 house is a very good metaphor for what we mean by prosperity because house really is a kind of balancing act you know it's not about having more and more as we write into the DNA of capitalism it's actually about the balance between having too little and too much it's about the balance between self and other it's about the balance between you know continually innovating and being bedded in tradition and these balances you know that we had to learn and relearn through the pandemic in our lives are also important I think in thinking about you know what prosperity is what the economy should be doing and how there might be a kind of actually a better life for us outside of of capitalism. Dr. Tim Jackson is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Tim is an ecological economist and writer since 2016 he has been director of the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity CUSP is the acronym at the University of Surrey in the UK where he is also professor of Sustainable Development from 2004 to 2011 he was a economics commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission where his work culminated in the publication of Prosperity Without Growth in 2019 and then I guess the second printing in 2017 which has subsequently been translated in 17 foreign languages. It was named as Financial Times Book of the Year in 2010 and Unheard's Economic Book of the Decade in 2019. His latest book Post Growth Life After Capitalism was published by Polity Press in 2021 this year. In 2016 Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate for exceptional international leadership and sustainability in addition to his academic work. Tim is an award winning dramatist with numerous radio writing credits for the BBC. Tim holds multiple degrees and mathematics from Massachusetts and Cambridge philosophy from Massachusetts, Uni Western Ontario, Masters in Arts at the University of Western Ontario and Physics Phd St Andrews. He also holds an honorary degrees University of Brighton in the UK and many many other. Tim welcome to the show sorry for messing up your biography there's so much you've been doing yeah I just have to be I just have to it must be I've just realized how confusing my biography is if you're from the US because because it's MA doesn't stand for Massachusetts it stands for Master of Arts and it was actually Cambridge, Cambridge England and for historical reasons Cambridge gives only Master of Arts degrees at bachelor level so it's a it's a slightly confusing biography but it's really not it's just me because I'll tell you what I'm nervous as hell which is hard for me to do because I I revere you I think you are an amazing man you've done a lot of things and your your books pick on my heart because it's the type of questions the type of wisdom the type of thinking around ecological economics that I've been waiting and looking for for decades and not only is your TED Talk fabulous but you just come right out there and so eloquently say it and you say it in a simple language for everyone to clearly understand and so I think I I should have gotten it but honestly I'm a little bit nervous because I'm so excited to finally be speaking with you. Thank you Mark I'm flattered and there's no need to be nervous because I mean I'm actually interestingly for the number of times I've done this I shouldn't be nervous at all but of course you know every time is different you never know what's going to happen so there's always a degree of not quite knowing what the situation is going to be but I'm really pleased to be here and I'm looking forward to the conversation. I am too and so I've got both of your books here I've introduced them already prosperity without growth fabulous read you might know that I'm a sustainable development goal advocate for the United Nations to speak about them quite a bit but even before that time you were doing sustainable development commission and quite a bit of work around that and also discussing it here but also doing reports as well and then this year thank goodness and hopefully the pause and the pandemic and other things that were still under the way brought this wonderful work about post growth. What I've led up with your biography what you've told me what what I see and read in your books you've been doing this for quite some while and whether it's sustainable development or ecological economics you've been around the block you've given the TED talks you've done the work you've done the professorship you've taught the courses you've been doing this for a long time but my real question is how have you weathered this crazy time has all that work that you've done around sustainable development talking about climate change and we need to have other economic models and that the current models and the ones that we've had in the past weren't working and really a lot of stuff wasn't working before the pandemic but then we were we were struck and hit with this time of craziness and it wasn't just economic downturn it was the pandemic and the crazy inauguration and black lives matters and Asian racism and on and on did you weather this time good did any new models bubble up to the surface or any learning lessons and most of all all that stuff that you you've been talking about for for all these years did that give you any more resilience to be prepared or to to say okay here we go here it's coming and I feel prepared so I just want genuinely know how you and your family have been but also what what are the learning lessons and does being sustainable or thinking about ecological economics serve to be a better model in hard times I think I hadn't really thought about that specifically Mark but I suppose in a way I suppose in a way it could be said to be true I mean let me say first of all you know it was tough for everyone through these last times I think by comparison with many of the people and even some of my students and some of the people that I'm responsible for at CUSP you know it has not been a difficult period in as by comparison with with the difficulties that some people have had and you know it has made it's changed my life obviously it's changed the way that I think slightly it's changed the interactions that I have with my with my students everything being online and constructing these slightly strange relationships that that you never met each other and yet you you have to reach a level at which you can talk and understand each other in in in order to function really in order to get through that and and of course you know I have been able to continue to work and and I think that's one of the things that struck me as a luxury I would say because I think because I think work matters I think it's important to us I think our participation in society kind of hangs off that ability to be able to contribute and and our identity is also hung up with that as well so you know I haven't had to make huge sacrifices in terms of giving up work and and I feel actually although you know sometimes I would like to have an easier day and a holiday sounds like a brilliant idea and you know a nine-month holiday sounds absolutely fantastic I know that it's not you know I know that people who have had to go into that situation where they couldn't conduct their business they couldn't attend their place of work they couldn't they didn't have proper places to work and sometimes they were not physically not allowed to work that's a really difficult place to me it seems to be it seems to me and and you know I may be a little bit strange in that respect I put it down to my slightly puritan upbringing but I kind of think work matters not not in a formal sense not necessarily in an institutional sense but in that ability to you know to participate in society to take action in the world and to some extent I think that is a you know it is a lesson from the pandemic it in order to one of the things that went missing so fast was that kind of business around which our lives have been structured and when it goes away you're left in a space where you don't understand it anymore you don't understand your role properly you don't understand your relationships in the same way anymore and to have that focus on your action in the world to be able to keep that focus you know I think was a was a huge privilege and I'm not suggesting it's not available to other people because I it certainly was and and obviously those who were working on the front lines through that pandemic the you know they they had the opposite problem in a sense they were 24 7 really engaged in a in a very very difficult situation but I think you know behind all that there's this interesting lesson for us that we think what we want is some kind of empty relaxing space where everything is provided for us and everything is materially comfortable and and actually there's something else that is more important to us and and in in learning that lesson through the pandemic I think it is something that we can sort of take forward in understanding how society may change and how we might actually construct meaning and purpose beyond the consumer society that really just stopped when the pandemic struck I want to go just a little bit deeper so we know that bubbles and problems we're surfacing well before the pandemic on economic models around the world and economies around the world and just this bigger unease of of humanity in relationship to their governments and to their the bigger governance societies around the world where we're saying just the world isn't working for everyone all over the place there's this dis ease this big dis ease being felt and there's this you know this problem theory from Einstein where he says you know we need to come up with different models to solve our problems not the same thinking that created those problems you know use different models and in economics and different systems around the world it seems like we see these bubbles whether it's a real estate bubble financial or tech bubble and they come up and then they burst or they come close to teetering and then there's a bailout but it just goes right back to that same old model and where there there's some learning lessons or some things that bubbled up during this time that that we also got a better glimpse at where some of the things that truly need to be fixed are in our models and before we go into deeper into your books but were there some other things some other learning lessons that came up where it says oh that's definitely some areas we need to focus on and and and adjust yes I think I think so I mean you know kind of one of one of the things and I do talk about it a little bit in in in post-grace is this sort of idea of how important health is to us and that obviously was brought home very very clearly and and almost to the to the point for me where I begin to think that actually health is a very good metaphor for what we mean by prosperity because health really is a kind of