What Advice Would a Generation 200 Years from now Offer Humanity?

This image serves as a reminder that there are other creatures on Earth, as well as humans, so what we do impacts on them too - all of us "Earthlings". It is also a jigsaw, from which interlocking pieces may be assembled or disassembled, providing a metaphor for the ecosphere, with humans looking on, but with the power to influence either a harmonious or discordant arrangement of the whole.

This is my first skirmish with AI:

I asked ChatGPT, " What advice would a generation 200 years from now offer humanity?"

I think its set of "10 commandments" are spot on. Below them, it then asked me what advice I might give if I were in their shoes?

I thought for a moment and offered, "Love and respect nature." Again, the list of "7 guidelines" appears very sensible. 

ChatGPT said:

That’s such an interesting question! If we were to imagine a generation 200 years from now, they’d likely have the perspective of having lived through some profound technological, environmental, and social changes. The advice they might offer humanity could blend both caution and optimism. Here are a few ideas:

1. "Honor the Earth’s Limits"

They might urge us to respect planetary boundaries, emphasizing sustainability over growth at all costs. Having witnessed the consequences of unchecked consumption, they could remind us that the Earth’s resources are finite, and humanity must prioritize balance—perhaps advising us to invest in long-term stewardship of the environment instead of short-term gain.

2. "Embrace Unity and Diversity"

The future generation could stress the importance of solidarity, not just within nations but across humanity as a whole. They may encourage us to celebrate diversity while recognizing that we're all interconnected, sharing a common home. They might also warn against division, knowing how fragmentation could lead to conflicts in the past.

3. "Keep the Human Touch"

They might emphasize that, while technology is essential, it’s crucial not to lose sight of what makes us human—compassion, empathy, and meaningful connections. Perhaps they’d caution against overreliance on AI and automation, urging us to maintain personal bonds, creativity, and spontaneity that technology can't replicate.

4. "Learn from History, but Don’t Dwell on It"

With the benefit of time and hindsight, they might suggest that while it's important to learn from past mistakes, we should avoid becoming shackled by them. They could offer advice on being forward-looking, emphasizing that humanity’s future lies in embracing possibility rather than being anchored in regret or fear.

5. "Focus on Collective Progress"

Recognizing the vast inequalities that have existed throughout history, they might advocate for systems that prioritize the well-being of all—encouraging global cooperation to lift people out of poverty, create equal access to technology, and solve crises together. They’d likely want to see less focus on individual wealth and more on collective prosperity.

6. "Balance Innovation with Wisdom"

They might urge caution in the face of rapid technological development. While new tools like AI, biotech, and space exploration could be life-changing, they’d likely encourage us to approach them with wisdom and ethics, always considering the long-term effects on society, the environment, and the individual.

7. "Adapt, Don’t Resist Change"

Given how fast the world is evolving, they might remind us that adaptability is crucial. Instead of resisting the future, they’d advocate for an open-minded approach to inevitable shifts in culture, work, and even human nature itself.

8. "Value Knowledge, But Question It"

They could advise us to continue pursuing knowledge, but also to develop critical thinking skills. The rapid advancement of information and misinformation alike may have taught them the importance of discernment in understanding what is truly beneficial for humanity’s growth.

9. "Ensure Well-Being for All"

Well-being might become the central measure of progress for them—pushing humanity to create societies where mental and physical health are prioritized just as much as economic growth. Their advice could center on creating systems where people have access to healthcare, education, and a healthy environment—reminding us that without well-being, nothing else truly matters.

10. "Leave Space for Wonder"

Lastly, they might remind us to never lose our sense of wonder or curiosity. That curiosity has propelled humanity through history, and it will continue to guide us to the stars—or even beyond.

It’s a mix of optimism about humanity's potential and a grounded sense of the real challenges that future generations will face. If you were in their shoes, what advice do you think you'd give us?

You said:

"Love and respect nature"

ChatGPT said:

I love that—“love and respect nature” feels like the foundation for so much of the advice future generations might give us. Nature is so much more than just the environment around us; it’s the life source, the backbone of everything that sustains us. If humanity could truly embrace that mindset, we’d probably see massive shifts in how we approach everything—from resource use to technology, from societal structures to personal behavior.

Here’s how they might expand on that idea:

1. "Nature is not a resource to exploit, but a partner to nurture."
   Future generations might want us to see ourselves as part of the web of life rather than separate from it. If we treated the Earth as a collaborator instead of something to conquer, we might approach everything differently—our cities, our industries, even our daily habits.

2. "Recognize the deep wisdom in ecosystems."
   They might encourage us to look to nature not only for its beauty but for its lessons—how ecosystems operate in harmony, how species adapt and evolve, and how cycles of regeneration can teach us resilience. There’s a lot of wisdom in the natural world that modern society has often overlooked in favor of short-term solutions.

3. "Rediscover your connection to the Earth."
   Perhaps in the future, there’s a renewed focus on mindfulness and presence in nature—whether that’s through spending time outdoors, supporting sustainable agriculture, or simply paying attention to the natural rhythms of the seasons. That kind of connection might be seen as crucial for mental and spiritual well-being, just as much as physical health.

4. "Honor indigenous knowledge and practices."
   They might remind us that many cultures have had a deep respect for nature for millennia, often with practices that are more sustainable and in harmony with the environment than modern methods. A future generation could encourage us to learn from these traditions and incorporate them into our own ways of living.

