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‘We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.’
-António Guterres
Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?
What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?
We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.
As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven't yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that all of us would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we are speaking to one of the icons of the environmental movement and to one of the young people that he interviewed to co-create the book, Love, Anger and Betrayal, with a subtitle, Just Stop Oils Young Climate Campaigners, which pretty much does what it says on the tin. And so a little bit of preamble; I am going to quote for you, Antonio Guterres, the UN general secretary, who is not somebody you would think of as a wild, green radical. And he says: "Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals, but the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness". And we on the podcast know this. It is axiomatic of this podcast that the current system is not fit for purpose, that we're hurtling towards the edge of the sixth mass extinction and blowing apart as we do so. All of the predictions about the speed and scale of ecosystem breakdown. And still we have politicians who will argue about whether GDP has gone up by 0.1% and if so, who's going to claim the credit? These same people plan for war without understanding that there are no armies, no nations, no people, or indeed any complex life on a dead planet.
Manda: And yet, as it says on the website for this book, what good are science and rational persuasion if no one is paying attention? The climate crisis deepens with terrifying predictability. And meanwhile, the courageous young campaigners who seek to wake us up to the truth of this through peaceful, direct action, are silenced and stuck in prison. Daniel Knorr is one of those young people and one of today's guests. He was 22 years old at the time this book was published, and had previously studied biochemistry at Oxford, with a view to engineering plants to be more resilient to extreme weather conditions. Which seems a pretty laudable aim to me. But as you'll hear, he realised this was no longer where he needed to be. It was no longer what the world needed of him. And so he joined Just Stop Oil, whose ethos and grounding question is: what does it take to be a good person in this time of collapse or perhaps of transition? I will let him tell you his story in detail. But like those of the other 25 young people in the book, it is truly humbling and inspiring in equal measure. The person who brought all these stories together is Jonathon Porritt, who is well known to anyone in the green or eco campaigning community in the UK and beyond. He was formerly co-chair of the Green Party and director of friends of the earth. He was a board member of the South West Regional Development Agency and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. For ten years he was chancellor of Keele University and he was awarded a CBE in January of 2000 for services to Environmental Protection.
Manda: Now he's writing a novel, and he was writing on the morning we recorded this. I am not remotely envious of the fact that he had the time to do that. But anyway, he took the time to come and discuss Love, Anger, and Betrayal, which brings his experience over decades of campaigning into juxtaposition with the experiences of young people one third his age, who are doing their best to make the world a better place. Of all the generations alive on the earth at the moment, theirs and the ones who come after them have been systematically betrayed by the politicians of our time. And yet, what comes across in this book is that while Jonathan feels the kind of white hot rage that consumes so many of us, Daniel and his fellow activists are focusing more on embodying love for each other and the planet. And this, in the end, is what I took from this conversation. There is so much that's wrong, and yet there are people who genuinely care, who are genuinely doing their best to make things right. I'm going to end with another quote from Antonio Guterres, who says: "We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It's in our hands". So with that ringing in your ears, people of the podcast, please do welcome Daniel Knorr and Jonathon Porritt with the book Love, Anger and Betrayal.
Manda: Jonathan and Daniel, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast and thank you for turning out. We had rain this morning on a morning where there's actual rain in Britain for the first time in a long time. Daniel, how are you and where are you on this August summer morning?
Daniel: Yeah, well, we're still holding out on rain here, but hopefully later in the week. As for how I am, I've never enjoyed that as a sort of small talk question, but it's like not been a very special morning, particularly. I think neutral is the best answer. Not feeling too great, but not feeling too terrible either, so pretty standard. And as for where am I? I'm living in Oxford right now. I've been living on a houseboat, which belongs to a friend of mine, just to sort of get out of the city and have an opportunity to take a break from work for a little bit. But I've come to my friend's house to record this podcast, because my internet is very bad out on the boat.
Manda: Brilliant. So you're in a houseboat on the river in Oxford, whose name I can't remember because I was a Cambridge girl. What's the river in Oxford?
Daniel: Oh, it's just the Thames. Some people here call it the Isis, but it's the same river, the Thames.
Manda: Oh is it? I never knew that. Brilliant. And just for interest, you're taking a break out of work. Are we pulling you away from work at the moment? Are you meant to be doing something else?
Daniel: No, no no, no, I quit because I wanted to not work for a bit, and I don't have to pay my friend to live on their boat because they're being very generous and they can't live there right now. So all perfect for me.
Manda: Fantastic. All right. Houseboat sounds great. Because when the floods come, you'll just go up. Yay!
Manda: All right, Jonathan, how are you and where are you this morning?
Jonathon: I am at home in Cheltenham. I am looking at presumably the same clouds that came to you, Manda, in Wales. They haven't yet delivered anything here, which is a shame, but you never know. How am I? I'm okay. This morning I managed to get quite a bit of writing done, early today, so I'm feeling productive. Sorry, I didn't mean to put that in there to make you feel bad!
Manda: Worked though! I haven't written anything yet this morning, so I have writing envy. What are you writing? And this isn't where we planned to go, but what are you writing now? You're very productive!
Jonathon: I'm going to try and write a novel.
Manda: A thrutopian novel? Tell me it's a thrutopian novel, Jonathan.
Jonathon: Well, it's an eco thriller, so whether that will ever be characterised as thrutopian I don't know. But I have got 1 or 2 ideas to make the ending slightly less depressing than is my normal predisposition.
Manda: Please. We don't need more dystopias. Please show us a way through.
Jonathon: I agree. No, it's definitely not going to be a dystopia and the bad guys get it in the end, so that has to be a good thing.
Manda: All right. And the definition, the working definition of thrutopia, is anything that shows us route maps from a recognisable present towards a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. If you can do any mapping of agency that gives people motivation, agency, direction and empowerment to get through, then it's thrutopian. Please do that. There are so few thrutopian novels.