balancing act you know it's not about having more and more as we write into the DNA of capitalism it's actually about the balance between having too little and too much it's about the balance between self and other it's about the balance between you know continually innovating and being bedded in tradition and these balances you know that we had to learn and relearn through the pandemic in our lives are also important I think in thinking about you know what prosperity is what the economy should be doing and how there might be a kind of actually a better life for us outside of of capitalism and you know I don't think we should think that's necessarily immediately going to follow from the pandemic or that it's going to be easy to get to but just that there were glimpses through that you know really tragic times in so many ways of of different ways of living different ways of being there I mean one big surprise I had which is kind of on a tangent is you know the big problems during this this whole pause there was a lot of unrest around the inauguration and the whole voting factor and that was turning America and the rest of the world kind of upside down with what was going on there and that one when Biden and Harris got into office immediately that I'm glad they doubled down on the environment and the climate and it started to kind of get back in the Paris agreement but I was thinking why didn't they fix the the voting thing back in 2005 with Al Gore the dimple chat in Florida you know we're still today in 2021 dealing with old things that should have been fixed decades ago and and now we're just going to wait till the next vote that that might be a little bit of a tangent but in your books really the beginning is with with an older book The Limits to Growth from the Meadows report Donella Dennis Meadows your grander Steve Burns Jr. who wrote The Limits to Growth it was paid for by the Volkswagen Foundation or Stiftung as you'd say in Germany and the Club of Rome and it's really about systems thinking dynamic modeling and this approach to and there's a big play of economics in there's a big role of this you know there is a limit to to growth capitalism and a lot is is based off of that type of thinking but as well one other and I happen to have a couple of his books here and I'm just going to hold them up but I want to mention them and then I want to go into how you kind of got on this journey and and that's Herman Daley you don't have the ecological economics this is actual academic book of the course that I took and then here's is another other ecological economics book from Herman Daley who actually left the World Bank you know because he saw a lot of things that were working and one thing I like about your writing style is you're not you don't only give us the history so to say you give us the behind the scenes of personal people who are real people who are nice people who are people you want to understand their story of their marriages in life and how this evolved and happened just like they do in your life and in my life and and I really like how that's progressed but me coming from what I was one of the first 50 people trained by Al Gore and his ranch in Carthage Tennessee well you know we're talking Dr. James Hansen we're talking these original ways of doing things there's this story of how this training this learning this history has emerged and I'm I like how you weed that into or weave that into so nicely into your books and into your stories so that we can understand why is it important and how does it fit into our lives so how did you come across that how did this journey thing is that just something that every economist no not at all I mean okay no I mean those economists start out in all sorts of different ways but for me that was a really important part of things maybe it comes from that sort of dramatist in me that it's people's stories that really motivate me that that I that connects me to ideas and and that you know everybody all the ideas that we have were the ideas of people and all those people had lives and all of those lives had their own characteristics and so actually embedding the life and the story and the ideas altogether in some ways it's a little bit of a device but it is a very effective device because it is to people that we relate and and so you know you can do all the all the concepts concepts and theory and all the textbooks that you like but it doesn't necessarily reach people and that was in a way that was a kind of you know learning that I had from from prosperity without growth from the earlier books that it was it was written for policymakers it was written logically rationally yes I used some of that story as a means of communication but it was essentially trying to persuade policymakers to make changes and I have to say you know in that in that sense it wasn't an outstanding success because the policymakers just did not want to talk about growth at all really except to kick start it and get it back after the financial crisis but actually you know following that what seemed to be a completely disorderly launch of a government report out of that emerged this huge and very enriching conversation with all sorts of people people who were in their 80s and have been there in the limits to gross debate back in the 60s and 70s people who were just starting out in economics and wanted a different kind of economics all of these people just kind of flooding into the space and that I did not know was there around this conversation and the fact I think the fact that it was a report to government was one of the reasons why that happened so extensively why so many people joined that debate in that way at that time so I don't regret it being a report to government but I do feel that what it you know what it what it was was a kind of opportunity to to really restart this conversation and I was humbled really by the response to that and and talking of the characters I mean Herman I've known for for a long time and he's always been very supportive and and he we actually brought him into that process at the Sustainable Development Commission some background seminars that we organized thinking about prosperity thinking about steady state economy so I knew Herman quite well but I just want to tell a little story of an anecdote where you know one of the sets of people that that invited me to talk after Prosperity Without Grace was published was something called the Balaton Group which was set up around an annual meeting in Balaton in Hungary and to sort of bring together the people who've been involved in the limits to gross debate every year and to and to you know just brainstorm and be there and network and discuss and I turned up on the shores of Lake Balaton and one of the first people who came up to me he was an elderly gentleman you know bearded in his late 70s probably and he stuck his camera in my face and it was an old style camera and he clicked the camera and he said that's one for the bulletin board and then he introduced himself to me and it was Dennis Menos it was just one of those moments you know and the next day he came bearing a gift which was just this extraordinary icon to me of a first edition of Limits to Grace which you know was it was the last spare one that he had and he presented it to me and it was it you know you're touching history you're touching ideas you're touching the sense of these people and I think that's something that we should not forget I think some of you know some of what I wanted to do particularly in post-growth in in reconnecting people to the ideas and to the people is to say look you're not in a vacuum you're not in the wilderness these ideas are here and the people who had them to some extent their spirit lives on through those ideas their influence is important to you and in a world in which we're dominated by kind of you know the the the likes that you get on Twitter and you're inclined to forget the ideas have depth and they have history and they have biography and they have personality and I find that you know a little bit sometimes with my students that they they are apt to want to and it's perfectly understandable you want to make your mark you want to create your space and what I want to say to them is do not forget your elders to not forget these people who came before not because they will overshadow you but because they will support you and they will be a part of the resource through which your work will become richer and it was a you know I think that's a very important thing to remember. It is so important and I look back at all the years I'm still a student in many respects and I look at our time together today as a huge learning lesson but there's maybe a handful of professors and teachers that I truly remembered and it's because there was a personal connection and a story and a history and it wasn't I didn't get treated like a number or a robot that I actually learned something from their courses and they gave me something of value once I left the classroom once I left the university that I'll never forget and to this day I just absolutely knew that that you were going to say that was Dennis Meadows and I have I have an interesting story so not only is the limits to growth they call it the climate science bible now and many of the circles especially in and climate reality project with Al Gore but I was having an email exchange with with Dennis who lives in New Hampshire I lived in New Hampshire as well and we were discussing him beyond the show and talking about some of the other things of how the limits to growth and the whole community of limits to growth and things and and he says yeah I'm retiring I passed on the baton I I you know he's he had some severe sadness with with Dana's loss his wife Donella Meadows and and and and many other things that he's been fighting a long fight for a long time but doing some very very wonderful things and more power to you take some time off but in his retirement he he donated to to the county that he lives in his entire property lives on this we're used to live on a ranch with his wife and and different things and it's just really neat how he he's made a big impact he's he's done the fight but it's really about all of us to to pick up the baton and take those wisdoms and bring them to a much clearer model in the future the crazy thing is there's so many multiple learning lessons out of that as well so the Volkswagen Foundation Stiftung in German is is a sister company of the Volkswagen company who did diesel gate in 2015 they're the ones who paid for this climate science bible this beautiful report which says there's a limit to growth and apparently they didn't read it at all or and I've heard okay they're separate companies that's not true sorry it's bullshit they're the same company they know what's going on and and and now they're they've been fined and they're moving forward in a positive direction I hope