vicious, de-humanized ideology which eventually engineered the coldly calculated death of countless millions of its own citizens as well as entire living traditions, all for the simple reason that the end justified the means in the great ‘historic struggle’ to turn people against their true nature and into ideological, indoctrinated ‘machines’. All this I will explain because the impact of the industrial mindset focussed by Modernism is key to the situation we face today. It is responsible for the loss of a deep experience of the interconnectedness of Nature, severing a meaningful relationship with the world we inhabit.
Making the shift so that we see things in a much more joined-up and deeply anchored way – the way things really are rather than as they appear to be – is the first stage of the Sustainability Revolution. But we must approach the challenge positively, regarding such a revolution as an opportunity rather than as a threat. We will all have to alter our outlook on life, but we could see this as an investment rather than as a tax. It will inevitably require a period of reassessment of our values and priorities and a realignment of approaches. But if it comes about, it must do so through interchange and discussion rather than by imposition or decree. It is my ambition that this book, the film that will follow it, and other initiatives that will accompany both, will help to facilitate that vital cross-cultural and international discussion and exchange.
Manufactured tower blocks rising above Dundee, Scotland, in the late 1960s. These buildings were built quickly to meet a housing need, assembled using a system of concrete panels made on a production line. They lasted just 40 years before they were deemed too old. This is not sustainable architecture in any sense, not least for the people unlucky enough to live there.
The Yorkshire Dales where the buildings and walls are made from local materials, creating a unique landscape where the Man-made blends with the natural and works best for the harsh conditions found there.
My hope is that I have at least made it clear so far that in the twenty-first century we desperately need an alternative vision that can meet the challenges of the future. It will certainly be a future where food production and its distribution will have to all happen more locally to each other and be less dependent, certainly, on aircraft; where the car will become much more subordinated to the needs of the pedestrian; where our economy will have to operate on a far less generous supply of raw materials and natural resources. But it could also be one where the character of our built environments once more reflects the harmonious, universal principles of which we are an integral part. It could involve a way of teaching our children which offers a much more comprehensive view of reality – one which emphasizes our interconnected reliance on every other part of the whole and living system we call ‘Earth’.
As it is, by continuing to deny ourselves this profound, ancient, intimate relationship with Nature, I fear we are compounding our subconscious sense of alienation and disintegration, which is mirrored in the fragmentation and disruption of harmony we are bringing about in the world around us. At the moment we are disrupting the teeming diversity of life and the ‘ecosystems’ that sustain it – the forests and prairies, the woodland, moorland and fens, the oceans, rivers and streams. And this all adds up to the degree of ‘dis-ease’ we are causing to the intricate balance that regulates the planet’s climate, on which we so intimately depend.
My entire reason for writing this book is that I feel I would be failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself if I did not attempt to point this out and indicate possible ways we can heal the world. I could not have contemplated producing it even two years ago, but I feel the time may now be more appropriate. I sense a growing unease and anxiety in people’s souls – an unease that still remains largely unexpressed because of the understandable fear of being thought ‘irrational’, ‘old-fashioned’, ‘anti-science’, or ‘antiprogress’.
We live in times of great consequence and therefore of great opportunity. This book offers inspiration for those who feel, deep down, that there is a more balanced way of looking at the world, and more harmonious ways of living. It will not only outline the kinds of approach that depend upon us seeing Nature as a whole, but also examine the great and practical value in seeing the nature of humanity as a whole. What I hope will become obvious is just how many answers we already have at our disposal, if our goal is to re-establish our rightful relationship with Nature and pull back from the brink of catastrophe. It is a goal I truly believe is achievable, if we remind ourselves of the essential grammar of harmony – a grammar of which humanity should always be the measure.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: The Imperial Valley would be a desert were three quarters of California’s river water not allocated for agricultural purposes. ‘Flood and furrow’ is employed here, which experts say wastes vast quantities of precious water. To keep pace with demand, water is being diverted from the Salton Sea, which is consequently drying up.
LEFT: 1864 trellis wallpaper design, by William Morris (1834–1896). Morris was an artist associated with the English Arts and Crafts Movement and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Morris developed strong views on mechanization, the environment and on the need for conservation in both the natural and built worlds.
Attachment to matter gives rise to passion
against Nature. Thus trouble arises in the whole
body; this is why I tell you: be in harmony.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
I want to begin in Cambridge, where I was an undergraduate over forty years ago. One of the colleges at Cambridge University is called Peterhouse. It was founded in 1284 and is the university’s oldest surviving college. Its medieval architecture is today among the most precious in a city that is unusually rich in striking historic buildings. Alongside portraits of past Masters of Peterhouse, the college hall is decorated with fabric hangings designed by William Morris. He was a leading inspiration in the nineteenth century for the romantic Arts and Crafts Movement, having set about rediscovering the lost techniques of embroidery, stained-glass window making, illumination and calligraphy, textile dyeing, printing and weaving. He did this as a defiant reaction to the roughshod commercial expansion of machine-based manufacturing of the time. Morris was not against machines. He was concerned about what machines were being put to do and was horrified by the human degradation of work in the nineteenth-century factory and how the land was being ruined by industrial pollution. He also lamented that art and beauty had no place in this factory-based world and felt that, as a consequence, human dignity lay in ruins. On the ancient stone walls of Peterhouse’s hall his work seems very much at home.
Some time after Morris completed these designs and they were placed there, they were joined by more modern fittings, symbols of the age of industrialization that he was so concerned about. Most visitors today would hardly give them a second thought: they are the hall’s electric lights. What makes them special is that they were the first to be switched on anywhere in the university. In the country as a whole they were second only to those in the Houses of Parliament the year before. They were installed at the insistence of the scientist John Kelvin to mark the six-hundredth anniversary of the college in 1884. The electricity for the lights came froma generator powered by a steam engine that was in turn powered by gas derived from coal.
The