Transcript- A manifesto for nature and re-enchantment
Well, Don, my name's John Denham. I'm the director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics here at Southampton University. And our webinar today is exploring the relationship between people, life and nature. And we're going to be exploring a new publication towards a popular environmentalism, a manifesto for nature and readjustment. And the speakers we've got today, an excellent panel. We have Tobias Phipps of the Common Good Foundation, who's written the manifesto, Alison Bones, who's the chief executive of the New Forest National Parks Authority, and Christie, who's a lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Environment to State at the University. Sorry, just a couple of bits of housekeeping there is on the screen for you a question and answer button the Q&A button. If you want to put questions to the panel, please do put those there and I will try to take questions from there. When we come to the discussion, there's also a chat function that you can use to discuss amongst yourselves. It's easier for me if you put your questions on the Q&A rather than the chat, because I'm an open look if they go into the chat. But I hope that's reasonably clear. So welcome again and. You pleased to get the discussion going. Thanks very much, John. And to double team for organising event. And thanks everyone for coming along. A word on the process of how this manifesto came about. Before I get into the substance of it, firstly, it began as a series of conversations beginning at the back end of last year and then through the new year this year during lockdown. And Ian, who's speaking next and and various others are involved in these conversations. And we began, I suppose, with a criticism of much of contemporary mentalism, which I'll get into shortly. So that was the kind of lead up. And then I wrote this out of those discussions. And I also want to thank purpose who supported this work and made it possible. I should begin by noting that this report mostly uses talks about Britain rather than England in particular, but much is specifically relevant to England. And I think often when we have these conversations, and especially when the conversation is about the countryside, we are implicitly, if not explicitly talking about England in particular. So I'm going to try and bring out the English specificities of this as I go through it. So like I say, there was a feeling shared amongst those of us who took part in the discussions that there was something missing in contemporary environmentalism, large swathes of it, anyway. So that a conversation that should be about natural limits, about nature, about how people live, had been reduced to something entirely abstract, something to be resolved at Davos by billionaires like Bill Gates dimming the sun or whatever he wants to do. And then the flipside of this abstraction was a kind of inane politics of personal and very petty ethical consumerism, which was best exemplified by Allegra Stratton while she was the spokesman for COP before it happened, writing a big editorial, basically saying that we could all contribute to climate change by reducing issues before we put them in the dishwasher. So on the one hand, this abstraction and global targets, and on the other hand, this pointless, inconsequential politics of the gesture. And there seemed to be nothing in between. Nothing that affected. All talked about the substantive ways in which we actually live our life. Well, that talked about how climate change and nature were going to affect the things that make up that life. So our work, our relationships, how we spend our free time, how are all those going to change? How could they change and how might they have to change? Those were the kind of questions we're interested in. We are also wary that there is a style of environmental politics that could alienate many outside of the activist public. And I've seen this play out in previous projects I've been involved with to do with farming in which farmers feel like they're being lectured to by a bunch of urban environmentalists who have no relationship with the land. But this potential conflict could and likely will resurface in the years to come in all kinds of ways. And I think that an early end of this. During the mayoral campaign in London last year in the arguments about low emission zones. So I grew up on a farm, but I live now in between east and north London. And usually during a mayoral campaign or any electoral season, there's almost kind of North Korean style of support for labour with posters on the walls. But this time they were gone. And often there were kind of A4 posters not announce any party political affiliation, but endorsing John Bailey and basically just campaigning, saying reopen the roads, scrap the restrictions and scrap the low emissions. And I think we're pretty unlikely to get a fully fledged yellow vest start movement in England. But lingering resentment could grow if environmentalism is seen as something punitive, distant, prohibitive and opposed to the provinces and so on. And we also felt that contemporary environmentalism failed to tap into a sources of sentiment and dispossession that are common in England and have been for centuries. The sense that human beings have come radically out of kilter, kilter with nature, that we've lost the rituals and rites, the festivals, the forms of work, the ones integrated us with our natural surroundings. This was obviously brought to the fore by COVID, where our lives became bare, digitally mediated, stripped of real present encounter of vitality. We lost physical connexion with others as well as our relationship with the nature. That surrounds. Us. And yet there were also seeds of something else during COVID, but especially in those early months which had more hope in them. There was hungering for something more for which relationship with nature, and it was found in the waiting list for allotments. The queues outside garden centres when they were the first thing to be opened, the rediscovery and the endless articles about wild swimming and illicit rambling in the English countryside. It became illegal and in the movement of people from cities to the countryside. So it seemed like there was a desire for people once again to find their place in nature. So our group tried to sketch out a politics that was both romantic, appealing, so rich a sense of what human beings are, how we relate to nature, how we live in it, and how we could live more fully human lives with nature and the politics. It was populist, so it worked. The mutual benefit of all that wasn't punitive, that provided good jobs and that went along. Rather than rubbing up against the popular the grain of popular sentiment in in Britain and England in particular. So this view begins by thinking about what its proper relationship is and how we have come out of kilter in England. And nowhere more so in England is the story of dispossession and disenchantment deeper rooted here. It's obviously tied up with enclosure, both enclosure as a real world policy with effects on patterns of agricultural work and where people lived and so on. But also enclosure is something which has taken on new power and force and cultural imagination. Enclosure is, in a sense, bigger than the the series of apps that it was at the time. It's now become something much bigger in our imagination, and it fits into this plucky, just Etonian notion of a rebellion against romantic England. Against Romantic England being suppressed by what William Cobbett called the thing I want. Very briefly and somewhat self-indulgent, he read from a Raymond William's book, The Country in the City, which probably most of you know, which speaks to the enduring nature and the specifically English nature of of that rebellion. So he is talking about in literature how writers, poets, novelists and so on all have this sense of this idyllic Arcadian England disappearing out of view along with that countryside. And he's he begins by talking about George Stewart and so on. And then he writes how and how they were describing this England disappearing along with their childhood. And then he writes, But then what seemed like an escalator began to move. Stirred traced this ending to two periods in closure after 1861 and residential settlement after 1900. Yet this at once takes us into the period of Thomas Hardy's novels written between 1871 and 1896 and referring back to rural England since the 1850s. And had not. Critics insisted that it was here in Hardy. So we found the record of the great climactic change in rural life, the disturbance and destruction of what one writer has called the timeless rhythm of agriculture in the seasons. And that was also the period of Richard Jeffreys, looking back from the 1870s to the old Hodge, and saying that there had been more change in rural England in the previous half century, that is, since the 1820s than any previous time. And then he goes along, he goes. But now the escalator was moving without pause for the 1820s and 1930s, with the last years of Colbert directly in touch with the rural England of his time. But looking back to the happier country, the old