No Natural Disasters, featuring Professor Ilan Kelman

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello and welcome to Series 3 of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. 

Jeremy Bentham, and 18^th– and 19^th-century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current thinking on climate justice, in conversation with leading UCL academics.

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN (INTRO)

The disaster is not from nature. The disaster is us. The disaster is our decisions. The disaster is who is governing us, who has the choices…

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

Hello, I’m Ilan, Ilan Kelman, and I have the privilege of being an academic here at University College London. 

I’m in two departments, first at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, second at the Institute for Global Health, which means that I have the opportunity to connect anything related to disasters and health. 

Some of the bridges we use are climate change, migration, diplomacy, and inclusivity. It really is thinking broadly about what do we mean by health, physical health, mental health, community health, public health, also what we’re doing to the environment more widely regarding health of the planet. 

But also we then start querying, well, what do we mean by disaster? Does it have to be many affected? Or could it be simply a tragedy within a family which becomes disastrous? Are we talking about our overconsumption as a species, or at least overconsumption by a tiny minority of our species, which hurts everyone, as a disaster? One question which often arises is air pollution. The health consequences are well known and well established. Surely that is a disaster. And to me, given the death toll from it, it very much is. 

So we try and make it practical. We work with the United Nations, we work with local organizations, we work with governments around the world, we work with the private sector with businesses. We are always trying to push the boundaries; in UCL terminology, ‘disruptive thinking’, in order to try and say what we seek for health, what we understand as a disaster, may actually be far wider and far deeper than the media tells us, or which we generally think about for those topics. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Right, there’s an awful lot to unpack there. We often talk about natural disasters. Well, I understand you don’t think that terminology makes any sense. I mean, that’s interesting from my point of view because Bentham was always keen on us getting our terminology correct and he would often refer to certain terms as ‘mis-expressive’; they didn’t give the right implications or they had the wrong associations. 

So what’s your thinking in relation to the term natural disasters? 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

And it’s exactly what you just said about Bentham which very much inspires us to dive deeply, to try and understand broadly. What we find is that a lot of common terminology, what we just assume, what we use every day, is definitely mis-expressive. 

What we try to do, the whole point of our research in disasters, is to stop them happening. What we find is absolutely massive powerful earthquakes, which actually do not bring down infrastructure, and then we find moderate earthquakes which kill tens of thousands of people. 

It’s the same with hurricanes, there have been massive category five what are called tropical cyclones, the fastest, the strongest – but people evacuated. They were ready for them. There was disruption but no real calamity – and then we get a smaller one and hundreds of people die. 

So why this difference? And the difference is basically us. How do we live? Some people cannot afford to evacuate or there have been cases where they’ve been fired from their jobs or threatened with dismissal because they knew the danger was coming and they wanted to evacuate. 

Why do some places have seismic building codes and they implement them, monitor them and enforce them? Other countries, like we saw in Haiti on the 12th of January 2010, know they’re in a seismic zone and yet have no codes, no monitoring, no support. 

So the disaster is us. The disaster is our decisions. The disaster is who is governing us, who has the choices, where is the political power, what happens to discrimination and oppression, which means the disaster is not from nature and the disaster should not be the natural state of affairs. 

So it’s not about thinking there are no natural disasters. It is not about believing there are no natural disasters. It is the scientific basis that the term ‘natural disaster’ is mis-expressive, is a misnomer, because we could and should stop disasters from happening. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, I mean, Bentham actually had a lot to say about the term ‘natural’ itself and how it comes loaded with different meanings, and, again, many of them confused and confusing. He, for instance, was very critical of the idea of what were then called natural rights, because he thought rights were the product of law, they were something positive, they were something that humans had created, and they were not something that was perhaps God-given or just simply existed. 

Then there was another meaning of ‘natural’ which means, you know, the physical universe, what that does, and another meaning of ‘natural’ which meant, well, this is what normally happens. And the problems arose when you started to apply some sort of value to the idea of, oh, this is what most people do, therefore it’s right. 

So there’s a whole, he had a whole range of problems with the term nature. But he also used it himself with his most famous work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals from Legislation, begins ‘nature has placed us under the two sovereign masters of pleasure and pain’. And there, he was referring to the sort of the basic human condition, that we all desire pleasure and want to avoid pain as much as possible. 

But what terminology do you think we should use instead of natural disaster? Just ‘disaster’?

