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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 TRISTAN MCCOWAN (INTRO)

The climate crisis is in human beings. It’s in the way we see ourselves and relate to the world. It’s in our political structures, our economic structures, and the industrial model that came out of the Industrial Revolution. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

My name is Tristan McCowan. I’m Professor of International Education at the Institute of Education at University College London. And my work really focuses on understanding the relationship between universities and society, thinking about each, how each influences the other. Questions like, I mean, if we think about a university like UCL or any other university, we’re usually thinking of some kind of mission to have a positive impact on students or on the society in which they’re located or global impact in the case of UCL. 

So, my work is mainly about how to understand what that impact is, how universities influence society, what the limitations of that influence might be, and in what direction they go. And they are surprisingly complex questions and quite hard to research. And some of my work is theoretical, trying to model that, trying to understand how we might conceptualize that relationship. But also, I’m involved in different kinds of empirical projects around the world. I work a lot in Latin America, but also other regions, Africa and Asia and the Pacific. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Can you give us a sense of what you were doing in those regions?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. So, I’ll give an example of a recent project that we’ve run called Climate U. The full name was Transforming Universities for a Changing Climate. And, as part of that project, we brought together 16 different institutions around the world, and in those different continents. We had partners in Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Fiji, as well as UCL, and the idea was to understand what universities can do to positively impact climate mitigation and adaptation. So, both reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also supporting communities to adapt to the difficult conditions that are already in place due to climate impacts. And – 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Sorry, what were the main conclusions that came from that?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Well, we tried to work with a participatory action research model. So that’s trying to do research in a different way from the conventional one.  Instead of researchers going into a community and extracting information of different types and going off and then publishing it and sharing it within the academic sphere, to work with community members as researchers, as subjects rather than objects of the research, partly as a matter of respect, but also because when we talk about climate, communities need to be agents in this process because they know their local area better than anyone else. And they’re also gonna have to be leading some of the changes that are needed. So, the research was about trying to understand how to support those processes better, how to work with communities to bring those difficult changes. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Can you give us an example of how that worked?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely, yeah. So our partner in Tanzania worked with a coastal community that had been threatened by, well, that are still threatened by coral loss and loss of mangroves, which is problematic for them, not only in the broader ecological sense of the threats to the planet, but also in a more immediate sense because they rely on the fish stocks that are supported by coral reefs and the crabs that are supported by mangroves. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Is it the increasing temperature of the water that’s causing the problem?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

There are various causes, but the coral loss through the temperature increase, but mangroves are also just cut down. So, our partners from the University of Dar es Salaam worked together with a community organisation that had started some quite innovative work on coral restoration, to try and work with them to systematise that knowledge and to support those processes and to spread it with other communities.  Now I hasten to add, I’m not a technical expert in this, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not an environmental scientist. 

So, what we were interested in was looking at the learning processes that take place, the sharing of knowledge that takes place between university researchers and communities, and how we can move to something that we might call co-production, so that universities can work together with communities where both are agents in the process. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, that strikes a chord with me, because we’ve been running a crowdsourcing project at the Bentham Project and instead of sort of public engagement, the original idea was: how do you get your message out to the public? Rather, what we did was involve the public in our research by getting them to transcribe Bentham manuscripts which had never been transcribed before. And members of the public have transcribed, and are continuing to transcribe, over, you know, 40,000 sheets, which is a fantastic resource for us. So you know, from my perspective that sort of cooperation really, really works very well. And your whole sort of enterprise is sort of multidisciplinary, isn’t it, because like you’re saying, you’re looking at the interaction between the scientific experts and the local communities, presumably to make that model more widely applicable?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. And I think it’s important to acknowledge, it is very challenging in the sphere. I mean, it’s easy to say co-production or co-creation, but to really do it, there are a lot of barriers. I mean, one of them is a condescending attitude on the part of university researchers. You know, sometimes they feel, you know, they’ve achieved a status in society and knowledge and that they are on a different level. So that can be a barrier.  But we have also encountered barriers from communities because communities sometimes have more of a transaction relationship with external agencies. And they’re thinking about what they can gain in a material sense, rather than the kind of knowledge exchange we’re looking for. So there are some real challenges, which we were working through in that project. Another is an instrumentalization of local knowledge. So, one of the things we were trying to work with, and is seen to be a very important thing in climate action, is indigenous knowledge. How can we tap into different knowledge traditions that aren’t represented in mainstream universities or academia or schools, sources of understanding of the world, which are within different cultures and languages and communities? And there has been some attention to this in different areas, in areas of health and agriculture and weather systems, but it tends to be in quite an instrumental way, where you’re almost plucking a piece of factual knowledge from a community and using that, you know, the most obvious example being medicinal plants, for example, and then you’re using it for other ends. And the real challenge is to engage with indigenous knowledge in a more holistic way, to understand it as a system of understanding in its own right that needs to be entered into and work with respectfully in the spirit of mutual exchange. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And there’s a point there, that the people who have to, in the end, do whatever needs to be done are those local people, and therefore they’ve got to be comfortable or see the sense of what’s being perhaps recommended, or thinking it through themselves, what they need to do.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. I mean, there are some, you know, some people hold faith in a technological breakthrough that’s going to save us all. And then you get various, you know, competitions, Richard Branson and then Bill Gates has also tried to promote, you know, a single technological breakthrough that can then be brought to market and save all of us or perhaps a scientific discovery. I mean, I don’t want to reject that idea completely because I think that some technological breakthroughs will be necessary and useful, but it’s never going to be the whole solution.  The complexity of the climate crisis and other environmental crises and social crises that are all interlocking are such that you need all communities on board for this and working in their unique local areas to bring the changes that are needed. So that can be in dialogue with a university like UCL that has a breakthrough, but it’s never going to be UCL doing it for communities all around the world. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right… Is this something that UCL is doing well? 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

I would say UCL is certainly a university that has a huge amount of expertise on various aspects of climate, both in terms of what you might think of as conventional climate science in natural sciences, geology and so forth, but also in other aspects of scholarship around climate. 

And I think it’s really important to point out: addressing the climate crisis is also about social sciences, arts and humanities. It’s not just about natural sciences, STEM subjects, because the climate crisis is one that’s in human beings.  It’s in the way we see ourselves and relate to the world. It’s in our political structures, our economic structures and the industrial model that came out of the Industrial Revolution and that caused the buildup of greenhouse gases. 

So, UCL is a university that has strengths across all of those areas, and many researchers are either directly or indirectly contributing to that. But that doesn’t mean that UCL necessarily has all the answers. It has a global outlook. It’s an extremely internationalised university, very high numbers of international students, which is also a great thing for that reach and engagement. But it still needs to work in a spirit of humility with partners all around the world, because no university can solve those problems on its own. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, I had two questions, one was about the origins of UCL in a sort of a radical tradition and you were talking about the role of universities, whether that has some long-standing impact on the way in which the university sees itself, I’m not sure about it. You think of Oxford and Cambridge, the way sort of they might have been founded and used for centuries by the sort of upper echelons of society and then the University of London, as it was, comes along as a radical challenge to what Bentham called ‘the two grand public nuisances’ of Oxford and Cambridge.  