Jonathon: I'm working on that Manda, but I'm also having a lot of fun working out how to screw the oil and gas industry in the book.
Manda: Okay, that's thrutopian too.
Jonathon: Is that ok?
Manda: Yeah, totally. Yes, yes, I think that's an essential part of any thrutopia. Oh, we could just talk about the novels we're writing, that wouldn't be what we planned at all. And Daniel would end up not saying much, so let's not do that. Tell us about Love, Anger and Betrayal. Jonathan first, because you open the book and it's very interesting on so many levels. Tell us about how you got there and how it came about and what it represents for you. That's probably the easiest starting question. And then we'll move to Daniel.
Jonathon: Sure. Well, it wasn't going to be the book it turned out to be, because it was going to be a book about Just Stop Oil. The idea was that I would just write about Just Stop Oil, almost as a third party observer of what I consider to be a really critically important social progressive movement here in the UK, which also defined many different aspects of what it is to campaign about things like climate change and human rights and so on. And in order to do that, I then started talking to lots of people in Just Stop Oil and realised, well, they've got a better handle on this than I have, so I might just as well use these interviews and bring them into the book in a completely different way. As in, they're completely in their own words, rather than me just editing, which however conscientiously I did it, would almost certainly have been me trying to use other people's words to confirm, in one way or another, what I myself thought was the deal. So that turned into a series of ten or so interviews, and then I got to know quite a lot of people inside the movement. I went to visit some of them, including Daniel, when they were incarcerated at Her Majesty's pleasure, His Majesty's pleasure. And that turned into 26 interviews in the end. So many, many more than I thought I would be using, but it just became an amazing chance to talk to people so close to that front line, so close to all the emotions that go with it, that it was a very different output than I'd thought about originally.
Manda: Okay, brilliant. Thank you. So, Daniel, let's come to you. Tell us first of all, how you became involved in Just Stop Oil. But also I imagine everybody listening has heard of Just Stop Oil, but we probably don't know the details of how it arose, how long it lasted, what it's doing. Give us the potted history of you and your biography moving into it, and then a little bit of the overarching creation of and aims of Just Stop Oil.
Daniel: Yeah. Great. So I was never a hugely political person growing up. You know, I went to school, I did my homework, and then I went to go off to university to study Biochemistry after that. The climate crisis was something that came up in my family, especially with my little sister. She'd get a climate anxiety quite badly, it would interfere with her sleep, as something that was really concerning for her. She went vegetarian when she was about 14. My parents gave her a lot of nonsense about that, so I also went vegetarian, basically just just to support her and stop her from being completely bullied unfairly by my parents. Other than that, it wasn't like a huge, massive concern for me. I was just living the life of a teenager, basically.
Daniel: I went off to university to study biochemistry, but in my first year, I had a really bad sort of crisis with my mental health. So I ended up taking a year off and spent a lot of time reading about history, for whatever reason, I was really into it. And catching up with historical changes in societies, be that through social movements or through the revolutionary periods that people have heard about. And then in the summer, I went away to see my family, but my parents are from Italy and Croatia.
Daniel: And on the way back, I was flying back into the UK (don't don't cancel me!) and it was the summer of 2022. I'm sure people remember it, where there was a drought yet again and also it was that time that we'd hit the 40 degrees threshold for the first time in British history. And it was just like now. And obviously from an aerial view, I can remember it really well, everything you could see was yellow. There was not a single bit of green remaining in that 2022 summer. And it was a terrifying moment for me, because I think just like everyone else, before that I'd had that sense that things were bad, but it was like the adults were in the room, someone had this kind of sorted and under control. And it very much felt like, okay, that's not happening. So in the rest of that summer, I did writing to my MPs, videos about cycling infrastructure. But when I got back to Oxford, where I was at university, I was given a leaflet by someone from Extinction Rebellion, and I learned a lot about that group, and I started getting involved. And then I felt like that wasn't enough. So I just found someone from Just Stop Oil and went to a training and started getting involved in that. And that was basically it. After that, I was sort of just straight in, really.
Manda: Straight into doing remarkable things. So tell us a little bit about Just Stop Oil and how it evolved. I was part of Extinction Rebellion back in 2018, the Trafalgar Square movement. But then Just Stop Oil felt to me like it was a subset of XR to begin with, and then it became its own thing. But I might be wrong about that. So tell us what Just Stop Oil's aims were and how it arose and who brought it into being.
Daniel: Yeah. So obviously I only got involved in sort of late 2022, so I'm going to do my best but you are getting a lot of the information sort of second hand.
Manda: Okay. That's fine.
Daniel: I don't want to kind of speak for anybody who was there. But yeah, so obviously Extinction Rebellion, it's founded by some cool people, it has a sort of different approach to how it's going to do activism in the UK. And it was very successful at first. It had this giant groundswell of people, you know, thousands of people involved in 2019. And then Covid hits and that really shut everything down. Like it felt like the movement was just growing and swelling and there was a lot of momentum and then BAM. But obviously, in the meantime, there had already been some disagreements developing between people. There was controversy about doing actions at Heathrow Airport and some people had to leave Extinction Rebellion because of that, because they were involved in that sort of thing. And, you know, there's quotes by people saying that after coronavirus there will be two sides of the movement; the people who are still in that kind of like, oh, we need to kind of be very appealing to the public, or people who are like, we need to disrupt. And that's what's important to face the crisis right now. And that's the sort of people who go on to found Just Stop Oil. Obviously, there's some big names, but it's a fair group of people.
