Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice

Episode 48 : The Climate Majority Project: An Inclusive Approach with Professor Rupert Reed, in conversation with Dr Nigel Gould-Davies

• Rebel Justice - Nigel Gould-Davies • Season 3 • Episode 48

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Have you ever experienced an epiphany so profound it reshaped your entire life trajectory? Our guest in today's episode, Professor Rupert Reed, certainly did, and this revelation led him on a journey of environmental activism, pushing for drastic societal transformation in the face of climate change. This isn't just an apocalypse tale, it's a story about recognizing the signs, questioning our path, and actively seeking change before it's too late.  

In conversation with former British Ambassador Dr Nigel Gould-Davies who also has experience working for a British gas and oil conglomerate,  this candid exchange takes us  through Rupert's involvement with Extinction Rebellion (XR) and his subsequent move to create the Climate Majority Project, which focuses on fostering a more inclusive approach to climate action. 

He sheds light on the project's goals and how it's incubating a wave of climate action initiatives. We then  focus on sector-specific action, discussing the potential impact of Lawyers for Net Zero and the insurance industry in influencing corporate responsibility and managing climate risk.

In conclusion we delve into history and the lessons we can learn from the past. Drawing parallels between the Second World War, the COVID pandemic, and the climate and ecological emergency, Rupert illuminates the necessity for long-term thinking and consensus to foster transformative climate action that transcends party politics.

 This is  the first of a 2 part podcast hosted by Nigel and is a more than just a  determined call-to-action for us to harness our collective power and make drastic , personal changes for climate justice. 

We think that this courageous  dialogue that will leave you pondering our future and considering the steps we need to take to safeguard it.

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Madalena Alberto:

Welcome to the View Magazine's Rebel Justice podcast. This week we are shaking things up a little. Dr Nigel Gould- Davis, former ambassador and academic, interviews Professor Rupert Read of the Climate Justice Project. We believe that climate justice is one of the biggest issues that we must all confront as responsible and concerned citizens today. Dr Nigel Gould- Davis is a writer and commentator on international relations. He served in the British Foreign Office, where his roles included Ambassador to Belarus and head of the Economic Section in Moscow. He also held senior government roles in the energy industry in Central and Southeast Asia and was a lecturer at Oxford University. Nigel spoke with Rupert Read, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is a former chair of Greenhouse Think Tank and a former Green Party of England and Wales spokesperson councillor, European Parliamentary candidate and national parliamentary candidate. He is co-founder of the Greens Climate Activist Network and co-director of the Climate Majority Project.

Dr Nigel Gould-Davies:

It's a real pleasure to welcome Professor Rupert Read of the Climate Majority Project onto the podcast today. The past nine years have been the nine hottest years on record, and this past month July 2023, was the hottest month on record, so this is an ideal moment to discuss the climate crisis and what we as citizens can do about it, and what practical action looks like now. Rupert, you have done many things and you wear many hats. You're an academic, a professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia. You have been a politician, an elected councillor for the Green Party. You may be best known more widely as an activist, if you wear that label. You helped launch Extinction Rebellion. You were a prominent spokesperson and then you left Extinction Rebellion and you've set up a new organisation. So could you begin by telling us about your environmental journey, how it started and how it's evolved?

Professor Rupert Read:

Sure, yeah, well, thank you for that kind introduction and yeah, I guess the journey is quite a long one. I'm 57 years of age now. Hard to believe it sometimes for myself, but that's the case. One has to try to be one of the adults in the room by the time one's this age. I have been involved for many years in the Green Party. I've been involved for many years in nonviolent, direct action. There's also been for many years a prominent dimension of ecological thinking in my philosophical work and my more popular writing. But I suppose for me, the pivotal moment in a way came in 2015.

Professor Rupert Read:

I was delivering Green Party leaflets in the town I was then living in Norwich and I was sort of noticing, as I did so, the way that many of the gardens that I was passing exhibited troubling features of our culture, our civilization. There would be a garden that was fully paved over. There'd be another garden which had a defunct sofa or fridge in it. There'd be another garden that was very highly manicured and looked like it had a lot of weed killer in it. There'd be another garden which just had one or two bits of rubbish in it and didn't look very well-kempt. And as I was passing these gardens and sticking these leaflets through the doors. These words just appeared in my head and the words were, this civilization is finished. And I sort of - I kind of reeled. I stopped delivering the leaflets. I was like whoa, where did that come from and what exactly?