The other point, perhaps most significant, is, you know, Bentham says look to interests and from that point of view what we need is to place academics in a situation in which it’s their interest to tell the truth and I’m thinking here about the whole sort of debate on climate and the climate deniers. You know, from Bentham’s point of view in a university like UCL, at least the academics here, should be in a sense rewarded for saying what they think is true. Does that make any sense in this context?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

I think we have, in some ways, some contradictory incentives for academics. I’m certainly not a doom-and-gloom person in terms of our higher education systems. I still believe strongly that universities represent one of the richest and most fruitful areas, spheres of society for generating the kind of transformation we need. Universities still have a vigorous spirit of inquiry and deliberation and all of the things that we need if we’re going to move towards solution.  

But there are some constraints on that, and I think the international ranking system of universities and all of the backwash effect that that has on national evaluation systems of different types – and this is global phenomenon, and it’s certainly not limited to the UK – can prioritise certain types of academic impact that may have a positive impact on solving our social and ecological crisis but not necessarily. And excessive focus on elite journals and high-profile research studies unfortunately devalues all of the other academic work and teaching, research and community engagement that are also needed. Not to mention difficulties of funding, which are a whole other debate, and that also make life very hard for researchers, particularly in the global south. 

So, there are a lot of constraints. I still have… Faith sounds rather too distant. There’s a reality of positive impact to the universities, but it is under conditions that make it very hard for academics. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

That’s sort of…very sobering…And the point you make, I believe, is that more about the climate change could be put into the university curriculum?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. So perhaps surprisingly, I don’t take an approach necessarily of teaching climate more. We are actually in the process of developing new modules, hopefully ones which people across any discipline can take. And those are very valuable initiatives.  But that’s not got the whole of the story. 

The approach I take personally, and this was covered in the recently published book, is one that I call a curriculum topography, so that we think about a university or any space in society is a learning environment that has many different elements. And what we need to do is to provide as rich a possible of an environment for learning for students, which includes what we might think of as the classroom, formal spaces of learning, so modules and not only modules on climate specifically, but also integrating those ideas and sustainability more broadly into every discipline area, every course. There are some initiatives on the way in that regard. 

But also thinking about other spaces of learning on campus, a lot of the most meaningful learning takes place in spaces that aren’t planned in universities and societies, in cafes when people are talking, those spaces are very important. And if we reflect back on our own experiences at universities, some of the most transformative spaces are in those.  

And that’s part of what creates a university. If you’re lucky enough to be in a campus university, great. Otherwise, there are some other spaces online which can do that. 

And then the third area, so we’ve got class from campus, the third C is community. So, learning that takes place beyond the gates of the universities, hopefully in conjunction with learning that takes place in universities through different kinds of work placement or internship or volunteering or other kind of experience, but integrated with those and in ways that have a different nature because it’s experiential learning.  It’s learning through real experiences of working with different communities and environmental work and so forth. 

And if we can combine those different kinds of experience, it can provide the best possible experience for learning, particularly because students have a whole range of different levels of understanding this material. And many students are extremely knowledgeable and experienced in this area. It’s very often more so than their lecturers. So, it’s important not to assume that students are coming in with a blank slate and to draw on that experience and to support students at all different levels in developing that work themselves. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And, I mean, it’s a point here that everyone can do something. I’m sort of reminded of a comment by Bentham’s contemporary Edmund Burke, who Bentham didn’t particularly admire, but there’s a quotation attributed to Burke – I don’t think Burke ever actually quite said this, but it’s that ‘there’s no greater fool than he who does nothing because he can only do a little’. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Yeah, I’m a very strong believer in the importance of grassroots initiatives that might be very small in scale. And I think it’s really important that we value those small-scale initiatives that exist in the work of a particular lecture in a classroom or a project with a particular community or a small-scale student led initiative, partly because if we have a flowering of many of those different initiatives, of course, together, they provide a big impact.

But, also, it provides the kind of experimentation that we really need to be able to address this from all of the different angles that are necessary. And that it taps into the creativity and contextualized understanding that all of those different actors have.

And particularly because when we think about the impact of universities, it’s not only about reach, it’s also about intensity. A single student might find themselves transformed by their university experience in a way that goes on to influence them throughout their life. It may be one person, but it might be still a very significant impact.

Of course, we can’t abandon altogether some of the large-scale initiatives that we have, even the much-maligned climate agreements and COPs, the conferences of parties. It’s all part of the puzzle – but that needs to be seen hand-in-hand with some of these small-scale initiatives that are vital.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And, I mean, coming onto the politics of climate change. There are people who deny this such thing as climate change, despite all the evidence – and what should universities’ role be in relation to that debate? 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

That’s a very important question, and there are people who don’t believe in the existence of climate change. It is a small minority of people globally, but particularly prevalent in the US and some other countries in Brazil under Bolsonaro, and this has been actively promoted by the fossil fuel lobby.  Moving now, to a large extent, from outright denial to a more subtle position of delay, so accepting the general thesis of anthropogenic global warming, but casting doubt on certain elements to delay any action that might lead to a lessening of profits. And there’s a very active social media and internet presence, as well as books that have been written on the subject. 

And while I was writing Universities and Climate Action, the book I’ve just published, I had to read a number of these books, which was quite an interesting experience. And there were times where I felt a little bit like one of those FBI agents, in a Michigan militia undercover, immersing myself in some of this material to try and understand it. And it was an unsettling experience, but very interesting. And certainly, there are some parts of the argument that are quite seductive when you’re inside it, when you are immersed in it, particularly when you are surrounding yourself with a community that is reinforcing these ideas, but connecting them up to many others as well.  

However, if you analyze that position, it is incoherent, mainly because there is no real answer to the question of why such a giant conspiracy would have been set up in the first place. It’s not quite clear why people would have created this enormous hoax of climate change if it didn’t exist. 

The main reason given is this idea of the watermelon, that environmentalists are green on the outside and red on the inside, that it’s communism via the back door or some kind of smuggling in of global government to restrict people’s freedom. So that’s the main argument given, along with self-interest on the part of economics and so forth.  

But it’s quite a weak argument. Anyway, this process of trying to understand climate denial, I think, is very important.  

So, returning to the question of what a university should do, it’s certainly tempting to shut it down. And it’s tempting because concerted climate action is very hard to achieve in society. People try and resist it because it’s unfamiliar, it takes effort. 

