Audio Transcript: In conversation with Professor Tim Jackson - Part 3

In conversation with Professor Tim Jackson - Part 3

Welcome to the third podcast in a series of conversations with Professor Tim Jackson exploring the topic of revisiting consumption for a climate friendly future. In this podcast, we're going to focus on the solutions needed to embed transformative changes in consumption. It’s great to welcome you back to Tim to our third and final podcast conversation, in the connect with climate change series. Evidence really highlights the damaging nature of current levels of consumption and people, and planet and consumption are embedded throughout our everyday lives, the level of the individual home, community and wider society, nationally and globally. And Tim, having presented a vision for a sustainable society and considered you know who and what needs to kind of shift, I'd like to turn our attention specifically towards possible solutions, and ask for your views on how we can best support and embed transformative change in terms of our current patterns of consumption.

I think this speaks a little bit to the process that I was describing before of understanding where the current structures lead us astray. And the sort of belief structures below that like this belief in the kind of atomized competitive view of the individual, and then thinking outwards from that, to understand where we need to make those kinds of changes. But I suppose, you know, one of the guiding principles in that process for me, is thinking about building the vision that we want to it isn't just about dismantling things. And it isn't just about having, you know, complicated policy conditions around the shifts in financial regulations, important those things are, much of what we're talking about, I think is giving ourselves the opportunity to free ourselves, if you like from that iron cage that we spoke about and to pursue a different vision for what prosperity is or what prosperity could be that to me is, is a task, you know about building opportunity. It's about creating the conditions under which everybody actually has the has access to, has not just rights, but has access to this concept of prosperity in terms of flourishing and fulfilment, and in which everybody has the potential to develop and increase their skills and to expand that skill base where everybody has this chance to match skill with challenge in ways which can be so conducive to real human fulfilment.

I kind of think in the same way that we should be placing health at the heart of prosperity, we should be thinking and developing psychological wellbeing, from the earliest age at which kids get exposed to education, until the very end of our lives, you know, a real lifelong investment in human potential. And that human potential, it seems to me is, is not untapped, because we can see extraordinary examples of people who reach those levels of fulfilment and achieve amazing things through them. But it isn't available to everyone. You know, if you're a kind of lower-class kid from a background that's in a city, and deprived with multiple depravations, and you go to the wrong school at the wrong time, you're never going to have access to those possibilities. The Tory government talks a lot about levelling up. And that's really, really important. But it's also important to think what that levelling up means, and to me, it means an early access to those opportunities to become fulfilled, and fulfilling human beings to give access to those experiences that emerge when our when our developing skills meet a real challenge in society and we learn how we can exercise agency how we can contribute to society and at the same time, learn where the boundaries of the self are, and, and move those boundaries constantly towards a sort of vision of a higher human potential that actually doesn't rely on power.

It doesn't rely on where you were born. It doesn't rely on the colour of your skin; it doesn't rely on what gender you are. It doesn't rely on relentless material consumption. It relies actually on the ingenuity that resides in all of us. And, and it's that the fact that it resides in all of us that it's almost unlimited. That's where I think that's why I think it's such a huge resource for this vision of a society that moves beyond consumerism, beyond material things, and into that unlimited space that is characterised by the human psyche, by social interaction by our communities by a sense of the spirit of our societies. And it's something that I think that Cornerstone that we can articulate all of the institutions that might protect that and build that in our kids in our in people of yours, yours and my age in the older generations, throughout our lives, that exploration of what it means to be human is a wonderful vision that doesn't rely, it doesn't trash the planet, it doesn't rely on being powerful in conventional material ways. It's available in principle to everyone, it could be the foundation for a life, a post pandemic life, but also a post a life after capitalism, that is that is richer than we ever imagined it to be. That's my vision likeness.

Thank you, Tim, you touched on so many excellent points there in terms of growth being uneven and, and how we take everyone along with us. And even on your previous work was talked about consumption in terms of the Odyssey, where we think about what would the change look like? What other frameworks are we actually offering? In the last chapter of the book, you include the story of Emily Dickinson and begin with a quote of hope from her work? And I wondered if that in that being, and following the theme of this podcast, you can maybe share two or three things for those listening, that they can maybe do to continue this conversation in our own lives and to revisit consumption for a climate friendly future.

Yeah, I mean, I think that point that Emily Dickinson makes about hope is a really interesting one, quite often I get kind of asked, you know, Are you hopeful? Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic about the future? And what Emily Dickinson says is, you know, hope is the thing with feathers is the poem that she talks, talks about that perch in the soul, and sings the tunes without the words and never stops at all. So, what the kind of insight she's giving us there, I think, is that that we should not worry too much about whether we're hopeful or optimistic or not. That hope resides in the human soul and is always there as a resource for us to kind of think about how we approach our lives and how we approach the world. But the question you asked, you know, the quest that's a very philosophical kind of part of the ending of the book, if you like, but there's the question you asked is more about, you know, the pathways that individuals can take the way that they can interact in the world?

My answer to that is, in a sense, the antidote to despair, which is a very easy place to go to when we're confronted with so many difficulties. The antidote to despair is not hope. It's certainly not blind optimism and naive faith in in miracles. The antidote to despair is action, it seems to me, and action is the place where flow happens that balancing of skill and challenge. And it's the place where we begin to see ourselves as connected to the world, as creating social agency and it can happen anywhere. It's very, very different for different people. For some people, action is, you know, getting out to protest the injustice is of the world, or the damage we're doing to climate, action for others can be building the social enterprise that brings young kids into an environment where they learn that skill, challenge, balance and become fuller human beings.

Action for others, is working in financial institutions to reform the damage that finance has played in relation to investing in the wrong things in climate, action for others is to become a political voice in a debate that is absolutely essential to our future. So, in other words, if the antidote to despair is not hope, but action, it's a place which has an open invitation to anyone to walk into and to develop in in ways that benefit us all.

Tim, what a perfect way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for your time. It's been great talking with you, and I very much enjoyed this conversation and the book. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure, Deirdre. Thank you for inviting me to the podcasts.

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