Professor Rupert Read:

does it mean and can it possibly be true? Because it's quite a drastic and dramatic conclusion. You know, for many years, like many people, I'd been working to improve, reform etc. Our society, our civilization, if you will. But this caught me short and so I turned as someone like me does to thinking about it systematically and I started writing about it and I wrote a piece with the title, funnily enough, of this Civilization is Finished, and I shared it privately with some friends and colleagues and I said to them look, I'm very nervous about this. Is this going to demoralize people? Am I going to get attacked for saying this as a sort of defeatist or something? And one of the implications of this? And the colleagues I sent it to said, "You know what, Rupert? This is actually more important than anything else you've written before and it has a great, great ring of truth to it and it needs to be disseminated and it needs to be followed up on more widely. So I, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to publish it, and first anonymously, and then I took the big step of starting to give talks with the title this Civilization is Finished by the time we get to 2018,. I'm giving a big talk of that name to a audience in Cambridge University. And this time something different happens, which is that the talk goes viral. And the reason that it does, I think, is partly because the time was ripe for it.

Professor Rupert Read:

By then, a lot of people were waking up to the very, very challenging trajectory that we were on by that stage, but also, and specifically, that around that time a new organization was being formed with the title of Extinction Rebellion, and these were people who, like me, had realized that our civilization was on very, very dangerous ground and could not continue in its current form. Just to be very clear when I say this civilization is finished, I mean this civilization, not all civilization, and I don't necessarily mean it's bound to collapse. I mean it's bound to change radically. That change will take the form of collapse if we carry on as we are doing, but it could take a very different form if we were to transform our current trajectory. But we are well in the danger zone. So far in the danger zone, there is no longer credible to think we can just tinker and reform our way out of this. We will end up with a transformed future. We will end up with a more localized future, for example. The question is whether we do so by way of a deliberate, more or less voluntary, collective path of transformation, or whether we let an enraged nature, if you will, impose such a transformation upon us in a way which will be much more difficult to survive, let alone enjoy. So my talk this civilization is finished went viral.

Professor Rupert Read:

I got involved in Extinction Rebellion from quite an early stage. I helped launch it publicly. We achieved an extraordinary breakthrough in public consciousness in April-May 2019. It was fantastic to be involved with something like that that was actually successful In 2020, by then, it has become clear to me that Extinction Rebellion had basically done as much as it was capable of doing and that it was never going to be the vehicle for the transformation that we needed. So that's when I started thinking actively about the need for there to be what I was then calling a new moderate flank in climate action and climate activism. But climate action more generally. As you correctly surmised, nigel, I don't think that all climate action is climate activism. Climate activism is one specific subset of climate action, and that has now taken the form of the Climate Majority Project. And well, this is what I now consider to be my life's work and my life's purpose.

Dr Nigel Gould-Davies:

And thank you, that's absolutely fascinating. So there was a particular moment that you can sort of recall, where you had a sort of epiphany and sounds like everything changed after that and that intersected with a broader movement, a broader, wider shift in social consciousness.

Professor Rupert Read:

Yeah, around about 2016, the world's weather really started to spin somewhat out of control, as you've already alluded to, and that has been probably the most crucial factor of all, I think, in facilitating the kind of mobilizations that we started to see.

Dr Nigel Gould-Davies:

Okay. Could you, to bring the story further forward and into the present, then, so you work for a time with Extinction Rebellion. Could you tell us about that experience, because you were prominent in that movement? And then could you tell us something about, to use your terminology action rather than or as well as activism? How you're thinking on that matter evolved and led you to to leave Extinction Rebellion and, in effect, to set up a different organization.

Professor Rupert Read:

Yes, very good. So, yeah, I helped launch Extinction Rebellion. I was involved from the beginnings in the political strategy team of extinction rebellion and was therefore one of our main strategists and political liaison people back in those days and, as you say, I also became quite a prominent spokesperson for XR. I also undertook some nonviolent, direct action with XR, as you know, many people in XR obviously did. One of those undertakings led me to be arrested for criminal damage against the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Professor Rupert Read:

The climate change denial delay outfit that lurks in Tufton Street close to the heart of power in Westminster in the UK Went to court for that was treated pretty revealingly really, by the magistrates, who I think were.