England of his boyhood during the 1770s and 1780s, and so on and so forth, through John Player and Goldsmith to Crabb all the way back to Thomas Moore and beyond to the 1300s. So there is something enduring and permanent in this idea of a romantic Arcadian England being destroyed. But none of this, it seems to me, actually discredits appeals to the past or implies that things haven't changed because of course they have. We can see that they're changing more and more now. And nostalgia is a universal human field and offers consolation and comfort and can potentially be a inspiring call to action. So it's worth thinking about the specific forms that the contemporary expression of what Raymond Williams was describing taken out and what they reflect. And I know that you've all been sent the document yesterday, but I'm going to paraphrase a bit from the middle section of that. Not now. On the specific nature of the disenchantment that we feel and the specific ways in which climate change contributes to that. So that climate change, though a lived reality for billions, has become an abstract and technocratic issue. Divorced from questions about how we live is a consequence of a much wider story. Our starting point was that human beings occupy a distinctive position within the natural world. We are of it and therefore cannot be fully ourselves when we are separated from it. Our abusive nature and our alienation from it damages us. And there's abundant research on the value to our well-being from encounters with nature. In the sociology of religion. Mansfield described how the Enlightenment led to Modernity's instrumental rationalism supplanting old ways magic tradition in effect in a lived, visceral relationship with nature. So where previously people had lived in what they were called a great enchanted garden. And again, you can see the accuracy of Robbie Williams's comments always now subject to rational calculus, whether scientific in the physical world or philosophic in the ethical world. He called this process comet. He saw he did not do that. He called this process disenchantment. COVID and I retreat from the physical to the virtual and mediated can be seen as the intensification of disenchantment. And there's obviously no purchase in abandoning the legacy of the Enlightenment cause to restore pre-modern pastoralism on the eve. Not just because of that utopianism, but also because of the extent of the Britishness and poverty, that way of life. Nevertheless, something was lost and it was a direct and sensuous relationship with our natural surroundings and an understanding of the limits they imposed upon us as surely as we imposed limits on them. The most obvious consequence of it is climate change, but it's evident everywhere from our literacy illiteracy about the species of the natural world to a specialised, indifferent approach to animal life. Today's factory farms a triumph of enlightenment, rationalism and the free markets division of Labour pass unloved and unremembered. Our relationship with nature then has come out of kilter. Never before. We live life so distant from natural ecosystems, so superficially freed from that constraints and so bereft of that wonder. A richer environmentalism would begin with a proper appreciation for the role of human beings as natural creatures possessed with unique capabilities but limited and given endlessly free and self-created. The human relationship with nature is obviously a longstanding philosophical probably pre-dates Genesis. And there are some like Bill Gates, but also the scientists who were taking part in gain of function research and move on and so on, who think that we can just tame and remake nature according to human will. And then you have the flipside of that here. Obviously, increasing prominence in the contemporary debate rewild is in primitive, primitive bits of various forms. You want to do things to retreat from nature and wild nature to flourish uninhibited. And one is not 2% and the other is borderline misanthropic because both of these human beings and nature is fundamentally in opposition. Both therefore ignore the role and dignity of human labour and both potentially result in similar outcomes. Finally, there is a third view that we take that human beings are not separate to nature and through self-consciousness and master of tools. Of course we are different, but we remain bound by its limits. The implication of this is that we should honour the human labour that shapes the rest of nature, while in turn being shaped by it. One example of this would be planting, for example, where you cut off the tops of trees and that allows them to live longer. And that's a human intervention exercise through tools. But that also benefits nature. When it comes to something like farming, this view might look like instead of rewilding in which productive farming disappears and the corollary of which presumably is high intensity farming. In labs we have low intensity, low input farming on a widespread scale, respectful of the accord between human beings and nature that persisted for around 7000 years in England until the 19th century. But the implications of this view are not limited to agriculture. They extend to our broader social arrangements. For. If we have nature and the humans, then the homes we make for ourselves in the world ought to reflect the distinctive features of the landscapes in which they're embedded. The gardens and parks, the rivers and seas, the architecture we build ought to be imprinted with the particularities of our natural environment. It is no coincidence that some of the most cherished and sought after parts of our built environment look at a Cotswold cottage, for example, which is loved. Built with local materials. This is protected by legislation. This view, then, is opposed to the flatness that increasingly characterises life under liberal globalisation, the uniform and often modularity. There's a French anthropologist who I like very much. Good luck. And he wrote about airports and hotels whose known places they had no relationship to, any particular tradition, culture, environment, textualist. They were purely functional, designed so that people felt always but also never at home. And I think lockdown accelerated what they had called disenchantment and led to a form of non life. Undifferentiated living with no particular reference point to any particular place or natural environment to the aim of a popular environmentalism rooted in human anthropology would be to reincarnate places of meaning in which humans were part of, not separate from their natural surroundings. And just briefly, because I don't want to get into the weeds in terms of our actual policy recommendations in too much detail because it's boring. But we came up with three broad, basic principles for a popular environmentalism. The first is that we should be a productive country and the industry should be nature and climate friendly. Secondly, the nature should be a common treasury for oil accessible to all and in which all people are involved with. And finally, that local places and environment should develop their distinctiveness and particularity. And the political implications of such an approach would would include in line with the first principle that we would have a green industrial policy that would stop the outsourcing of externalities, stop what's being called carbon leakage, in which we basically offshore our industry, therefore reducing our domestic emissions and congratulating ourselves and instead bringing back industrial jobs to this country, reshoring, supply chains, and making sure that green and produce can tight standards. That would be a kind of populist aspect of the of the agenda. It would also mean a transformation of agricultural subsidy policy post cap in line with a direction I've outlined earlier. The second principle the nature should be a common treasury for all. Let us believe that we should support calls for a national nature service to provide everyone from children to retirees opportunities to work and find solace in the countryside as it really is not some picture postcard version of the countryside, but it is a living and working place. And that could tie in with the agreed industrial policy, because people could be working on the land as forms of apprenticeships and that lead directly into vocational work, supporting farmers, dealing with degraded English countryside traditions rather than against them, but in nature friendly ways. And finally, the third principle the local places and environment should develop their distinctiveness and particularity. This would lead to better towns and cities with regulation investment to reverse the homogeneity from high streets, the building of beautiful housing, which gives young people the chance to have a home in the world. There is obviously a lot more on the actual policy in the report, but I don't go into too much detail on that right now. So I'll end just by saying that this is a starting point, an attempt to try and build a politics that is both green in industrial, radical and conservative, ancient and modern, and be an attempt to build a country more at ease with itself. Tobias, thank you very