I believe the reason I bring that up it's unique how that book that was written in 1972 Dennis Meadows and that can have an impact on you on me and on the future because it talked about the exact things that we're experiencing now there is a limit to growth capitalism can't go on forever your books post growth you know prosperity without growth and I'm wondering how many people have have read the book and move forward so it's important that this collective intelligence that we have out this intelligence out there that we get that wisdom so that we know it existed and learn how to apply it um I I really want to touch on Herman Daley for just a moment you are an ecological economist and and that's I guess that but did it start out that way and and how what was a Herman Daley that that got you on that path because I mean as an economist it's usually white elderly men who who go through this type of a degree or become economists it's not very many females in the industry and very even fewer people of color but how do you get on to the path from this capitalism or these other economic models to one of ecological economic and is it a struggle is it a battle you have scars and wounds all over or how does that work can you help us there yeah sure I mean you know I call myself an ecological economics because it's a label that's out there and it's actually one that Herman you know more or less created for people who who were thinking about the economy but weren't necessarily thinking about it in a conventional way and I certainly wasn't I mean I wasn't actually trained as an economist I think a you know more accurate title for me would be an accidental economist I mean it doesn't look quite so convincing on the website but it's more it's more in keeping with reality and and and I didn't start anywhere near economics in fact in my when I was at school I I did a couple of economics classes and I could not understand them I could not understand who they were talking about I could not understand the terminology of it the language did not connect with me and so you know economics was the last thing in the world that I wanted to do as I was working my way through through my education and and I came back to it really because I needed to and and the story of coming back to it you know went through this education as you mentioned around maths and philosophy in particular where I began to think more deeply about the world but also this excursion into into drama and the arts and theatre which I absolutely loved and was my escape out of the dryness of academia so much so that when I left university after completing my PhD that's what I thought I was going to do I was going to be writing plays and I'd already sold a couple of plays to the BBC and and I'd also received the paychecks for them and realised they weren't very much so I was working part-time during that period when I was still thinking I was going to be a playwright and just you know serving in bars and cafes and restaurants and doing laboring jobs and that kind of thing in London and then in April 1986 very very precise moment in time the number four reactor in Chernobyl, Chernobyl melted down and and I don't know why it affected me so so deeply but I remember it very very clearly I can even remember the day when it happened because I was travelling through the British countryside outside London looking at this beautiful sky listening to the radio and the radio telling us that the radiation from Chernobyl was coming towards the UK and was already being detected in the sheep in Wales and and this you know this image actually of a fragile world a fragile planet in which humanity's technology was creating dangers that we could not even see sometimes and I sort of it for some reason it had a profound effect on me and the next day more or less I kind of thought I was thinking you know I've got these skills a lot of my contemporaries for example in the in the physics department where I was doing my PhD had gone into the nuclear industry they were people you know those skills were creating these technologies and so I kind of thought to myself you know if the skills are being dedicated to the creation of these technologies which are threatening not just our existence but the planet itself then maybe they can also be used in a different direction and I walked through the door of the Greenpeace office in London and said look you know I don't know if I'm any good to you but I got a PhD in physics and a degree in mathematics I want to do something can you find me a job and they found me you know really a volunteer's job just working on the economics of renewable energy technologies you know if we're not going to have nuclear and we're not going to have fossils what are we going to have where is our energy it's got to be in these new technologies we need a little bit of insight into that and so I became an economist initially just the kind of microeconomics of financial appraisal of renewables and so on and then eventually as I began to see how the system worked and how embedded we were in this ideology of growth eventually that sort of critique of growth and there Herman actually was one of the you know the first most influential figures it was actually a a graph a figure that he had in a book called for the common good which he wrote with John Cobb and at the end of that book they have an annex where they have this index of sustainable economic well-being and I remember again very distinctly that day I was in London in a crowded room above a bookshop which is where those kinds of meetings happened at that point and Greg Katz who was working with Bill keeping at that time on the relative economics of nuclear power and and and other technologies he just happened to put up this picture this one graph of the GDP that growth path growing and growing against the index of sustainable economic welfare which grew for a while and then flattened off completely as welfare departed from the growth in GDP and that was the moment that you know that that led me to this conundrum around the organization of our economy entirely around the pursuit of growth and the damage that that was doing environmentally and socially. Yeah and you and as you your entire first book for us for your book prosperity without growth really I don't think you I mean it was probably a failure for the politicians or the those who are making policies or are needed to to hear it because they didn't want to hear it but it's really it's a better model it's a better way of looking and it is so much more like how the world really works and has always worked. And so I really think that it's the best that we you know that's probably about the all I want to say about the prosperity without growth because I really think that you set the tone there enough and that I mean I think it's interesting it's interesting what you say there about you know that that's kind of the way that's a pragmatic of way the way the world works and that's been the nature of the conversations I have had that have been inspired by prosperity without growth was from you know ordinary people in different sectors of the economy who recognizing actually that there's a different way of thinking there and it's a pragmatic entirely definable meaningful pragmatic approach to change and and and that's that's kind of what I want it for the book. Yeah and and I but I can also see the extreme pushback that that you would get from those on the others and what they they want that money they want that a different type of growth because that's all they're used to are they think that's how the world will will run there's a point in time where even the big corporations they realize the stranded assets and there's a wall they hit and it's it's just done and over and not a lot of pre-preparation or they fought against the losing battle the one that's a much bigger than them and post growth really it discusses all the post growth but it does it in a little bit much different way than prosperity without growth and it blew me away story after story so not only do you talk about you know this how it began but you talk about Robert Kennedy Jr. yeah and do you talk about these stories that go throughout the book and there's two that I want to touch upon so first of all for all my listeners I'm not going to give you the whole book I'm not going to we're not going to go through chapter by chapter I'm going to tease it enough if you don't go out and get it you're missing something because this is the eye opener and connector of the dots of of truly how our world works and how we can function function post growth but I want to first well I won't start with my favorite I'm going to start with Hannah aren't this is her book the human condition which really didn't get finished she actually died of a massive heart attack on a celebration on her birthday and that was a human condition did did get finished it was her later book about the life of the mind that was on the life of the mind okay yeah but but it was at the celebration or birthday where she had a massive heart attack and there was the start of the next was papers were still in her typewriter but but she is an amazing person that really has a lot of lessons a lot of stories that first of all she's an American born in Germany but American Jewish lady who has written a couple books have done fabulous writings as well but she to surmise it and I don't want to do it in justice she just said hierarchy is bullshit the people at the bottom of these hierarchies aren't the evil ones making the bad decisions it's the ones at the top making the most money making these decisions where they're just doing their job and I know that's a very simple explanation I'd like you to kind of tell us why she's so vital and why she shows us that there's these other models available for post growth and economics and many other things that we really should take a lesson from that we've been repeating for centuries decades millennia in our world that right now I'm not seeing a lot of hope for changes but I want to touch upon her yeah yeah I mean she was a you know she was a fantastic inspirational thinker really and and and her personal story as you say she started she was a born Jewish in Germany during the the period of Nazism and escaped with her life through over the mountains into Czechoslovakia at a certain point in time after being arrested and and then smooth talking her way out by by being nice to a Gestapo officer which is a you know just fantastic story you know that I can't be harmed how can I possibly be of any harm you know I know you're a friendly guy let's let's just overlook this fact that I was spreading some what you thought of was seditious information it wasn't really at all somebody asked me to put some leaflets out and I did it and she talked her way out of that and then realized you know that it was a difficult it wasn't obviously impossible place for escape