Speaking at Caper Books, Natalie Bennett began by talking briefly about the House of Lords, in which she is a very active participant. Her one-word conclusion about this institution is that it is “strange”.
Green Thinking was conceived as a follow up to her 2024 work, Change Everything: How we can rethink, repair and rebuild society. She asserted that there are enough resources for all of us to equitably share the benefits of both the climate and nature. Competition has led to “more stuff”, but this is an ideology rather than a necessity.
The case for unlearning
There is a need for unlearning because of some aspects of our overall intellectual culture. University politics courses still start with Thomas Hobbes, who was clearly an authoritarian. Abraham Maslow, a major figure in the field of psychology, conceptualised the hierarchy of needs to explain human behaviour. This stressed survival needs, such as food, water, and shelter. However, Bennett suggested what really matters is respect. The implication is that other needs would be met out of respect from others and from society, but perhaps not without it. Similarly, Maslow’s argument is something Maslow himself admitted he could not prove. There is also the problem that his research was based on an extraordinarily narrow sample.
Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis elevated liberal democracy in the 1990s into a kind of ideal state of human existence, after which no progress would occur. This alleged peak condition was followed by the 2007-2008 economic crash. The financial system was not stabilised any more than human immunity was obtained against all threatening microbes, including Covid-19. The trashing of the planet continued through the 1990s into the present, providing more evidence that our current approach has not resulted in an ideal state.
Natural Cooperation
Lynn Margulis played a large role in developing Gaia theory, which hypothesises that life on earth sustains itself by self-regulating through interactions between organisms and their environment. She persuaded James Lovelock to withdraw his strong support for fossil fuel industries and, through her expertise in biology, led him to recognise that permanent partnerships between species exist. This cooperation, or symbiogenesis, was found to be in human cells. Mitochondria – the powerhouse of the cell – and the chloroplasts responsible for photosynthesis both originated from independent bacteria, evolving through symbiosis. Ultimately, Bennett affirmed each organism on the planet is the result of cooperation to create complex life on Earth.
Despite the intellectual leap forwards in recognising the fundamental importance of cooperation amongst and within species, competition is still overemphasised. David Attenborough’s Planet Earth exemplifies this by stressing competition, but side-lining cooperation. Neither he, nor others, can successfully argue for some kind of genetic determinism. A genome is not a blueprint and progress may not be linear. The idea of a “machine blueprint” model negates the essential role of cooperation. A similar problem lies in the idea of economic growth. Continuous growth can be presented as “the ideology of the cancer cell”. Jason Hickel has argued we cannot maintain economic growth for profit when continuous economic growth on a finite planet is unsustainable.
Cooperation between different types of human species appears to go back many thousands of years, including in the form of landscape management, with early humans favouring edible species. This is exemplified by an extensive spread of edible species throughout Australia, and the spread of avocado growth across South America.
Rethinking Values
John Maynard Keynes thought people would be working 15-hour weeks by the 1970s. But work, as a concept, does not recognise volunteering, often by the retired, as enormously valuable to society. Bennett emphasised the importance of human time, energy, and talent to society. We need to rethink the idea that life is work.
A ban on octopus farming reflects the need to recognise intelligence and set aside the idea of humans as superior to all other beings. Human beings, with all our attendant features, are microbiomes after all.
Mental health is at its best in greener environments. We cannot rely on solutionism to invent answers for problems human beings have created. All too often this means creating yet more marketable technologies for profit, rather than actually solving issues. This approach is related to neoliberalism, and its failures in the UK’s university system, where STEM subjects are strongly emphasised. As observers, we both note that many subjects, such as languages and music, lack sufficient teaching staff in many schools.
A bill for progress
Bennett finished by emphasising the Private Members’ bill she is involved in promoting, the Nature’s Rights Bill, to help address deficiencies in environmental protection which are prevalent in the UK.
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