5. "Preserve biodiversity, the fabric of life."
   With the loss of biodiversity being a critical issue today, the future might urge us to take stronger action to protect all forms of life—not just charismatic species like tigers or pandas, but even the tiniest microorganisms. They could emphasize that we cannot thrive without the full spectrum of life around us.

6. "Sustainability is the only true progress."
   In a world constantly pushing for "growth" and "development," future generations might point out that real progress is measured in how well we maintain a livable world for future generations. This might mean redefining success and rethinking economic models that prioritize infinite growth on a finite planet.

7. "Cultivate gratitude for nature's gifts."
   Nature provides us with everything—food, clean air, water, raw materials, beauty. If future generations could send us a message, it might be to appreciate and value these gifts more fully, understanding how fragile they are and how easily they could be lost.

It’s not just about preserving nature, but about living in a way that feels balanced with it, right? I think the future would tell us that we’re not doing nature a favor by protecting it; we’re doing ourselves a favor. What do you think would shift if we started living that way today—if we truly loved and respected nature in every decision?

As noted, this is my first serious "play" with AI. I think we can make of it what we will, but it's certainly interesting, and these responses seem very sensible. That said, for the most part, I think I'll carry on using my own "head" for thinking and writing articles. :-)

Local Community Resilience: Braziers Park, Glaister Lecture (2025).

                               Braziers Park - main house, in "Strawberry Hill Gothic" style.

This was an excellent Glaister Lecture at Braziers park, given by Sarah Wood, about the trials and tribulations of running a community, and some of the history there. It is, overall, inspiring, but of course illustrates the complexity of the human being, and how we interact with each other. As many others experienced, the Covid pandemic added its complications and difficulties to life there, and created some divisions, among that culture of fear we all experienced then, while trying to deal with a strange external threat whose outcomes were not entirely clear.

I made a few remarks (about About 2.44.00 in, for a couple of minutes), as I now transcribe, on the importance of local community resilience in adapting away from our present ill-fated course:

“Well, I’m Chris, and yeah, I wonder to what degree actually, your tribulations in Braziers or any other community, becomes a kind of microcosm of how society is going to have to adapt, because there’s the mythology that, oh, it’s sometimes called “carbon tunnel vision”, that so long as we change our energy system away from fossil fuels, we’re using wind and all the rest of it, we’re fine... Ah Ah! ...

No, I think we’re going to have to change a whole lot of things about how we do things, our expectations. Basically we’re going to have to deconsumerise, and so thinking of – um – Donella Meadows, she was one of the co-authors of the Club of Rome paper, wasn’t she, “The Limits of Growth”, back in the early 70s.

And that was saying, right ok, we carry on the way we are, crunch!, it’s not going to get too good by about 2030. All we’ve done since then it follow the standard run, everything is along the lines of that prediction; a new analysis says, yeah it might be 2040, so really the way we are going, we have to get off that, and this is going to take human behavioural change.

And it’s going to take a hell of a lot of cooperation, and I think fundamentally, local community resilience is probably our best anchor, and our best stabilising force.

We’ve got to have that, we’ve got to build that where it doesn’t exist. So, I thought that [talk] was very inspiring, and I’m glad that Braziers is on the up, and going in that direction, and may well serve as a beacon for what other people can do [in their own community].”

Reading (UK) – A Town in Transition, and Local Community Resilience.

 Credit: Karen Blakeman.

Reading, Transition, and Transition Town Reading.

A large town, not yet a city, Reading (UK) is typically seen as a commuter hub, with thousands travelling into London every day to get to work. Reading itself may seem unexceptional, even bland, with not much going on there. But, on looking a little closer, Reading has real community, a group of local people who are coming together to create real change.

While many of our problems are global – e.g. the climate and biodiversity emergency, declining fossil fuels, dwindling resources, pollution, overconsumption, food insecurity, inequality – there is much we can do at the local level to make things better. This is what the Transition Town movement is about: a group of local communities that are reimagining our world at the local level.

These communities foster grassroots projects that focus on increased self-sufficiency, through relocalisation, especially in terms of local food growing and energy use, minimising unnecessary consumption and waste, and building strong, resilient communities, where neighbours know each other and act together to make things happen.

Transition is based more on envisaging a “better world” rather than “fear”. It focuses on positive outcomes, rather than doom and gloom – carrots not sticks.

An essential feature of this approach is to imagine how “the world we want” might look, sound, feel, smell, taste. Then work backwards, from a given future date to the present, to figure out the necessary steps to take, in order to make it happen. This is called “backcasting”.

The first Transition Town was founded in Totnes, in 2006, and became an inspiration for other groups to be created. The Transition Network charity was set up in early 2007, to support these initiatives. The movement has become global, with thousands of communities now involved in Transition initiatives in over 50 different countries. While the overall aims are closely aligned, the specific approaches of each group may vary, according to particular features of its local area.

Transition Town Reading began in May 2009, when Pete Wheat met Colin Pearson in the Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC), having made contact through a “register of interest” action advertised on the Transition Network website. Dave Allen was on board with TTR by September of that year, and hosted the group at Reading University. Essentially, TTR then grew by people in Reading gravitating toward the central idea of Transition. TTR screened the film “In Transition 1.0” in 2010, and by that stage its numbers had grown to about 25-30 active members.