through the mountains as I say into Czechoslovakia and from there ended up in New York where she lived until until her kind of tragic death in her late 60s and this extraordinary kind of clarity of thought and she she she a lot a lot of it was in some sense and this is why her last book around the life of the mind was was so important in a way was the sense in which thinking is really important you know she got this from her her teacher who was also her first lover a philosopher called Martin Heidegger and and you know his his his ideas around thought have been connected actually sometimes to eastern transcendental ways of thinking about ourselves and world the idea that there is a thought world that it's something that is you know doesn't pass away with us but actually is a kind of plane of ideas in which we can exist and coexist and interact with other people and and that even if you don't take that slightly transcendental perspective on what thinking and what thought is about actually the process of thinking continually where are we who are we what are we doing what are we doing with our lives what are we doing with our society that's the process that that Hannah Arendt really wanted to stimulate through her work that critique of who we are and to do it in a passionate way what she added to Martin Heidegger's kind of exhortation to think is is passionate thinking and and that sense of being really engaged in thought worlds in order to understand ourselves and who we are and she kind of also felt that in capitalism that we had we had basically stopped doing that and we'd stopped doing it in in really in really quite destructive ways and the way that I particularly was drawn to her work on that is what she says about what she says about human activity about the different kinds of human activity and in particular what she says about labor and about work and she draws a distinction between those two things she says labor is the stuff that we're doing when we're really you know grinding out living and and and a way of feeding ourselves and maintaining ourselves and it draws obviously from that idea of maternal labor where we're giving birth to the next generation and that and that sense of a very visceral experience which is very material and physical and involves hard hard labor and hard work and and and sometimes and this was an extraordinary thing really she said that's the only place we're happy because we're not thinking too much but we're engaged in that task and we're really dedicating ourselves to that task and then she distinguishes that from from the idea of what what she calls work and she does it in the following way she sort of says you know once we stopped that once once we have enough time on our hands and we rest and we look up around us and we're not engrossed in that all consuming activity of feeding ourselves and looking after our kids and looking after our grandparents that labor of love that that constitutes physical basis for us then we we find something really really shocking which is we we begin to see our own mortality you know we've almost got too much time on our hands at that point and we begin to see actually the way a finite beings living in a finite world and that we're going to die and the people we love are going to die and we're terrified of that so what we what we what we throw ourselves into at that stage is this this work of trying to provide society with continuity with something durable with something that will last for over time that will give us a defense against the insecurity that's generated by thinking of ourselves as mortal and she put both these things together it's a fascinating distinction to me you know one we're just embedded in this visceral process of survival and the other we're engaged in the very human activity of confronting our own mortality and wanting to build durability from that and what she says is basically capitalism has denigrated both of these things it's put that labor of care at the bottom of society it's rewarded it poorly it's rewarded it's it's forgotten to give it security it's forgotten the value of it and that was you know to me one of the things that came through very very clearly through the pandemic that the people who saved our lives in the pandemic for decades had been sort of left behind the the most precarious incomes and livelihoods the the most pressure on them and and this sense of continually having to chase productivity targets when the essence of labor is actually care and time and being able to slow down into it and capitalism has done that it's kind of you know it's flipped that idea of labor and as as care and the foundation of life and said that doesn't matter it's not creating wealth it's not creating greater production it does not contributing to society because it's not money-based and and it's an absolutely awful abomination of of the role of care and then she said well actually you know it's even worse than that because capitalism has also denigrated the world of work how can it have done that well it's because essentially that what we're trying to build through work is durability the ability to last through time to give us a sense of continuity to build a world that we can trust and that will support us and our children into the future and capitalism cannot abide durability it's all about obsolescence because if things last too long then there's no need to be building more of them so we build stuff that falls apart that we have to throw away we're encouraged to even when it's not at the end of its life we build innovation after innovation into things in order to escape from durability and so you know in a sense capitalism is kind of undermining its own rationale it's undermining the rationale that we have as human beings because it's throwing away the labor of care and it's undermining the durability that might protect us from our fear of death and that's what we're trying to do in work it's just a fantastic analysis of of the ways in which our our kind of culture of consumerism and the capitalism that drives it has undermined that you know that one fundamental thing that I was talking about right at the beginning the the ability of of us as human beings to be agents in society to work and to participate in the creation of a social world capitalism has undone all that and she was absolutely you know crystal clear in a way she thought about that and a very very you know very good communicator she became a kind of icon for in particular for you know the the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the and the kind of rebellion on the campuses that Robert Kennedy was talking about she became someone that the students she became one of the only professors that the students would actually attend classes for at certain points in time when there was that sense of student rebellion going on because of this sort of humanity that shines through her work and the lens that she then you know directs at capitalism in order to not just point out its faults but to say this is what you're missing this is what work could be this is what society could be and I mean that's that was a long long response to your question but it's fought on and it's you say it obviously much more eloquently than I do and and that there's much more in the book that really brings it together as well that is so vital I don't want to simplify it too much but it's really it's that capitalism and the way we work in many respects I'm sure your work is different and I know my work is different but I think a large majority of humanity is dissatisfied at work and especially in the pandemic and how many people don't want to go back to the jobs they have before because they're actually enjoying in some ways having a little bit more control and freedom to work from home to see how it can be done differently not to be micromanaged or to be turned into somebody who punches a clock and a robot and just a number you know that you can have passion and have even if you work for a large corporation or an organization you can still treat it like it's your own baby like you're part of an intrapreneur of a bigger organization and still value and enjoy that work whereas a lot of a lot of organizations have been really structured in a way built-in obsolescence not a lot of value we want you to just be a robot don't think you know type of a deal and and I really like that and I'm also study a lot around business and and how to work and one of one of my good friends here in Humberg or actually in Germany he's from Humberg is Tim Leiberecht he wrote the book business romantic and Frederick Lalu reinventing organizations and and so I like how you know how do we get that romance back into business that passion back into our work and so that there are things that people in humanity do at work that they would never do at their home or they never do if they were the boss they would like say no that's insane but for a paycheck or because they feel they're boxed into the situation abhorrent things and another thing that you don't talk about in the book but Hannah kind of really says you know there's things that the Nazis did that that were abhorrent but it wasn't those always those individual players that did it because they were evil people they did it because it was their job and that was they were the low man on the totem pole and they were carrying out orders and a lot of organizations I hate to put it so brutal or the same ways they work for that company that's the rules that's the job they're got to follow the orders but they wouldn't do it if they were at home or somewhere else and so that really tells us you know we're functioning on some broken systems but you give that hope that there is other models there is a different way to look at it and to really not just theory and not just be a rebel but there is a better way a better operating system out there and because we we can actually physically I know talk for hours and hours I'm going to have to focus a little bit more on a couple others the points that I want to make sure I was just going to say on that work thing you know one of the things that's been fascinating to me is that point that you were making about you know the choices that we have and the ways to do things differently and this is something that has really been you know very moving in some sense since Prosperity Without Grace was published and I've been talking particularly with younger students about about the ideas in it that many of those students because that's now 10 12 years ago that book was published many of those students are now you know setting up enterprise in a different way working in a different way using those models thinking for themselves I'm not saying you know they did it all because of me they didn't they did it because actually that vision makes sense to people and once you've got that vision then you can go out into the world and you can do things