Talking to young people - Green politics

I had the pleasure of talking to the bright young girls at South Hampstead High School just last Friday about green politics. They were clearly knowledgeable about the environment as well as about current affairs. The Euro-zone crisis was top on their minds. But I soon realised that there is still a big gap between the idea of the environment being important and seeing it as a political issue.

To them green politics is about an issue that all accept is important and has to be dealt with - but what has it got to do with real politics? That's about real issues like the threat of insolvency to countries, jobs, growth etc. A resident made a related point to me at my surgery - that our talk about the environment is perceived as talking about trees and plants rather than people!

How far from the truth! I should have pointed out that wanting to put the environment to one side and talk about the pressing issues is a bit like wanting to talk about saving your new TV when your house is about to be washed away.

But its clear that we also need to explain better why action is necessary on the environment now and why it is interconnected with everything else. We need to explain why green politics is important not just some work on the environment as an add on.

To many of us it seems obvious. People live within an ecosystem - without it we cannot survive. For the 6bn people ( and expected to be 9bn by 2050) on a planet that is already exploited to its full, which suffers from water scarcity, fuel scarcity and real threats to food security to avoid conflict or famine or both we need to live very differently. Otherwise our fragile ecosystems will collapse.

And there is a way that does allow us to bring things into balance but it is one that challenges consumerism and the idea that owning more and more is the ultimate aim of human existence. It has a different perspective of human beings - as creative and social beings that achieve real well-being through friendship, family, community and creativity.

It places a high premium on a fair distribution of resources so that we don't need enormous amounts of growth so that just a little trickles down to the very poorest. It also places a high premium on respecting the world we live in and depend upon.

This means changing things so improve our democratic structures to challenge the power of the big corporations which are unable to look at the world through a different lens. It involves people coming together to say they want a different approach.

It means managing our economy so that we can ensure high enough levels of employment but without making the economy all about growth driven by advertising and a manic need to buy more and keep up with the neighbours. It means addressing a financial services sector that seeks higher and higher returns without an interest in the longer term, and ensuring that banks aren't so big that we have no choice other than to prop them up and we need a fairer system nationally and internationally. That's essential if we aren't going to be on a constant search for growth.

Thats' not to say that growth isn't needed for Africa - it is - nor that we don't need it now in the UK. We do need it to get out of recession.

So still more work to show why we need green politics and a green perspective not just an environmental policy as an adjunct to business as usual (or at least seeking to save business as usual).

Losing Small Wars, Frank Ledwidge

This is a great book.....

Visit to India

Just back from Goa (and a day in Mumbai). On a superficial level, at least, much has changed since my last visit 4 years ago with large amounts of construction - apartment blocks where not seen before and new roads some in slightly surprising places.



On the positive side, people do not seem unduly worried about finding work - hope I was talking to the right people as based on a slightly small sample of friends, people I bumped into, drivers, and the odd shack owner. At least in the tourist business all looks good. Now very often Russian tourists as well as Indian and western tourists. And some of the tourist areas despite like the Palolem strip though jammed from end to end (or almost because there is one protected area with amazing forest coming almost to the shoreline) seems reasonably well organised and the water clean.



There is also a new vibrant community of artists, writers and others. I went to a book launch at Litterati by a world renowned photographer Dayanita Singh, who now lives in an old house in my mother's village - and in fact previously the family house of her great uncle's family. It was a great setting outside in the garden at the back of another old Goa house - this one crammed with books and not just the old moth eaten, monsoon battered books that we would read as children in our parents house. The reading was attended by a collection of writers one even all the way from West Africa, another who is a well-known biographer of Graham Greene, but also architects (one of whom arrived in his electric car) and an assortment of the new Goa intelligentsia. And it’s an intelligentsia from all of India and from Goa too - cosmopolitan and breaching all those sectarian divides.



The old city of Panaji is now better protected and Fontainhas always a pretty part of the town near the old Rua D'Ourem reasonably well looked after but without being a dead village of holiday homes as we see far too often in the pretty old towns of the West. We visited architects here as well as going to a lovely little tea shop and outdoor restaurant. The old Portuguese Secretariat, previously the palace of Adil Khan an earlier ruler of Goa, is to be restored as well bringing this landmark building back into public use.



That was all the good part - and of course much much more! But there are also lots of challenges which it seems as if Goans are seeking to tackle but they are not easy to resolve. The constant talk is about corruption and a political system which operates through people building up vote banks by buying people over - jobs, money etc! How to break out of this system is the intractable problem that none of us know the answer to. Whilst Sri Anna Hazare goes on hunger strike for the whole of India, Goans struggle to figure out how to deal with this issue locally. My feeling is that we need political parties with a real clear mission, and by that I don't mean the BJP, but people who are putting forward a real platform not simply to be less corrupt than the last lot. In that way, perhaps they can build up a real following not simply one based on how much money one has to pay out. But we also need the people who constantly complain about the politicians not to expect them to bend the rules in their favour. So two limbs here - new political parties and a social compact amongst ordinary people. How much easier it is to say things than to get them done!



As you would expect, I noticed the environmental challenges too. The most obvious not surprisingly is the waste issue with huge amounts of waste strewn all over the place sadly even in some beautiful spots like the lake outside Karmali station where we went for some early morning birdwatching. Though there are some collection systems this doesn't seem to be the case in all places. And though there are some signs of waste being scavenged and recycled there is still a lot that isn’t. I wonder whether Goa doesn't need to be taxing plastic bottles or at least seeking to bring some sort of plant that uses recycled plastic as a resource into the area. Or otherwise even a waste to energy incinerator would be better than burning plastic in the fields! Lots of opportunities here and Goan politicians are aware of this - a very long serving politician who had been an Environment Minister said to me a few years back that he had tried to commission a waste to energy incinerator many years back but there had been too much opposition! It looks as if the NIMBY issue is a worldwide one!



I also worry about the water quality even in the sea especially on the long tourist strip in the north. It seems to be affected by the large number of boats in the area and possibly poor infrastructure in the surrounding area. But it’s still beautiful - and I’m sure action can be taken to improve it.



The destructive open cast mining system is temporarily halted as a result of public interest litigation. So well done to campaigners here and good results from the court system as well!



The other issue is highways construction which seems to continue – too much to gain here for the politicians with the potential for cuts and lots of contracts to award. The most worrying is widening of a national highway that cuts across this populated coastal strip. I fear that it will bring HGVs along this route cutting up villages and towns. Surely we don’t need a large highway through such a densely populated area! Local people have mixed feelings because of congested roads with some being keen and others worried about devastation to their areas.



The plans for additional smaller roads cutting across fields is also a worry to people who fear losing the last quiet tracts of land – and these can be beautiful with coconut trees and paddy fields, kingfishers and herons, mango and cashew blossom etc. I hope that just as with how waste can and should be dealt with, Goa leapfrogs the Western world and goes for a system of clean and quiet trains and maybe folding bicycles for journeys at either end. I fear this is a yearning for a quieter more peaceful era of my childhood holidays, but it will be so much more pleasant and safer too.



So I hope with courage, determination and imagination Goa manages to leapfrog the West in terms of systems of transport, waste, energy use etc. It has all the potential for doing so – with an educated and aware middle class, entrepreneurship, capital availability etc – and being at that crossroads where it is possible to take the path that avoids being locked into a system of high energy needs and other serious environmental problems.