much. And that's a really. Good overview and a. Link to the manifesto is also being circulated in the chat. Please, can I encourage you as we go along, to start posting some questions under the Q&A book? Mr. Response Can we go to us and balance place? Alison. Thank you very much and thank you, Tobias. It's great to have the opportunity to respond to your important thinking at this time, especially because when I read it, it seems to me that it was very much at the heart of what somebody like me, who has the privilege to work in a national park and with the wider protected landscape family of England is kind of striving for. So I think one of the quotations that you heard in the report was the was from W.G. Mitchell in his book Landscape and Power. And here he said, I believe that landscape is the medium of exchange between the human and the natural. And, of course, that's something that has been ripped through all sorts of legislation and conventions on landscapes such as the European Landscape Convention, which still stands because it's true. The Council of Europe, as an area whose character is the result of action, the interaction between the natural and human factors of a place. So, you know, I'm sort of alighting on landscape, of course, because I work in a national park and national parks being, I think, a real expression and a real testbed really for the manifestation, the manifesto that you put forward. In fact, I was looking at the three principles that you've just run through. And I think we kind of, you know, with 24% of the landscape, if you take bees with us and we all know, first off, we are living working landscapes. So we're places where people and nature come together and we work with communities, businesses and landowners to be productive and industrious, as you outlined it, and also be good for nature and climate. So we're kind of aligned with the first principle. We're also places where there is, you know, an inherent common treasury for all in the nature that we hold. We are national parks visited by 19 million day visits here, 15 million people in the new forest alone, sources of respite, spiritual enrichments and givers of health and wellbeing. In fact, the National Park Movement was set up 70 years ago, around about the same time as the NHS. And I think given where we are with pandemics today, that's even more resonant and worth thinking about in terms of how we implement the manifesto. The manifesto. And of course we are inherently locally distinctive and particular, which was your third principle. And we have special qualities that are outlined in terms of why we're designated. In fact, I go as far as to say that we must be a collaboration of cultural culture, heritage and nature interests if we are to be successful. So this is, like you say, bringing environmentalism into much more mainstream and much more resonant with people in their communities. So I just thought I would spend my time today, given that context and that resonance with the three principles. Reflecting on a couple of things in the context of what I've been doing with my colleagues in National Parks in England over the last few years, and think about our role in the Green Revolution that you're sort of touching upon. But also secondly, to think about the leadership style and ethos of working I think might be needed for success. So to turn and firstly about our role in implementing the sorts of ideas you've outlined at this time of green revolution and green recovery, I think it's fair to say that the big issues of our time are very much being played out in places such as national parks, which are increasingly being seen as engine rooms for green recovery, where there's a better future for climate, nature and people where we're imagined as nodes, if you like, for this extended network of connected landscapes that give a greener future for all, and also inspiration for others to be able to act in their own communities outside of protected landscapes. So I would say that this is an unequalled moment through bodies such as national parks to start to try and take forward what you propose. You know, the inspiration of places like the new forest obviously come to the fore through the pandemic, the power of landscape designations in that they encompass natural beauty, cultural heritage and nature. It's that whole package that's really resonated with people at this time of crisis. And of course, locally we've been talking to people about how they would like to respond to the challenges ahead and the things we've faced over the last few years. And, you know, there is a thirst and willingness to build back better, greener and healthier. I suppose I'm a bit more optimistic that people day to day and communities are motivated and made to motivated and do want to take forward some of these themes into their lives going forward as we come out, hopefully of the pandemic. I mean, within this as well, I think it's worth noting that there has been a bit of a shift in focus in terms of, you know, places like national parks in England were, I guess in the past really designated because they had natural assets where people could go to experience them. But I think there's a bit of a flip happening in terms of the demand for nature happening everywhere. So it's not just about supply in places like national parks, it's about the demands coming from across the landscape. And I think there's a real opportunity in that to use the ideas that you having and others are having about reimagining places and harnessing this local distinctiveness that you talk about at scale to really make step change. And in fact, in this context, we've seen things come forward like national parks, cities over the last few years, rather disruptive idea that you could actually apply the principles of national parks in urban settings to have greener, greener, healthier, wilder and fairer societies. But there is a demand for this. And as John will know locally, we've very much been called upon to work with others in the in in the area, including the University of Southampton and the Southern Policy Centre in the University of Portsmouth, to come forward with ideas on what green recovery that's distinctive to our area could be. So there's a lot of leadership, there's a lot of experience which really can come forward to support what you're saying. So I feel quite optimistic about that. However, I really do recognise the assertion in the manifesto that we've been used to being quite punitive and blame written in the way that we speak about things. And I think it has prevented some of the kind of partnerships of working together for a green recovery that you kind of talk about. So we, you know, I often think in our own sector that we have quite. So lots of friendly fire, as I would call it, where groups of essentially elite organisations who've got people in them who are lucky enough to have been, you know, given the resources in times, have degrees and time to think in basically discussing with each other about what we should do next rather than looking outwards. And, you know, perhaps pause and stop speaking for a while and listen and think about how community and individuals can get involved. So I think there is something for us to reflect on together as to how we unlock that moment of opportunity that the pandemic has been giving us. Just to move on to my sort of second area, then, you know, if there is an opportunity and this manifesto starts to give us a hint towards the transformation that we might make. I think it's really important that we think about the leadership style and the ethos of working that's going to unlock the change as well as think about the change. And I think, first of all, for me, it's quite simple that rather than working in different pockets, we need to pool our resources in our landscapes and across our cities and towns to do more together. If we don't do this, we will all we will still be working in our silos. So I think there is a real need to pay special attention about how we build partnerships in protected landscapes and beyond. And for example, persuade more than just the nature campaigners and ecologists that we need to work together across sectors and to get those trusted relationships in place, which are not based on blame but are based on possibility of what we can do with each other. So I think this is about human nature. Like you said, it's about how we recognise each of our individual gifts and our gifts within our community to come together to make that difference. And I think landscape going back to the beginning is a place and a concept which really starts to do that. And Dame Fiona Reynolds wrote in her book The Fight for Beauty. The Beauty and Landscape touches emotions that are deeper and more meaningful for to us as a society. And then that helps to raise expectations of ourselves and others. So I'm suggesting here that we need to work consciously and purposefully to reach hearts as well as to our own minds and to be intellectual about this and get quite practical. And perhaps that's partly what you meant by choosing the word enchantment, which is a quite an emotional term to use. So I think that any talking target driven, scientifically, scientifically