Many projects have spun out from the original TTR group, based around energy, reducing waste, local food growing, and nurturing nature. In only the last 3 years, we have seen the establishment of Reading Hydro (a microhydro electricity generating station) on Caversham Weir, the further development of Reading Repair Cafe, the Reading Library of Things, and the Reading Community Energy Society (which puts solar panels on roofs of buildings, including schools and churches across Reading), and we connect with other Transition groups, e.g. Incredible Edible Reading has formed a collaboration with one based in Englefield Green, Surrey, and they have been awarded a “partnership” grant from the Transition Network to support this.

TTR also works with the local borough council through the Reading Climate Change Partnership/Reading Climate Action Network, and has forged links with the University of Reading in regard to soil health and renewable energy projects. More of Reading's citizens are now engaged with Transition activities, including energy saving, local energy generation, reducing overall resource use, curbing waste, and local food growing. The award of grants, some from the Transition Network and from the National Lottery, has enabled us to expand awareness and practical action in all these areas. We also now feel more connected with the broader Transition Network.

The DraughtBusters project has helped dozens of families across the town to reduce their energy bills and emissions by properly insulating their homes. Incredible Edible Reading and the Reading Food Growing Network (along with its “seed swap”) have encouraged and helped families to grow their own food, in collaboration with Reading Food4Families, and to reduce food costs. Some TTR members are highly active in outreach and explaining issues of climate change, peak oil and energy, to broaden awareness of the fundamental challenges confronting us, and where changes can best be made.

Reading Repair Cafe helps local people to learn about repairing items rather than just throwing them out, while the Reading Library of Things lends tools and other items within the community, thus avoiding the need for lots of people to buy the same devices, but which they may rarely use, individually. TTR’s connection with Reading Borough Council (RBC) enables us to make positive inputs to how things are run here, in regard to reducing emissions and resource use, supporting biodiversity, social equality, and in building community resilience.

 

Other great things happening in Reading....

The spirit of local community connection and involvement extends widely across many of the town’s activities:

Thus, Ethical Reading helps organisations in Reading to do the right thing by each other, the wider community and the environment and to thrive in the process. It is also a key player in planting trees across Reading, so expanding its green space.

The “RISC roof garden” is a permaculture forest garden, growing in just 30 cm of soil, actually on the roof of the RISC building in the centre of Reading. It serves both to insulate the roof, and hosts a huge range of biodiversity, among the 120 or so different species of perennial plants from around the world that grow there, including a few full sized trees! It is also highly educational, showing how space that we don’t normally think of using, can be made “green” and used for growing food and other plants, many with multiple uses, e.g. for medicine, fuel, fibre, construction, dyes, scents.

Nature Nurture focuses on the health and community benefits of spending time in nature, “Green social prescribing”, and also conservation with Eco-net, connecting the community with nature, school programmes, developing new waymarked walking trails with the community.

“The Marshians” are a large number of people taking action to expand the biodiversity of the largest undeveloped area in Reading (The Kennett flood meadows – Fobney Marsh). This also helps to protect Reading from being flooded during periods of very heavy rainfall, of which we can expect much more as the climate changes.

The artwork on the Reading Hydro turbine house and by the Holy Brook Nook (where Nature Nurture holds events, and there are also raised beds, with herbs and vegetables for anyone to help themselves to, although they are also encouraged to join in with the growing) was painted by Commando Jugendstil (with help from local volunteers), who also received a grant from the Transition Network to produce a book “The Town that Could Be”, based on an imagined “Transitioned” vision of Reading in 2045, aimed to backcast from so it can be made real.

TTR also collaborates with the local independent cinema (“Reading Biscuit Factory”) to show films with Transition themes, which so far include: “Six Inches of Soil”, “Wilding”, “The Sequel”, “Living the Change”, and some locally produced films. TTR has also actually commissioned a new film, currently being produced (more details to follow), which we intend to screen there, as part of an event to stimulate further action in Reading’s Transition journey.

“Refill Reading” is a grassroots campaign started by TTR. It aims to reduce the number of disposable coffee cups going to landfill (2.5 billion per year, just in the U.K.) by encouraging people to use reusable cups instead of disposable ones. This project has the support of the Reading Borough Council.

Lavender Place Community Gardens (a space set free by the demolition of the old RBC “civic centre” offices) was temporarily turned into a community garden by Food4Families (F4F), in partnership with Thames Valley Police, and later joined by members of the Forgotten British Gurkhas community. The F4F volunteers (at Lavender Place and in many of Reading's other community gardens) supplied fruit and vegetables to local organisations for food parcels and free meals during (and after) the pandemic. [In fact, they still do from Craven Road, Ardler Road and Southcote GrowAllot, amongst others]. F4F volunteers also look after the raised vegetable and herb beds at Holy Brook Nook. 

Health and environmental challenges for minoritised communities in Reading, including those from Nepal, are a focus of the Integrated Research and Development Centre (IRDC), while Reading HongKongers CIC was founded in 2022 to support Hong Kong nationals who have settled in the Berkshire, providing them with a diaspora network and helping them to integrate into the local community. Both groups have woven their activities around local food growing and wellbeing.

British Islamic Gardens (BIG) is based in Reading, and run solely by volunteers, to create garden spaces around mosques that grow in harmony with the environment, encouraging community cohesion without compromising on sustainability.

There is very much more happening in Reading, and the above merely provides a flavour of it all. For example, there is  the Reading Voluntary Action (RVA) website, which lists (under "Directory") all kinds of community and other local organisations that are looking for volunteers.


Relocalisation and community are the foundations of the future.