Daniel: And the other thing I'm told, like I said, I wasn't there, but that in the founding of a Just Stop Oil, the main question was, what does it mean to be a good person, you know, in a time of ecological collapse. Rather than how can we be the most successful sort of climate activists or whatever you want to call it? So then just stop oil starts. And there's like a couple of things coming from that one, it's evolved also out of this other sort of separate group called Insulate Britain, which people might have heard of, which was blocking motorways around the M25. And one of it's big, let's say problems or criticisms of Insulate Britain, was it was really dominated by the 'grey activists' or older people. So Just Stop Oil's kind of first objective is there needs to be younger people in this movement. There needs to be younger people being empowered and in leadership positions. So they go around a lot of university campuses mobilising, getting young people involved. And then it's decided that the first targets are going to be at the oil terminals. And there's a sort of strategy of civil disobedience at the oil terminals to kind of block up the supply of fuel in the UK. They were trying to create a shortage, and that would put a lot of pressure on the government to meet them and resolve those kind of demands.
Daniel: And they actually do get quite close. So something like 50% of the fuel pumps in the south east of England had run dry by the end of the 2 or 3 weeks that they'd been blocking oil terminals in April of 2022. But one thing that happens is that the companies that run these fuel terminals, start buying out private laws called injunctions, where they can go to court and essentially pay to have their property or land declared Injuncted. Which means that if you then continue to protest there, you're in violation of a high court order. It puts you in contempt of court and you can face prison time straight away. That's for even just holding a sign outside of the oil terminals. And some people decided to test this. About 50 people go to, I think it's called Kingsbury Oil Terminal near Birmingham. And they just sit there with signs, saying just stop Oil, like protesting over there, quite simply like that.
Daniel: And almost all of them go to prison for about two weeks, which isn't like a huge amount of time, but obviously they haven't really done anything. All they've done is violated the injunction. So on the back of that, and based off the fact that also it wasn't getting very much attention in the media, the campaign switches its focus to that classic civil disobedience in the capital city in London. And that's when you see it start to like block roads and that sort of thing. And at this time, there's also this other innovation called what they call a cultural action, which is what people have seen with the disruptions at the sports pitches and the soup on the Van Gogh. Basically people were having a lot of trouble, kind of like getting the word out about the movement, about the Just Stop Oil being a new group. Like we said, at the fuel terminals, they'd really struggled to get that media attention. So there was a theory that if you did one really attention grabbing action, that would basically boost the profile of the rest of the campaign and everything else that you were doing. So obviously, a lot of thought went into this back when they were at the fuel terminals, but this kind of carried through into the civil disobedience in London, which is very much more visible anyway.
Daniel: So this goes from a more industrial direct action and sabotage group into like a really public, really high profile campaign in the space of a few months. And that culminates in the gantries, where people were sitting above the motorway on these sort of gantries at the end of 2022. And then obviously, a lot more people got remanded to prison after they've taken that action. And that once again puts the campaign into a bit of an oh, like a lot of our best people have gone to prison, we need to figure out what to do, we're running out of money. And that's where this sort of slow marching thing comes from, which people might have seen. Which was basically a way of pushing the police all the way up to the point of arrest and then being able to just sort of run off after that. Like, how close can you get to breaking the law without quite doing it? Because with a slow march, you weren't technically sitting in the road, you weren't technically blocking the road, the traffic was still moving, just really, really slowly.
Daniel: And that was considered fine at first and that allowed the campaign to survive for a few more months. It was a summer of about 12 to 13 weeks where people were slow marching every single day. Coupled with the cultural actions and some big figures like Dale Vince and Adam McKay doing fundraising drives, the campaign I think was able to raise more than £1 million in the space of three months. And that basically shot a bunch more life into it. Then the law changes again. They introduced this thing called section seven of the Public Order Act, which essentially allows the police to arrest people for disrupting key national infrastructure. They don't have to give a warning or anything, they can just come and grab you off the street, and you can be imprisoned for up to a year. Previous public order legislation for marching and blocking roads, the maximum they could really give you was some community service or a fine. Which now means that basically they can get you, and because this is an imprisonable offence, they can now remand you to prison, which is essentially holding you to prison before your trial, which they couldn't do before for a lot of these things.
Daniel: Which essentially means they can take a few people to scare everyone else and just throw them in jail. So that's what they do. They start putting people in prison because they're marching, because they're slowly marching on the road, which is like an insane thing to go to prison for. And once again, people go to prison, the campaign goes into a bit of a rut. You know, a lot of the best organisers have been arrested and sent in prison, and there's a lack of money in the system. And then we get to the airports, which is the last bit I'm involved in, because I ended up going to prison because of this. Which was a bit of like a Hail Mary. It was modelled off the Insulate Britain campaign, which was a smaller number of people doing a large amount of disruption, to kind of push the campaign forwards. And this was going to be at airports. And also there was a lot of other groups at this point spawned around Europe based on the same model, like the Last Generation in Germany, Last Generation in Italy, there was one in France, there was one in Spain, there's even one in Poland now. And the idea was to coordinate with all of these groups. Everybody in the summer was going to have actions at an airport. And this cumulative effect would both create a lot of disruption that would obviously put pressure on European governments, but also that would have a cumulative effect in the media and hopefully get more coverage. What the airports do, they're all private companies, right, is they each give the police a lot of money to sort of try to head this off. I think Heathrow gives almost 2 or £3 million. I know Manchester Airport gave £500,000.
Manda: They're allowed to give money to the police?
Daniel: Well apparently.
Manda: Isn't that like buying the police?
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well they've already been buying laws. They, you know, they've bought injunctions beforehand.
Manda: They bought the injunctions. Yeah.
Daniel: Exactly. So this is something they're completely used to doing. It's like, oh, some protesters are bothering us; we're going to pay the courts off, we're going to pay the police off. You know, we're going to figure this out somehow. And that the police have this massive budget now and they put a lot of it into surveillance, to the point that you have phone conversations being tapped. Like I have a document confirming that there was someone assigned just to follow me, specifically, like in person.
Manda: Whoa, wait. Hold on. Daniel, how do you feel about that?
Daniel: I mean, you know, like, obviously not great. But you get used to it, right? Like it comes with the territory, as they say. Occupational hazard.
Manda: Do you think they're still there? Can you spot people? I mean, presumably they are on a rota. It's not the same person all the time.