defined approach has to be met with the understanding of a human spirit and the way that we as people work. So it's knowledge and awareness of what it means to be human working together. One of my heroines, Jane Goodall, I think does this really, really well. In fact, she won the Templeton Prise this year, which recognises her life's work on animal intelligence. But they were recognising in the giving that award that she had humility, spiritual curiosity. Her achievements went beyond scientific research to define what it means to be human. And she herself, she calls herself an advocate rather than a activist, which she said has a ring of aggressiveness about it, which I think was really interesting because she believed that people would only change from within. And so to meet hearts and minds as well as minds, I think we really have to think about how we connect with people as individuals, that we support each other, that rather than only challenge one another and blame one another. And so for me, this is why your manifesto, I think, is so important. It gives us hope that we might start to think about each other as gifted human beings that can work with each other across the landscape, bringing our talents and skills to the to the task in front of us, and hopefully to make it, you know, again, with the word ring tournament, I sort of feel joyful and lighter about it. And that should be the goal. We should enjoy working together on this mission. So I think those that kind of summarise what I want to say. I've reflected on the role that the landscape has in leading what's become termed the Green Revolution in England. And of course, that's reflected in your manifesto. But I've also said something about the leadership style, the reaching the hearts and minds of people and what it might take to truly transform our fortunes in leading the response to climate and nature and health emergencies. So my final ask really for all of us is that we do commit to building bigger and better and more joined up human networks when we think about those natural networks and systems that we also want to build and that we're mindful of all times, that we hold the heritage of ourselves as people, as well as our natural heritage in our hands and the possibilities of the future generations as well, and that we have to therefore tap into each other and our authentic being. And certainly when I think about young people coming into the environmental movement, I want them to come in as being able to be themselves, not somebody else. What is so they can understand their own power when they when they come become the environmental leaders of the future. So I think coming away from the blame game and really tapping into human nature is what it will take to make that power real. So for me, that's the real work that comes after thinking about the manifesto and perhaps the real work of this green revolution that we're all talking about. So thanks for the opportunity to sort of reflect. It's a really important piece of work, and I really hope that it opens up these conversations very widely. Alison, thank you very much. Yeah, and some really stimulating connexions there between the what we are trying to do at the house central, how we do it and how we as human beings approach that I think was very, very interesting. Can I move straight on now to Ian and then I'll open things up for discussion. So again, an invitation to people locked in to those questions in the Q&A. Some of my have been rather poor. Was that you put it in. Well, thank you, John. And thank you very much to Tobias and Jonathan for their comments. And I appreciate the opportunity to offer my own remarks here. I do declare an interest. As Tobias said, I was a member of the small working group that contributed some ideas towards the paper, so you won't be surprised to know that I'm very warmly welcoming of the manifesto. I agree with pretty well everything Tobias has written in it, and I think and hope it should be the starting point for a much more detailed analysis and programme on the common good and our common home that is the Earth as a whole and our local places, perhaps particularly in England. So what I want to do is offer, first of all, three cheers about main points that Tobias makes well into one. Quite a caveat, I think, about language and the historical perspective and raise some anxieties about the language of enchantment. And then I'll just finish with two sets of proposals very briefly outline to complement this list of policy ideas that Tobias has made in Part three. So I'll start off with the three cheers. Well, first of all, for the very clear declaration of principles that UK industry needs to be productive and good for people and nature, that nature should be a common treasury for all. Although we could argue perhaps about the implication that nature is fundamentally the Treasury of resources for us, and that everyone should have the chance to develop a rich relationship with the natural world. And I'll come back to that idea of relationship and what it might include later on. There's also the message that we need to foster local distinctiveness and pride. And again, I'll come back to some of the mechanisms through which that could happen at the end. Now, all of these principles and the ideas that flow from them have been given due acknowledgement in a lot of UK policy documents, but not least from the present government and its rather remarkable embrace, at least on paper, of green policies and leadership on climate and nature recovery. But overall the UK in general, England in particular, I think, flattened a coherence and consistent, pervasive process for embedding these ideas in policy and practise. And it seems to me that the key need here is not just for greater political commitment at national level, but of strong and well-resourced local institutions. That that's a key point in. I'll come back to that at the end. I give a second chair, the political analysis. I think Tobias makes very important points in his part one on the political background about the risks of climate action being framed in very abstract and technocratic ways, the risks of policies for nature, recovery and climate action, generating resentments and cultural clashes. There is a risk of the politics of the environmental transformations that we need coming to exacerbate existing social, economic and cultural tensions between people in cities and those in the countryside and in small towns. It's quite right, I think, to emphasise that a successful green politics has to escape from what Tobias calls the environmentalist ghetto. It's got to build up common cause across centre, right and left and greens. And I see that as a core task of a post liberal blue green project, turquoise labour, as I sometimes call it, that can connect conservation minded conservatives and progressives. I also back Tobias point that we need a positive vision of a more sustainable and greener UK and people like me in the environmental world and the sustainable development world overall be much better at saying what's wrong, what's to be avoided, rather than describing in depth and in a compelling way what could be great about the future that we want to see. That said, we've also got to be practising a politics of honesty and fairness. The action that we're going to need on climate in particular is going to involve skills and many people to be sacrifices in consumption, and they're expected lifestyle options. It's crucial that we create a just fair transition, that there's a progressive approach to the economics of decarbonisation. And let's be blunt, that means the rich and the very affluent. I've got to pay more. In a spirit of enlightened self-interest, as well as in the spirit of proper altruism and acknowledgement of living within limits. And that applies nationally, as well as in international relations between states. When we look at climate policy and I'll give a third shift the policy proposals on that a couple of points in a moment. But it seems to me that the focus on trade and supply chains and on food farming and land use are absolutely right and also badly neglected at the recent COP26 climate summit. The UK government has yet to join up coherently its climate strategy, its land use and food policies, its planning reforms and its industrial strategy. There are good things in all of those, but they don't hang together. But they must fit together consistently. Or we run the risk of getting more of what we've already got. Too much of that is great policy announcements undermined often instantly by contradictory plans and practises elsewhere in the government system. So those are my three chairs. And before I come to a couple of concluding policy proposals to build on what Tobias has said, I just want to enter a significant caveat and sense of unease about one feature of the argument, and that concerns the language used in Tobias is part two of disenchantment and human nature. Now, the overall analysis seems to me to be right and important. I don't disagree at all with the anthropology that Tobias sets out or to his analysis of alienation. But I think we've got to be wary of the term readjustment and of