Professor Rupert Read:

They found us guilty, but they gave us the absolute minimum fine they could. They didn't, obviously, give us any custodial sentence. I just spent one night in a police cell and, very interestingly, they made the Global Warming Policy Foundation pay more for the cleanup operation Of getting rid of, you know, the damage that we've done on the outside of the building. Then we had to pay, which we thought was a very intriguing signal that they were sending. But, yes, in 2020 it became clear to me that extinction rebellion is here to sort of Ceiling of support and what was needed was a much wider mobilization that if there's going to be the kind of change that we actually need on climate Roughly it's going to take all of us, or at least a majority of us, because this isn't the kind of this, just isn't the kind of thing you can quote, solve, unquote, by way of any kind of elite action.

Professor Rupert Read:

I mean it can't be just solved by governments or governments and corporations in the way, for example, it was more or less possible To solve the ozone hole problem in the 1980s, through that kind of elite, technocratic action. There is no technophics for climate. Obviously technologies have a role to play, such as renewable energy. There's no, there's no simple technophics. It's just gonna deal with the whole thing. This is a predicament. It strikes to the root of our civilization. It shows us what's gone wrong with so many of our values and institutions and so forth, and it's gonna take all of us to get serious on tackling it, or at least acquiescing in others, getting very serious on our behalf and tackling it. There needs to be an essential democratic dimension, therefore, one kind or another, to the kinds of climate action and transformational change that we need to see. So that was part of my thinking in calling for a new, moderate flanks. Take advantage of the space that extinction, rebellion and the school strikes for climate opened up in the system, open up in public consciousness opened up in political space, and that's bring together that kind of coalition, if you will, of all sorts of ordinary people as well as elite actors, and not just people who were already, you know, part of the cause. This is a central part of what the new moderate flight needs to do. It needs, therefore, to be depolarizing rather than rather than polarizing in the way that the radical flank Environmental action normally is. It needs to, that is, you know, be able to bring a wide range of people with us. Excinction rebellion had a slogan beyond party politics, or sometimes it was put as beyond ideology, and I think the slogans are right there. They're right for our time. I don't think that xr succeeded in following through on those slogans as fully as it might have done. It's became clear to me that the new emerging moderate flank needed to do so, and he's the word emerging advisedly, because one of the things that's really exciting about the situation that we have now is that this is happening, that these new ways of taking action involving citizens in diverse ways are springing up all over the place, and one of our main roles in what became the moderate flank incubator and now, more recently, has been renamed as the climate majority incubator in the climate majority project. What about key roles? Is to support such elements of the emerging moderate flank, the emerging new moderate flank, the ones that are most promising, that are most effective, that are that are starting to take shape, and we've been doing that. So we've been supporting, for example, organizations like lawyers for net zero and P watch wild card, community climate action organizations that are involving citizens in legal activities, that are calculated to Really move the dial when they are all added up. And that's one of the crucial features of this that the movement that is emerging, and even the word movement seems to me probably to Constricting.

Professor Rupert Read:

I sometimes talk a bit as a wave and you wave rolling of action that this wave consists of many parts. Just as you know wave is full of lots of different molecules, if you will, of water. This wave consists of stuff going on in businesses and professions and workplaces no-transcript that can seem completely different from each other. You know what has community climate action, which is basically people building resilience together on land and perhaps engaging in retrofit and community energy Generation. What's that got to do with lawyers for net zero, who essentially work with elite Corporate lawyers who are trying to change their businesses. Well, what it's got to do with it is that if all of these things start to happen, and if there's increasing awareness of them, and if people come to see that there is something emerging here and start to feel less Isolated and hopeless and lonely in their concern, which is very widespread, this concern now Well then we have a real chance of actually getting somewhere.

Professor Rupert Read:

And this is what is so enormously hopeful seems to me, about this emerging order at flank, about this Climate majority which is taking shape, is that the climate majority already exists.