It’s not always a sacrifice. It might lead us to a society that we would prefer anyway. But it’s certainly a difficult shift for people individually and collectively. And uncertainty is an excuse for inaction. 

And so, I can certainly see the temptation for trying to shut down climate denial altogether.  But I don’t think a university can do that. I think pedagogically we can’t do that. I think in a classroom we have to air different views. Of course, there are always limits to freedom of expression. But I think as far as we can, we need to air different views, even ones which might be seen to be factually false.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I suppose you have to instill a view that you have to respect the evidence and then you can debate it. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s part of the learning process. 

And, you know, the scientific method feeds off that scepticism. And it’s important to maintain awareness of the fact that, even though the existence of human made climate change is not in doubt, there are many aspects of the question that still need investigation.  We still need to solve, not least of which: What on earth do we do now, in order to get to a place where we’re actually addressing the problem? 

So, there are a lot of questions that still need that skepticism, those open minds, and to try and try and work together to discover those ways forward. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean, the way you described it, it’s like the interests behind climate denial seemed a bit like the tobacco companies when they were denying that smoking caused cancer.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Absolutely! In fact, there’s a very good book and documentary, called Merchants of Doubt, that traces exactly that lineage from the lobbying around the damaging effects of tobacco through various other environmental scandals and to the climate crisis, the same techniques are being used. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Right, and like the betting industry with its ‘bet responsibly’, as though it’s not really a problem if you’re responsible. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

And one of the techniques used instead of outright denial is a shift of responsibility from companies and governments to individuals. So, a large part of the recycling drive actually came from the fossil fuel lobby trying to pass responsibility onto consumers; that, you know, the environmental problems are your fault for not recycling your cartons.  It’s nothing to do with the company or state policy. Of course, recycling is a good thing to do, but it’s never going to be the whole of the solution, and it shouldn’t deflect attention from the kinds of collective solution that we can bring. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And have you got any examples of what we, let’s say the UCL community might do? I mean, I find lights left on.  We have rooms in Bentham House, which are air-conditioned and windows open. And I’m sort of forever shutting doors in one of our particular air-conditioned rooms, which people open. Yet, there’s a lot of attempts being made to educate our staff here about waste. And I despair sometimes. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Absolutely – and even air conditioning and heating battling against each other at the same time.  Yeah, it’s very frustrating. 

It also it sends a really negative message and it creates cynicism and that’s really dangerous because climate action is so fragile and, you know, there’s a psychological element there. You know, bringing change is difficult and cynicism often provides us with an excuse for not bringing change, so I think we have to be really careful about that because of the messages it sends out – as well as, of course, the actual direct carbon emissions and other environmental impacts that universities will have. 

And I think maybe looking at that in a more positive sense, we can think about a hidden curriculum of an institutions that might bring positive change. There’s been a, you know, sociology of education for the last 50 or so years has paid quite a lot of attention to the hidden curriculum but almost always in a negative sense of the way that capitalist societies reproduce themselves through formal education systems, creating malleable, conformists but also competitive, workers who are then compliant in an unequal capitalist system. But you could also see this idea in a more positive sense; that maybe we can create environments that that actually can model and inspire and perhaps pre-figure a regenerated community and society and ecosystem in ways that will actually encourage people to live well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean in a sense getting the university to be that microcosm, the way we treat each other, the way we respect each other, say well this is a model, you’ll learn these values and put them into operation when you get into the real world, because the people we teach here are going to, some of them, a lot of them are going to have very significant roles in the future. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that modeling is vital with students, but also between staff members. I mean, we are a community. It is a transient community. It’s a little bit different from a geographical community, but universities are nevertheless communities. They have their own dynamics and people learn from one another. And that needs to be taken into account.  

Some universities are extremely large. UCL is a large university in the UK context, but some, even setting aside the giant online universities in South Asia, some of the universities in Latin America are two or three hundred thousand in-person students. So, they’re real cities themselves. And the Latin American tradition has a very strong social commitment in public universities. They had a reform in 1918, which diffused through the whole region, which brought a real reorientation of universities towards the public good, to a commitment to society, to democratic governance. So that also led to all university leaders being internally elected, which has its ups and downs. But it certainly leads to a strong responsiveness of university leaders to the university community and a much stronger emphasis on community engagement that exists in most regions as well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I suppose one way of looking at it is not that, in a sense, yes, universities could do more, we could all do more, but at least universities are doing quite a bit, you know, if it wasn’t for universities, we’d be in a much bigger mess, arguably. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Absolutely. I mean, I think we need to strike a balance between, you know, the need for change in universities and that there is a need for change. And there are some things, you know, we have our fairly entrenched disciplinary divides that can be an impediment. Universities are also exclusive in ways that they shouldn’t be.  They don’t always communicate with societies in ways that they should. 

But having said that, I entirely agree. I think we need to value the institution that has successfully adapted over many, many centuries, and also is, you know, in a world that has so many contrary dynamics, a sector which still provides a lot of hope for solutions that we can find, particularly in the context of such a complex issue. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Thank you so much Tristan for that, it’s been really enlightening.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Thanks, it’s been a pleasure. 

Universities and Climate Action by Tristan McCowan

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 SEIRIAN SUMNER (INTRO)

I mean, I think we just have to understand how important wasps are and, you know, a world without wasps would be a horrific place because ecosystems would collapse. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So, Seirian, if you’d like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your research, please. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, my name is Seirian Sumner. I’m a professor of behavioural ecology at UCL, and I study mostly wasps, which is always a very controversial topic. 

But the reason I study wasps is that I’m interested in their ecology, their evolution, and particularly how their enormously impressive societies evolve. To be honest, the reason I study wasps is because of UCL. 

I was an undergraduate here, and then I stayed on to do my PhD. And the only reason I ended up studying wasps, because actually, full disclaimer, I hated wasps before I started my PhD. I just finished my undergraduate degree, and I was hooked on research. 

I loved doing my projects, my undergraduate projects. And we just had a new member of staff, Jeremy Fields. He was looking for a PhD student, and it was on behaviour. I was really into animal behaviour, and it just so happened that it was the behaviour of wasps. 

And I remember very clearly sitting in his office and saying, ‘oh, but I don’t like wasps,’ and he said, ‘oh, no, no don’t worry. These aren’t real wasps. They don’t really sting’ – which of course is a big fat lie, because of course they sting, these are stinging wasps.

But then I found myself a few months later, lying on the rainforest floor in Malaysia, looking up at this wasp nest, just like a few centimeters above my head, and I was in love with these wasps – which do sting, but not very much.

But I only got into wasps because I was interested in the questions, the biological questions about social behavior. I didn’t actually… I wasn’t interested in wasps and even after I’d done my PhD at UCL I went on to do a postdoc on ants for a couple of years. And then I realized the error of my ways, and that, you know, wasps are so much more interesting and understudied.

