Thank you very much indeed Jeremy (1). Two warm-up acts this evening, one more raucous than the other! The first extremely eloquent in their own way, I must say. This is the first time I’ve heard Weapons of Sound, and I was greatly moved and impressed. It is amazing what you can do with recycled rubbish – and I don’t want anybody saying that after my lecture!
It’s a great honour to be invited to give the eighth Cornwall Lecture, one of a succession of extremely fine contributions to help stimulate people in Cornwall to fashion different prospects for the future. My remit from Keith Hambly-Staite (2) this evening was very clear : Keith offered me a number of major themes, plus nine hopelessly intractable dilemmas which he felt that I must just like to touch on, and a couple of rather more open-ended questions about the meaning of life, to which the answer “42″ was not permitted ! He concluded modestly by suggesting that if I could actually demonstrate that sustainable development was the one thing that might make a difference to everybody in Cornwall, then I would be doing a good job!
In that respect, I think we find ourselves, in a very odd situation; sustainable development is certainly part of our lives but there’s a feeling that we are all hanging around waiting for sustainable development to start moving things big time- a sensation that sustainable development is ( and here I use Keith’s words) “on the cusp”. So I want to talk this evening about the psychology of transformation. What is it that makes people as individuals, as citizens of a region such as this, move from relatively passive subscribers to a set of beliefs and models of progress into a very different sense of active commitment and engagement in everything they do in their lives. Why is sustainable development still in the passive area of the brain rather than the active area?
At one level, after all , it’s as if sustainable development was a done deal. Listen to all the wise words from the world leaders at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg last year. They are all ( in theory at least ) subscribing to the notion that sustainable development is the only way forward. Tony Blair said in his speech: ” we know what the problem is and we know the answer to it – sustainable development.”
It’s the same with many of today’s business leaders ( whatever you may see in the media!) who have led from the front on sustainable development, adopting a model of business success that unhesitatingly includes the challenge of meeting wider social expectations in terms of the environment, social justice and so on. Elsewhere, many local authorities the length and breadth of this country now agree that sustainable development is the “convening principle” for bringing together all of their different concerns about the environment, communities and quality of life. New community plans and Local Strategic Partnerships are taking on that kind of remit, as are Regional Development Agencies. Here in the South West RDA, sustainable development is embedded in our project appraisal process so that everyone understands that , for us, economic development has to be done in ways that simultaneously support peoples’ environmental and social aspirations. Done deal!
So read the words, and you might think that we were already living in a sustainable world. But I do sometimes wonder whether all of those words amount to very much at all. Are we in reality confronting the phenomenon of ‘business as usual with a few green knobs on’? I oscillate wildly between those two persuasions!
I want to dwell for a moment on why it might be that this change process is more about image than it is about substance. Why is it so difficult? Up until now, we’ve done sustainable development by accretion; we’ve added things on slice by slice, layer by layer, issue by issue, project by project. Nothing wrong with that kind of incremental change; it’s how change mostly happens, not by quantum leaps. But then you have to look at what sustainable development is being added on to. And here I invite you to think about PIMMS, not the drink, unfortunately, but PIMMS representing POLITICS, INSTITUTIONS, MONEY, and MINDSETS – in the plural.
Lets start with Politics. We tend to do politics in this country by tribal loyalty. We are not good at lifting up our eyes beyond the particular party political persuasion that we are first drawn to, and which then serves as the principal source of political meaning from that point on. We find it hard to imagine that we might have more in common with people of other persuasions, other tribal loyalties, than those of some within our own tribe. And yet sustainable development is not about tribal, political loyalties. It transcends those difficult and deep-seated ideological and political persuasions that people feel such loyalty to today.
On institutions, many of the institutions that hold sway in this country (historically) are very narrowly defined by sector, whether its business institutions or trade unions, or voluntary sector, or farming or industry or whatever. Again, sustainable development doesn’t work by sector; it works most powerfully as a concept when it transcends sectors, enabling people in different parts of society to come together across and despite their sectors to share a different perspective on how to improve peoples lives today and tomorrow.
