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Jonathan Porritt

Board Member of the South West Regional Development Agency

If you are anything like me, you will be thinking of where you will be in 2026. In my

case I will be 76 years old, which I find difficult to imagine, but none the less thats

what it will be. I would be thinking about impact on my own personal life, on myfamily, friends, community - assuming that Im still living in the South West of

course - and trying to work out if that really gives me, us, genuine hope for the future;

or should persuade us that at the moment we are travelling down a rather dangerous

track. Scenarios of course are not predictions of the future. They are essentially a

conduit through which one can contemplate a range of possible futures and hopefully

arrive at a favoured future emerging out of all that.

The work that we do in Forum of the Future and the Sustainable Development

Commission - we spend a lot of time talking to people about their favoured future.

Some time ago, when local Agenda 21 was all the rage in local authorities across the

whole UK, a huge amount of personal and collective energy went into these visioning

processes. Looking at what it was that the future might hold for communities and

individuals in those communities - they were extraordinarily uplifting experiences

because whichever way you looked took them, however much you ask people to

contemplate differences, they all came back to the same set of secure constants that

they wanted in their life. The quality of the physical environment, the sense of

security they had in it, the range of opportunities both for work and recreation, good

public services and a sense that they werent trespassing on anyones entitlements, in

terms of achieving all of those goals.

I guess thats what we mean today by the pursuit of a sustainable future - trying to

think how we are all going to live more intelligently, more compassionately so that

we dont go on generating some of those serious costs and threats to all of us. Thatspretty timely. Its difficult at the moment to turn away from some of the foreboding,

some of the sense of the onrush of real environmental crisis. The extraordinary

frequency now of extreme hurricanes in the Caribbean, and of course around Florida,

which might even have made some of the people living in Florida think that the world

is actually is changing.

This country, this week - we have the extraordinary sight of the leader of the

opposition, Michael Howard, giving a ringing environmental speech by all accounts.

Some of the green groups were most polite about it this morning. Then this evening

we have Tony Blair giving another ringing speech about climate change and the

importance of thinking differently about creating quality of life for this country. Thereis no doubt that this is now very much main stream, coupled as it needs to be very

often with an equal emphasis on how we actually generate these benefits more

equitably, more inclusively, so that that sense of community spirit is given a real

breathing in our lives.

I think that is forcing people, politicians, to think on a more precautionary basis - to

think long term. It has been extraordinary for me watching civil servants and

politicians wrestle with the complexity of trying to deliver a policy which is geared to

achieving something by 2050. We have a target in this country to reduce CS gas

omissions, greenhouse gas omissions by 60% by 2050 and by and large civil servants

and politicians do not do 2050. It is just not in their daily routine. They are of course

understandably at the moment focused on the next 6 months because thats a much

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more pressing timeframe, for all sorts of more obvious political reasons. Even so,

casting out to 2050 is massively complex for people to undertake.

The good thing I suppose is that you dont really find anybody any longer who

disagrees with the statement that we have to do this process, this transition. We have

to move towards more sustainable and inclusive societies. Each one of those four

scenarios, in its odd and idiosyncratic way, none the less touched on the way of a

more sustainable way of doing what it is that we need to do. In that sense, sustainable

development seems to have become what you might describe as a no-brainer, there

isnt really anybody who doesnt think that we have to do it. But, this is the essence

that I hope that we can reflect on during the course of today, all the workshops and so

on. It doesnt make it desirable; it doesnt necessarily leave people saying that is my

future of choice. What it leaves a lot of people saying is that is the future of

inevitable necessity, so we better get on with it.

For me, this is the transition of moving from a grudging sense of inevitability to a

completely different dynamic sense of desirability about what is that we now need to

do. I put that grudging sense of inevitability to 250 years of industrial history, wherewe have accepted, as an inevitable price of the progress we have won, that the

environment will be damaged and degraded and that people who are less well off in

society will remain less well off. Their communities will not be as successful and

vibrant as we would like. Weve built in environmental damage and social exclusion

as legitimate costs of progress. What you see today is an acceptance that those are no

longer the legitimate costs of progress - doing it differently. I think what the RDA is

trying to do in this respect is really important. We are trying to move away from a

very old fashioned sense of environmental protectionism, where you keep your

business model in tact and try and protect the environment as much as you can. We

are trying to move away from that old world, negative, constrained view about

environmentalism and into a very different approach to it, which is understanding theenvironment better and using the environment as part of the economic drivers in this

region.

Its not easy. Its difficult wrestling with that concept. It is still counter intuitive for an

awful lot of people to see how thats going to move this regional economy forward.

For a lot of environmentalists, its counter intuitive. They dont like the talk of using

the environment as an asset for future growth and prosperity. But to say that doesnt

mean to say that we lose the sense of the environment and community meaning a

great deal more to us as well.

I was very taken reading the newspapers yesterday about this new survey of patterns

of mental illness and ill health amongst young people - the incidence of depression,

stress, addictive pathologies of apparently endless variety. Twice as bad today as it

was in the preceding generation. At a time where our economies keep growing by 2%

per annum, you keep asking yourself what it is that is creating that enormous pool of

suffering, of misery, of lost opportunity amongst young people. And in that respect I

wondered if the policy makers, who are largely disempowered by this sense of ill

health and disaffection amongst young people, whether they actually look at the

evidence which is available to them. Four tiny little things: The British Trust for

Conservation Volunteers for the last four years have been running something called

green gyms - taking people who are recovering from serious illness, mental or

physical illness, taking them out into the country or into the town and doing basicconservation work - hard, empirical evidence of the enormous benefits that those

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people within those green gyms are deriving. New research I read last week that in

Wales, those farmers that are now involved in our green environment schemes, now

have a lower rate of suicides and mental illness than the farmers who arent. Just a

coincidence perhaps? Perhaps something more? The long suppressed evidence that

those patients in hospital who are able to look out over green spaces, woodlands

whatever it might be, recover faster and vacate the bed quicker than those patientsforced to look out over grimy, urban dereliction. Increasing evidence that shows that

young people in schools today thrive and blossom in schools that are quality

environments, with school grounds that reflect this sense of connecting us back into

the natural world.

The great American ecologist describes this as biophilia, the sense of the natural

world in us, which we cannot in any way route out. So for me I hope today is about,

as we move into the rest of the proceedings this morning and this afternoon, is trying

to understand that sense of a sustainable future, whichever of those scenarios you may

have inclined towards - a sustainable future, where sustainable development is seen

not as a constraint, a cost, a limitation, but as a desirable, favoured future for thisregion and indeed for the whole world - opportunity rather than risk, balance rather

than extremism, liberation if you like out of some of the worst aspects of our

consumptive society and liberation into real community, real social justice, real work

life balance, innovation, dynamism and relationship with the natural world.