And I went back to wasps, and so I came to wasps because of the evolutionary questions. And I guess my journey in the wasps has now ended up with realizing that people don’t care about social evolution same way that I do, but actually people do care about what wasps do for them in the environment. 

So I use a range of different methods from field, wellie boot, ecology, travel the world, wherever wasps, exciting wasps are I will go, and also genomics. I sequence their genomes, I scoop their brains out and I sequence the transcripts that underpin their gene expression of their behaviours. 

And I’m also really interested in using wasps as a kind of gateway for people to be challenged by the facets of nature that they find difficult to like. So, you know, wasps kind of come in the same bracket as slugs and spiders and all of those sort of unhappy creatures that people don’t like. But in this age where we are increasingly aware that we do need to value every facet of nature; biodiversity is the underbelly of the planet, it’s the way that we’re going to buffer our rocky journey through climate change. And we need, in order to do that, we need to understand, conserve and manage all facets of nature. 

And I think wasps is a really nice gateway for that for people. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

You’ve written a book about wasps. Will you tell us a little bit about that? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yes, so in my 25 years of studying wasps and my mission to try and persuade people that wasps are worth caring about, I’ve done a lot of popular science work, I love giving talks to the public about wasps. 

But I soon realised, and I realised I could change people’s perceptions of wasps, but I realised that I couldn’t do this one village hall at a time because I’d go and give a talk to a WI meeting or a gardeners’ meeting and I could see them change their minds about wasps in the room. 

But I realised I couldn’t change the world, you know, there’s only so many times I can give talks about wasps. So I decided to write a book, it’s a popular science book about wasps, it’s called Endless Forms – which captures the closing sentence of Darwin’s Origin of Species where he says ‘endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have and are evolving’, and I like to think that possibly he was thinking about wasps when he was thinking about endless forms. But you know there are certain…people think about wasps as just one form, that picnic bothering wasp, whereas actually there is over a hundred thousand, possibly five hundred thousand, species of wasps and they’re endless in their forms. So it’s called Endless Forms: Why We Should Love Wasps, and it takes us through the kind of evolutionary side of wasps but also the more ecological side of wasps about their pollination services and their pest control and why you should love wasps. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean given that we’re speaking in Bentham House, the home of the Faculty of Laws, I should say that or begin by saying that you’ve got a difficult brief because – and you must hear this all the time – the typical reaction is that we hate wasps; the world will be a better place without them. 

You know, they come along and sting you for no reason whatsoever. They hang around litter bins. They spoil picnics. So give us the the case. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So wasps are definitely... They are very much a difficult sell, but I think that’s what’s made me quite attracted to them, because I kind of like I like to stick up for the underdogs or the ‘under insects’ of the world. 

And I think, you know, the reason that people don’t like wasps is because, quite frankly, people are ignorant. People don’t understand what wasps do, but when I say people, I mean, this is the general public. 

And I know that because we’ve conducted a public survey asking people what they know about wasps and comparing. That’s what they know about things like bees and butterflies. And people definitely have very little understanding of the role that insects that wasps play in the environment. 

But what I found is that a tiny bit of information, a reason for people to actually hate wasps a little less goes a long way. So I would always explain, you know, not the normal conversation goes just as you’ve opened it. 

So, ‘oh, I don’t like wasps. They’re always bothering me at picnics.’ And I’ll say, well, yeah, they did get a bit bothersome, but that’s only for a couple of months of the year at the end of the summer. And, you know, there’s actually 100000 species of wasps in the world. And there’s two or three species that might bother you at your picnic. So let’s get this in perspective. 

And actually, those wasps that bother you at your picnic are actually really important parts of the ecosystem. They are pest controllers, they are pollinators, they are decomposers. We massively underappreciate the ecosystem services that wasps perform. I mean, I think we just have to understand how important wasps are. 

And, you know, a world without wasps would be a horrific place because ecosystems would collapse. 

We all know the importance of top predators. You know, whether it’s wolves or lions or whatever it is, they are the regulators of whole food chains. Take away that top predator and you get all the prey species exploding in populations and the ecosystem gets out of sync. And we know that well, you know, we’ve taken so many sort of accidental experiments that humans have done by hunting to local extinction predators in particular areas. And then you see all this change in the ecosystem. 

So, yeah, wasps are top predators. They should be given the same sort of prestige and importance that we would give to wolves and bears and lions and other top predators. 

So they are really important. And I find that people’s perceptions can be shifted quite easily. And I think a nice comparison is that people don’t like wasps because they sting; bees sting, and people love wasps.

I mean, you positively trip over bee merchandise in any shop you go into, you know, like the number of bee mugs I’ve been bought or scarves with bees on them, you know!

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

They make honey! Bees make honey!

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER 

One day there’ll be wasps on scarves and mugs, and I will be so happy. But the comparison is really nice, because actually people tolerate bees because of, despite their sting, because most people understand that bees are really important in the ecosystem as pollinators and of course as providers of honey, particular bees provider us with honey and wax. 

So people forgive bees for their stings because they understand what they do. People tolerate bees because they know what they do. So if we help people understand what wasps do then they will tolerate their stings. 

The point about them being a bit bothersome at picnics is actually a really important part of understanding their biology. So the wasps that bother you at picnics generally doesn’t happen until late summer, like August, September, and the reason for that is that that’s the time of year when, at least in, you know, Northern Europe, the larvae in the nest have mostly pupated. 

Now the wasps that bother you at the picnics, they are foragers. They are, their job is to go out and hunt prey and bring it back to the nest and feed it to the larvae. Once the larvae have pupated and they’re ready for metamorphosis they don’t need feeding anymore. 

So at the end of the summer there’s this sort of tipping point where there are still thousands of wasps in a colony, adult workers that are foraging, but the ratio of workers to larvae that need feeding has shifted, such that there are almost too many workers for the jobs that need doing. 

And so the wasps kind of become slightly furloughed from the colony, in that they don’t really have as much foraging to do anymore. And so they do tend to bother us a bit more. But the other reason is that when they feed the larvae, they get this sugary reward from the larva through this process called trophallaxis. 

And that is thought to have high nutritional content for the adults. And that’s part of the adult’s nutrition. Because the adult wasps, the foragers, the hunters are actually vegetarians. 

So they don’t eat the prey at all. They just catch the prey, bring it to the nest, feed it to the larvae. And so they need to get their nutrition from somewhere. And they would ordinarily, most of the year, most of the season, they will get that from the larvae. 

But as there are fewer larvae available to provide this nutrition, they have to go elsewhere for sugar. And before our alfresco dining took off, they would go to flowers. So that’s one of the reasons why they’re good pollinators. 