On Money, the first of my ‘Ms’, I’ve become increasingly focused on the way in which public expenditure in theory gets allocated through what have been described as “vertical silos” by specific government departments. Sustainable Development in that respect is hopeless. It isn’t an issue, it isn’t a theme, it isn’t a project; it isn’t something that one government department can take on and make work uniquely in its own right. Sustainable Development invites people to see the world in a different, cross-cutting horizontal way that challenges each of these vertical silos which dominate the landscape of our lives.
As for Mindsets, this is perhaps the most important of them all. Sustainable development is being “added on” to a dominant economic mindset fashioned since the end of the Second World War. Decades of economic material progress have led people to believe that this particular pattern of progress can be sustained indefinitely over time. For this model, economic growth is all that matters; the politicians that generate higher levels of economic growth (regardless of its impact on people and their environment) tend to end up getting higher levels of crosses on their ballot papers! Yet if you go and ask people what really matters to them, it isn’t actually GDP growth in itself, but things like their community, education, security, freedom from crime, the ability to walk home safely, access to public transport, quality of life, no graffiti on the wall – not economic growth per se.
It’s worth remembering that for governments, the end goal of the exercise of their democratic mandate is to improve peoples’ well being. The means available to them for achieving this are many and various, though securing as high a level of economic growth as possible has become by far the most important. Indeed, it has become so dominant that people seem to have forgotten that the purpose of this economic growth is in fact to improve well being. Economic growth may well have served post – war politicians well as a reasonably accurate proxy for human wellbeing or contentment, but now that the environmental, social and psychological externalities entailed in generating decades of economic growth in that way are weighing more heavily on people than ever before, there is a pressing need to re-open the debate about economic growth and wellbeing itself.
Survey data regularly show that there is no straightforward connection between levels of affluence and personal happiness . Perhaps counter-intuitively, the pursuit of financial security is often associated with declining quality of life in much of the West . There is a large amount of US literature on the reduced wellbeing of family life in the middle class as well as the working class, as a result of intensified work place pressures over the last twenty years. The percentage of people describing themselves as “very happy” has declined since the late fifties, despite the fact that personal real income has more than doubled since that time.
Elsewhere, there is plentiful , quantitative and qualitative evidence of a broader issue: that rising average affluence in the West has not been associated with the elimination of many psychological ills. Money can buy us goods and services undreamed of in previous centuries, but it can’t buy love or meaning, or at least not for long or not reliably.
So that’s what we are trying to add sustainable development on to: tribal political loyalties; institutions that wield influence by keeping their horizons narrow, policy development and public expenditure processes that are inherently ” unjoined- up”; and mind sets that are still exclusively geared to images of exponential economic growth over time. The difficulties of trying to graft sustainable development on to that lot are then compounded by the way in which we try and do it, still relying on the time- honoured tactics of scaring the life out of people, threatening them with tales of terrible ecological doom and gloom if they don’t listen to what we’re saying, “guilt tripping” them in such a way that they feel bad about their own personal contribution to the impending apocalypse! Psychologically speaking, this is not a good trick. Guilt, fear and anger will only get you so far in terms of transforming society and until we learn to articulate what sustainable development really means in a very different and much more positive language , it will be hard to make much progress.
But let me give you one example of how difficult that can be. Today, Jeremy Pope and myself were representing the RDA at the Select Committee Hearing organised by the Regional Assembly to scrutinise the work of the RDA in helping to improve the rural economy here in the South West. ( It’s a good process, by the way ; even though the Assembly itself may not yet have the kind of democratic credentials that a directly elected assembly might one day have for the Region, it has a lot more democratic accountability than we do on the RDA! It’s critically important that RDA’s help to bridge that democratic deficit by ensuring that these scrutiny processes are properly and responsibly carried through.
Amongst other things, we had a lively discussion about why the RDA put such a strong emphasis on the environment. Why were we making such a priority of the Market and Coastal Towns Initiative ( co-sponsored with the Countryside Agency)? Or the new Rural Renaissance Initiative? Or our conversion grants for disused farm buildings and so on. One of our scrutineers suggested that we appeared to be more influenced by the works of Beatrix Potter than the current realities of the South West’s rural economy! For the RDA, however this concept of the environment as a principal driver of economic progress is something we have become familiar with over the last three years., and we see it as a very positive part of fulfilling our remit. But I’m certain that the Assembly member giving us such a hard time for our Beatrix Potter nostalgia really did see us as ‘bunny huggers’, as the people who are there to make it all look nice, to worry about the birds and the bees, but not really to get our hands dirty with the serious business of wealth creation. An environmental add-on as it were, not the economic mainstream.