Resources are precious, and we can use them much better. We can become far less dependent on supply chains spanning the world, often to buy things we don’t really need. We can be more self-sufficient, and produce more energy and food locally, while wasting less of what we have. We can nurture nature, so she can nurture us. We can strengthen our communities.

Undoubtedly, we face many interconnected and systemic challenges, but it appears sage to plan away from the proverbial global village, and more toward a globe of villages. Thus, although Transition Towns thinking was initiated primarily from considerations about peak oil, it has been stressed that:

“All essential efforts toward re-localisation and community resilience may provide the strongest available single buffer against the many storms that are likely to prevail upon us.”

Reading is a town in Transition, and has its own character. The things we’ve managed to achieve here can be built on to become a place where we love to live, and the whole community of living beings thrives.

We hope that some of what we have done in Reading lights the way for others to see what they might also do in their own town, their village, their street.

It is members of the community, people, who are the force of change. By our own hands, hearts and minds, we make things happen. We can begin to shape our future, ourselves, and not just accept what governments may decide for us, or the prevailing paradigm throws our way.

Transition needs local people to get involved, lots of us – we can all help to build the story of our future, then act together to make it real. We do this for ourselves, for our children, and for our children’s children, who will inherit our Earth.

Only So Much Oil in the Ground... or Gas for that Matter.

“Only So Much Oil in the Ground”, so sang the band, Tower of Power, in the titular track on their album “Urban Renewal”, which was released in 1975. Following closely on the heels of the first of the oil shocks in 1973, its lyrics sounded a strident warning about the limits of natural resources. Fifty years later, with well in excess of half of the oil and gas ever produced  having been exhumed and burned, and as viewed on an unpredictably flexing global geopolitical stage, it appears apposite to observe the way different countries are currently shifting their sources of imported oil and gas. Hence, an effective competition is underway for whatever remains, and by all trying to grab the same fossil resources, the exercise is akin to moving around the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic, until it collides with an inevitable iceberg of depletion and begins to sink. The course of techno-industrial civilization needs to be changed, while there is still some leeway left to do so.

The energy infrastructure in the North Sea is complex and vulnerable.  The effect of a major undersea disruptive event – of either human or natural cause – could be catastrophic. In any case, the reserves of oil and gas are limited, with about a decade’s worth each of proven oil left for Norway and the UK, and enough gas for 14 years and 5 years, respectively. 

[The above resource lifetimes are estimated on the basis of the reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio, which is the ratio of the size of the reserve base to the annual rate of production: thus, for example, a 100,000 tonne reserve produced from at 1,000 tonnes per year should last for 100 years. This is, of course, a naive piece of arithmetic, since no material can be produced at a constant rate, right up to the bitter end, and instead, a production peak is to be expected, as the quality of particular deposits/ores declines, and the energy input, per tonne of a material recovered, increases relentlessly - eventually to the point that further extraction from a particular source is no longer worthwhile. The concept of the “burn-off time” has been introduced, which has the same formal definition as the R/P ratio; however, it has been emphasised that, while this is applicable in a stagnant economy (constant production rate), in a growing economy it overestimates the production lifetime].

Since Russian gas supplies have been attenuated as a result of the Ukraine conflict, Germany, along with Italy, is now importing more gas from Norway. In consequence of such increased demand, Norway has ramped up its gas production, the majority of which goes for export, to a record 124 billion cubic metres in 2024, a strategy which must use up its reserves even faster. In contrast, Norwegian oil production was down in 2024 over 2023, mainly because few fields came onstream and most of those already in production are in their decline phase.

The Troll Field holds 40% of Norway’s gas, and accounts for 32.5% of its gas production. Its reserve is reckoned at 606 bcm, down from an original 1436.6 bcm, and which at a sustained 42.5 pa, as was produced in 2024, amounts to 14 years worth. Since Troll is the current cornerstone of Europe’s gas supply, meeting 11% of total consumption, this is significant.

[Norwegian gas production in 2035 had been estimated in 2017 at 90 bcm, but this depended on 30 bcm coming from undiscovered fields]. 

The situation will be worsened by the rapidly declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for gas and oil liquids which will result in “energy cannibalism”, with less net energy being available for society, as more is consumed by the production of harder to get, diminishing resources.

An inexorable decline in North Sea production has also been highlighted by the collapse of the Dutch gas fields, and in trying to secure future gas supplies, it is likely that Europe overall will deepen its dependence on liquefied natural gas (LNG), including from Russia. The prospect of fracking as a means for securing gas supplies in Germany, banned since 2017, remains very uncertain and would not happen soon enough to help with the current energy crisis, even if qualms over environmental impacts could be abated. 

Despite claims that granting licenses for oil and gas extraction by the UK government will increase our energy security, most of the North Sea oil is not available for use in the UK because it is extracted by private companies, who sell it on the open international market, rather than necessarily to the UK. For this reason - and because the UK lacks facilities to refine some kinds of oil - around 80% of the oil produced in the North Sea is exported. In contrast, most of the gas is pumped directly into the UK network, although some of this is piped to Europe, in part to fill gas storage reservoirs. Of the gas used in the UK, 46% is imported, 90% by pipeline from Norway, along with LNG, increasingly from the US and less from Qatar 

Business leaders have urged “full-throated support” from both Westminster and Holyrood governments for oil and gas from the North Sea, a sentiment accorded with by newly elected second-time president Donald Trump, who also says that he will push shale producers in the US to ramp up output even if it means they “drill themselves out of business”, i.e. no holds barred, “drill, baby, drill”, having signed an order directing withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, also for the second time.