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN

They’re all disasters.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

What about Bentham? What did he say about disasters or natural disasters?

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Um, I don’t know. 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

Well, we need to look into that.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I don’t know if he talked about natural disasters very much. I mean, the most famous one, I suppose, at the time was the disaster at Lisbon when many people lost their lives because of the earthquake. 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

So 1^st November 1755?

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yes, yeah.

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

The earthquake followed by the tsunami?

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah.

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

That happened on All Saints Day, so the religious aspect, and in fact two European philosophers, Rousseau and Voltaire, exchanged letters about it and so far this is the earliest that we’ve traced the idea definitively that perhaps disasters are not natural in that exchange of letters. 

What we are missing is we have a few possibilities of centuries earlier within European philosophy of people questioning it. We do have to corroborate it and of course there was a lot more philosophy to humanity than simply the Europeans. 

So there’s a whole vast area where we need researchers. What did the Khmer civilization think of disasters? What about the Incas, the Mayans, the many indigenous African cultures, the Maori, the Australian Aboriginals? 

We need scholars and we need peoples from these cultures which survive to try and explain, how did they view disaster? And even though, yeah, okay, we’re in English, we use the word disaster, and there’s so many synonyms – catastrophe, calamity, emergency, and many more – what do they mean to us? 

And if we start saying, well that was a disaster and that wasn’t, and yes, okay, the drought lasted five years, so it was a five-year disaster, the earthquake recovery was five days, so that was a five-day disaster, does that really make sense? 

And are we starting to say, well that is exceptional and different and abnormal and unusual, rather than thinking of disaster as a long-term process of marginalizing people, of failing in our infrastructure, of undermining education, health, and other social services, and in effect creating the societal ills, which we sadly see every time we walk outside this campus, with people who don’t have housing; every time someone has to wait six weeks for cancer treatment after diagnosis; the air that we breathe; the water that we drink every day, are those the disaster? 

So we’re even starting to explore philosophically and practically, by calling it a disaster, emergency, calamity, catastrophe, whatever, are we suddenly divorcing that from the every-dayism that people experience and suffer, when we have the resources, knowledge, and abilities to do so much better for everyone. And it could be that, yeah, okay, 50, 60 years ago everything was a natural disaster. We’ve now tried to move away from that for a few generations. 

Maybe we should be much more quick. Maybe we should be much quicker in terms of even not referring to disaster and just trying to do better for society, which of course includes my health work, but includes simply how we treat people, how we treat the environment, how we live together, and the baseline problems of society, such as the rich-poor gap, the inequities, the inequalities, the sexism, the racism, the other forms of discrimination, oppression, and marginalization. If we solve these, by definition, we solve what we’re calling disasters. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

You make me feel not so bad about not having a response to your question about Bentham, given that it sounds like it’s a more general philosophical, or something else, that historians or intellectual historians or historians of philosophy have not looked into. But I shall certainly be on the lookout now. 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

No, let us know. We’d be delighted to collaborate on this. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, the underlying problem that you’ve identified is inequality. So, you know, what we think of as rich countries can deal very well with a disaster, whereas poorer countries fail, not through any fault of their own, but they just don’t have the resources to deal effectively with them?

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

It depends. The UK is generally seen as a rich country. I don’t think that our response to COVID-19 was a world-renowned approach to dealing with the disaster. When there is another major tsunami off the UK coast, we are going to see how ill-prepared we are for that situation. 

We often talk about the US as being the richest, most powerful country, and a world leader, yet they have a long history of continuing calamities. Of course, people see the headlines of the recent fires around Los Angeles earlier this year. We talked about Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but of course, let’s go back to COVID-19. Let’s go to the fact that numerous weather forecasters and people involved in tsunami warning were recently fired in the US. 

What is that going to mean for the possibility of disasters in that country?

Conversely, Bangladesh, which is by no means a country we want to support as a model of governing and of supporting their own people, has reduced cyclone deaths by orders of magnitude. 

So in 1970, just before the country had its independence, around half a million people died in a cyclone. In 1991, the cyclone death toll from one was a hundred and forty-three thousand. In the past five years a handful of cyclones have ripped through Bangladesh and the death toll has been perhaps dozens or maybe a few hundred. 