Professor Rupert Read:

It just needs to be Deepened by even further realization of the truth about how tough the situation we are in is, and it needs to be more activated.

Professor Rupert Read:

The elements of it that are already Activated need to serve as models for, for the rest, and people can be inspired by what they then see and feel and and hear of each other, and and and see in the spaces that they already in, all the spaces that they are not in, which is all broadly pointing in the same direction, and that direction is one of sanity, that direction is one of us having a future, as in the book I published a couple of years ago, which was a sort of prototype call for the deepening and activating of the emerging climate majority.

Professor Rupert Read:

That book was called parents for a future how loving our children can prevent climate collapse. And I think the identity of being a parent is one very important identity to bring in here, you know, very different from the identity of being an activist. You know most human beings are parents and it's now gradually, painfully becoming clear to a lot of parents that they cannot adequately protect their children in the world that we are moving into Simply by, you know, making sure that they are polite and well educated and well-fed and get into an ok school and so on and so forth. But it's going to take something more Fundamental and collective and and joined up. And that kind of sense of joined upness is something that in the climate majority project, we are seeking to help to provide.

Dr Nigel Gould-Davies:

Okay, that's really fascinating and it gets to the heart of the question of action. There's no doubt that the climate is in deep trouble and the causes are anthropogenic, they're human cause. The consensus on that. Then the question is what can we all in practical terms do about it? Now You've been quite clear about. You know what a solution does not look like. It's not just Technocratic, it's not just about governments or a leads. You've Pointed the way towards something that's much more inclusive, yeah, encompasses all of us. That is, in your own terms, depolarizing, so it's uniting. And just to go back to extinction, rebellion we all think of, you know people gluing themselves to tarmac or clogging out the traffic and so on. What are the sorts of things? How do you turn this more inclusive approach, this wave, into Actions? How does that look like?

Professor Rupert Read:

Yeah, yeah, good question. So it's not a straightforward an ask, as quite a lot of other groups or movements have. So In XR the ask was relatively straightforward. You know, we want people to come en masse into the streets together, that's all. That's a sort of more Radical form of the sort of standard traditional activist protest ask of something like you want you all to come to a demonstration, or Other kind of simple asks that other organizations have.

Professor Rupert Read:

Some people say it's about green consumerism, you know, if we all buy differently, or other say, if you all eat differently, we're gonna sort this, and. And then there are kind of simple technophics proposals or simple political proposals. The thing about simple proposals is that they're nice and simple and by themselves they're always wrong. At least in relation to this challenge, which is a total Civilizational challenge, we have to undertake what is often called system change. It's gonna be what I referred to earlier to as transformation, and that just isn't something which which one Action or one body or something can accomplish. It's gonna take a whole load of things. So really, the ask that we make in the climate majority project of each and every person is Firstly to notice that you are part of something, or at least that you're trying to become part of something which is much, much bigger and that if we're gonna find ways through this, we're gonna do it collectively. It isn't gonna be about, you know, one individual, powerful leader. It's not gonna be about us as loads of isolated individuals. It's gonna be collective, it's gonna be fundamentally Civic, it's gonna draw on our identity, among other things, as as citizens. So that's where we kind of start. But then, in terms of you know what, what does one do on the base of that? What does one, what does one actually do? The call is well, that's what you need to figure out for yourself, along with others. Where is the place in your life that you have most potential Power, voice, influence to do something meaningful? That will be a part of this wave. So I've already suggested some you know possible example, actual, concrete examples. Let me go deeper into one or two of those and then add one or two others. So one of the organizations that we incubating and, by the way, every organization that we are incubating that we've Been able to give seed funding to has gone on to access further Significant funding and they're all growing and, frankly, doing really well, which is really encouraging.

Professor Rupert Read:

One of the organizations we incubate, as I mentioned, is called lawyers for net zero. They work with elite corporate lawyers, general counsel Some listeners may be familiar with the TV series succession Jerry. She's the general counsel for the corporation at the heart of that story. We're hoping to influence Corporations to do to be rather better than the corporation that is portrayed in succession, obviously. And the idea of lawyers for net zero Is, by working with these elite lawyers, to start to move them in the kind of direction where, for example, they are less likely to get sued in future. Because I can absolutely promise you and the reason I can promise you is because I know Some of the people involved that there's a load of other lawyers who are going to be involved in more and more litigation Against companies and governments and so forth who do not actually fulfill their various and Actually growing all of these should grow more legal responsibilities in relation to climate and nature and ecology and so forth. So if you happen to be an elite corporate lawyer and you're listening to this podcast, well then you know what to do get involved with lawyers for net zero.