But… if we are providing them with a feast of sugary drinks and jam sandwiches then they will happily come and get that source of sugar from our picnics. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Oh that’s really interesting because I remember having a friend once who got stung on the inside of his mouth because a wasp had gone into his coca cola tin. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, always look before you... 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

No, it’s really interesting to know what they’re up to. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

But it is only a couple of weeks or you know a few, two, three weeks in the year when they bother you. And as I said those wasps that will come and bother you are a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the large biodiversity that is wasps. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean you said, which is quite incredible to me that there are 100,000 –

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Described species! And there’s probably five to ten times more to be discovered because wasps are so massively understudied. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Really, right. I mean, how many, say, are in the UK? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So there are about 7,000 species of wasps in the UK, but the most important thing to do when you’re trying to understand wasp diversity is to know that 70% of wasps don’t sting. 

They are parasitoid wasps, they don’t have stings, they have ovipositors which are then modified through evolution to become a sting, but they use the ovipositors to lay eggs. So in the same way that the wasps that we all know as the picnic botherers are hunters and foragers and they hunt insect prey, these parasitoids will also seek out insect prey but then they will rather than catching it and killing it, they will lay their egg on it or in it and then abandon it and so a lovely live caterpillar will have, unknowing to it, have an egg laid on its back. When that egg hatches into a baby wasp it will then munch its way through that caterpillar whilst it’s like a living larder. 

So that’s what parasitoids do and we just don’t notice the parasitoids, because most of them are really tiny. There are a few parasitoid wasps that are well known by people who are either farmers with greenhouses, you can buy in parasitoid wasps as a form as buyer control to control your aphids on tomato plants for example, or you can even if you’ve got moths in your clothes, moths in your house, you can buy a parasitoid wasp to pop in your wardrobe and they will happily deal with all of the moths in your wardrobe. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Then will they go away? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah because as soon as the moths are dealt with and die there’s no there’s no prey left and so the parasitoid wasps will die out as well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And I mean do they all look the same? Because I mean, the typical wasps we think of are the ones that bothers you at the picnic in the late summer with the sort of black and yellow stripes. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah it is kind of iconic isn’t it, the black and yellow stripes. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Do they come in different shapes? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Absolutely I mean there are endless forms of wasps in their in their size and therefore forms, there are some that, there are some spider-hunting wasps, so as well as the parasitoid wasps which don’t sting. 

Amongst the stinging wasps, of which there are about 30,000 described species, the majority of those are also not social, so they are solitary wasps and they will hunt prey in the same way that all the other wasps do, but they will parrot, so they will go and hunt a spider, paralyze it, so they’ll sting it with their venom and the venom has all sorts of neurotoxins and other chemicals in it which will paralyze the prey, they bring it back to a pre-prepared burrow, they’ll pack the prey into the burrow, lay an egg on it and then seal it up. 

So I mention the spiders because actually some of the most dramatic looking wasps that look so different from our picnic bothering wasps are the spider-hunting wasps, the pompylids and I’ve done a lot of my research in the tropics and in the tropics everything is bigger and better obviously and the spider-hunting wasps get to be utterly enormous, you know the size of my hand and they are just beautiful. 

You can always tell a spider-hunting wasp by its curly antenna, so they’re really beautifully curly and they’re often very iridescent, their wings will be very iridescent and these wasps hunt really big spiders like big tarantulas and so they are also very big wasps and coming through the rainforest they sound like little helicopters, you can hear them coming before you even see them. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right, oh gosh, that sounds frightening.

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Oh no it’s not because actually the solitary wasp is never going to come for you, I mean to be honest even the picnic bothering wasps, they’re not out to get you, you are, I mean we’re so sort of naval gazing, we think that everything cares about us, these wasps are not interested in us at all, they are just interested in what we have, so a solitary wasp will never never comes to your picnic unless it sort of happens to see a particular kind of prey that’s also like, you know, a caterpillar or a spider that’s also arrived at your dinner. 

The wasps will only come when there’s a food source there, so the fact that they appear to be slightly intimidating to us, you know, you’re cooking your barbecue because they’ll come for the carrion as well, which of course is your sausages, your dead meat on the barbecue. 

When they’re trying to get a bit of your sausage from the barbecue and they’re flying around and you’re swatting them, shouting at them, they then will attack you, of course they will, because you’re simply behaving like their predator, which in the northern hemisphere is the badger, and so badgers will dig up these wasp colonies and they’re flailing their limbs around and they’re huffing and puffing, which is carbon dioxide, and so the wasps have evolved to respond to those cues that signal, there’s a predator coming, everyone will attack, and so they attack. 

So when you’re at the picnic, your barbecue and your throwing your arms around trying to swat the wasp and shouting. That’s what you’re doing, you’re behaving like a badger. So my top tip is the way to not get stung at a barbecue is not behave like a badger if a wasp comes along. But also just to see what they want. So what I do, and my kids are very well trained to do this, is when the wasp of inevitably comes along to our picnic outside, just sit still, watch what the wasp wants. So early in the season, it’s generally going to be a little bit of meat. 

If you get a wasp early in the season, which is quite rare. 

And then later in the season, it will be sugar for exactly the reasons that I explained the change in their biological needs. And so if they want a bit of your chicken from your chicken salad, then let them take a bit and then they will fly off to their nest. 

And they will come back, but you can just move the chicken slightly, an offering, a wasp offering, move a little bit of that wasp offering to just a little bit further away from you. And she will come back because they use landmarks and you are a landmark. 

So if you’re sitting here, when they come back, they’re looking for where you are. And they’ll take a bit of that chicken and you can gradually move them away and give them a little bit of a wasp offering and everybody’s happy. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, just coming back to sort of the role that wasp play. I mean, as an avid watcher of Gardener’s World, I’ve seen bees extolled and even moths extolled, but never wasps. 

You mentioned that they’re pollinators. I mean, do they pollinate plants that other creatures don’t pollinate? Or do they have a very unique role in that respect? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So wasps are generalist, largely, we think they’re generalist pollinators. 

So that means that they visit lots of different species. And so by, I mean, there’s two ways to look at it in terms of how useful that is. In most useful environmental terms. If you’re a generalist, then it doesn’t really matter what plants are flowering. 

You will visit any of them, and you’re likely to be passing as long as there’s a high density of those particular species you’re likely to be transferring pollen from one individual to another of the same species. 

If you’re a specialist then you are likely to be very useful for that particular plant and but you do require that plant so you’ll be seeking out a particular flower to gather that nectar and pollen and then you’ll transfer it. 

So wasps are largely, actually to be honest, there’s practically nothing known about, nothing published about wasp pollination. We’ve been pulling together a big data set of which flowers wasps visit. 

Now, wasp visitations to flowers doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually pollinating but at least they have the potential to be pollinators. And the picnic bothering wasp, you know the wasp that you’ll come across in your garden, visits a wide diversity of flowers and so it is likely to be useful in that respect. 