Still a disaster – a couple of hundred a few dozen deaths is simply unacceptable – it is far better than tens hundreds of thousands. So Bangladesh has done well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So what did they do to make the difference? 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

They decided that disasters are not natural. They educated the population. They built a system of monitoring, warning, evacuation and sheltering. They created shelters in schools and in community centers, so the population felt comfortable about evacuating. 

They were familiar places and places associated with positive aspects of society. They talked to the people – I mean, how innovative, actually talking to people! – and discovered that some people were not evacuating because they were concerned about their livestock, or they were concerned about looting, or they were concerned about their livelihoods. 

So the evacuation system now includes evacuating livestock. And the people know that they have implemented community approaches to protect their water supplies, to protect their agriculture, to protect their homes, so they know that they are coming back to their livelihoods. 

And very sadly, around the world, which includes the UK amongst other so-called rich countries, certain populations may be reluctant to evacuate because they know or they expect they will be harassed and assaulted when evacuating or when in shelters. 

Women; often their hygiene needs are not even considered in this situation. Speaking about the rich, developed country of the UK, during the first lockdown, some of the items initially declared to be non-essential and therefore you couldn’t shop, were for menstruation needs. 

Imagine someone saying that actually, oh, we’re in a crisis, therefore we don’t have to worry about menstruation. It just defies logic. And so understandably, women may not want to evacuate and they die because of it. 

Bangladesh has recognized all of this and dealt with it for cyclones. However, they have not dealt with air pollution and Dhaka is horrific for air pollution and they are in a major earthquake zone. They know they are going to be slammed by an earthquake and the seismic construction, planning, monitoring enforcement is abysmal in Bangladesh. 

So we often say, yeah, okay, there are issues with climate change and sea level rise, but the expectation is that Dhaka will be flattened by an earthquake long before major impact from sea level rise, and we’re very sadly saying where in the world could be the first million-death earthquake in human history, and we are looking at Dhaka. 

These are all choices, cyclones, air pollution, earthquakes. Disasters are not natural, and so-called rich poor doesn’t make a lot of difference. 

Haiti, I mentioned the Haiti earthquake – Haiti is devastated by corruption, by gangs, by misgovernance, by poverty, yet it’s a phenomenally rich country. It’s just that elites outside of Haiti and within Haiti have reaped the wealth and taken away from the people. 

So no wonder there’s abject poverty. No wonder a moderate to high earthquake kills a quarter of a million people. No wonder they’re not ready for a hurricane. despite being in a hurricane zone during hurricane season. 

It’s not to do with being a poor country, it’s the fact that it is a rich country with resources that have been taken away from the people who need and deserve those resources. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So I mean, that’s sort of, in a sense, identifying the problem is with the elites who run countries, but you’ve also said you know it’s a problem in a UK. I’m wondering whether there’s in the end much difference in terms of these countries having by governance. 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

I have long moved away from labelling countries as rich, poor, developing, developed. A long time ago we stopped calling them first world, third world, second world which is good but underdeveloped, developing, developed it just doesn’t make sense anymore. 

We do identify differences. We’re very fortunate that we are having this conversation in the UK and I’m not going to fear someone knocking on my door in the middle of the night and dragging me away. They have that real fear in Haiti. 

In terms of this wider context that you’ve been that you mentioned – what about governance, misgovernance, what about resource allocation, resource misallocation – we see it everywhere. Two different levels but in effect it’s equivalent but we also see a lot happening beyond the country level at the supranational level and also more locally. 

So whether it’s England or the Greater London Authority or the London Boroughs or the City of London there’s plenty happening beyond the country and that’s the same in Haiti, that’s the same in Zambia, that’s the same in Cambodia. 

So it’s really recognizing that labeling countries and thinking of all these – health development, sustainability, disaster – context by country does miss a good part of the picture. The UK, of course, is interesting in another way due to devolution. 

So we are one sovereign state comprised, or four countries comprise a one sovereign state which adds other aspects of governance. Fundamentally though, for health, for disasters, for helping people, for helping society, for helping the environment, it really comes down to ensuring people have what they need and what they deserve, and that they are also contributing. 

That happens from local to international. National is part of that, it has to be considered. It is never the full or complete story. I mean, do you, you know, given what you say, are there sort of strategies that are applicable, more or less, is that a strategy that’s applicable more or less everywhere? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean, you know, given what you say, are there sort of strategies that are applicable, more or less – is that a strategy that’s applicable more or less everywhere? You know, getting conversation between those in charge and those who will be vulnerable to a disaster?