differently and I've got you know a network now of former students and people that I've younger people that I've worked with who I you know I really regard as the pioneers of a different way of doing things and and the extraordinary creativity that they bring to that is a is a testament to that's that exactly that idea that those choices to do things differently exist and they can be acted on I mean there's there are so many books and wise people in our world who who said that thing same things and maybe in a different way under different guys what one of my favorites I really was a big Joseph Campbell fan still I am and he always you know said follow your bliss he says don't join the wasteland of just doing you know what you think you should enjoy what you do what you work it's the biggest part of your life we spend for the majority of us spend more than 40 hours away from our loved ones working for a living and and that's more time with people that you don't love that you're not married to that that aren't your children uh why why can't you enjoy that time as well you know what why can't we have bliss and and and and do something that has meaning and joy and gives back to the world and a lot of this flip of capitalism and and what we're seeing emerging in the past five years or more is planetary services and leaving the planet better than you found it how can you be in service to the planet and offer these planetary services cleaning up the waters or planting trees or doing businesses that are environmentally social uh socially responsible um so there are some better models out there and you do touch upon it but we're not going to give any more away because I want people to read the book there is a thread throughout the book when I read it and I've read it three times because I just so I don't know it was unbelievable that it even came up I was like how can this be I mean because I I've been talking about Lynn Margolis I kid you not probably for 11 years or more and people look at me like I'm crazy I kid you not they look at me like crazy who's Lynn Margolis what and and she was Carl Sagan's first wife and why are you telling me about a symbiotic earth and symbiogenesis and Mark you're you're going you're going out on a limb you're just talking something I don't understand and but but I do understand and others are beginning to understand and there is this kind of and I'm not at all a tree hugger or esoteric it's I'm very much grounded in science and math and facts and realities and models that really work the way the world truly works and so when you first bring her up in the book just I mean that that was it you how I was sold you know but I've got two of her books here by the way and I just want to kind of tease and open but then I want to have you tell us so one symbiotic planet and she also came up she did a movie called symbiotic earth and the other one is the micro cosmos so those of you who have heard me speak about Lynn Margolis before hopefully you figure that out since those who have not I want to just kind of before Tim tells us a little bit more and goes into the importance of I want to prelude it she's the first wife of Carl Sagan they married very young both of them very successful and achievers in their own right Carl Sagan was a wonderful astronomer and lover of the earth as well as outer space and did did many great things for our world and she had to show the cosmos and watched it all the time my dad watched it it was just a wonderful time and and read the books Lynn Margolis was his first wife and when they divorced and they when they met they she was studying Hans Reese's work and and doing wonderful scientific research about bacteria and microorganisms and zoo is a zoology zoonotic not in the zoonotics but zoology and biology and different types of things and and she really did a couple things one through the bacteria and microorganisms she came up and said that our world works in the symbiosis symbolic symbiogenesis as well that these organisms play off of each other and kind of work in cooperation and collaboration and she turned the entire scientific community almost on its head she started a scientific revolution it's basically this rebel who challenged the male dominated scientific community and proposed a totally new approach to understanding life and the way we understood evolution the way things worked and she got the Leonardo da Vinci society inducted her into like their hall of fame and recognized her with one of the world's greatest living thinkers of times and she was also good friends with James Lovelock who wrote the Gaia book who was you know the Lord of the Flies kind author said hey you should call it Gaia and and those two were pretty good friends but she was just revolutionary because she said there is no such thing as neoliberalism or neo Darwinism it's not natural selection survival of the fittest only the strong survive severe competition she said our world works different in a symbiosis it's cooperation and collaboration and all organisms of which human beings are an organism and have bacteria and microbes in us but that we work in harmony with our biome with our planet with other organisms and that's how we can go far and so I I've been talking about her many times because we're so disconnected from our earth and our planet so we disconnect ourselves from food we disconnect ourselves from bacteria and microbes that live in our body and we have this disconnect and I'm trying to show everyone the connection not only did Carl Sagan lends first husband or lends the first wife of Carl Sagan he said we're all star stuff the basic elements of life are star stuff but those basic elements are the basic elements of our earth and the very first and longest living ancestor we have is bacteria microorganisms on our surface which live in us and we crawled out of that primordial soup so to say we are connected to this earth instead of having antibacterial and thinking that's something else we're connected with the symbiotic earth and that I think there's a lot of knowledge to have that knowledge and that wisdom or to know to not be ignorant around that so we can move forward with better operating systems that work in harmony with ecological economics and with our planet that are better models that don't have a limit to growth they're regenerative they continue to regenerate indefinitely and I probably don't say it as dramatic or nicely as you do but I've been trying to talk about it and connect the dots for people for years but you go on and speak about her many times throughout the book and reference I just love to hear a little bit more how did that come about and what did you discover on this fabulous journey actually I mean it came about I was exposed to Lynn's work I guess quite early on in my career when I was thinking about these mechanisms and thinking in particular about the role of competition as opposed to the role of cooperation and so you know the basic evolutionary model is that the whole world is full of competition because it's scarce resources and you have to struggle for existence put those things together then the only thing that allows evolution to happen is competition and interestingly you know then that metaphor of competition that comes through biology is adopted by capitalism to give a rationale to the competitive framework that we have for the economy and I was interested in a couple of things about that really one was one was you know trivially in a way but quite important is that when you look at the history and the social history of the theory of evolution you find that the people that influenced Darwin were actually economists and economists with a competitive view of the world so that although now capitalism tries to justify its its focus on competition by appealing to a theory of nature that theory of nature didn't appear out of nowhere it was adopted at a point in time at which early capitalism was beginning to create this struggle for existence that then became the basis of the theory of the evolution and its defense was on the basis of people who thought the competition mattered and guess what they were all old white men more or less I mean Darwin was a bit younger when it came to it but it but it was a very male dominated idea it came from a particular set of ideas and so and then and then so I'd come across Lynn's work and then actually a colleague reminded me after she read prosperity without growth that I might have included it in prosperity without growth and I hadn't done and so I went back to her and her life story and it's just fantastic you know as you say there was Carl Sagan kind of with his gaze turned to the universe looking for life out there and then was there was his wife kind of looking looking in the primordial swamp and there's some wonderful videos of her walking on beaches scooping up you know handfuls of bacterial matter talking about how long they've been in the world but also talking you know talking about talking about the the big step that got us from bacteria to primates and and and indeed to multicellular organisms and it was not about competition it was about collaboration so the very foundations of the theory of evolution had neglected this massive mechanism which had allowed evolution to happen and and it was such an extraordinary idea I mean now it's become accepted but back in the day as you say you know she was a young woman she was 26 or something at the time that first paper was published it was rejected by 15 journals and when she wrote a book about symbiosis it was rejected by the same book publisher who had commissioned it from her they refused to publish it it was published later and a decade later it was an accepted part of our view of evolution but she a young woman operating the male dominated science and and seeing actually that that even our economics even our understanding of science everything is seen through these metaphysical metaphorical lenses and how we think about the world and sometimes we just get it absolutely profoundly wrong because we miss out a whole element of what was so critical to our own evolution and it's very very powerful I mean her story is wonderful and the the energy that she has and unfortunately you know she's kind of young enough in history that you can go back and you can look at some video footage of of her talking and giving lectures and this wonderful kind of humanity that shines through her science but also a sense of you know steely nerve because she had to have that in order to fight these scientific fights and and prove to people actually that we had been looking wrong not just at the economy but actually at the underlying science that's now being used to generate the economy we're not just about competition we're equally about cooperation and collaboration it was a it's a fantastic way of of rethinking who we are and also it opens up all these new possibilities for us you know if we