In trying to dispel that misperception of sustainable development, I quoted from a very interesting piece of research commissioned some time ago by the National Trust to calculate the economic value of all our special landscapes here in the South West . The study revealed that 78% of all holiday trips taken to the South West each year are motivated by those special landscapes; further analysis showed that conserved landscapes in the South West attract a spend of £2.3 billion from holiday trips, support 97,200 jobs or 43% of all tourist related jobs in the region.
We don’t do enough to demonstrate that our finite physical environment ( the cherished landscapes which we make so much of in our art, in our poetry, in our personal wonderment at the natural world) also generates enormous economic value. There’s no fundamental incompatibility here; sustainable development is about all these things. It is indeed about spiritual reconnection with the land, about understanding the relationship between humankind and the natural world, and at the same time, its about economic development, and the pursuit of prosperity in a very different way. >
The RDA is very involved in the follow- up to the report from Don Curry (3) whose Commission came up with a host of different recommendations as to how we might reconceptalise the use of land to produce food for the future. The essence of that report was all captured in one word: “reconnection”. Reconnecting producers with consumers, reconnecting different parts of the value chain in the food and farming industries; reconnecting people with the land, and people with farmers.
Now, at one level that all sounds extraordinarily reassuring, possibly even a bit sentimental, a nostalgic throw back to the way things used to be. But I want to challenge this idea. Reconnected farming is not about some small-scale, add-on sentimentalised niche for food producers who can’t quite make it in the big wide world of competitive global agriculture; it’s actually a different model of food production which will require a very different pattern of logistics, retail and marketing. Sure, start with the local box schemes and farmers’ markets, that’s fine. But then allow your mind to widen out from that. Start thinking strategically about what would happen if every single supermarket in this region somehow felt that it was part of its responsibility (its “licence to operate” in that community) to source ‘x’ percent of its fresh produce from local suppliers; you can fill in the ‘x’ yourself, depending on whether you are a retailer or farmer! Then widen out a bit further, and ask yourself what would happen if every single public sector body in the South West ( and especially here in Cornwall) was able to source ‘x’ percent of the food that it uses in hospitals, schools, local authorities, or government agencies from local suppliers. (there are already some very good examples up and running in Cornwall). Widen out a bit further. What would happen if every single private sector business that sold food, (pubs, restaurants, entertainment facilities, destinations etc) was able to source ‘x’ percent of their produce from local suppliers? Unworldly? I don’t think so. We are so wrapped in the fatalistic mindset of our food being somehow detached from local producers and suppliers that we have lost the vision of local agriculture as it still exists in many other parts of Europe. (The last five minutes of this lecture, for instance would be incomprehensible to anyone living in Italy, because in Italy these links between local suppliers and local consumers are still written naturally into their culture).
It’s not just on food and farming that this kind of thinking should be brought to bear. Take Tourism which is so enormously important here in Cornwall. Calculations show that anywhere between 20 and 30% of Cornwall’s GDP comes from tourism. In preparing for this lecture, I was particularly interested in reading a publication from the In Pursuit of Excellence stable, entitled Pathways to the Future (4): Tourism, Leisure and the Environment 2001. It reminds us very eloquently, that the Cornish economy depends utterly on the quality of its physical assets. That’s what is special. And if you are going to keep what is special about Cornwall truly special then the whole tourism industry is going to have to think about itself differently. At the moment (with a number of wonderful exceptions) most tourism businesses in Cornwall are still playing with the idea of sustainable tourism. The core proposition for most, remains , maximising the return from tourism in the South West. But if that’s what tourism means to the South West, or Cornwall forget it. It isn’t difficult to think about ways of maximising the short term return from tourism from Cornwall. There are all sorts of things that can be done to promote the kind of tourism, if the sheer number of people coming over the border into the county is the sole measure of success. The basic thinking of many people in business, in local government, in tourism bodies is still about numbers, about scale, about quantity; it is not about quality, about real, value-adding sustainability over time- which was one of the key messages of the IPE publication.