But people think that, scientists think that, because wasps do tend to be more generalist and less fussy than bees in what flowers they will visit, scientists think that possibly wasps are really important backup pollinators, particularly in degraded environments where perhaps bee populations can’t be sustained. 

So that’s a plus. I mean, it’s not been tested, but it is a potential. There is a study, I think there’s two studies now that actually show that wasps can completely replace the pollination services that bees perform. 

So experiments where rather than put bumblebees in a greenhouse, which is what farmers do to pollinate, they put polystyrene wasps, paper wasps in, and the yields, the pollen yields were the same. So they completely matched that. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, you’re saying, you know, you’ve got these enormous wasps in the tropics and the ones we’re familiar with. This is a naive question, but what makes a wasp a wasp? How do you know that…? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So the bees, wasps, and the ants all belong to the Hymenoptera. 

And the Hymenoptera can be distinguished from other things that look a bit like a bee or a wasp, which normally flies. Flies only have one pair of wings. The hymenopterans all have two pairs of wings. 

So from their thorax, if you look carefully, you’ll see two clear distinct wing types. The back ones are smaller than the front ones. So the original hymenopterans are actually wasps. So wasps are the root of the tree, the evolutionary tree. 

And bees evolved from wasps, and also ants evolved from wasps. So wasps evolved this wasp. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Oh, ants evolved from wasps, is that right?

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, so wasps evolved, so they’re actually the original Hymenoptera, the earliest, the oldest lineages of hymenopterans are actually sawflies. 

They’re called flies, but they’re actually wasps. They are thick-waisted vegetarian wasps. So they laid their eggs. with an ovipositor into plants and then the egg would hatch and the baby sore fly will eat the plant. 

There are also called horn tails or wood wasps and they can often be quite scary looking, big chunky things and their ovipositor is often sticking out, so they do look quite scary but they can’t sting and they’re totally vegetarian. 

They’re also important economic pests as well, they do decimate forests, for example. Then the parasitoid wasps evolved from the sawflies, and the key innovation there was the development of the wasp waist. 

So, when you say what defines a wasp, it’s the wasp waist, it has that very pinched petiole between the thorax and the abdomen, that constriction. We think that the wasp waist evolved in order that the wasps could bend round their abdomen to deliver an egg to a wider range or different types of prey. 

So, the evolution of their larvae feeding off prey as opposed to just plants has also occurred about the same time, so they’re concurrent. And then once they could bend their abdomen around, they could lay that egg anywhere, and that is likely to have led to this huge diversification of the parasitoid wasps. 

And they parasitize pretty much any insect on the planet has its own parasitoid wasp, or possibly multiple. And then the aculeate wasp, which is the word that we use to describe the stinging wasps, the ovipositor was modified into a sting, and then the venom was developed more. 

I mean, parasitoids also have venom, but not to the same extent that stinging wasps do. So the sting in the venom gland evolved with much more rich biochemical components within it. So you can tell a wasp from a bee mostly by this constricted waist, but also without looking at it under a microscope or a hand lens, a bee is generally a lot hairier than a wasp. 

Having said that, the picnic bothering wasp is quite hairy, if you look carefully. So bees are simply wasps that have forgotten how to hunt the vegetarian wasps, and ants are simply wasps that have forgotten how to fly, apart from the sexual phase. 

So, sexuals of ants have winged males and females, and that’s for dispersal. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah. I’ve got only one Bentham story about insects, and when he was a boy, he said he had a candle and he burnt earwigs, and was sort of amused by the way they popped when they burnt. 

And the servant said to him, ‘how would you like to be burnt like that?’ And Bentham said he felt so ashamed and upset that he didn’t want to hurt another creature in his whole life. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Oh, that’s amazing. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So he’s well known for his views on animal welfare. So I think he would have been with you in terms of, you know, looking after wasps.

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Did he say anything about wasps?

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Not that I know. No, no… but I mean, you’ve mentioned once or twice that the venom that the was developed and how Interesting that might be for what it does. 

I mean, you know, is there anything we can learn from the substances that wasps…?

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Yeah, I mean that’s a really exciting area and people are starting to look at the constituents of venom for its biomedical potential. So, whether it’s got some sort of medical applications that could be useful and they have found some interesting stuff.

There’s two components in particular which are which have received quite a lot of attention one is bradykinins, which are actually what you might be given in intensive care because it causes vasodilation. So it causes your veins and arteries to expand and that’s good in intensive care because you want to pump drugs around the body really quickly, and actually if you think about it, what is a wasp doing is, especially a solitary wasp that has to paralyse prey it stings the it injects it with venom and it wants to get the venom around the body quickly, so it causes everything to sort of relax.

So that’s one component and then there’s another one, mastoparans, which is a peptide, which have got some interest from the medical world because lab studies have shown that these mastoparans from wasp venom can cause cancer cells to explode or hemorrhage. So there is interest in whether these could be used as a cancer treatment – so I mean, obviously this is a long way from actually being clinical trials or anything but there is a field of research into the mastoparans of wasps and how you can get them to the cancer cells. But I think, overall it’s a very… it’s like the the tip of the iceberg has barely been scratched. I think that wasp venom – I mean it’s not something that I work on – but I think, having an understanding the biology of wasps, I can see how it could be of an enormous interest and benefits because if you think about it wasp venom, depending on what the wasps hunt, they have to have the right kind of venom to paralyze that type of prey just the right amount, such that the prey is paralyzed enough that it doesn’t sort of come back to life and instead eat the wasp larva but it has to be not killed because it has to stay there as a living larder, because the the solitary wasps will bury the prey with the wasp baby and then she’ll leave it and over the course of weeks that wasp larva will feed on that living larder and so it has to be preserved. 

And also, solitary wasps do tend to be quite specialist in what they hunt, so as I mentioned the spider hunting wasps, they only hunt spiders and there’s wasps that only hunt beetles and wasps that only hunt bees. And the type of venom that you need to paralyze a tarantula, for example, will be quite different to the type of venom that you need to paralyze a tiny little beetle or a little fly. 

So what we expect is that there must be some really strong selection over evolutionary time for a very bespoke type of venom so that those wasps can do the right job with the right prey because they do tend to be quite specialist. 

So I think that’s really exciting, so both from the evolutionary perspective but also from the sort of potential bio prospecting for what kind of, you know, chemical, biochemicals are we going to find. 

And then there’s some other, so they’re very unstudied but there is this lovely case study of one particular predatory hunting wasp which is the bee wolf which is very common in the UK in sandy soils, you’ll find it everywhere. 

It is a wolf of bees. It hunts bees and it catches the bee carries it back to its nest and then it’s going to bury it in the ground but bees are actually quite mucky creatures and lots of bacteria and fungi like to grow on bees, so if you’re going to bury a prey item in the ground, especially in the soil where there’s lots of other microbes and things that can lead to disease or that want to eat the prey itself, if you’re going to bury that in the ground you need to make sure that you are going to somehow create at least a vaguely sterile environment, because you’re going to pack it up with your baby and leave it.

