute, our car is careering towards the cliff edge. Even if the road turns out to bend a little away from the precipice, our alarm increases when we realises that Dick Cheney is at the wheel. (A McCain victory next month is too grim for Sachs to begin to contemplate.)

The three horsemen of Jeffrey Sachs' apocalypse are environment, poverty and population. Each can be reined in, but not by a self-regulating market. Global, co-operative, science-based mechanisms are needed. They don't at present exist, but they could be established - at a cost of about three per cent of world income. Trillions have been made available to save the banks, so in principle the money is there. Can we sit back and allow the aggregate of a year's Wall Street Christmas bonuses to continue to exceed the entire world's annual aid to Africa? "I'm a PhD beggar," proclaims Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs spoke for 50 minutes without any notes from the Town Hall stage, an astonishing tour de force.

Is the Pope green?

Leo Hickman raised this question last weekend, in the Guardian. It followed Pope Benedict's words in Australia: gazing out of the window on his flight there, he had, he said, been filled with introspection about the plight of the environment.

Benedict is getting something of a reputation as a green Pope. Solar panels have appeared on Vatican buildings, and the Apostolic Penitentiary numbers ecological offences amongst new forms of social sin.

Moreover, Vatican City boasts it is the only sovereign state to have zero carbon dioxide emissions - thanks to the Vatican Climate Forest in Hungary. But, as a theologian from Louvain University points out, where is the justice in this "indulgence-type" method of offsetting one's carbon footprint?

As expected, Hickman's crunch point is to home in on the population consequences of the Church's opposition to contraception - much the same as I reported Jonathon Porritt had concluded in a blog I posted last month.

The Vatican hosts, amongst very many other organisations, a Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerants, headed up by a Cardinal. Travel lightly, it urges: use public transport, carry less luggage and do everything you can to make your holiday environmentally friendly. But what about Vatican Airlines, launched last year to ferry pilgroms back and forth to the world's shrines? Given that a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life's journey, shouldn't we be thinking more in terms of making virtual pilgrimage these days?

Those who may have been gazing down from the two planes in my photograph could also have been "filled with introspection," but it is only we who gaze upwards that see the damaging vapour trails.

"The world must be peopled!" said Benedick

It's a while since I heard Jonathon Porritt give a lecture of his own (as opposed to interviewing someone): I had forgotten what a devastating speaker he is when he's on top of his subject, as he was last night speaking on the theme "Too many people" at the Cheltenham Science Festival. He held a very large audience in the palm of his hand.

The message he brought was extremely simple: "Save the world! Have fewer children." The Italians had got the idea, he said: their population growth rate was the lowest in the world, indicating that "for them it seems that using a condom is a better guide to life than Papal infallibility." Benedick - yes; but Benedict - no.

Indeed, for a Catholic this was not a comfortable hour's entertainment. Jonathon was asked how the UN could be made more effective: "It has to act by consensus," he pointed out. "The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was paralysed by the Vatican - a UN member - intervening to oppose artificial family planning." The loudest applause of the evening was for Jonathon condemning the Catholic Church's adherence to the teaching of Humanae Vitae as "immoral".

And yet. "Aren't you depressed at the lack of signs of progress?" asked a questioner. No, came Jonathon's response, because of all the spritual resources that remain untapped. (Here was evidence for Gordon Lynch's analysis, that I mentioned on Thursday.)

A final question was lobbed in. Jonathon had been praising the Chinese for having prevented 400m people from being born through their one-child policy. "Did the end justify the means in China?" a woman asked - the only woman to get a look in. A long pause. "On balance, no," came the eventual reply.

Isn't this the crux of the issue? Do wrong means ever justify good ends? We have since last year a beautiful granddaughter, born after very much soul-searching: how impoverished would our family life be without her! Not to speak of that child's mother, our only daughter - the fourth of our children, born after Caroline's doctor had warned her to have no more.

Burne-Jones' image of the Christ-child in Birmingham's St Philip's Cathedral misleadingly shows a white baby. Had the "necessary" funding for family planning - advocated by Jonathon - been available within the third world community into which Jesus was born, my question is: "Would he have been?"