But anyone who comes to Cornwall as often as our family does, begins to see the danger that the real quality of Cornwall, that ‘elusive specialness’, will be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who want to share that quality, that specialness. In that respect, the Eden “phenomenon” begs all sorts of questions about how to improve the infrastructure of Cornwall to accommodate its astonishing success. What will happen if we have a succession of these success stories, with the National Maritime Museum Cornwall and other places? What will happen to the infrastructure on which your prosperity depends? Even success as wonderful as Eden’s can be unsustainable, if it is not managed in the right way.
So, to the point: if I have a challenge tonight, it is the challenge of working out what it would mean for Cornwall to become the first completely and genuinely sustainable county in the UK. How would it work? What would it add in terms of the value to peoples’ quality of life, their prosperity, their livelihoods?
Four very quick examples of where we might look for answers to those questions. First, let’s look at construction. People’s image of a place is shaped both by the natural environment and by the built environment. Many people would say that the built environment in Cornwall isn’t particularly special; its not the draw that brings people here – notwithstanding some splendid heritage “trophies”. So, what would make the built environment in Cornwall special? The Regional Development Agency is currently promoting as actively as we possibly can a Charter for Sustainable Construction to ensure that as many people as possible have an opportunity to live and work in buildings that comply with some of the highest standards anywhere else in Europe in terms of energy efficiency, waste management, building materials and so on.
For me it is inconceivable any new building goes up anywhere in Cornwall that doesn’t now meet those standards. On what possible basis are we still putting up shoddy boxes, poor office spaces, and soul-destroying retail outlets, when we know the enormous benefits that can already be achieved by high quality, people friendly sustainable design, architecture and construction. Why shouldn’t Cornwall take a bold leap and say “we are not going to have any new buildings that don’t meet the standards of the South West Sustainable Construction Charter”?
Indeed, for my second example, why doesn’t Cornwall go a bit further and say it wants to be the first genuinely sustainable county in the whole of the UK in terms of energy: the most energy efficient, with the highest percentage of renewables, and the lowest percentage of people living in fuel poverty. There are plenty of energy pioneers here in Cornwall, land owners, engineers, entrepreneurs, planners. (And I hope the RDA has done its bit through the Tolvaddon Energy Park) – and the establishment of Regen SW, but it’s all a bit low key. What we need is a real stretch target for which Cornwall would become not just known in the UK but renowned throughout the world.
Which brings me on to the wonders of wind power! May I invite you to think here of three different perspectives. Firstly, wind turbines are an embodiment of the future. They speak of and to the future. They are statements of future intent, whatever you may think of them aesthetically. Why is this important? Well, Cornwall needs to be just a bit careful about the degree to which it is over- dependent upon its heritage, on its past, on the built and natural environment as we have inherited it from our ancestors and re-interpreted it now for current and future use. But Cornwall needs as powerful an articulation of the future as it has of the past. And I know of no more powerful, symbolic, manifestation of the future than a cluster of wind turbines.
Secondly they speak of a more integrated use of land, opening up the possibility not just of using land for food, but for a variety of sustainable options. And thirdly, local wind farms represent a very different energy world in which electricity is not necessarily generated in huge vast power stations hundreds of miles away, but comes from increasingly distributed, small scale energy systems in which local communities and local people have a personal and indeed a commercial stake. In a much smaller, humble way, I see the wind farms in Cornwall as another version of the alchemy of Eden through which the debased coinage of Cornwall’s industrial heritage is being transmuted into beacons of prosperity for the future.
So much for wind power! The Third main area of concern is a simple one: don’t forget the message we heard earlier from The Weapons of Sound. We have an opportunity now to completely rethink the way we manage all the waste generated by our inefficient, profligate way of life. Regrettably, as I’m sure you know, the UK lags behind most other EU countries in terms of recycling and waste reduction strategies. And it remains one of the weakest areas on environmental policy for this government – as for every other preceding government in my lifetime!