However, whether or not this production bonanza will actually materialise is a moot point, and depends on financial aspects being favourable. Meanwhile, shale gas plays may have begun to decline, even as the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and its greatest LNG exporter. 

The word Dunkelflaute is one of those uniquely German appellations, translating to (something like) "dark wind lull" or "dark doldrums, and describes a period when there is little to no wind or sunlight, thus limiting the amount of energy that might be generated from renewable sources. At such times, in the UK, 70% of our electricity may be generated using gas, with just 7% from wind plus solar combined: 

Overall, gas provides around 37% of the UK’s primary energy, about the same as oil, with almost half of each being imported. Clearly, in addition to climate change issues, we have to find alternative energy sources, and get away from our acute dependence on dwindling oil and gas supplies. As Fatih Birol neatly summed up the situation:

 “One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day. The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously.” 

So, what about renewables? We have already mentioned dunkelfluate, but to cope with the variability of wind and solar at a full scale, in the absence of fossil fuel backup, will surely need considerable storage capacity, and materials to build this. According to a recent study, based on battery storage, the requirements depend markedly on the time length factored in for the buffer, and so the demands increase from 6 hours onward to 12 weeks. However, even at 6 hrs, a massive necessary production expansion is indicated for Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt, Graphite, over 2019 levels. The rare earth elements show a similar huge production increase to be necessary. It appears that there is insufficient Lithium and Cobalt (based on 2022 reserves) to build a completely Fossil Fuel free, renewable energy system. If the price of these went up, more would become available (pass from resources to reserves), but still the mining and production would need to expand appreciably. Progressing onward to 48 hours + storage, having enough copper begins to become a potential problem, but the main issue seems to be over Ni, Li, Co, Graphite, which are all used in Lithium ion batteries, with huge production increases necessary for all of them.

Other kinds of batteries, e.g. sodium, or those based on other earth abundant elements, might offset this, but mining/production increases would have to happen there too. The study is based on a full replacement of FF by RE by 2050. To bring this forward to an earlier date (e.g. 2030), the mining/production increases for materials to build the new RE system would be greater still, and any new battery technologies brought to reality and at massive scale very fast indeed. Of course, other (non-battery) storage devices are possible and might offset demand for some materials. 

However, without the expansion of such energy sources (including with sufficient buffer capacity), it is difficult to see how “Peak Oil Demand” can be achieved, i.e. using less oil and gas by choosing alternatives, rather than by their depletion (“peak oil”).

A critical component strategy for creating a viable future energy system and addressing climate change, must surely be energy demand reduction (minimisation), e.g. through relocalisation, retrofitting buildings, local food growing, and reducing waste, to curb the size of resource [very much plural] demands, get us below overshoot and avoid collapse (if we can). Human behavioural change is a necessary and major driver of these changes.

Even apart from climate change/emissions considerations, it would make sense to save oil and gas for those specific future uses (including as manufacturing feedstocks) where substitution will prove difficult or impossible. On the immediate human timescale we have but a one off bestowal of them. Currently, fossil fuels are needed to install renewable energy capture devices, and even if the new energy system grows large enough to feed back sufficient energy for its own fabrication and maintenance, oil, gas and coal will still be needed for mining and processing raw materials for some time to come. Nonetheless, falling EROI for oil liquids may well set a limit to a rapid and global low-carbon energy transition.

Meanwhile, the hourglass drains, while transient resources ebb away.

Society of Authors Interviews Chris Rhodes about his eco-parable, “Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus!”

I was among several authors, involved with "sustainability", who were interviewed by The Society of Authors (UK) recently, as part of their “Tree to Me” sustainable publishing campaign. Interviewer: Teddy McDonald. 

“A modern day eco-parable (for 5-8 year olds), with themes of family, community, sustainability and diversity: aimed to help young children with reading English, and to see that cooperation, empathy, and being inspired by Nature, are the best ways to live in a massively changing world.”

Awarded as a Winner in the Authors Show's "50 Great Writers You Should be Reading" contest.

The Interview.

TM. I guess maybe the best place to start would just be if you could just tell me a bit about your sustainable journey and what got you interested in sustainability and then how you heard about Tree to Me.

CR. I've always loved nature. I grew up in the countryside, first in South Wales and then in Gloucestershire, and then I moved to Banbury and then to London and became a city boy. But I've always had this love, the love of walking in nature and all that sort of thing. Yes, I was a university professor in chemistry, this is probably about 20 years ago, and I really found myself gravitating towards environmental matters, if you like. Then I got the opportunity to set up an independent consultancy and I got involved with energy and, in my deliberations about energy, I came across a phenomenon called Peak Oil, which didn't mean that we're about to run out of oil any time soon, but we've got this hugely oil dependent society. And if we can't maintain the flow of oil into it, then what do we do? And so I started writing a blog about this, called “Energy Balance”, which has got quite a few million hits over the years. And I was really thinking around energy and what do we do about fossil fuels? Can we get enough renewables, etc., etc..

And it struck me that we are going to have to relocalise a lot of our activity if we don't have all this oil dependent transportation, in our own lives, but also importing food and energy itself and so on. And it occurred to me that children are going to be challenged in all sorts of ways in the time to come and I put this story together about a little Hippo for my niece who was four then – she's 29 now, so we're going back a few years.

And the story of the Hippo. 