Daniel: The way I've come to understand this is they're very, how do I say it? Like they have a very short attention span. Sort of like they they follow you, they arrest you, they convict you, they deal with you and then you're basically fallen off the face of the earth as far as they're concerned. They have other problems to worry about, they have budget constraints. They have this and that. You know, the airports are no longer giving them this money, or there might be something more interesting for them to be doing, like a lot of grandmas to arrest in Trafalgar Square. So basically they move on really quickly. I can provide other examples of where they've really like hammered someone and then they've completely forgotten about them, right? Like it happens all the time. But yeah, anyway, they're doing a lot of surveillance and they arrested a lot of people on conspiracy charges, including myself. And I end up in prison because of that. And that's the next ten months I'm in prison and the campaign keeps going on without me. But as I understand it, it can't really find that momentum anymore. And there's also the fact that the original demand has been met; the Labour government comes in and it does promise to end all new fossil fuel licences. And we can get into that if you want a bit later.
Daniel: So those two factors together, of a group which is really struggling to keep going, plus the fact that the main objective has actually been achieved, comes together. And essentially it's decided the best thing to do is to shut the actions down and just keep the rest of the resources to focus on supporting the people still going through court and prison and that sort of thing. And that's the story, I think.
Manda: All right. I have a whole bunch of questions on the back of that. But let's come to Jonathan for a bit. Give you a break and and you can rest your voice. And Jonathan; so we had a hard right government in the UK at the time when Just Stop Oil started and they rushed through laws very, very quickly that effectively, as Daniel has just said, you can be arrested for walking on the road. Which is not too far off Singapore, where you get arrested for jaywalking and very little due process. And I had no idea, but have just learned that people who feel themselves targeted can buy the police. Which just shouldn't be happening in any kind of functional democracy. Talk us through your view of what the establishment is doing, because this feels to me like a triggered response. It's kind of an immune response and is probably predictable. And so do you think it was predicted? And where from here would be an obvious end point? But let's just talk about your view of what's happening to our democracy and why and how.
Jonathon: There have always been two elements to the civil disobedience of Just Stop Oil, which was a bit different from Extinction Rebellion. The first, obviously, is the whole continuing concern about the climate crisis and the continuing failure, wilful failure of politicians to respond proportionately to what is obviously, by any standards, becoming a more and more urgent problem. But the second part essentially is what is going on in our country in terms of the assault on basic human rights; the right to assemble, the right to freedom of speech, the right to protest. And there was a huge movement when the conservative government pushed through the first of its two Draconian acts. That's the police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, followed up a year later with the Public Order Act, which Daniel referred to. And there was a massive movement just to point out that this would constitute a very significant erosion of basic human rights in this country; our right to protest, our right to freedom of speech, etc.. And that was all simply waved away. And the government just went ahead and did what they did. The Tory government. Everybody then thought, well, we're going to have a Labour government soon. That'll be fine, if they don't come from exactly the same part of the political spectrum.
Manda: Did they not?
Jonathon: So presumably they won't rely as heavily on judicial interventions to make the judicial system that much more oppressive than it was before. Couldn't have been more wrong on that score. Labour has turned out to be as bad, if not worse, than the conservative government. People don't really believe me when I say that, but if you look at what they're trying to do now, and the ways in which they have been further Jeopardising people's rights to protest and what we can say, and so on. It's just got worse and worse.
Manda: Yeah.
Jonathon: So for a lot of people, it isn't just the need to come up with 'attention grabbing', as Daniel put it, actions that force people to think about something as life threatening as climate change. It's about what is happening to our rights in this country, what is happening to our democracy, the degree to which now it's becoming harder and harder to get the kind of freedom, the sort of debate that we now need about so many different things, not just the climate crisis. So that's been a big part, and it still is a big part of it now, because those assaults on people's freedom go on to this day, and they get worse and worse.
Manda: Yes. And I genuinely don't understand why anybody thought Labour was going to be any different. But let's not go into the history of the Labour Party, it's not worth it. You said failure of the government to respond proportionately to what's happening. And I really want to drill into this because you've been involved in loosely what we might call ecologically aware things for all of your life. If you were given a blank slate, if a miracle occurred, and Andy Burnham, who I have recently seen referred to as Burn'em, which I think we should definitely normalise because it might actually make him do something. If he were to have an epiphany and come to you, Jonathan, and say, okay, what do we need to do? How could this government respond proportionately? Leaving aside obviously they would immediately decide that they were not actually, in fact, going to open up wells in the North Sea. But up to a point that's demonstrative and performative, we need, in my view, much, much, much, much more fundamental change than that. Give us a flavour of what you think proportionate action would be.
Jonathon: In what time scale, dare I ask?
Manda: Well, starting tomorrow, you know, because we only can start where we are. We couldn't start last week, which would have been good, or last year or ten years ago. Starting now and going as long as you want.
Jonathon: You do have to put an awful lot to one side to give a positive answer to that, Manda. Because what you have to put to one side is the degree to which this government, Andy Burnham's government, like every other government before it, is a creature of the capitalist forces that have got us into this position now, and in particular the fossil fuel industry. They have no freedom in that respect. And a lot of the co-authors for Love, Anger and Betrayal, when I was asking about why are they not more angry with the politicians, I felt myself quite often reprimanded by saying, well, look, it's not really their fault. They're just as much imprisoned by this system as anybody else is. They're creatures of the system. We may think they're super powerful because they're elected MPs or whatever, but they're not. They're all stuck in this system. So we're going to put that to one side, right now.
Manda: They're still making choices.
Jonathon: Although obviously every time we put that to one side, we can only ever come up with partial answers to what needs to happen next, because we're putting to one side the single most important part of our dysfunctional political system. But if Andy Burnham was to come and ask some advice, then it's rather more intriguing then, because essentially we're talking about a total failure of imagination.
Manda: Yes.