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN

Fundamentally, yes. The question is, who is in charge? So if we look to the US, they talk about the co-presidents of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. 

Even if we think about the UK or Haiti or other countries, how much are multilateral corporations influencing the governance? There are certainly non-governmental organizations which have a lot of influence. 

There is also the media, some of which are non-profit, some of which are for-profit. They have a lot of influence. Individuals, celebrities, they do sway voters. And we are into a realm where people are creating generative artificial intelligence, also having major influence on what people do and how they think. 

So yes, it is very much about this societal political power. It’s your question, who is in charge? It’s not necessarily the people who we are electing in free democratic processes. Again, that’s part of it, not to dismiss the prime minister, not even to dismiss our head of state, the unelected member of the royal family. 

But it is recognizing there are many other powers out there influencing those who we see. And to me, it is this fundament of who is making the decisions, who are they making them for, and how could we do so much better to use the amazing wisdom, knowledge, capabilities, abilities that we all have, plus the money, in order to help everyone do better for themselves and for society and the environment more widely. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

You mentioned Haiti on several occasions. Who is the problem there? Who are the people who are taking money out?

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN

So it started two centuries ago. In the late 18th century, the slaves in Haiti revolted and saw independence. 

They won that independence in the early 19th century, but the major colonial powers at the time, France and the US, how dare these people, these ex-slaves, how dare they assert their independence and separate themselves from us. 

So France and the US exacted reparations, which took decades to pay back and effectively stopped Haiti from rebuilding a country based on its own wealth. In the 20th century, Haiti was led for the most part by two totalitarian dictators, Papa Doc Duvalier and Baby Doc Duvalier, effectively again supported by France and the US. 

Not entirely – they fell in, they fell out – but in essence had the world powers decided that they wanted a democratic free rich Haiti, they could have let that happen and they made an active choice not to. 

The Haitian people understandably were fed up with this, so they revolted in 1986 and overthrew Baby Doc Duvalier, which has led to the decades of violence and corruption and misgovernance since then. Haiti did become relatively stable at some point had reasonably or comparatively free democratic elections, they elected Jean-Baptiste. 

The U.S. then quote ‘extracted’ unquote him, which again sent Haiti into level of turmoil. Eventually in 2004 the United Nations more or less stepped into govern the country. You cannot rebuild a country in six years, so the earthquake struck and sat back Haiti decades. 

So it’s a combination of local elites like the Duvaliers, like the militia which they set up called the Tonton Macoute who terrorize a population, all supported by external elites for their own interests and Haiti is in the state it is in today simply because the few with power decided to oppress the many who do not have power. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right, thank you. You mentioned something a little bit earlier which I thought was interesting was about a very small number of people taking lots of resources and I mean this is a little bit off the point but we can imagine a community – let’s say New South Wales when the British first sent prisoners there – and it was possible the scenario could have existed where they thought it was going to be six months before the next came with food and they only had three months of food left for the population. 

So for half of them to survive, for the whole six months, you would kill half of them and so at least half would survive. And on the sort of a Benthamite utilitarian calculation that would be the appropriate thing to do. 

Thinking about the sort of the situation the world’s in and if we’re thinking well maybe there are too many people, then we have to get rid of some. Then who should we get rid of? Well it’s those who consume the most resources. 

So the multi-millionaires, the people who drive SUVs around the streets of London, gas guzzling or petal guzzling guzzling machines. I mean that’s an extreme example but if we’re going to save the planet maybe we have to stop people consuming so much? I mean does that make sense?

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

Oh absolutely, that is the baseline. So people will talk about climate change being the threat, they talk about the climate crisis, climate emergency. 

It’s actually not climate, it’s exactly what you said, it’s over consumption. If we suddenly stop using fossil fuels overnight, we would still have all the societal ills emerging from over consumption like deforestation, overfishing, the inequities, the oppression. 

Conversely, if we took your approach and reduced consumption to appropriate levels, by definition we would stop human-caused climate change. Human-caused climate change is a symptom, not a cause. It’s not a crisis emergency or existential threat in and of itself. 

So I much prefer to focus exactly as you said. I’m a lot more cautious about targeting certain groups of the population for elimination. I’m not going to support killing anyone. What we do talk about is ethical population stabilization. 