Professor Rupert Read:

Now, most people are not going to be that, but many people listening may be, for example in other Professions where there are similar kinds of potentialities for meaningful action. So we're just in the early stages, for example, of working with professionals in the insurance sector, which is an enormously important sector in all sorts of ways which I could explain at great length. But just to give you one or two hints, and it's probably already pretty obvious to people without insurance you can't have companies like coal mines and an airline companies and so forth. So insurers have enormous power in that way. Also, insurers know quite a lot about risk and and about you know what's coming down the pike at us, and that knowledge ought to be disclosed. Most crucially of all, insurers are the way that, socially, we above all manage risk and make it tolerable.

Professor Rupert Read:

And we're moving into a world, unfortunately, of greater and greater risk and uncertainty, for climatic reasons and, of course, other reasons as well, often related. The world we're moving into, unless we actually get serious about tackling the root causes of what's going wrong, it's, among other things, going to gradually become an uninsurable world, and this has already started. Insurance companies are already pulling out of ensuring house insurance, for example in some coastal states in the United States. In the heart of our supposed advanced capitalist system Security is becoming a reality. An uninsurable world is a world which is on the brink of, or indeed in, collapse. It's also, self-evidently, a world in which there's no insurance industry. So if there is an intelligent person high up in the insurance industry listening to this podcast, be very clear that the climate threat is an existential threat, not just to the world, but also, more mundanely and more soon, more quickly, to your industry, and there's a number of industries which are like this, but insurance is the starkest one. So, in a number of ways, insurance is actually a crucial potential leverage point.

Professor Rupert Read:

Now, more briefly, let me go on and mention some other cases. So people in the teaching profession or in universities, academics, academics have an enormous responsibility here of truthfulness. What are you teaching? What are you researching? After I had my dis-civilization as finished revelation in 2015, I changed the way that I taught. I changed the way that I taught to start saying to students fully, truthfully, what I saw in the world and in their future. And it wasn't easy and sometimes it was not very enjoyable for them, but over and over again, they've tended to reassure me that they're very grateful to have an educator who is actually speaking frankly to them and enables them to appraise their future better.

Professor Rupert Read:

We're working in the Climate Majority Project with a group of actors who are seeking to transform the acting profession more generally, the creative world. There's all sorts of ways in which that needs to happen. For me, the most important one of all the place where creatives have their greatest potential power, and that's what everybody needs to ask themselves what is my greatest potential power in relation to this civilizational crisis, with people in the creative world, it's ultimately to create art, to create content which is about this and enables people to imagine different futures, including futures that are OK, futures in which we get through what's coming. We've had quite a few dystopias in recent years. Utopias are much less useful to us than they used to be because we're not heading for utopia, but we could still head for what I call a through-topia, which is getting through what's coming in the best possible way, and if artists and actors and directors and musicians and so forth which are really get serious about trying to produce through-topias, of which there have been pitifully few so far, for example, on television approximately zero, I would say absolutely pathetic. I mean on television.

Professor Rupert Read:

We think, for example, of the excellent documentaries getting increasingly good in recent years from David Attenborough and Chris Packham about these things, and that's great, but where are the dramas about the climate crisis? Where are the comedies about the climate crisis? Where are the films about the climate crisis? You can count them on the fingers of one hand and none of them are through-topias. None of them sketch for scenarios of, well, the kind of future in which something like the Climate Majority Project works and we get to get through what's coming. This is so badly needed.

Professor Rupert Read:

Going more widely, some people listening to the call may have money I mean money to spare real money. If you do, then it's possible that the greatest way you can contribute whatever your profession or background or talents or whatever is by putting that money to really thoughtful, good use. Because, as I said earlier, for example, if you're thinking, well, yes, but I need to provide for my children, and so on, we need to remember that, unless there's a load of people who step up and help us to adapt to and mitigate and improve the future that is coming, it doesn't matter whether your children are well provided for or not, or will school and so on. They're still going to end up in the same collapsing society and some people, their best contribution might be to put their body on the line. There's some people who feel that, still, the best thing to do is to be part of the radical flank.