He's got the mind of a five year old boy growing up in Africa. And it's his interactions with his family and human creatures and so on. And it just struck me that it would be nice to bring out this story, not in any preachy way, but just to sort of get over the ideas that cooperation rather than conflict and connecting with nature are probably the best ways of solving where we are at the moment and going into a happy kind of future.

And also I sort of wrote the first story - I've written quite a few other stories in the hippo-series since - but I thought to myself that it might take a while to get a publisher for it. So I thought, okay, I can write words, but I can't draw to save my life, frankly. So I tried to look around friends, and then somebody said, “Ah, Jeanette Cole, she's really good”. So I was put in touch with Jeanette, and Jeanette drew the illustrations for that, and we've done lots of outreach in schools, and she lives in East London and in a lot of the schools there, the kids don't have English as their first language. And the teachers have said, “You know what? This is really so easy for them to read from, to engage with”. I met kids who normally don't have a lot of confidence in reading out loud, and they do, they take to it. I think it’s down to Jeanette's lovely illustrations, which draw them in to the stories, and the words. So that's kind of all part of my view of sustainability.

I mean, I do a lot of different things. I still continue to write academic papers. And regarding this campaign [Tree to Me] – well, kind of interesting – here is a paper of mine, just accepted, entitled, “Trees - protectors against the changing climate”, which is going to be published in an academic journal, and I'm pointing out that we should stop destroying nature. Keep the trees preserved. Protect the trees, and the trees will protect us. So I'm kind of carrying on with the academic work, but also community related stuff, and things to do with nature.

And we came up with something called “For Our Children’s Earth”, the idea being that we need to protect and rebuild the soils, and we're having a film screening in Reading. It's part of a national screening of “Six Inches of Soil”, and being shown by Transition Town Reading, an organisation that I have become chair of, mainly because nobody else wanted to do it at the time. But we're doing this screening, and it's all sort of going on with our other activities.

And what I found with the Hippo stories, is they naturally bring up discussions from kids about nature, about the environment and so on. So all these things, although that wasn't quite what I was thinking when I put the stories together for my niece, along with all the sustainability topics that I've got involved with since, it's all become kind of interleaved.

And that's probably expressed in a slightly haphazard way, because there are a lot of complex things that have happened, coming in from different directions, but if any of it proves useful at all, I’m glad.

TM. So you obviously wrote it for your niece was there, was it always in your head that you were going to publish it in some way? And what was the experience of publishing it like? Was it on a big scale to begin with?

CR. Not at all. The first shot we had, we used Lulu - you are probably familiar with that, a sort of online print on demand, right? Yes. Here we are. It's one of the original ones [CR holds up book to the camera]. It's an unusual sort of size. It's one of the American sizes. But I think we did an initial run of  50, and since then we've sold about 2,000 copies altogether over the time, but just in small runs, basically.

So there's not been an issue of having a great pile that we needed to do something with, or God forbid, dispose off. I would never want to be in that position. But yes, we've just done it – and it's moved almost by, it's too much to say, an underground movement, but word of mouth. And then people get in touch with us and say, “Oh, would you come along and...” you know, give some sort of outreach somewhere.

And I talk about the environmental aspects, and read the stories. Jeanette helps the kids to draw the pictures, of hippos and everything else, and we sell them that way. But it is also available via Amazon. And we produced it that way. And it's available in various independent bookshops, including a local one, Fourbears Books in Caversham. 

So it's been relatively low-key, but steady, and it's more all the other things that have come from it, basically. The way it sort of fits in with the community stuff, with the kids and really where we're all going as a human society, and how their future is likely to be.

TM. So I suppose obviously you didn't have to worry too much about print run in that case. But what about the other stages of the production process? Did you have did you have control over, for instance, the use of inks or finishes, trims and cover materials? Were any of those things a consideration when you were trying to make it a sustainable book?

CR. To be perfectly honest, when we started this, even despite my developing thinking in terms of sustainability, until the Tree to Me campaign came along, I hadn't – I don't know why I hadn’t – but I hadn't thought, “Wow, the publishing industry producing books, and of course this has sustainability issues in terms of where the basic wood comes from to make the paper, the inks and all that”.

So what I'm doing now, I mean, yes, we've had sort of total control of the thing in a general sense, but we've just used commercial printers. But now I'm looking to people, printers who swear that it's all ecologically sound, to use recycled paper, or paper that has not had a huge detrimental impact in its production, that sort of thing.

And also I saw something the other day, I don't think it works so well for printing books, but for the fliers and so forth – this is paper with seeds incorporated into it. So you could tear that up and put it in the ground. It's a bit like this sort of guerrilla gardening activity where somebody casually goes along with a handful of seeds and chucks them in a hedgerow somewhere, the idea being to grow flowers to help the pollinators, this kind of thing. I mean, you would certainly hope not to have to be shredding and disposing of books. But certainly all the advertising stuff, if you did that in that way, it's even better than composting it because you could actually bring forth new life basically and help out the local environment.

TM. Did you find the Tree to Me questions useful in relation to your book before or after publication? Obviously you didn't send these questions to a publisher as some authors would use the campaign, but was it a useful prompt just to think about issues around your book’s sustainability or how you might do things differently?

CR. Yes, I think, sort of, from going forward now. Despite my activities in sustainability, for some reason I've not really thought of the fact that this of course applies to producing and distributing books. But now I'm aware of these aspects of where the basic materials come from, what happens potentially to them afterwards and throughout the whole production and distribution process. Yes, I think the way you set that out is very useful and I would certainly pay attention – if we proceed forward carrying on under our own steam, then I will take account of those indicators. But I think seriously, to expand this on the scale that we would like to... I mean, I would like to have a million kids reading Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus, and the other Hippo stories, because it's such a strong and positive message.