It is not population control, we are not interested in the failed experiment of China with one child per family, we are not interested in telling people what to do with their reproductive abilities, we are interested in having a stable sustainable population achieved in an ethical manner. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Could you say a bit more about how you would do that?

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

Absolutely, but within the subtext of that it’s not just population numbers, it is consumption per person. So it’s also ethical levels of consumption per person. 

How do we do that? We are doing it. The rate of global population increase, that rate is actually declining. So we’re moving towards stable population numbers, not fast enough. We could do better. 

What we do find is, as always it’s complicated, yet the more equity that we provide people, which means educating girls and educating boys, the more open we are about reproduction, sex, sexuality and relationships, the more options and choices people have regarding their bodies, men and women, we find the later in life people choose to have kids and the fewer kids they have. So it’s creating an appropriate way for people to have choices and we are moving towards ethical population stabilization. 

So we’re not going to tell an adult that they can’t have a child at 19. If they make that choice that’s fine, but if they want to wait to 35 or 40 then that’s fine too. Also, the more we improve our health systems, the fewer babies die in childbirth and the fewer mothers who die in childbirth; the more we vaccinate, the more kids survive their childhood so there’s much less incentive to have 10 kids on the hope that two survive and then you end up with six surviving but you want two.

Again, it’s what we should be doing anyway supporting gender equity giving women and men control over their reproduction, educating children and having good health care systems. That’s what we need anyway, and then we actually end up with people making choices to have kids later in life and to fewer children. 

Reducing consumption is harder and this is where we can point to successes but we have so many more failures and this is where we would invite anyone interested in science to come and join us and really try and work on this problem of how do we ensure that we have rapid ethical population stabilization at the same time as not increasing consumption? Not over consuming, but letting people enjoy quality of life with a level of consumption which is appropriate to ourselves and the environment. 

Fundamentally it’s not about saving the planet. Earth doesn’t care if we disappeared, Earth wouldn’t know about us in a million years. I mean, what difference does it make to the planet? It really is about saving ourselves – but saving ourselves not as a separate entity on earth, but as part of everything living and non-living on the only planet we know which sustains intelligent life.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

No, I know Earth is good for another five or six billion years, and it’s a matter of how long human beings can be around to enjoy it. And, I mean, on the question of overconsumption, we – at least most of us – accept there’s a real problem with climate warming, and it’s due to us using too many resources. But very few of us are prepared to not go on aeroplanes for holidays, to cut down on car travel, or whatever it is that’s most problematic. 

So there’s a sort of a gap in people’s thinking between even if they recognise the main problem and not being prepared to do enough themselves, to do their bit. How do we get people to consume less? 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

So this is always a balance. And it’s a balance between individual choice and providing those individual choices while also recognizing so much as structural. I fully understand why some people have a private vehicle in London. I don’t, I actually do not have a driver’s license, but I am privileged in being able to work my lifestyle around not having a car. 

We have world-class public transportation in London, and that is a phenomenally controversial statement. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

No, I use the buses and trains all the time and tubes, and you go outside of London, and the difference is quite staggering. 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN 

It is still not good enough in London for some proportion of the population who for perfectly legitimate reasons need that private vehicle. 

How do we reduce their consumption for their private vehicle? Provide even better public transportation, and perhaps it means, and again, a controversial statement, we somehow have to raise and allocate taxes to make the public transport far more affordable. 

For me, it’s not a big issue because I have that privilege. For others, it makes a difference if they’re using their oyster car during peak periods or non-peak periods, and the tragedy is that so many of the population have to think about is it peak period or non-peak period for affordability rather than the tragedy being people using their private vehicles per se. 

So we do have all these possible options for supporting individual choices provided we make these systemic political structural changes, and that’s where we do see some examples of successes to some degree public transport in London despite all the problems, despite some of the exclusionary aspects. 

We see many other cities, and even countries, doing better. Luxembourg has free public transportation. It is remarkably underused despite it being clean, reliable, comparatively safe and comparatively frequent. 

There’s an international movement called Transition Towns which tries to localize as much as possible regarding transportation, food, health and other services. They show what could be achieved. It is harder in larger cities but yet we walk around London and we see community gardens. 

There’s also something called Guerilla Gardening –not gorilla as in the animal, guerilla as being a bit subversive – where people take over land which appears to be abandoned, it’s not necessarily clear who owns it, it may or may not be commons, it’s being disused. They plant fruit and vegetables. Guerilla Gardening. 