Jonathon: I mean, if we had a government that really wanted to seize hold of what we are already doing in this country, which is quite good stuff around renewables, around new technologies such as storage technologies, new ways of thinking about transport systems, new opportunities to build houses differently, to look to agriculture differently. All of these things are part of the kind of policy Package that Labour talks about and occasionally puts into practice. But they haven't got sufficient imagination to realise that is everything we need. We don't need this continuing dependence on these fossil fuels, which would cause such devastation to prospects for future generations. And actually, of course, today's generation now we're thinking about it. So I feel angry on many counts and shared this anger with people like Danny when we were putting the book together, for the fact that they can't see that if we did it properly, it would be outstandingly good for people. It would create a better society, a fairer society, a much healthier society in which people would have better opportunities than they have now. And the outcomes would genuinely look much better than the outcomes currently look for people today. So that really pisses me off. And I think it was one of the reasons why I think Just Stop Oil in the end said, well, this bunch, they just can't see their way through to understanding why this is not just necessary - as in we've got to stop burning fossil fuels - but why it's highly desirable because our lives are going to be better as a consequence. And you can imagine it's bad enough when you're 76 dealing with that kind of frustration, when you're 22 or whatever, in your 20s, and you see politicians simply incapable of grasping the blindingly obvious, then it would tend to drive you bonkers.
Manda: Yes. Doesn't it just? And for what it's worth, I was talking to a friend who is an MP last week and who does get it and nonetheless we ended up in a conversation where they were saying we need to do X, Y, and Z and X, Y, and Z are definitely going to take 20 years. And my response was, we don't have that long. And they said, oh, I thought you'd say that. And I'm not saying that as a debating point, I'm saying that because there are wildfires on the Hill, and we've had no rain since April, and people are feeding oat straw covered in molasses to their sheep in August. And there's going to be a food shortage by November. And it's your job as a politician to get your head around this and do something. And the problem, it seems to me, and I will stop ranting in a second. But anyone who's read Isobel Oakeshott's Why We get the Wrong politicians; our system does not allow for people with proper bandwidth. Very rarely. My friend is one of them. I would say Clive Lewis is another. There are a couple of others, but I can name on the fingers of one hand the MPs who have the bandwidth and who get it, and that leaves hundreds of others who are basically there because it's comfortable and they have sponsors who give them money, exactly as you said, to not rock the boat.
Jonathon: Hmm. Exactly.
Manda: So given that, I want to come back to Daniel. I want to talk more policy structure, come back to Jonathan in a bit about what we could do and how we could help to shape a future that works. But Daniel, I really want to come back and drill into your experience of being in prison, actually. Because I am in awe of the courage of all of the people in this book. I sat in Trafalgar Square and outside the BBC and things in 2018, and I have rarely been so scared. I was a good little middle class girl who thought the police were on our side until there. And it radicalised me beyond anything. And I wasn't arrested, but only actually because I discovered later that the BBC had decided not to press charges. But it was very scary. And yet, what comes out through the book from you and all of the 25 others, is that there's a sense of community that enables you, I think, to have the courage to feel not isolated and not alone. And you have a government of people, as we've established, who have no bandwidth, no imagination, no empathy, no capacity to do anything, and should resign their jobs and let somebody else have the place who could actually do proper stuff. Or they should work to change the system, and they're not. And the weight of all of that is bearing down on you, and yet you have the resilience still to go and do something that pretty much 100% guarantees you're going to be arrested and you're going to spend time in prison. I would like to know how that feels from the inside. Is that something that you feel able to answer?
Daniel: Well, I'll do my best.
Manda: Go for it. Thank you.
Daniel: Yeah. I mean, if you're just asking how it feels, to be perfectly honest, it feels quite good really.
Manda: Okay!
Daniel: You can imagine, if you hear quite objective facts about how, you know, the human race is basically committing suicide day by day. And you might feel like you're just going crazy. I think probably a lot of people do feel like that. And you obviously have this sort of like cognitive dissonance, right, every day. Which is perfectly normal. Like everybody lives in many ways with cognitive dissonance, it's just sort of part of the human experience. But when it's that strong of like, you know, I'm going about my daily life doing such and such, you know, trying to get good grades, trying to get a job, whatever it is. But also the human race is like doing a collective suicide. For some people it's just too much. It's too much cognitive dissonance. And the idea of going to the point of prison and living, as they say in resistance; you know, I've done everything I can to stop this, there's nothing feasibly I could do anymore. And that cognitive dissonance can feel to settle to a lot of people, where obviously physically you might be restrained, but sort of in your mind and in your soul, you feel very much more at peace. There's nothing sort of contradictory happening anymore. So in that way it can feel quite good.
Daniel: And then on your point of community, I mean, I have this idea that basically human beings can and have lived in all sorts of Conditions. You know, in this day and age some people, especially in the West, live with like the most material comforts that you could possibly dream of. And you also have some of the most unhappiest people who have ever existed. You know, we talk about it every year that we have this horrible sort of mental health crisis. And yeah, I think the truth is that basically people need community. And if you have those strong social ties, you feel like you are going to be supported and you feel you are going to keep having your friends, your family, your loved ones, I think human beings can basically withstand almost any physical condition you put them in as long as that remains true. You know, that's the sort of thing that extends your life. When they've done research on why certain communities in like Sardinia, with these communities there, they live a lot longer on average than their mainland counterparts. And there's always been a lot of like, oh, what's going on there? Like, is it the food?
Manda: The olive oil!
Daniel: Is it the olive oil? Is it the climate? And I don't want to claim to be like an expert on this, but I think one of the things that's also been explored, is it just that in this sort of traditional rural lifestyle, is it that they have stronger communities in their village and their towns? They feel supported. They see their friends every day. They continue living with the people they've grown up with. It's just good for us. So if you can feel that sense of community, I think you can you can basically survive anything, you know?