So what they do is quite incredible, so they, first of all, they embalm the bee. They lick it all over and that creates a kind of waxy cuticle, a sort of first line of defense of waterproofing against the external environment, and then from their antenna they exude this bacteria streptomyces, which it has a symbiotic association with, which lives in its antenna. 

 So they will put these bacteria into the capsule with the embalmed bee and streptomyces produce streptomycin, which, alongside penicillin, is one of the most important antibiotics that we use for our own dealing with defensive diseases. So these bees actually use antibiotics to keep the disease under wraps inside that cocoon with the bee, and then on top of that, the egg of the bee also gives off toxic farts of nitrous oxide which is a fungicide, and so all of this is packaged inside this very common little wasp that most people won’t even notice. And all this work has been done by this group in Germany and it’s just one one species of wasp. 

And if that’s just one species, what’s all these other different species of wasps doing to keep their prey hygienic for their offspring to grow? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Well that’s really interesting. And so doesn’t the poor victim of the wasp suffer? 

I’m thinking Bentham’s, you know, about pleasure and pain. All that matters is pleasure and pain and that pleasure is good and pain is evil. Therefore aren’t the wasps nasty little things that are giving pain to lots of other creatures? 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

So, I think probably those neurotransmitters will be blocked by the venom such that the prey doesn’t feel any pain. So the top reason why you should appreciate wasps is actually pest control. So in natural systems they will regulate populations of insects and other arthropods. 

Some of those insects and arthropods are pest species. And so in farmed environments, wasps also have tremendous potential as biocontrol agents. Now I mentioned the parasitoid wasps that are already being used as biocontrol agents, but the stinging wasps are really not well understood or not their potential is not well understood and that’s one of the areas that we’re working on at the moment. 

We’ve been sequencing the guts of the larvae of these social wasps, particularly in developing countries where they’re really abundant. In their guts we find we can work out what insects they’re hunting and we’ve been sampling these in agricultural landscapes and we found that they are indeed hunting key economic crop pests. 

So in that respect they hold a lot of potential. 

We are obviously using chemicals to control pests; that’s the main way that we do it at the moment, and so by doing that we’re also killing wasps along with other natural enemies – you know, it’s not just wasps that are important biocontrol agents, it’s lots of other, you know, other insects as well and so it’s a double whammy that we are, you know, we’re in this sort of vicious cycle and that’s especially the case… a lot of the work that we’ve done is in Africa and South America, where they are subsistence farmers so they will farm just what they need to eat and they are completely reliant on that crop. 

They have key economic pests especially in Africa the fall armyworm is a new invasive species that’s only arrived in the last five to ten years and it’s causing it can cause 100% yield losses of things like maize and sugarcane – you know, key staple crops. 

The governments are panicking because, you know, their populations are already living below the poverty line anyway and starvation is a real potential problem if these fall armyworms just decimate crops, and so they are overcompensating with using chemicals that actually were banned here decades ago because we know that they’re really toxic to human health, let alone the natural environment. 

And the pests, of course, are evolving resistance. And so all the farmers can do is just use more of the pesticides, which is also fueling pesticide resistance. And by doing so, they’re also killing anything else that might have been a natural enemy that comes in. 

So it is a real problem, but the work that we’re doing is taking a sort of sociological approach as well as a biological approach because it’s one thing to tell people that wasps are useful on their farms and therefore they shouldn’t kill the wasps and they should stop using pesticides so the wasps can kill the pests. 

But it’s another problem to tackle the cultural biases that everybody has and prejudices that people have against wasps because we are all products of our own cultures and most people don’t like wasps around the world. 

So it’s challenging their social ideologies alongside promoting their biological roles. 

But there are communities around the world who are actually pro-wasp. So I was in India a few weeks ago, where they are farming hornets, and they farm them for food. 

So these are not just any old hornets, they are the so-called murder hornets that the Americans have given the name to, Vesta Mandarinia, they’re massive. They have like a wingspan of 12 centimeters, and they can fly at 40 kilometers an hour, massive things, but that’s great because they produce really big larvae and pupae, which are really packed with nutritional content, very high in protein, low in fats, really good source of food, and the local people absolutely love them, they know the value of them, so they can sell an enormous nest of these Vesta Mandarinia for 500 pounds, which is a massive amount of money in India, rural India. 

So they are farming these insects, they have indigenous expert knowledge about the ecology of these insects that we didn’t know. So it’s been fascinating learning from these people, these indigenous communities about their relationship, their positive relationship with wasps because they value them as a food commodity. 

So I think there are definitely positive wasp stories from around the world that we are just completely blind to in the West. So I’m definitely looking to these other countries now because I know what Westerners think about wasps, and I’m bored of it. 

I’m interested in the people who have positive relationships with wasps because we can learn from them. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I said at the beginning that you had a difficult brief, and one of Bentham’s points was that the lawyer who makes his reputation does so by taking the person who appears to be the most guilty and making them innocent. 

So I think you’ve done a brilliant job in defending the wasp. Thank you so much, Seirian, it’s been a real pleasure. 

PROFESSOR SEIRIAN SUMNER

Thank you so much for having me. Bye-bye. 

Visit Seirian Sumner’s website for further information.

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.

DR RORY GIBB (INTRO)

Mosquito species are moving and establishing populations in new places and the pathogens are following. So just last year we saw the first sustained dengue outbreak in central Italy…

DR RORY GIBB

So my name is Rory Gibb. I am a senior research fellow here at UCL. So I’m based in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment. 

And my background is as an ecologist, right? So ultimately I’m interested in what determines where species are and how they interact and how they interact with people and what that ultimately means for us. 

So more specifically, I work on infectious disease. So the bulk of my work focuses on really this question about how do climate and ecological processes and social processes interact to determine how sick people get, where people get sick and why. 

And I guess the value of a kind of an ecological perspective on this is that the vast majority of human diseases either have their origins in non-human animals or currently spill over to us predominantly from non-human animals. 

So that’s like everything from rodents and bats to sort of mosquitoes and ticks, right? These are really important kind of key species within the sort of diseases that we really care about and in order to actually understand, you know, who’s most at risk, why diseases cluster in certain populations. 

We need not only to attend to little sort of social factors but also to the kind of ecosystem level and the climatic processes that give rise to patterns of disease. So I kind of take a data science-based approach to this. 

I pull together, tend to pull together lots of data from different sources about kind of human health, about the climate and about sort of biodiversity and ecosystems and bring those together to try and ask questions about, you know, about what these processes are and, you know, whether we can understand and predict who’s getting sick and why. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

It sounds incredibly complex… and you’ve also got an interest in the way climate change is affecting these processes, and might become more prevalent. Is that correct? 