buy the capitalist myth that everything is a struggle for existence in which only the fittest survive then we lock our vision of humanity down into this narrow cage and and what Lynn Margulis's work and others do is it just you know it just blows the bars of that cage apart and and and we are free from a dogmatic science a dogmatic economy dogmatic economics and into a world where actually we can begin to construct something that that could work for us I just also because of what what you described about Hannah aren't I think the two blend together they're both this symbiotic different way of of of doing structures the way of organizing the way things really how our world truly works and and time and time what we can fight it organizations can fight it for so long but it always it's an unwinnable battle because we're fighting our planetary systems we're fighting you know a symbiogenesis we're fighting the life the way it really has always functioned before we were here you know and long after we're gone and it's proven to be a very good model and that's why I mean I think we've touched enough on on the books and teased it or not but I mean that's a good setup on the direction where we're going I want to dive back in unless I you didn't get to say something that I know you wrote something down unless you didn't get to say something I'd love for you to say it now because I really want to get into ecological economics as you are some of the models that have been presented and they maybe even discuss why we're not using other models or are are into some other topics do you have any more to say about post post growth or what we've talked about before we move on so much that I could say but we've covered a lot of ground so let's yeah I'm very happy to do that I'm keen to to talk about that Mark so yeah far away so so the new emergent has has been whether it's an economic model or not as planetary boundaries from Stockholm resilience center plus some institute of climate change uh Johan Dr Johan rocks from and his planetary boundaries and many other scientists on there saying you know we've got these nine planetary boundaries we're already kind of pushing into the red zone on five of those he just came out with a book called breaking boundaries and a Netflix documentary that could be seen as one economic model that we need to operate in the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries another one that kind of also goes hand in hand with that is the doughnut economics from Kate Row worth and that's another model that we've heard about so different types of economic models that also are thinking doughnut economics and how do we work within the safe systems of our planet and environment then there's uh Mattis Wacker Noggle the ecological footprint um Dr. Wacker Noggle about 35 years ago I believe it was started the earth overshoot day and the the kind of using data that we get about our global hectare footprint or ecological footprint to calculate you know if we've done a resource overshoot which also really ties back to not only Herman Daly was one of his original people he worked on that as well as his other partner was Reese another professor Bill Reese yeah Bill Reese exactly that they just wanted I wanted to give a shout out to Bill actually because Bill was Mattis's PhD supervisor and and the idea of the ecological footprint was as much really bills as it was Mattis's so and he's a lovely guy you know really a lot of wisdom in a in an old soul and um and fantastic sort of influence on that younger as it was then younger generation of of uh of people like Mattis yeah and so and he's he's still going strong he was on the podcast as well and I tried try to get into some deeper discussions about things he's very politically correct and uh his organization's going so so strong I love it did you know that earth overshoot day is July 29th this year last year was August 22nd day after Sir Ken Robbins passed away so that's how I remember it so August 22nd was last year this year they've moved it up it's July 29th which is what it was I think in 2017 so we're not really gaining a lot of traction we're actually getting worse sustainable development goals report came out normally comes out in September it came out July 14th because we're so off track in doing that and the last economic model that uh well there's two more circular economy Ellen MacArthur Foundation which is you know cradle to cradle kind of thinking and uh this planet uh closed loop system the organic cycles and technical cycles circular economy thinking on the way we produce our things and then there's been a little bit of tickling about the the new Green Deal the EU the Green Deal and and um I really want to know are they all separate economic models that everybody's kind of these camps are pushing for okay we were going to do circular economy okay we're going to do donut economics do they all work together can they all be blended into one model of ecological economics is there another model out there that's just called ecological economics and and that's the model that moves forward and how in the hell sorry Tim are just the lay people supposed to understand all these models what's right and wrong and are all those models fighting capitalism are they fighting extractive economies are we meant to be confused or what's the plan here I think you might have given me an idea for another bookmark is to kind of make some of that clear but I do think you know you're right in a sense you know it is quite confusing territory um I mean there's also something behind it all that's really interesting which is your your desire and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it at all but your kind of desire and I hear this language a lot the desire for a different kind of model you know a model that's different from capitalism and then and and then so the word model itself becomes you know almost associated with our dissatisfactions of where we're going and our desire to be somewhere else and this sense of wanting a signpost you know tell me which way to go tell me which model to follow tell me what what wisdom that will lead me out of this impasse and and I think you know again that's very very understandable but models themselves you know don't don't really necessarily do that models away as ways of thinking about our world of organizing it and of allowing us to think through a problem in a particular way so take the circular economy for example you know it was very easy to see particularly when circular economy ideas were first talked about and that was kind of back in the um actually when I was beginning to work in my professional life in the mid 1980s and again somebody you know wasn't Helen MacArthur but somebody else's idea Walter Starr held to talk about the circular economy and that idea actually he won an essay competition as a student in when he was quite young talking about that um circular economy idea and and it's a very it's a very obvious thing it's like you know we dig stuff up out of the ground we produce as much stuff as we can chuck it away at the end it's a very linear process and and and that that means that it has a big impact on the planet in terms of the resources we need it means it's a huge impact on the planet in terms of the waste we're throwing away and it doesn't even help us much in the middle can we think about you know bending that curve as it were and creating it circular so that that's kind of how it works in nature you know the waste of one organism is the food of another organism the beginning of one chain is the end of another and this idea of creating you know recycling and reusing that is that's the that's what the circular economy is about it's it doesn't solve all our problems for us but what it does is it gives us you know it's almost like that that that question of you know what's the metaphor behind economics is it competition or is it collaboration what's the metaphor behind our production system is it linear throwing stuff away or is it circular is it reusing so it gives us a kind of lens through which to look at our problems and similar I think for you know planetary boundaries and and then the sort of doughnut extension of the planetary boundaries to include the social floor and define a safe operating space and they can be you know that you can make them useful tools for example Amsterdam is using the doughnut framework to organize its sense of the city and and looking at where it's transcending its planetary boundaries looking at where it's not meeting its social floor where it's not giving enough for people and and beginning to organize our society society around that and and that's the kind of thing that models can do but they can't solve all our problems and and they answer silver bullet you know they're not a kind of magic solution they're ways of thinking about our world that would allow us to see different possibilities and and it is you know I accept it is confusing I think the thing really to do is to kind of see what's the you know what's the learning what's the metaphorical lens we're being asked to look at how can we apply that as we think through where ecological economics is going and also you know how can we how can we use it to critique the way in which the existing system works where to find the points of influence to find the places where we need to change and to identify the policies that could do that but I don't think you know I know it's sort of it's um it's it's sort of you know encourage it's enticing in a way to think that there's a single model that will become the ecological model of the future and and and I'm absolutely convinced that there is a you know there's a different perspective we will not be looking at the world through the perspective of capitalism forever and we don't necessarily know exactly what that is at the moment but all of these models and all of these ways of thinking can can help us on the path towards that different place towards that better better place if you like that better economy there there's even mariana matzucato with mission economics and and then i'm i'm a student of professor jeffrey sax from columbia university and the united nation's sustainable development solutions network and i've also taken his macro micro economics course that he teaches through that as well and he's written a couple books on economics as well kind of to give us some information so you're am i understanding correct or am i oversimplifying where you're saying each of these models or types of economics whether a circular economy or if it's a donut economics are different lenses at looking at models or just different lenses of looking at economics the difference of looking at the world mark i think basically i mean they mostly looking at the world because that and one of them some of them are saying some very basic things about our economics which is the economists you know bad at taking the