Professor Rupert Read:

My own view is that by far the most important thing now, by far the biggest gap in the ecosystem, is the kind of stuff that I've been talking about the activation of the Climate Majority, which means each and every one of us, and for quite a lot of people, what that's going to mean is getting involved in a serious way, in an effective way, in their local communities, in growing food, in producing energy, in building resilience, and one of the great importances of that, of all those kinds of activities, what I call transformative adaptation, is that they have the huge benefit of waking up other people. So when one says, for example, as sometimes climate activists say, things like, well, it's all about net zero 2050 or even net zero 2035 or something, for most people that still sounds an awful long way off. That still sounds like some kind of distant threat. But the threat isn't distant, it's right here, right now. And when we do adaptation, when we engage in preparedness activities, when we build resilience together, then we bring the threat right to where it is into the forefront, into the center of our lives right now, when we are getting ready to deal with wildfires, for example, which are coming to this country, to the UK the kind of stuff we've seen in Rhodes and in Maui. We'll see that in the UK within the next two, five, 10 years.

Professor Rupert Read:

When people are doing water storage together or food growing together, seed sharing, et cetera. There's all sorts of simple forms in which this can take. When that's being done seriously and effectively, it's a good way of protecting ourselves against what's likely to be coming. And it has, as I say, this fantastic advantage of being just about the best wake-up call that there is, because when people see other people engaging in profitable, helpful, community-building, adaptation activities, then they understand it's real, it's now, it's here, not some distant threat, and that helps everybody, therefore, to get more mobilized. And then you start to see this wave being able to take greater and greater shape, which, I'm confident, is what's going to happen. The only question is is it going to happen quickly enough? Is it going to happen widely enough? Is it going to happen intelligently and widely enough? And those are the questions which all of us have a responsibility to step up to and answer together in that way, it's a very exciting, frankly, prospect.

Dr Nigel Gould-Davies:

Absolutely. Yes, the Earth is the biggest interest group in the world. It's, in fact, as you say, a majority, a compelling majority concern. Just drawing on my own security background, even the Pentagon is very concerned about climate change and has all sorts of strategies for addressing it Absolutely. And as you say, what's needed then is and it's an ambitious term, an ambitious aspiration system change, system transformation. So, I wonder, are you trying to achieve something of a kind that's never been done before, or are there precedents? Are there models in other times and places where fundamental change has been achieved that you can look to and draw upon, for example, for inspiration?

Professor Rupert Read:

Yeah, that's a great question. The simple and short answer is what we're talking about here is unprecedented. This is an unprecedented challenge. The sheer scale of it, the global nature of it, how urgent and pressing it is it's unprecedented. But there are indeed partial precedents and we need to look to those.

Professor Rupert Read:

So let me give a couple of examples. An obvious one which is often mentioned and it really is, I think, in some important ways quite helpful is the Second World War. So a story I like to tell, for example, is when Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors visited the American Auto Association members around the time when the USA plunged into the Second World War and said okay, here are plans for what you're going to do in the next few years in terms of producing tanks and armored personnel vehicles and contributing to the manufacture of aeroplanes and so on as part of the war effort. And the auto manufacturers looked at the plans and they said Mr President, there must be some kind of mistake here. If we go along with these plans, that means we're not going to be building any ordinary cars for the next three, four, five years. And Roosevelt said yep, you've got it, you've understood. That's the situation. That's the nature of what you do when you're in an emergency. What happened in the Second World War and a more recent example, of course, is some of the responses to the COVID pandemic showed what is possible when a society, or even a whole broad coalition of countries, or in the COVID pandemic, to some extent the whole world, decides to actually take something seriously and move fast on it. And let no one say that things like that can't be done because during the Second World War and during the COVID pandemic they have been done Now.

