To Bath today to listen to Keele University's Andy Dobson talk on Environmental Behaviour Change: incentives, 'nudge', and citizenship as part of the I-SEE seminar series. This will be based on his recent publication Sustainability Citizenship for Green House, the (relatively) new think tank with which he is involved.
Green House says of itself:
Politics, they say, is the art of the possible. But the possible is not fixed. What we believe is possible depends on our knowledge and beliefs about the world. Ideas can change the world, and Green House is about challenging the ideas that have created the world we live in now, and offering positive alternatives. The problems we face are systemic, and so the changes we need to make are complex and interconnected. Many of the critical analyses and policy prescriptions that will be part of the new paradigm are already out there. Our aim is to communicate them more clearly, and more widely.
For a bunch of rationalists, their credo has a ringing, evangelical tone:
We believe in the human race: we believe that we are wise and clever enough to think and act our way out of the terrible crisis that we as a species have created for ourselves.
We believe in the power of the people. We believe that one day our country and our world will see true democracy: the rule of the people by the people for the people.
We believe in massive co-ordinated action on climate, in a just transition, in public services, in equality, in a dynamic-equilibrium economy, in restorative justice, in localisation, and in real care for the future.
We believe that the economy is more than just a machine to produce more and more trinkets and that the pie has to stop growing because the ingredients are running out.
We believe that the ownership of land is a historical mistake, and that animals cannot be our property.
We believe in the future and that the interests of future people carry as much weight as our own.
We strongly believe in society, in our common humanity, and in a culture of hope.
We believe that the time is right for a thinktank that is adequate to the challenges facing this country and this living planet of ours.
This we believe.
Looking forward to it ...
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