physical world into account and what some of these models are doing is saying look you know your economics looks completely linear this take it out make it throw it away as fast as you can this does not fit with our understanding of the natural world so so it's a way of sort of critiquing that both of the world itself and the way the world operates and also the economics that underlies it i was going to say something else i've forgotten exactly what it is but it's kind of a i think around the idea that at the same time that we're doing this we've somehow got to connect that thinking to to the economics that's governing our society at the moment so the institutions of that so even though i'm a critic critic of the GDP and even though we know that it's not measuring the right stuff the system of national accounts in which the GDP is embedded is actually a way of organizing our understanding of the economy telling us what's being produced telling us what's being consumed telling us what government's doing telling us how much investment we need telling us how much labor there is in the economy and this this sense of the model this you know that in some senses is is such a basic description of our traded economies that we need to be able to connect these visions like circular economy like doughnut economy like the ecological footprint we need to be able to connect that to the the working if you like the working model of our economies so that we can figure out how that working model also has to change how we have to change investment however we have to change work have to change the incentives in enterprise and you know and also to pick up the places where we've gone missing just to add another model to the confusion the one that actually i talk about in prosperity without grace i call the Cinderella economy and and i call it the Cinderella economy because it's you know those sectors of our economy that we were talking about before the care sector the craft sector the creative sector the places which contribute hugely to our lives and the quality of our lives and yet are poorly regarded by this capitalistic model which is just chasing productivity and just chasing money and and and it's just another way of sort of saying actually you know the way that we've organized these institutions around this structure and the things we're measuring is leading us astray and we need to we need to identify what's gone missing our care for each other the strength of our relations the quality of our work the the impacts on the planet and and and these are the things that we need to be able to bring back into our frame of reference not necessarily with an eye to their being and all singing all dancing solution to all our problems but definitely in terms of critiquing the way that we organize society and thinking about how we could do it in a different way so this is where I really want to go out on a limb and kind of debate or discuss an idea a new lens of looking at ecological economics or the way our world works and just throw it out there to you but maybe you see if we can even get into a little discussion on it and and and it really ties to everything we've been talking about ties to Hannah aren't that ties a lot to Lynn Margolis that were you know kind of a symbiotic earth and we have to realize what are the just the natural systems of how our our world works which is chaos 30 is complexity science systems deep very complex systems and and it is really based off of it's kind of a play on this ecological footprint and so I'm going to set it up a little bit for you okay in the ecological footprint to be replicable you today you would need 1.6 global hectares that is replicable meaning you would have enough land air water space and food to to live a long healthy prosperous life prosperity really truly 80 90 100 years of age you'd have enough shelter and the basic needs with good stewardship to live a ripe old age and you'd have what you need is kind of like the basic needs covered mazl's basic needs covered through that 1.6 global hectares today because July 29th where the earth overshoot were per person using something like 2.98 global hectares per person which is a deficit a resource overshoot doesn't matter what the population is but we'll go with the population today we'll just we'll round it up to 8 billion people on this planet what if we were to give everyone on planet earth when they are bored and the minute they die they don't have it anymore they can inherit it to someone else their global hectare for that time period depending on population and death that is replicable and that's their basic rights and aliable basic rights to have as long as they're here on this planet and as long as they have good stewardship over it but it's guaranteed them a long life for everything that they need they don't need money and they don't need work they don't need to worry about that and it's also one that's regenerative now if we couple that with something that is autonomous and a trustless system like I mean they're saying distributed ledger technology blockchain is in some respects a trustless system but if we worked on more autonomous natural systems like Simba Genesis and the way our world works like Lynn Margolis talked about and we had that process of that stewardship over that 1.6 hectares that was continually regenerating itself depending on when we grow when we're babies we probably won't use 1.6 so then we give the family unit a little bit more of our global hectare because we're in that family unit and as we're elderly we give the rest of our family unit a little bit more of our hectare because we don't use that space but let's say as a family we're living together with four people in a house less than 1.6 global hectares passive home renewable energy we're not wasting finite resources we've actually increasing our global footprint our global hectare for our whole family unit which in turn increases the global hectare for every human being on earth as a business owner you say I'm going to start a production facility producing drinks I want to produce beer it's on one hectare of land and for that one hectare of land I only need one person to to run an owner or it's on 50 hectares I need to get 50 people who are willing to say we believe in this business we're going to give you our 50 hectares and it's going to be one that works within planetary boundaries but guess what we're going to use renewable energy ambient water harvesting all the new technologies but we're going to do without greenhouse gas emissions of finite resources so now we've just increased global hectare of our company of our people of our families and the way we live more in harmony with with our world I know it's crazy I know it sounds out there but it's a new lens and the more we think innovative the more we think about sustainable resilient desirable futures and how we can do things more in tune with our planetary boundaries or circular economy or even doughnut economics we increase that global hectare and here I'm going to take a one step further and then I'm going to shut up and I want to get your input we live I live in Humbert Germany so I now in the city I live in I'm going to give my global hectare to Humbert city and say I trust you to be a steward for me over my global hectare but I need enough good energy water transportation infrastructure which is sustainable development which is that what that 1.6 global hectare is and they says oh no problem you can entrust us with that because we're going to have a good infrastructure we're going to use renewable energies we're going to provide plenty of water and influx for the city so actually you can live comfortably and not worry that's the basic need and I've given it to the city now once that city doesn't obey with that where my landlord doesn't obey with that I live in a junky place that's not living within these planetary boundaries I pack up my global hectare and move to a place that is Eden or that is bentorn or that is in the ecological boundaries and until we all shift to kind of this this different model and and it's one where it's an inalienable human right the basic needs of everyone everybody gets this equal playing field so then how can we be capitalist and greedy and steal and do all this other extractive stuff well I'm sure there'll be people people that will game the system but we've just raised the bar higher and so they've got to do it in a different way that doesn't affect the basic needs as needs of humanity of every single human being on earth so anyway that's crazy that's as short as I could probably possibly get it but I would love your input and feedback and see if we can maybe talk about it for a few minutes or see what your thoughts are maybe if I'm even off in left field I think it's terrific I mean you know it's a principle of equity that everybody's that's right and it's equally shared as a principle of sustainability in a sense that you've got the limits and you know what those limits are and you know what you have to work within is a principle actually of a kind of market because you can trade these things and you can trade that regenerative capacity and and and actually that safeguarding principle around the city and the exchange that happens between the sort of public section the private sector it's also very interesting what it reminds me of I mean the you know I don't want to say it's been done before it hasn't been done before in quite in quite the way that you're spelling it out to me but it does have a sort of pedigree in the sense of ecological space which was a concept that Friends of the Earth developed actually back in the kind of 1990s I think it was early 1990s and when I was working with them at that time they were kind of thinking through exactly those sorts of ideas about how you know what's that concept of ecological space might mean if it was equitable and how much could be afforded and I can't remember it off the top of my head but there is a book that Friends of the Earth UK put out and Duncan McLaren was one of the authors of it where he basically set out a concept not a million miles from what you're suggesting didn't have all the you know niceties of allocation through a blockchain ledger and the tradability that you might have which I think is terrific you know really creative way to approach that idea of a of a right to ecological space and a mechanism through which it's allocated and traded I just think there's quite a lot of mileage there Mark I think next you should give you the short version because there's I mean innovative ways that we can go vertical with our global hectare that we could do seasteading or we could do you know cloud hectares or something to increase that hectare so that maybe you know the now arable a replicable land that we have that would qualify as a global hectare is continually decreasing I think it's something like 26 or more hectares per minute