But things are changing. Here in Cornwall, the need for change is more urgent than anywhere in the UK, because the County is quite literally running out of holes in the ground. Wholly unsustainable plans for a mass-burn incinerator have been shelved, and the Council’s alternative strategy has been much better received. The essence of any strategy, however remains the same: reduction and recycling. And Central Government has to work much harder to secure proper funding at a local level to make all this happen. I was therefore happy to learn of the Waste Management Awards which I will be announcing this evening. These Awards ( which are an extension of the Cornwall Lecture this year) are sponsored by the County Environmental Trust and are about encouraging primary school children to think about what they call ” smart waste” – that is waste which is recycled. This is an important project because it is with the enthusiasm h of young people that change will come. I look forward to seeing the results of these Awards in the summer.
My fourth and final example is fishing. As many of you will know, Newlyn launched a regeneration strategy for the Cornish fishing industry last year. A lot of new investment is needed in the harbour itself and the surrounding area, both to support a modern fishing industry and to diversify into tourism and leisure. It’s an up-beat message- which in itself is a rather special phenomenon when most of the messages coming out of the fishing industry today are incredibly downbeat. The strategy includes a few references to sustainable fishing. (one small part of the Cornish fishing industry is seeking accreditation under the Marine Stewardship Council), but I have to ask : what extent is sustainability really the driving force behind this new model of what Newlyn could become? Is the ‘sustainable bit’ just another add-on, another “accretion” to the business – as-usual model? I don’t know, but for me this is a real benchmark of what sustainable development in Cornwall might mean.
Is it unreasonable for someone like me to demand sustainability of a community like Newlyn? After all, the fishing industry is in terrible trouble, and Newlyn itself is facing huge economic and social problems. And now you are going to beat it up on sustainability issues too. But what exactly is the point in spending millions of pounds regenerating a fishing industry if sustainability isn’t absolutely at the heart of these plans? Have we really not learned the lessons yet that if our fisheries are not managed sustainably, then there won’t be any fisheries left anyway?
Just four examples: construction, renewable energy, waste and fisheries. But they could be multiplied indefinitely. Is sustainability at the heart of what Cornwall aspires to? Or is it just another add-on that happens to be useful today because it seems to be in fashion? I rather suspect that this is a generational thing. My generation has had incredible difficulty incorporating sustainable development into our political loyalties, our institutions, and our spending priorities; worse yet, the wiring in our brains hasn’t coped well with the arrival of this interloper in our midst, insisting on a way of looking at people, places and prosperity so different that it seems to challenge the very essence of our world view.
Happily, younger people seem not to be as blocked as we are; their wiring isn’t quite as fixed as ours is, they see the opportunities in a different way of thinking. In that respect, just think of the power of the Combined Universities of Cornwall and what that now means for the future of young people in this county and beyond. This is such an opportunity, such an important part of the future of Cornwall. It will be the RDA’s single largest investment in the county today, potentially an enormously important economic multiplier in the Cornish economy. And sustainability must be at the heart of this vision as well.
That’s the challenge: can Cornwall so embrace the opportunity of sustainable development to create the wealth it needs in such a way that Cornwall is not just a special place for the people who live here now, but a special enough place to persuade young people to stay here? Embrace it in such a way that Cornwall is not just special to the people who visit Cornwall today, but special enough to persuade them to keep coming back year in, year out, without increasing their environmental foot print? Can Cornwall embrace sustainability with such enthusiasm and purpose that it becomes special for the rest of the world?
(1) Jeremy Pope – Deputy Chairman: South West Regional Development Agency
(2) Keith Hambly Staite – Previously Director of In Pursuit of Excellence: A campaign to raise the profile of Cornwall through the identification and promotion of the County’s economic and social achievements. The Cornwall Lecture was establishes as part of this initiative in 1995.
(3) Don Curry – Report of Policy Commission on the future of Farming and Food 2002. Cabinet Office.
(4) Pathways to the Future was published by In Pursuit of Excellence in 2001 as part of its publications programme designed to highlight achievements and promote discussion of strategic issues.