the temptation to which I'm as prone as anyone is towards ecological nostalgia. I'd want to ask whether we ever enchanted and if we were, would we actually want to be reincarnated on the basis of some specific past condition? That's assuming we could he could be wary about my own nostalgia and by extension, about other peoples. Was there a time when the British were in a state of harmony and balance and right relationship with the more than human world? Well, not in the industrial era, for sure. As Tobias has noted, the history of pollution enclosures, mass wipe outs of wildlife shows that to be the case. But pre-industrial societies were hardly in right relationship either. Whether in these islands or the rest of Europe or many other parts of the world pollution enclosures, the abuse of animals, the mass killing of wildlife, deforestation all of those pre-dated the industrial and agriculture revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now, people have always been enchanted by some particulars of that world. We can we should mourn the loss or degradation of many of those features. But I think we have to resist nostalgia. The overall condition of human relationship with nature has been for centuries, one of alienation, disruption, degradation and exploitation. Mr. Price is underlined. There's no going back to find anywhere desirable on which to focus the model our policies. We've got to look forward. Instead, what we have lost perhaps is not so much enchantment as a complex sense of interdependence and ultimately of dependence on the natural world. All of this, Tobias says in his paper. Direct and sensuous relationship with weather, soil, crops, other creatures, disease. And we're surely now in the process of rediscovering that kind of relationship. And as climate disasters and pandemics show, the process is in many ways a fearful one, although it can have many aspects of delight and enchantment. So instead of speaking of re-engagement, then I would recommend instead using the language of shaping right relationship with the more than human world. And that's going to include recognition of what genuinely is enchanting, delightful, inspiring, beautiful, worthy of love, but also cultivation of virtues and practises that reflect our ultimate dependence on the US, which is our common and inescapable hope, no matter what Jeff Bezos thinks. These virtues and practises would include care for surroundings, whether they're human made or natural. Gratitude. Humility. And I completely echo what Alison was saying there about Jane Goodall recognition of interdependence, respect, and a proper sense of awe and fear. So that's the caveat that I want to enter about to biases analysis. But as I say, the overall direction of the argument is anthropology. Where he wants to get to does seem right important to me. I also want to endorse the policy points he makes in part three of the paper, and I just want to finish with two additions in supplementary remarks and what he proposes. First of all, I want to go back to support these offering to the idea of a national nature. So. Which has been strongly campaigned for, and I really hope this gets strong backing across parties so that it can be campaigned for much harder in this Parliament as a priority for post-pandemic recovery. And it should be seen, I think, as part of the ecological and social dimensions of the so-called levelling up agenda, as well as of policies for climate and nature recovery. And I would back the proposal that the preparation for a National Nature Service year should start happening in schools. And here there's well over a decade's worth of proposals and evidence that we can build on bringing. Learning about natural history into primary and secondary curricula is vital, I think, and so is the introduction of immersive visits and activities for every pupil throughout their primary and secondary school lives in the countryside, but also in urban and suburban landscapes. And second, and this is my main point. We've got to relate all of these proposals to the institutional rebuilding that can connect US citizens meaningfully to the places in which we live and to the natural systems on which we all depend. In these places, we need to relate to nature as citizens, not just as consumers and tourists. And that means we need institutions at local level that shape and enable us to act as citizens. If anything needs reincarnating it's local government and local governments in particular in England subject as it has been to relentless centralisation and disempowerment from governments of all stripes for decades. Remaking local democratic institutions is crucial, as these are the bodies and processes that can make sense for a relationship with the natural world and with the quality or lack of it in our built environment. And how that connects us or fails to to nature and to a sense of being at home. Noble. That means re empowerment of local authorities and development of new institutions for community engagement and motivation. I'm thinking there of citizens forums and juries and related processes. But above all, what we need is a reinvention of the local planning system. Now to speak of re enchantments of planning is a tall order. Now, let's face it, it was never a very enchanted world. Even in 1947, when the Town and Country Planning Act was passed. But the planning system is the public realm, the space in which we debate and decide on local common goods and the impacts of our desires on the environmental systems in which we are embedded and on which we depend. Now, that system, and I'm thinking, especially here of England, it's currently understaffed, underfinanced, unloved, disrespected, completely dominated by the short term greed and self-interest of the big housing and commercial property developers to a large degree. This system, which was about generating public goods, is in large part machine now for generating what Tobias noted crazy markers non places, little loved, poorly connected to anything that makes for a life beyond commuting and shopping. It's also now a system which is creating yet more unintended consequences, such as massive exposure of residents to flood risk. So I think a manifesto for the nature, for nature and right relationship with our common home has got to include the detailed set of proposals for remaking local governments in general and the land use planning system in particular. And that needs to include policies for beauty, good design and renovation of our spaces and for urban and suburban greening. Now these kinds of proposals aren't in short supply, but governments overall have not been interested. There are signs with this one that it's taken seriously. Some aspects, at least of the programme proposed by the likes of Scruton and Nicholas Boy Smith on Beauty and the Built Environment published last year. There is scope, I think, for a big coalition across the opposition parties and from properly localist actual conservatives to press for the empowerment of local democracy and for the government to consult far more widely and deeply on its stalled reforms of the planning system so that we can start integrating that agenda with the broader vision that Tobias and Alison have set out. So leave it there. Thanks to John for the chance to comment. Congratulations to Tobias on the manifesto. Thank you very much. A thank you very much indeed. Another stimulating contribution. Your last comments about local government remind me that we think before Christmas we may have the levelling up white paper with whatever that proposes for county devolution deals and similar. So it will be interesting to see both whether the Government encourages what you talking about in terms of local empowerment and probably equally important, whether the proposals put forward from local level, put those ideas forward as one of the things that could be done by other devolved institutions. Now at the moment I don't have any questions in the audience, so I get to ask some of my own, if I may. The first one really is, is this what is the source? This may not seem to be the right way of posing it, but what is the sort of scale of change in people's lives that we are looking for? We are a very heavily urbanised society and I think nobody has challenged the idea that we suffer from a disengaged disenchantment, disengagement with the natural world. But it does then make you wonder how many people need to be exposed to what sort of experiences or understandings of the natural world to really shift the balance. And so we can say that as a society, we have profoundly made a change in our relationship with the natural world. Can I can I come to you first? Tobias, the author of this, to get a sense of the scale of your ambition, of what is achievable, and then put the same question to the other two. Yeah. Thanks, John. And to Palestinian as well, though, your comments, which I very much agree with in terms of the scale of ambition, obviously it would range from the extremely local to the national. But some examples might be a local community. And it would not be a rural place. It could be a town. This is we know we're not just talking about the countryside here, which faces flood