And the feedback we've got from teachers and parents and everybody is wonderful and that gives me heart to carry on with it. But I think this is going to be a, well... I think in general, the whole publishing industry is going to take all that stuff on seriously from now on. It’s with us. It's part of modern life. It's almost criminal. And in some cases, probably what happens in grabbing resources really is criminal in some parts of the world. But yes, it's a sort of offense against society to not take sustainability as an issue in terms of everything we do.

TM. I was going to ask you – and you may not have comment on this, but I was just wondering – if you had any thoughts about how it could be made easier for authors to ask these questions of their publishers? I know that you've had you've obviously had other books, and you’ve gone through independent publishers with those. Because these are difficult conversations for authors to have a publishers.

CR. Yes, and authors don't necessarily want to put publishers off, I would imagine, by making their job sound more difficult. Yes, you're right, I've worked with lots of different publishers, I've worked with a lot of academic publishers, for example, like the tree paper I’ve just shown you, in publishing in journals. I had a black comedy novel called “University Shambles”, that was published by a small press near Cambridge. They have sadly gone bust, so either I try and find another publisher for that, or if we go it alone, then I will make sure that the printing is operating in a sustainable kind of way. So, there's a bit of a question mark to that one.

But I think it should become part of the package from the publisher, a set of questions about sustainability or along the lines of what you have with your campaign – like the frequently asked questions (FAQ) kind of thing. Where the publisher explains what the situation is in regard to these issues, to give the author an idea what they are getting involved with and what the impact of their book is likely to be if they go with this particular publisher.

TM. So in terms of the questions, which of them felt the most pertinent or relevant to you?

CR. Well, actually the deforestation and water use there, for example, I said I've just had this paper about trees accepted. 

And basically what I'm saying, in a nutshell, is if we carry on destroying the forests, destroying the natural environment, you can forget about zero emissions targets in terms of cutting fossil fuels. I mean, this might sort of encompass the whole thing a bit better in terms of my thinking, it's called ‘carbon tunnel vision’, because the message that comes over all too often from the government, and generally speaking, is as long as we decarbonize our energy system, we can carry on as we are. Everything is going to be hunky dory. But that's nonsense, because, if we got to zero carbon energy, if we're still using that energy to destroy the forests and the soils and overfishing and polluting the oceans and shoving plastic everywhere, we're still doomed, frankly. 

So we need a whole, more integrated, way of approaching this. And I think that set of questions was nicely integrated, because you talk about renewable energy, you talk about deforestation, you talk about water use. It's the bigger picture.

When I first started writing the “Energy Balance” blog, which is now getting on for 20 years ago, and I give lots of public lectures and sometimes I lecture at universities. 

I've not been formally employed by a university for 20 years and don’t miss it at all. I still interact with universities around the world. I do all sorts of things. And people have said to me, “Well, you know, the problem is we're in overshoot.” So I kind of casually replied, “Yeah, that's right.” And then I got sent a paper a couple of years ago by Bill Rees, who was one of the originators of the ecological footprint analysis, you know, Earth Overshoot Day is the 2nd of August – so in other words, we’ve used up a year’s worth of resources by then and I hadn't really got what this meant until I saw that. And then – bloody hell – the penny dropped, and it just framed the whole picture of our overconsumption of resources and the fact that the waste we're producing in how we use them is overwhelming the capacity of the Earth to absorb it. So it's a real double whammy.

So yes, it's energy, it's resource use, it's how we use those resources and the energy in terms of the waste, greenhouse gases, but plastic pollution and really all the whole show.

TM. Did the questions spark a wider conversation with those around you or with people who you've worked together with on the books? So colleagues, for instance, or anyone close to you – were the questions sort of a prompt to talk more about sustainability?

CR. Yes, perhaps not those precise questions because I hadn't seen them before we started doing this. But, Jeanette Cole, the illustrator of Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus, and I have got a couple of other books in the series so far... and she is very much into environmental matters and sustainable energy and so forth. And, I know a lot of people, and this is what they are talking about... you may remember, I said my father was ill.

Now, I wouldn't have imagined Dad becoming any sort of environmentalist, but I phone him up, and my God, he's well aware of the places that are on fire or flooding and everything else. So I think it's becoming that almost everybody is aware of climate change and environmental damage, and certainly people that I know from all walks of life are. I've also written quite a few articles, mostly about sustainability and energy, for a journal called Science Progress. 

I was on the editorial board of that journal – still am, actually – and everybody involved with it is deeply and definitely aware of the sustainability aspects in their own lives. So yes, I don't think I know anybody who isn't concerned, right? I guess there are a few people... I don't know what Mr. Trump thinks, for example, about the coal industry. I seem to recall him saying that, no, we can't cut our use of coal because it disadvantages our economy against other countries that are producing coal like China and Russia. But the trouble is, I think we have a fear of giving things up; there is a reluctance, because it almost seems like you're stepping back. You know, you're giving up something that you've earned through your hard work. And so on. You're sort of stepping back toward the dark ages, if you’re not careful. But of course, if we stay on the path we are on, then we're all going to lose everything.

So we have to change our behaviour. I'm coauthor of another paper which says that Overshoot, as I was talking about, our overconsumption of resources, and also overwhelming the Earth by the waste we produce, is down to a kind of behavioural crisis, and a lot of it is driven by advertising. 