that we're losing globally soil contamination drought fires etc deforestation and it's only getting worse but there's got to be a way to restore and regenerate and get into one that increases through better ways of capturing carbon or storing carbon and other models that are more sustainable development when I I mean the reason I loved your sustainable development commission and reports and what you've done with cuss or still are doing with cuss is to me sustainable development I come from a background years ago 12 more than 20 years ago and development just regular residential commercial land development and things to me sustainable development is like an infrastructure it's a sustainable development over multiple generations that is passive and renewable and restorative that's how I see it and it's it's it's not an add-on to business as usual it's an entirely new operating system as an entirely new economy and that's how I see it yeah I it reminds me also of of something that was in the first edition of prosperity of that growth I don't know why I took it out because people that I've spoken to about it really liked it of this sense in which you know you could have this model of regeneration and the way in which both enterprise and ecosystem works together in a symbiotic way to kind of create a regenerative economy and and again you know it's a lens through which to look at things but I think there's there's some there's some lovely ideas there and I think we're going to have to definitely have a call again and catch up on some other terms I tell you what we're going to do mark next time you're going to write this book about ecological space and the and the you know the global act as the shared version of it and and I'm going to interview you oh I would love that I would absolutely love that there's another great book this a Parkinson's law have you ever heard of that I haven't seen that yeah that's a fabulous book it basically talks about the original the just just how hierarchies don't work in things but I have I have four last questions for you and then then I'll let you off the hook um this is the biggest and hardest question I have for you but it really kind of is a synopsis and ties together hopefully everything we've talked about it's the burning question WTF and it's not the swear word maybe you have said it during these crazy 15 18 months of craziness but it's what's the futures and even even more so to be more specific I want to know for you and and maybe another twist on it would be what does a world that works for everyone look like for you or what's the future and you can even make that plural yeah I mean I I uh well yeah I mean this is this is kind of I I'm not sure whether asking that as a personal question is the sort of vision question I think one of the things that I both yeah both okay I mean it's certainly in post-grace you know I see a world in which I see it I see one of my criticisms of capitalism is that we kind of stopped thinking about human progress we stopped thinking about social progress and it became over burdened with materialism and with the idea of material progress and I don't think material progress is the same thing as human progress and I think sometimes you know materialism and material comforts impede social progress impede human progress so I think for me you know this vision of of the future is is a place which kind of richer in opportunity and and I talk in the book I talk about this concept of psychological flow which is again goes back to that idea of being engaged in the task to the point where you almost lose yourself in the task and we associate it with sportsmen with dancers with with you know acrobats with but we also associate it with social activity when relationships we associate it with meditation and contemplative activities we associate it with craft and the ability to you know to really work on something in detail and and and we also know that that goes missing when our lives are too materialistic so I see this future actually in a very specific sense as being you know a richer better more fulfilling place and and and and that sometimes you know the gateway to that place is a recognition of these material limits and Wendell Berry said it once and in in a beautiful way he sort of said you know human and earthly limits properly understood should not be seen as confinements but as an invitation to fullness of relationship and meaning and I and I think that's that's exactly what I see that vision for the future is this world in which we can again have a hope for the future not least because progress isn't stalled and looking at ecological disaster and overburdened with materialism and standing in the way of these deeper satisfactions which the human spirit is capable of and it's a vision driven by that idea that there is something that we can meaningfully call the human spirit and there is something that we can meaningfully call social progress that that learns through the human spirit how to live better I absolutely love that and you got the answer right by the way I because the crazy thing is as I ask everyone that and the answer is different for everyone and and I really I wonder if there there's a whole another book in that in and of itself do do we know what the plan is do we know what the road is or do we need to be aligned to eventually get there and and I I like in the book and you just surmised it so nicely with with your your answer is really it's more freeing the less materials we have the better our life goes the better the prosperity goes in many respects and it doesn't mean living on the street or being a pauper or whatever term you want to use for that it's it's just a different different way of looking at the world the last three questions are really for my guests who are thinkers of people that want to get on the right side of history innovators young startups a lot of activists a lot of environmentalists a lot of people from the UN and the world economic form or who look to those organizations for help for the future to get us to a different more sustainable resilient desirable futures one post growth definitely if there was one message you could depart my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life what would it be your message breathe I always come down I mean I think you know it's a trivial one in some ways because it is so basic the idea of breath but it's also quite a deep one and again it's something that I talk about in the book it's one of the things that's at the heart of some of the teachings of teaching that on the Buddhist monk that I talk about in the book and and and it's a very pragmatic thing you know we're apt to be kind of rabbits in the headlights surrounded by stories of despair and desolation unclear which model we should be using to do what in the world unclear of our next step and to me it's always been the case that actually that that step of just looking stepping back and and taking that moment that pause through which to breathe and to understand that ultimately our existence and and our perceptions are actually fundamentally physiological and and fundamentally linked to the way that we breathe first of all but also obviously the way that we nourish ourselves and the way that we engage in the world as well and and the first of those to me is always and you know it's something that I've seen taken up and talk about over and again is it's just that simple step of being aware of the breath what should young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make real impact or what do you tell your students I tell them I tell them that there is no single answer to that question that it depends it really depends on you know a number of things their skills their passion and and this might seem a bit strange but what the world asks them to do you know and when those three things align then you know that that's the point of which you become that kind of creative individual engaged in the world in and and engaged in action and engaged in action for change and and paying attention to those two things I think is is the is the answer to that question not pointing anybody in any particular direction but understanding your skill your passion and and what the world is asking from you the last question is what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start oh all of this that we've been talking about I mean you know I do have a you know I'm kind of I'm not at right at the end of my career but I'm definitely later in it than I am earlier in it and and and so I have you know and it's a very it's that kind of goes together with that sort of fear of mortality that we were talking about I know that it's going to stop and it's not going to be that many summers before it stops and and so this sense I think of you know we we can't we can't go back we don't we never can go back and we can never wish for ourselves that we knew everything that we do now at some form of point in time but I think you know there are bits of that wisdom that I think you can learn very very early on and again I would probably reach for Tishnath Hanan this because you know he has a very he has a very profound way of saying wherever you are your life really is is a kind of a journey and you can't you constantly think the journey is about getting you home somewhere but actually home is the journey and and it's it sort of turns that idea on its head in such a fundamental way that wherever you are in your life you can begin to sort of ground yourself and make sense of it and feel that you'll pass through life is a is a thoroughly unique one and you don't get the right to change it afterwards you don't get the right to predict it in the future but you do have both the right and the responsibility to kind of be aware of that place of that journey and I think that's a you know it's a very profound sort of learning that I think and we don't really teach that to our kids we don't you know I didn't have that 35 years ago when I was kind of starting out and and it's something that I would wish for everybody really that sense of of a place of a journey of a person and and of a of an interaction in in our world that is thoroughly unique and forever creative I'm so thankful that the world has given us you and that you exist and your your students are very fortunate to have such a wonderful teacher and professor to give them guidance prosperity without growth please go get it read it from end to end post growth please go get get it and read it my listeners it's it they're both fabulous reads and I hope that this has been good for everyone to listen to I thank you very much for letting us inside of your ideas Tim it's been a journey and a huge learning lesson I really thank you so much for your time thank you mark it's been a it's been a pleasure being here and don't forget to write that book I won't I will I'm already working on a couple others thank you bye thanks bye