risks actively going out. As part of their natural nature surface in re wiggling the river to literally building flood defences en masse as a community. Or it could be things which aren't so directly related to adaptation and mitigation, but are more about generating a wider awareness of our natural surroundings. It could be, and I'm borrowing this idea from Ruth Davis that communities integrate walks, and perhaps this happens through primary schools or something, where you go around the places in which you live and you name the species of tree and plant and flower and bird that you see and you generate through that. And understanding of yourself is part of the wider natural surroundings. But then of course, it also goes up to the national level and to what people are doing with their lives, with that, with their work. So I think we need far, far more people working on the on the land. I think we need many more farmers. Even as I want to see less consolidation within agriculture, I think we need many more people with the land. So that means that a national, even if it's implemented at a local level, vocational training plan for people, farming and doing taking part in nature friendly farming. So I think it goes from the very local and quotidian to the national. You measure your visitor numbers in millions. But what's the scale of your ambition? Well, I think you reach beyond the people who come to your park. Yeah. I mean, I think. Well, this is a you know, you could say all sorts of things about this, but. I think what I've learnt in a practical sense about this is that change happens, not as this sort of big bang theory, but project by project, relationship by relationship I did by idea, interaction by interaction. And I think what both in and Tobias have said is about creating at scale the conditions in which people can be actively active and take action and be supported by each other to do so. So the challenge, yes, is enormous. But the scale of action towards it needs to be very incremental, I think. Otherwise it kind of feels unobtainable. So I think. For me, I like to sort of put out the idea of creating a very large scale, landscape scale network. But that is about nurturing a human network, about being good at convening people, about challenging one another. Yes. But knowing that if we do that, that we have to support each other in equal measure to make change happen. So, I mean, yes, reaching out to millions of people, I think is something that national parks can do, because we're an articulation, really, of of the relationship between people and the environment over which transcends politics. It transcends the ideas of the day. It's about the place. But I think you've got to think quite practically about this to do things at scale. So we've just got to roll up our sleeves and treat each others as a big human team that are going to transform our possibilities. If we don't do that, we will just be talking to each other about it. So, you know. I think that's probably what I want to say about this at scale, but it's also very small scale and it's very intimate in terms of what we have to do. Thanks. In. Well, I agree with a lot of that. I think that there is a place for large scale national gestures and leadership and a sense of urgency. And it's very striking that we didn't have a prime minister broadcast about COP26. We didn't have that. We don't have a state of state with the environment debate in Parliament every year and so on. So we need, we need that kind of thing to make sure that the the urgency and the scale is something that's ever present in our in our national discussion. But Alison's quite right. The, the learning by doing that we've got to do is bound to be incremental. It's got a peculiar quality to it because we've got to take our time. But we're also up against the very tight time, that type timetable in some respects. So we've got to do lots of careful things. We've got to make sure that we don't create all kinds of unintended consequences. So that means we've got to go slowly to some degree, but we've also got to learn very fast about what works in particular places. I work with the think tank to perspective that says it's an urgent 100 year project. And that's that's the kind of paradox that we have to keep in mind here. We've got massive urgency, but we're also looking at very long range shifts and we've got to be patient as well as being urgent. And I think the place to combine those things is, as I've said in the in the local governance system, it's not just about the planning system, although although that is a big part of it, it's also about having the right kinds of conversations and partnerships at local scale, sensitive to local needs and conditions which can look at changes in the fabric of cities, towns and villages. We've got to be looking at decarbonising, travel, electrifying and renovating our housing on a big scale and reducing the need to travel and relocating to some degree on food production. So I very much agree with what Tobias said that we need to be looking at making extending, improving our parks the idea of the 10 to 15 minute city and towns so you can get to all the resources that you need on foot or bicycle. We need to be looking at tree planting in towns and villages and cities and we need to be looking at. Tobias said that a lot more small farming and urban horticulture is a big, big shortfall on horticulture in the UK and it's not something we've been discussing much in relation to land use but really need to be. And I think a big part of that is going to be in repowering and really giving some resources to neighbourhood councils and to planners. I'm doing some research at the moment on climate governance at local scale in the in the UK, particularly looking at Surrey. And what we're finding is a lot of spontaneous connexions being made between networks of villages, neighbourhood planners and councillors and. That there's a real ferment of imagination and ideas about how to join up the climate agenda and the nature recovery agenda. So there's a lot going on which could be even better, I think, if better resourced and recognised by national government and empowered through a proper rethinking of local governments in the planning system. And thank you very much indeed. With apologies to the audience, I'm having the night, but you get what you chair one of these events. Your internet connexion is dodgy, so I turned my camera off. But I hope you continue to hear me. I do ask a question now that's been put in by Mark Levine, but also by Stephen Hart. The same issue. Mark says it's all great, but what about the elephant in the room? Land ownership? How can we enhance the popular environmentalism and genuinely empower people to feel that the land is coming to us all? When the land itself continues to be owned, farms too controlled by a tiny, monopolistic agro business or simply business minority. And it would certainly be true in southern England that large farms are very often not owned by farmers, but by hedge funds and farmed on their behalf. So, as Steve Hart says, how is ownership challenged and the wish for a more participatory countryside? So what do we do about land ownership? And I guess in your ideas about planning, essentially also provide a more radical challenge to the idea that the private landowner should get can get permission for what they want to do rather than meeting the needs of what local people want. So can I start with you? Well, yes, it's it's it's a massive issue and I recommend going shrub sales recent work on all of this in his book come on humans England. I think we need to be. Realistically, we're not going to expropriate landowners on a large scale here. So what we can do is set conditions on ownership and access. And even though you might not be owning land in common, you can govern land in common. So the idea of the Commons isn't necessarily all about ownership, but it is about access and is about rules of engagement with the common good generated by the land. So I think the planning system starts that needs to start being able to place conditions on ownership. That means to set standards of ownership, and it needs to set penalties for bad stewardship. So part of the empowerment of local government and the planning system, I think would be to start forcing, if need be, landowners, and that they don't all need forcing, but forcing them where required to live up to common standards of environmental stewardship. And that might be eventually on pain of losing title to land. But it shouldn't come to that. What we should be looking at, I think, is the idea of managing as much land as possible as commons, regardless of ownership, so that owners respect commonly agreed rules on how to steward the land. Thank you. The media. National Park. What's your view more widely about land ownership and whether we need to rethink whether it's in terms of stewardship or otherwise, what responsibilities go with land ownership? Yeah, I mean, obviously, new forest, half of it is common land just to start with. So that is a very unique and interesting. Well, history. I mean, since the charter of the Forest, we've been, you know, exercising rights common and all the