There are so many local examples like that, sometimes scaling up to the national level, which show what we can and should achieve if we choose to go about it. 

When we’re talking about the long term, again about giving people choices, about having equity, about what can we create for a society which seeks ethical population stabilization, again the UK is criticized for education in many ways and understandably. 

Conversely to a large extent, girls are doing better than boys in school. That’s not good for the boys because we have a gender inequity, but it shows what we can achieve for girls and they’re going to be our future business leaders, our future government leaders, our future university professors, hopefully and many more. 

So, we do not have to marginalize on the basis of sex or of gender. Again, we have to be so careful that the boys are falling behind, and we have to deal with that, but as a success it shows what we can do for the long term. 

Many places have local currencies, so rather than using the national currency which then goes into the central banking system and supporting the worldwide financial approaches, which to a large degree fuel the inequities, it’s buying local with a local currency, supporting local businesses rather than the chains or the multinationals and ensuring that that scales up and gives people an incentive to be part of the community and to contribute to the community. 

Another example of success, one person in a small city in southern Colorado decided that high school kids should be taught physical first aid, implemented a program called CERT which was basically about emergency response for teens. 

And number one, she started tracking how many lives a teen saved simply by teaching them physical first aid in secondary school and discovered that what she could record was about one life per year saved by a teen who’d been trained. Second is that the ethos of saying, ‘oh, I can and should help people, I need the skills, I need the confidence, I’ve been given them that I can help someone in the street’, something started to have a rippling effect of the teen saying, ‘oh, I should pick up litter.’ ‘Oh, I know my elderly neighbor down the street is actually on their own and needs help shopping, let me do that.’ 

So suddenly they knew the compression-to-breath ratio for giving for someone in cardiac arrest, and they had a sense of civic responsibility in terms of helping their community. 

Scalable. Ripple effect. Giving our youth a means to think about the wider society and to help others. And imagine now what those teens are doing as adults when they’re thinking about their own location right up to their country and the world. 

A definite success story we should imitate elsewhere. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And that’s really encouraging to hear but what do you think of as failures? What most frustrates you? 

PROFESSOR ILAN KELMAN

The expectation that we should own more and more. 

The ability to spend beyond our income going into debt and then paying off the debt with huge interest charges. The desire for so much bigger and better technology rather than being satisfied for what we have. 

The increasing pressures on everyone to be rushing around everywhere all the time trying to do more and more being so-called productive and that the time for family, the time for ourselves, the time for community, being compressed. 

So many people I speak to have the volunteer spirit and do not have the time or the energy or the scope to give back to their community what they want to and that’s simply because we have the resources and we’re not using it. 

Again, if we talk about public transport, one of the tube lines in London, the Central Line, is always delayed because they don’t have trains. Now. that seems crazy. Go out and buy trains and put them on the tracks. But the resources aren’t there; the signaling system is not up to date; plus, they need the drivers and the mechanics. 

So despite all the good things about Transport for London anyone using that one line gets frustrated and has trouble simply because money is going to billionaires, rather than to buying more trains and upgrading the signaling system. 

That is so frustrating that as a complete systemic failure, which no individual, not even the mayor of London, can actually resolve. 

So yes, we can go on and on about the failures, on and on about the negative examples. 

That’s not particularly inspiring. We prefer to say, well what can we do within our constraints? And even if it’s as simple as knocking on the door of an isolated neighbor and saying, how are you? What can I do for you? That’s enough. 

But if you do have time to volunteer, if you can help out, if you do happen to be a millionaire or billionaire listening to this podcast and want to do something, then absolutely look to these inspiring examples from local currencies to transition towns to remarkable health approaches, which are saving lives and educational approaches, and invest resources in publicizing, promoting, and imitating those successes everywhere – to bypass those millionaires and billionaires who seem intent on creating a failing society. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I think if Jeremy Bentham was here today, he would be really on your side and be flooding you with suggestions about how to improve things, because that’s what he spent his life doing, looking at how elites were getting in the way of the happiness of the people generally, and trying to think of better ways of doing things with the available resources. 

Antarcticness: Inspirations and imaginaries, edited by Ilan Kelman

Arcticness: Power and Voice from the North, edited by Ilan Kelman