Professor Rupert Read:

Still it's not a complete precedent, because a one of the difficult things about the climate and ecological emergency is that it is so vast and relatively slow burning. I mean, I don't want to exaggerate, you know it's getting worse by the year, but of course it doesn't compare in speed and scale to Hitler's Blitzkrieg. It doesn't compare in speed and scale to the COVID virus and therefore it's more psychologically challenging for human beings. And that's one of the reasons why we're lagging behind here and one of the huge challenges and one of the reasons why true wisdom and long term thinking is needed here, that we can't get away from that. To some extent we're just going to have to take inspiration from the way that, for example, many indigenous cultures that survived have long thought of the famous seventh generation rule, for example among some Native American tribes, that any weighty decision you have to think about the interests of the seventh generation. You know when was the last time in our civilization that you heard a politician saying well, look, what we have to be really concerned about here and facing this issue, whatever the issue is, is what people are going to be thinking about this 150 years from now. You know we don't hear that and we should hear it. So those are among the key reasons why those precedents, although they're very encouraging, are only partial but they are very encouraging in important respects.

Professor Rupert Read:

Another, for instance, from the Second World War that I think is very helpful. So in the UK food rationing was brought in during the Second World War and it lasted actually not many people know this till 1957. It didn't fully cease till 12 years after the war ended. So it lasted a generation, to some degree Anyway. So food rationing was a policy that was. It had some people who were unhappy with it, but it garnered broad national support. Even though it was very bold and an infringement upon certain liberties, it was very egalitarian in its effects. It helped the population to be more healthy, but because it wasn't brought in primarily for those reasons. It was brought in basically to stop the Germans from starving us out. So it was in that sense, an emergency response and the same kind of logic applies, you know, kind of like we had in the Second World War.

Professor Rupert Read:

The kind of thinking we need to be moving towards is there ought to be something like a national government, or the least there ought to be a wide depolarizing consensus on very serious, strategic, transformative climate and nature action. It ought to be beyond party politics. In particular, if you have people in, say, the Green Party or, for that matter, the Labour Party, who are saying, well, but we want to do these things because of our ecological ideology or because of our socialist ideology, one can say in response well, that's fine, but you mustn't insist that everybody thinks that way. And this is a crucial part of the logic of the Climate Majority Project that we're bringing together. For example, you can see in our founding statement, we're bringing together a diverse coalition of unusual suspects. So we have some prominent conservatives, people like Lord Deven, the former head of the Climate Change Committee, lord Randall, theresa May's former environment advisor, ben Goldsmith, the conservative conservationist and philanthropist. They are supporting us alongside business people, alongside former prominent members of the radical flank, alongside more usual suspects as well. It's a broad coalition.

Professor Rupert Read:

That is what is needed, and what we don't need is for people to be insisting on a kind of ideological purity. The kind of policies that we need to address the situation adequately and bring us to where we need to be, the kind of ideas, for example, that are embedded in the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill which the zero hour campaign have put forward, those policies for serious, transformative change to our society. They need to be designed and argued for in such a way that they can appeal to people who are middle of the road or in business, or even card-carrying conservatives, etc. Not just designed to appeal to supposedly ideologically pure few. Because, once again, we need the majority on this to actually win, to actually triumph, and that is what we need to do.

Professor Rupert Read:

That is the responsibility that is upon us. Our children and our grandchildren are not going to be interested in. Did you sort of have good intentions where you're hoping for the right thing? I mean, yeah, sure, there'll be a little bit interested in that, but they'll be mostly interested in did you actually do stuff that was effective? Did you swallow your pride? Did you cross boundaries that were difficult to cross? Did you work with people you weren't necessarily entirely comfortable with working with in order to achieve something absolutely vital and fundamental to our future? And you know, these are the kind of questions that the politicians who joined the national government in World War II were able to successfully answer. We need to be able to successfully answer them as well.

Madalena Alberto:

And this concludes our podcast for today. Tune in for the second part of this very important topic. Nigel and Rupert. Thank you for taking us on this journey down the history of Rupert's climate action history. We need to all think about how we can change our corner of the world and what we can do to try and transverse the enormous damage being done on a daily basis by being responsible for our own actions and lobbying for those in power to make better energy efficiency choices. Thank you for listening to this special episode on climate justice. You can subscribe to the View at theviemagorguk. Follow us on our social media. We are Rebel Justice on X, formerly Twitter and the View magazine on Instagram, linkedin and Facebook. Thank you.