other rights across a large landscape which interacts between nature and people. I think that's fascinating model to learn and think about what saying so for a starting point I think somewhere like the new forest is is. Very much an intimate expression between. You know, those rights. But also there are states in the other parts of the land where people have been and landowners have been there for many, many generations and they have been the custodians of the place. So it hasn't all been bad at all. I think there's been some very positive examples of where, you know, states have come forward with innovative and important ideas about how we would manage land for public goods if subsidy is coming in from public money. And of course, you know, that principle, I think, and you've touched on it before, is public good. You know, public money for public good has come through the Agriculture Act, and I'm really pleased to see that. And a lot of the goods that Tobias is paper would need to have in place have been actually mentioned in statute, which is all great stuff, but we've got to make that now happen and make it a reality. And of course, I do need a planning authority as well. So I'm listening to what Ian has to say about planning, and I would agree we do need more resources for that, but it is a instrument as well for delivering on the public good. You know, we've I suppose, luck in one way, although our resources are very tight. We've had 40% reduction in our funds since 2010 and we've got a thousand planning applications a year for our service. So we are still able to bring all disciplines of landscape, archaeology, ecology into that. And I think we feel that we are doing all we can against the backdrop of drop of policy to deliver that sustainable development. But I think, you know, it would be really useful if public good and public money for public good was actually applied more widely. So for example, if grants were being given through something like a local enterprise partnership to private entities and landowners, that there should be equally public goods being delivered on climate and nature and health, you know, as well. So this is where this partnership that I was trying to say needs to come together. Suits should now be supercharged and supported in saying and that we need to define where we want to put our money as a community. So, you know, we've been talking about agreeing to sort of this area, the South Hams, South Hampshire, South Hampshire as a whole. And we've got five elements and we've got public, private, third sector working on them and trying to get that agreement about what food looks like. But what we do need, you know, to back that up is data about things like natural caps. So we've got a baseline, for example, a new baseline in the new forest that we can hope for use for that. And we then need, you know, public good and public money for public good to be really instituted across the board, across other government departments to really make that work on the ground. But I think, you know, I'm more optimistic now than I ever have been about people's appetite to actually do that. I don't know whether it's the pandemic that's done it or whether it's climate and nature. Emergency people are finally waking up to the fact that it is emergency or the public health issue or the fact that we've actually really wanted to reconnect with each other in our communities and do good things together. But I think we do need to to really act now. And so going back to the original question, you know, landowners are still people and they are still part of our communities. And I think. I really feel very, very strongly at this moment in time that we must think the best of each other and treat each other as human beings. That can create a really strong team for the future of nature and climate and know selves. If. If we enter with cynicism, we will not. Overcome some of these seemingly huge barriers to implementing what we've discussed. Thanks, Alison Tobias. Do you do you feel that we have the tools or we could have the tools we need without making more fundamental changes around ideas of ownership? First, I think probably right to call it the elephant in the room. It is obviously a massive question. And I think that the distinction is made between changing land ownership and changing land government is very useful in thinking about it and as well as regulation. Landowners and agribusinesses on respond to sets of incentives and structures of incentives. And for a long time, the primary incentive structure which landowners were responding to was cap. And that's because the vast majority of our land is farmed. It's now being replaced by, as Allison says, public money for public goods in the form of the slightly, not fully yet fleshed out still environmental land management schemes. So I think key to changing how land is used, it's getting those sets of regulation and those incentive structures. Right. And I think Allison is right, too, that we should extend it beyond just thinking about farming. And it'd be great to have environmental land management schemes that went beyond that and do more than captive, for example, is very hard to get grants for forms of agro forestry under CAP because of the limitations around what it doesn't. So I think it'd be great if we talked about public money for public goods more broadly than just traditional farming and that be central to any wider project of. Making both our countryside, but also our towns and cities. And urban conservation is more nature friendly. Thank you. Can I just ask you a question? Asked for some quick replies. I want to get two or three more in before we finished the first one from one of the attendees. Which device? Jemmy, for that you've touched on already, but how useful is the phrase rewilding in terms of the need to reach out and encourage genuine engagement? So. Tobias then on us and then in. Yeah, that's that's a great question. I think it's certainly not very helpful when you're talking to families. And I could say that from lots of personal experience, it seriously, seriously turned off farmers. But I think that rewilding. Sometimes seems to mean different things. So the definition, George Monbiot is the most prominent advocate of it, and he himself is divisive and puts off a lot of farmers. And that's not a good starting point for his definition. I suspect most people here would agree with it to catalyse the mass restoration of the living world, bring trees back to bare hills, allow roofs to fall once more on the seabed and to return to these shores. The magnificent trunks, the animals of which we have so long been deprived. None of that has to mean anything particularly anti-human. It doesn't have to put farmers out of work. And yet, as the question implies, I think the term itself immediately sets up a kind of conflict between the natural and the human. That's off putting to a lot of people who work on the land. So I don't think it's very helpful. Thank you, Alison. Yeah. I think I mean, I think many of the ideas that come out of our movements are really important in pushing the boundaries of understanding and helping people to imagine a different future. I think it's really helpful. And I think, Tobias, your words are almost poetic in terms of what that means. However, I think. When it comes to the practical reality of delivering things, you've got to. Maybe think less about, you know, being on the end of a spectrum of something more about how you actually can take the first step on the journey towards having more nature, doing more for climate, togetherness, nurturing each other to be the best we can be for delivering this task. So I think you have to be less sort of absolute about these sorts of terms. I think you have to be tenacious about the direction and the fact that we're all on a on a journey together. But I think in terms of painting a picture of what some of the possibilities might be for the future, I think it can be useful. But getting practical and integrating it with what is actually possible to happen in our communities, I think you've got to think differently. And actually some national parks, one of the National Park, South Downs, not so far away from, in my views, the words re nature. So, you know, I think there's lots of language ways in which we could try and articulate what our vision for the future is. But as far as I know, people in nature are going to be coexisting in this country for quite a long time ahead. So we have to think about how that works together. Thank you, Ian. Yes, I agree with everything. Alison and Tobias have said that I support lots of projects which go by the name of rewilding, but I'm wary of that. It implies that as a as a state we can put things back into and there isn't. Even if there were, we wouldn't be able to keep it stable because of climate change, the changes to which we're committed to, we're going to have a new kind of nature, whatever we do. So really what I think we should be looking at is some recovery where nature has been badly damaged and that and there's a chance of getting back to a functioning state. But it won't necessarily be the state it used to be and also resilience. So I think