You're told to buy more and more and more, etc., etc. So it's going to be tackled in that way. But I do think there is a sort of splinter movement of awareness that is moving away from this kind of thinking.

TM. Have you communicated [your book’s] sustainable credentials as an object with your readers? Have you communicated that in the pages of the book or via other channels to like let people know?

CR. Well, as an object rather than the concept to the message? No, because I think until I signed up for this present thing we're talking about I wasn't really quite aware of the impact of the publishing industry on the environment. So, now it’s more of a going forward stage, but I think it will add a lot to the environmental, the sustainability message in the book to say, “...and hey, here it is, this object, it's been printed sustainably…” Sustainable is one of these words... it’s so overused, sometimes people don't quite know what it means and yet it's a good word because it covers everything, doesn't it? So I use it, but I don't totally like it. But yes, if you could say, well okay, this waste paper has been produced from the book’s advertising literature, it's got seeds in it so you can tear it up and plant it in the garden and so on and so on. I think that that would be fantastic.

I think there are different ways of estimating carbon emissions and so forth, but they're quite difficult. It wouldn't apply to me and what I've done so far. But of course, I can probably do some calculations to come up with something to address that aspect of it. And I would do, because going forward it's important to address the sustainability issues of the object itself, how it was produced and to come into your hands literally.

So I think that's going to be an important part of the message and it's often, I think, powerful to give practical examples of things. You can say things, you can quote things, and there's so much doom and gloom in the world. And I think sometimes, if you've actually got something like this and you can say it was sustainably produced and the other aspects of it in a in a real tangible, practical sense, I think that would carry the message forward more powerfully.

TM. The next question I had was, has the Tree to Me questions and sort of engaging with the campaign – has it changed the way you might think about the next book that you produce if you've got one lined up or if you're thinking about producing another book. And is there anything you do differently next time?

CR. Yes, for sure. Okay. In terms of printed copies, we just have "Hippy the Happy Hippopotamus", but there are two more in electronic form, other books, "Hippy Eco-Hippo" and "Visitors for Hippy". We are planning to get those printed, for sure the three books; we would intend to use a printer that can guarantee that the materials have a low environmental impact in all respects. So yes, that's going to become a critical part of it. Or, if we do eventually manage to get a publisher, then I would engage in discourse to make sure that we get the right one, who is also on board with this kind of thinking, and how they produce it would have minimal environmental impact. But yes, that's going to be a critical part.

I would also say the novel “University Shambles”, as we take that forward out of the wreckage of the publishers - who were based near Cambridge - going bust, then we would certainly make sure that the materials, not just tick the boxes, but are genuinely of low impact. I would look into that as deeply as possible.

TM. So what’s next for you? Do you think you will be writing another book or is there anything there anything else in your sights in terms of a next publication?

CR. Well, we’ve got the three books so far in the happy Hippo series, which we want to take forward as described, and then the novel already written. New books to write… I may do. Of course, it's an enormous amount of effort to go into that. People keep saying to me, you ought to write a book about energy. Well, yes, I'm probably well qualified to do that. But there are other good books on energy by very well qualified people. I think I might produce a book about trees because I have a growing love for trees. I wanted to get an actual academic article out to try and get the message to governments to say, look, this is where you need to put your money, change the law if necessary on that level. But it's a matter, I think, also of what we can do as individuals, as communities at the local level, which is what the Transition Towns movement is about. But I think, until I decide firmly on that, I will continue writing articles, I'll write my blog, I will cooperate with people on the scientists warnings topics, papers, things like that. When something ignites me sufficiently to write another book, I'll write it. There are a few things on the drawing board, actually, and I will probably go with one of them when the muse strikes me and I have enough energy to focus on a particular thing. I'll just say I'm involved with a lot of different things in the world, so I might have to put some of those to one side if I were really to focus on a book in regard to what sustainability activities I'm engaged with at the moment.

TM. If you one tip for authors – whether in their personal lives or professionally – about sustainability, what would it be?

The phrase that comes to mind is “think global act local”, which of course was from Fritz Schumacher’s book, “Small is Beautiful”. 

But it’s true, while many of the problems confronting us, like climate change say, and all the rest of it, are global... that's to say, they affect everybody, there is a lot you can do at the local level to ensure some resilience, so you can insulate buildings yourself. You can grow food, you can do a bit of guerrilla gardening. Because we need some resilience against supply chains failing, for example. You know, as I said, my thinking in this way began around the fact we might not be able to... well, we almost certainly won't be able to maintain the oil supply. I don't think we can run this civilization all on renewable energy. But we shouldn't do it either because of all the other impacts on the environment. So I would say our focus should on the local, you know, what you can actually do in your own community yourself, but be aware of the global picture.

TM. What would be your tip for readers about sustainability?

CR. Yes. Well, you know, the tips for readers are not so different. But if I can say then for readers, use less stuff, produce less waste. The two things are not disconnected. And so, as I say, overall, the problem is we are in overshoot. We're using up too much stuff and we're using more than the Earth can provide. We're producing too much waste in how we use those resources, more than the Earth can absorb, basically. So in this time of rising costs of energy and everything, of course, everything you do to try and save money, if you like, does reduce the environmental impact. So that would be one metric. How could I save some money?

So, use less energy, do things more locally, try and get hold of a patch of land, if you can, and grow local food. It also helps to bring communities together and build communities and in a very healthy and positive way.