Manda: Okay. Alrighty. Thank you. Again, a whole bunch of questions arising from that. But let's come back to Jonathon, because it seems to me we're in a moment of transition. Definitely there are wildfires sweeping across the UK. I posted a question on a local Facebook group going, who's actually paying for the water to put out the fires? There were thousands of gallons poured onto the fire on the hill, and we've got a growing area, we think we could feed the village if we really had to. Not this year because we're still learning to grow, but we're putting a lot of water on there. And are the water companies profiteering out of the drought? And a day after I put that up, a news story came around that the water companies are in fact considering putting the price of water up, having a price spike during a drought in order to reduce people's use of water. And I think you still need to put out the fire. You still need to keep the plants growing, you still need to water the livestock. And just so that some CEO can buy a new yacht.
Manda: I think people are becoming more aware. The capacity to deny the reality of climate change is much less. It doesn't stop the Mail on Sunday running multi-page spreads saying, no, Britain is fine, this is just a lovely summer, nothing is happening. But most people don't believe that. How could we, who can see the bigger picture, use this moment, do you think? Is there a way to use this moment? If we've established that the current system is not fit for purpose, that the current system of governance is not fit for purpose. But we have people like Zack Polanski in the UK, Zoran Mamdani and many others in the US, who are beginning the social side of what we need to shift from an inequitable, extractive death cult. If you again were asked how to shift things, can you see actions that we could take right now in the political and the media sphere, particularly the information sphere, that would help people to stop with the cognitive dissonance that Daniel was talking about. Because indigenous cultures don't live with cognitive dissonance. We live with cognitive dissonance because we can see the wildfires on the Hill, and we're still going to work in the morning. What would you have people do, again, if we could help to shape something?
Jonathon: I feel nervous answering a question like that, if it takes you to what people can do as individuals in terms of their lifestyle and so on. Because whilst that might be useful at the margins and it may reduce...
Manda: That wasn't necessarily the question.
Jonathon: Well, you asked me specifically what people can do.
Manda: People who create a movement.
Jonathon: Well, let me answer by saying politically is what they need to do.
Manda: Yes, that's what I was meaning. Yes.
Jonathon: Yeah. That may be what you were meaning, Manda. Sadly, when people ask that question, normally they say, why don't you turn out the lights more often? Why don't you spend less time in the shower?
Manda: Oh, yeah. No, no, you and I both know that's not going to work.
Jonathon: So all of that stuff. So as long as we don't have to worry about what George Monbiot, wonderful Guardian writer, described as 'consumerist micro bollocks', as long as we don't have to do that, we can engage politically with this. And that is beginning to happen. And clearly the Green Party has made a big impact over the course of the last year or so. Zack Polanski is a very different kind of leader. He has enabled now a whole series of reconnections for people with the world in which we live. And of course, that's crucially important. We have to reconnect with the natural world, reconnect with water, reconnect with the land, reconnect with the food that we eat, reconnect with the energy that doesn't just suddenly, miraculously materialise out of a socket in the wall. And deep down, what green politics has always been about is that sense of reconnecting people with the reality of life on earth. So when we talk about these crises that pop up now, whether it's wildfires or water shortages or we will be facing food shortages, as you said, Manda, we also need to remind people that because of 200 years of simply ignoring any of those dependencies.
Manda: Or 10,000 years?
Jonathon: For humankind on the non-human world, as it were. So I'm heartened by that. I actually think people are beginning to rethink some of their indifference towards that, their careless approach to all of that. I'm not saying that's universal yet, but you're beginning to see a whole different approach to those relationships. I wish it was easier to make that work for society as a whole, but we are still dominated by media interests that would go to great lengths to crush any of those reconnections, to make sure people do not understand why it is that we need to think through our way of life differently. Most of the media in this country are owned by the same right wing, life crushing, billionaire sub fascists, who would obviously hate to see the Green Party flourish more than it is now, would hate to see people begin to rethink what it means to live responsibly. Coming back to Daniel's question, which Just Stop Oil was asking itself, what would it take today to live well on this earth? How do we be good ancestors? The last thing that any of the mainstream media in this country are interested in is that question. Their question is how do we go on being better consumers? By which they mean spend more money on crap. So the idea of how do we get to be good citizens is a lethally dangerous question to the media in this country.
Manda: And yet, unless somebody answers it, there is no other narrative. So let's go to Daniel. Daniel, if you were able to spread a narrative that was different to the one; we're all agreed that the legacy media is part of the death cult: it's dangerous and it needs to go. For what it's worth, and this is an aside, the think tank compass has now redefined itself as better with an exclamation mark after it. And previously they were just going for PR and now they're going for better democracy, which is PR plus citizens assemblies plus participatory budgeting, plus all of the stuff that we need to actually create a democracy that works. Better taxes, which is largely Gary Stevenson's tax wealth, not work. And better media. Which broadly, I think is sailing on the back of Donnachadh McCarthy's dismantling the billionaire control of the media and having a media that actually works for people instead of against people. So anyone listening, I will put a link to that in the show notes, because I think that's well worth supporting. But Daniel, coming back to you, you said that the big question of Just Stop Oil was, what is it to be a good person? Which was a different question to XR, which was, how can we gain attention. Now that we're moving on from Just Stop Oil, what would your answer to that be now? Or what was it ever?
Daniel: Yeah. Well, that's like the big question, right? So I'm gonna do my best here. But I think for most of human history, this was what was sort of driving people. I think we've had this sort of weird thing after the enlightenment especially, but probably a little bit after that, where we become a bit more obsessed with the things in our life. You know, I'm going to get the nicest things in my house or the best job, or we're going to increase the GDP the most. And I think it's important to understand that that really for most of human history, people have been concerned with how can I be the best person? What is the good life? That's what philosophers have always kind of like gone on about. And for me at least, I have this understanding, whether it's right or wrong, that everything we are and that extends beyond the human to everything around you, is completely relational. Every human only exists in so much as they relate and are created by other people around them. And that's the same thing for the chair you might be sitting on and everything else. Like it exists in relation to you and that's what makes it a chair rather than anything else.