bring those two together and say we're looking at we're looking for nature, recovery, nature, resilience and nature. Nature rewards in a way, but not necessarily rewilding in the sense of going back to something which is, in effect, unrecoverable. Thank you very much indeed. I have come straight back to you on the next question, which is, are are we looking to the past in terms of what is considered beautiful, for example, on housing design and you referred to this gruesome report or does our age have a different aesthetic being developed? Well, I'm as prejudices, sir. Roger was in this respect, I think that some most nice building since World War Two has been aesthetically grim. And on the whole, the public agrees with that. Look, the building is not particularly popular. That's not to say it can't be beautiful and it can't be good. Nor is it to say that it would be a good idea to go back to Georgian and mediaeval models. What we need to do is to think to ourselves, What kind of legacy are we leaving? I used to work with a councillor who resisted all new developments in this area and was incredibly proud of the Tudor village that he inhabited. And I said, What do you think that village was when it was first being built? Because it's new development. We do need new development, but we should be thinking to ourselves, will people look back on us with gratitude for having built it this way? By and large, nobody does in relation to a lot of peaceful development with the principles. I think that which lots of scrutiny Nicholas Boyce Smith set out in that paper were not reactionary or too backward looking. There's the risk of that. And as I say, I'm wary of nostalgia. But I do think we've made vast mistakes in philosophy, school housing design and other of the building design. There's a lot of evidence from which we can learn and we can make beautiful new buildings which aren't backward looking if we use the right kind of materials in particular would. Thank you very much. I just want to squeeze in one more question, if I may, so I won't bring in Allison's advice on that one. It's really about with small and large p the politics of everything that we've been talking about here today, Tobias. His manifesto. Is. Speaker 1 Explicitly looking for a politics that is both conservative and radical. And you spoke of a common cause, I think, between centre right, liberal left and green politics. It does seem to me that we live in a pretty highly polarised state of politics at the moment. So could I ask each of you if you have a sense. Of. Where the political leadership with a small P or a large party is going to come from that actually recognises this politics as one in which a wide range of people have got a stake, rather than simply being claimed by one side or another as belonging to their bit of politics. I'll go to you first, Ian, if I may, then Alison and then Tobias and please Tobias, then add any final points you'd like to make. But Ian. Well, thank you, John. I think we had a whole afternoon on this question alone. I think there are two forms of politics which are inimical to the whole agenda. First of all, is hardcore neoliberal economic libertarianism. The other one is national. Populism, nationalist populism of of the right. And there's a risk that while I don't think neoliberals interested in this agenda at all, and I think there's a real risk that people in the heart of this right will get too interested. And there is a risk of a shift towards eco fascist positions, which I think we've got to be really mindful of. It's that it's the dark, shadowy side of everything we've been talking about. So we need to keep an eye on that. But all that said, I think there is a common cause, as is shown in the politics of, for example, the German centre right on environment of social democratic parties across the continent and of the Green Parties, for example, in Germany, that you can get common cause across a wide range of positions beyond these extremes that I've mentioned. And I think that's cultivated best away from national politics, although national politics is crucial, I think it's cultivated best at the local level. So I come back to my point, something like a broken record. That part of what we need to be looking at very closely here is the is the reinvigoration of local government. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alison. Well, obviously, I'm not going to put forward any political reason. But, you know, I think what I can say is that what's persuasive to a politician is what people want, hopefully. And I think there is a palpable sense that there is a great demand for nature in people's lives. There's certainly a demand for people like myself, time and others on and to be together seeing this. But, you know, we are being called upon to help people articulate, productize and operationalise their ambitions for their communities. And the more that we're able to. Harness that and talk together, bastards, and talk to our leaders about it. The more they're going to be up, stand up and talk about it back to us and hopefully put in place some policies that will make it happen. So I see it as a sort of I mean, we have got all politicians of all colours talking about the green revolution. And that isn't a sort of subversive thing any more. That is something that people want to see. And I think that's a huge sort of exciting opportunity for personal, personal politics, you know. Every day I can go out and try and help other people realise what they want, their hopes and dreams for their future. And they can do the same for the people that they're with. And I think, you know, that's the politic. I think, you know, it's about the people and it's about, you know, feeling like we can be ourselves. We can harness our gifts and skills. And that we can make this difference together regardless of what our leaders are doing and that we have power in our own communities. So I think for me. That's a bit. I probably have a bit more agency on and that is where I'm going to focus my attention in terms of the opportunity of. The. Bigger politics around us. Thank you. Tobias. Thanks, Alison. Nina, both spoken about the local side of things. So say something about the national because one of the reasons I am interested in this thing and in particular around the idea of a national nature service and so on, is because I think precisely this is a politics which does have the capacity to reach across the political, cultural divide. And I think it's important that any. Politics of this kind had a national lens, not as a solar exclusive lens. And I think the principle of subsidiarity is a good one, but I think a national focus and a focus on national reconstruction. And indeed, these initial seminars came out to the wider set of seminars about national reconstruction. And I think posing it in that way means that you keep, as it were, the progressive environmental wing of the coalition, while also opening it up to those on those who might typically be sceptical of the claims of environmentalists by focus on the national, on good jobs and so on. So I think it has the it's a politics which has the capacity to be led from either side, as it were, because it reaches both sides and brings them together. Well, thank you very much indeed. And apologies for being off camera for most of the event, but we've got through to the end. I thought that's been a fascinating discussion because it has gone as we hoped it would way beyond the environment as it normally talked about. And that sees the whole idea in what we've covered, the possibility of a unifying politics at national level, the revitalisation of local institutions, the need to move beyond the politics of blame and building the human networks that make this possible holds out this vision of being able to move from the small initiative to something with a large, national and even international scale impact. It's been a hugely rich discussion. It's one that I hope to in the sense of we can return to because it's very much part of the politics of England in the future, how people feel about living in England, what their relationship to the land and the environment in England is going to be like in the future. So if there's anybody on the call who says, Well, this is a bit different to what you normally talk about, your seminars don't know. This is integral to actually having a politics of England in the future in a nation that we can actually live sustainably in. So I hope people find it interesting. Thank you to everybody who's been on the call. We will get the recording up on the website within a week or so, I hope. And we have events in January and February to look out for which we'll circulate details of. But John Wilson from Kings in London and myself will be talking about statecraft and how we govern. John Timoney from UCL and Bernard Stewart. We'll be talking about the politics of place and James Meade Way and Simon Lee and others will be discussing the political economy of England. So we'll be sending details of those efforts in due course to Ian, to Alison, and particularly to Tobias, who's written the report. Thank you very much indeed. And it's been a really good seminar. Thank you.