Manda: Yes.
Daniel: And in order to have a good life, I think we need to just live in appreciation and gratitude of those relations, in understanding that that is who we are. That's what creates us. And that our main objective is to celebrate and build those, to maintain those, to always be expanding and nurturing those relations, you know. Like everything we do, we need to think is this something that's going to not just help, but nurture the other people around me, you know, help them grow? Or am I cutting off those relationships and destroying them? Which if you're destroying a lot of complex life on earth, you probably are destroying all of those relations. But if what you're doing is giving that life space to grow and evolve and develop, then maybe you're nurturing them. That sounded probably complex and philosophical, but I think it makes sense.
Manda: No, no, it sounds really good. It totally makes sense and it's very aligned with what we regularly say on the podcast. In practical terms, then, because I think we can have, again, a degree of cognitive dissonance; I think all three of us are agreed with exactly what you just said. And the difficulty comes in explaining to ordinary people who don't really care because they're still too busy trying to feed the kids or put a roof over their head or get a bigger car, because they're still being sold the consumerist lifestyle. And yet they want to care, they don't like the idea that there will be no hedgehogs by the end of the decade, for instance. That hurts. So they have grief and they still have acquisitiveness. Can you personally, Daniel, see a route map from the reality that we're living in just now, which is a consumerist post-capitalist, but still largely capitalist culture, run by people who definitely don't get it and don't give anything for anything other than their own careers. Can you see a route that ordinary people could take? And we're not talking about switching off the lights or changing your diet, or not flying, or the tweaks at the edges of our own existence. We each of us need to make some changes but none of those work. What are the changes that would work in order to create a movement towards what I would suggest is total systemic change? Even the stuff that Zack Polanski is doing in the Green Party, it doesn't cut it because it's basically tweaking the existing system, and the existing system is not fit for purpose. How would you suggest we get through from where we are to a system that works? Can you see a route through or at least the first steps of a route?
Daniel: Yeah. Well, I guess one of the important things to say is that basically the change to how people see the world is happening and that's coming, whether we like it or not.
Manda: Quite fast.
Daniel: People's concept of who they are is not going to survive impact with ecological collapse. And people are going to turn either towards this sort of nature of love, there's no other word to describe it and people can use another word, but I quite like that one. Or they're going to turn to some other kind of non-material outlook, but which involves sacrifice, but is like a lot more evil. Say something a bit more fascistic where, you know, I'm sacrificing for this fake group of people that we call a nation or something like that, right? But either way, that's where people are going to go. And that's what happens when, when societies come under stress, like we've seen that in history. So I'd say it's on us who for whatever reason, we care about this right now, we have a little bit more information, whatever it might be. To provide space for people to step into, into that framework of love and not worrying too much about the outcome, but doing things because it's good and it's the right thing to do. And generally speaking, people change and especially change for the better when they're around other people and they're doing things with those people, which involves helping them. So I'd say in terms of how we get through it, to me at least the best way forward seems to be getting involved in your local community, creating spaces where they can come together, they can, you know, help the lady down the street that's struggling with their bills. They can get together and buy food as a collective so that it's a lot cheaper, buy in bulk. All these little things, people start to see themselves now as part of that community rather than like an individual. And then once people are doing something, the psychological justification tends to catch up with them. The main thing is that they're doing it first.
Manda: Okay. And then the cognitive dissonance evaporates a bit and you feel better. And it seems to me that's an internal tipping point for people, that the change can happen quite fast once it begins. It's a pebble that rolls downhill. Jonathon, I would like to come back to you, because we're fairly near the end. The theory behind XR and Just Stop Oil was a theory of social change predicated on a percentage tipping point within the population. If you could get a certain percentage believing something new, then it would carry the rest of the population with it. First of all, is that still an extant concept within the broader reaches of this movement? And if not, what's the theory of change behind where we are now and who is leading it?
Jonathon: It was always controversial.
Manda: Okay, good.
Jonathon: To say that the theory of change depended on these two percentages. Two groups of people in society. One a very small group, don't worry too much about the specific percentage, but a very small group who would take on the heavy lifting, do the kind of civil disobedience, put themselves out there. And that was always coupled with the other, much larger part of what society would have to do, which is that they'd be broadly supportive of the way in which those people conducted themselves and the civil disobedience that they undertook. And there's a huge literature, sociological, cultural literature demonstrating that you can indeed see improbable change processes built off the idea of a small group of activists, if you like, and a much larger group of people urging the activists on. But the idea that that in itself would have delivered the changes that we needed was never going to hold up, because it was premised on the idea that the powers that be would somehow allow that movement to develop and grow positively. And of course, that didn't happen. What happened is that oppression kicked in, as it usually does. So the theory of change today is pretty mixed. There's no civil disobedience at the moment in the climate movement. The civil disobedience in the UK has moved elsewhere, protecting critical human rights, supporting organisations, whatever it might be.
Jonathon: It's gone elsewhere. It's not really in the climate space any longer, and I don't know what's going to happen, to be honest Manda, on that. I have no idea. If this government is as tin eared, deaf and insensitive on climate and nature as Keir Starmer's government was, then the response to that could actually come much, much more quickly than people imagine. Because there is now a pent up indignation that we seem to have politicians who can only talk about growth, growth, growth, who can only talk about what will happen in terms of consumer societies side of things. Can only talk about the economics without touching on any of the things about people's lives that matter as much to them. Not matter more, but matter as much to them. And that could happen quite quickly. But at the moment I don't know what that will be any more, any more than anybody else does. But the one thing I do know is there'll always be some civil disobedience in the mix. We're not going to get to the point we need to get to without there being quite a lot of people saying, that's it, had it. You know, we've got to do this differently. And that will include stepping into the space in the way that Just Stop Oil did.
Manda: Unless they really hand us all over to Palantir and we have total surveillance.
Jonathon: Well, indeed.
Manda: Which strikes me as not that far down the line. And quite an interesting and quite dystopic vision. But one hopes. I think we're in an interesting race between climate breakdown and total surveillance. And that doesn't feel like a good binary to be caught within.
Jonathon: Yeah. Great choice eh?
Manda: But we do exist in a space where, at the time of recording, the government held a Cobra meeting last week, which for those outside Britain is basically this is crisis time. Boris Johnson got around to actually attending a Cobra meeting, second or third or fourth, when Covid was hitting. And Andy Burnham attended the first Cobra meeting and came out with the radical change that what they needed to do was to ask the supermarkets if they would kindly stop selling portable barbecues. And the second thing they did, Zack Polanski has been saying fossil fuel companies should pay for the helicopters to drop the water on the wildfires, and so they decided the government would pay for those instead, which I think tells us exactly who's funding these things. And you're right. I mean, they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the capacity, they don't have the freedom of movement. So it's going to be very interesting. All right. So from Jonathan, some civil disobedience in the mix. But I think we need big, wide, broad motorways of narrative shift, that show people that there is a better way of doing things if we all got together and just did them.
Manda: Because the people in Westminster only have power at the moment, because we have government by consent. The day we go, you know what? We are not interested in you in Westminster, we're all having this government over here and we're going to pay attention to them. We're going to pay taxes to them. And you guys, you can do what the heck you like. We don't want to listen to you anymore. That is how we get changed. And I don't see any other way of doing it. We just need to normalise that as a concept. Please put that in your novel. I put it in mine but people don't read my novels as many as will read your novels. Daniel, we're heading towards the end. Have you got any last thoughts? Where for you now, other than a houseboat in Oxford. Where for the movement? Where for our culture? Where for the world? Any of those or all of them.
Daniel: Well, yeah. I mean, I'm still interested in being a good person, basically, or trying my best to be. Because that's all we can ever do is try our best. We can never really achieve it. So I'm going to still stay as involved in the movement as I can possibly be, basically. And, you know, for people who are involved in this sort of work, be it similar to the way I've done it or otherwise, I think it's really easy to get like dispirited. To feel like, oh I'm not having any success; I was trying to, you know, get this international agreement or have this river be protected and it's not happening. I feel really bad and despondent and unsuccessful or whatever. I think if you can and you know, obviously it's difficult. It's easy for me to say, oh, just do this. But if you can switch that mindset of I just get up every day and I'm just trying my best to be a good person who loves and is loved and everything. I think it can give you a lot more resilience, you know?
Manda: Right. Yes.
Daniel: Because there's no individual failures. You're doing this every day and hopefully you're succeeding most days, all things being equal. So yeah, I think as many people as can shift to that sort of new mindset of there is good things in life. There is love, there is truth, there is justice and clemency and all these things, as many people as can orient themselves that way. You know, we're going to have like an army, right? A non-violent army of very much stronger people who can actually do this, because it's super easy to break down otherwise. I've been there, a lot of people have been there, you know. Let's try to move forward without breaking down in the future, you know?
Manda: Perfect. Thank you. That feels like a very good line to end on. Jonathon, unless there was anything that you wanted to say as a final word? All right. In that case, thank you, Daniel and Jonathan, for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. For being part of writing this book, which is everybody, I will put a link in the show notes; you really, really do want to read it. It's hard for those of us who haven't been arrested and thrown ourselves out on the streets, but the love of the Love, Anger and Betrayal comes across, exactly as Daniel said, at the core of everything. And it feels to me that if we have a superpower as a species, partly it's our creativity and partly it's our capacity to love all parts of ourselves, each other, and the web of life. So let's go for it. Thank you both very much indeed. I hope to talk to you again sometime.
Jonathon: Thanks. Bye.
Daniel: Thank you.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Daniel and Jonathon for taking the time out to come and talk to us. And for all of the care and compassion and insight and work and courage that each of them has brought to all parts of this endeavour. This could be a really harrowing book to read, and actually, it's genuinely inspiring. Getting to know the young people, most of them in their early 20s, who have been actively trying to do something about the chaos around us, left me with an astonishing groundswell of hope. People do get it. People do care. There are so many different theories of change, but in the end it comes down to people who really care standing up to the establishment. And people do and will continue to do so. So if you felt moved by this and want to do something, the first thing to do is buy the book and read it. If you want to do something more explicitly political, I have put a link to The Better Coalition, the new movement and website from Compass, which is part led by Neil Lawson, who is a friend of the podcast and has been here several times. And the idea of better democracy, better taxes, better media is certainly one we could throw our weight behind. It's not total systemic change, but it is at least a step in the right direction.
Manda: And if you want to explore more about what it takes to become a good ancestor, as luck would have it, we're running an online gathering exploring exactly this on Sunday the 13th of September from 4:00 till 8:00 UK time. I promise we didn't deliberately tag this to the podcast or tag the podcast to the gathering. The two schedules are set up completely independently. The only common denominator is me. But I am the common denominator, and we will be looking through all of the things that I think matter. So we'll be looking at the inner work that we need to do to be able to self-regulate, to have the capacity to respond in flexible terms with the chaos and collapse that is all around us. And we'll be looking at some of the practical things that we can do, because we need the inner work and the outer work now. Both are really important. So there's a link to that in the show notes. Please do follow it up.
Manda: And that's it for now. We'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot, to Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the audio production, to Lou Mayor for the video production, and for organising all of the YouTube channel. To Anne Thomas (welcome back from holiday!) for the transcript, to Faith Tilleray for the website and for keeping everything together when I am going quietly crazy trying to write the book, while Faith is trying to complete her dissertation for her masters. Thank you. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to begin to understand what it's going to take to get us forward through the pinch point that we're in, then please do send them this link. And that is it for now. See you next week, thank you and goodbye.