DR RORY GIBB

Yeah, so I think a good way of, maybe a good way into this is actually mosquito-borne diseases, which I work on a lot. 

So the classic example of a really important human disease is malaria. Another really important emerging disease that I work on a lot is dengue. These are sort of two infections that are transmitted by mosquitoes, so these sort of tiny creatures that cause an absolutely huge burden on human health. 

The thing about mosquitoes is that they’re invertebrates, their body temperature is very much coupled to the temperature of the environment around them, and so as temperatures warm up we have, you know, more mosquitoes, their biological processes go faster, and you end up with basically the transmission of the pathogens that they carry changing depending on the climatic conditions. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So it’s not the mosquitoes themselves that are the problem, it’s the sort of the bugs that are, you know, parasitic on the mosquitoes. Is that correct? 

DR RORY GIBB

Yeah, I mean, so I think probably the best way to kind of understand what’s happening with mosquito-borne diseases is that there are sort of two things that are going on with the climate. 

One is that the climate very much restricts where those mosquitoes that we care about can be, right? So we can think of sort of dengue, for example, as being very much a disease of the tropics and subtropics, and that’s effectively to do with the fact that the climate is very suitable in those areas for those mosquitoes to live and transmit those infections. 

As the climate warms, there are large areas of the globe that are now becoming suitable for those mosquitoes that weren’t suitable before, and so what we’re seeing is then those mosquito species are moving around the planet, they are emerging and establishing populations in new places, and the pathogens are following. 

So, you know, a great example of this is something like the emergence of dengue fever in Italy, where, you know, just a decade ago we were seeing… You know, a few cases here and there, and then just last year we saw the first, you know sustained dengue outbreak that was able to continue transmitting over the course of a whole summer in central, Italy.

So that’s one piece of the process, right, mosquitoes are moving around and they’re taking their pathogens with them.

Another piece of the process is that in areas where the diseases are already a problem changes in the climate are reshaping the populations of those mosquitoes and how they’re behaving and how the pathogens are behaving within the mosquitoes, so an increasing frequency of climate extremes. 

So we’re seeing more extreme rainfall and extreme flooding events and also more extreme drought events that’s sort of changing the size of the mosquito populations at different times of the year and leading potentially to really big and really severe unexpected outbreaks that are happening. So we’re sort of seeing these these two pieces. 

There’s like a geographic expansion, diseases going to new places, and then there’s like an intensification where we have diseases becoming worse in places where they’re already a problem. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right, how big a problem is dengue fever? 

DR RORY GIBB

So dengue’s becoming a massive problem for a few reasons. It’s an interesting disease because on the surface of it the fatality rate is not that high, right, so you know it’s sort of under well under one percent and so this year in the last year we’ve seen an absolutely unprecedented epidemic of dengue in Brazil. 

We’re talking several times higher than has ever been seen over the course of a dengue season. The number of deaths that have you know the number of deaths that have resulted from that many millions of cases is still relatively low compared to some other pathogens but there are a couple of things that make this really tricky. 

One is that dengue is really physically debilitating so if you get sick you’re pretty much unable to to work, like, you know, for potentially an extended period of time while you recover. So the economic costs can be really high and they can be especially high because of the fact that the populations that are sort of disproportionately affected tend to be poorer, marginalized, sort of people who live often on the urban peripheries of big cities, right, and so you can imagine that if you are and this is where the kind of climate justice angle comes in, right, you can imagine that if you are in one of those communities where you’re potentially relying on your work and then you know you become sick and you’re not able to work for several weeks that can really be a huge problem. 

So it has that kind of issue. The other challenge with dengue is that there are four main circulating strains of the virus that sort of circulate the planet. If you get infected by one and then recover you’ve got some immunity, you’ve got immunity to that one forever but if you get infected by another one, another one of the strains, you’ve got a much higher likelihood of severe disease and death. 

So there’s some really interesting kind of complexities around the virulence of the pathogens, how often you get infected, and as the climate is warming and the viruses are moving around the planet more and more, the opportunities for people to get reinfected again and again are increasing. 

So it’s sort of a changing landscape that’s both kind of economically problematic, but also increasingly sort of posing complex health risks. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Are there effective vaccines? Of course, if there are, they have to be affordable. 

DR RORY GIBB

Yeah, so precisely because of that interaction that I talked about, of the immune system with different dengue strains, there was one previous dengue vaccination that was rolled out and then actually was, there was a kind of rollback from that because of the fact that it turned out that if you hadn’t been infected with dengue before, it kind of mimicked the effect of a prior dengue infection, which meant that you may have been more likely to get severe disease after you were vaccinated. 

So this created some real challenges. So there’s a new generation of dengue vaccines that are coming through and the sort of, I think the Holy Grail is developing what they call a tetravalent vaccine, right? 

Which is where you have one that protects you against all four of these strains. But that’s very much kind of a work in progress. There are other really interesting sort of solutions that people are coming up with. 

And as an ecologist, you know, I’m sort of always interested in, you know, what those kind of more holistic solutions are as well, right? Rather than the kind of just the targeted kind of medical solutions. 

And one is something called Wolbachia, which is a bacterial pathogen of mosquitoes, which makes the mosquito much less likely to transmit the virus. So they’ve been releasing batches of mosquitoes that are infected with this bacterium. 

And then those populations outcompete the populations that already live there and massively suppress transmission. And some of the trials of that have been really effective. So I think it’s like, it’s a multi-pronged attack, right? 

We need to think about how do you change urban landscapes in ways that they are less amenable to the mosquito living there? How do we reduce people’s exposure to mosquitoes? But then what are these both ecological and also kind of medical interventions that we can come up with? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, given that one of your interests is biodiversity, I mean, mosquitoes are part of the biodiversity of the planet. On the other hand, one might think, well, we’re better off without them. 

DR RORY GIBB

Yeah, so this is a question that I’ve thought about a lot. 

I guess there’s a couple of ways of sort of getting at that. One is that there aren’t that many medically relevant mosquito species compared to the sheer number of mosquito species that are already there. 

So if you were to try and remove a certain subset of mosquito species, that’s only a relatively small subset of mosquito diversity as a whole, right? So maybe you don’t lose those other important ecosystem kind of functions that mosquitoes help to support, right? 

They’re important food for bats, as one example, or for other sort of insectivores, right? So they are part of that. Yeah, if you kind of knock a species out of an ecosystem entirely, we often see unintended consequences, right? 

And I think one of the really interesting questions here is like, what might the unintended consequences be of mosquito eradication? I think we don’t maybe have a good handle on that as a whole. And certainly with something like malaria, where there’s sort of work looking to locally eradicate the major malaria vectors, for example, in parts of Africa, there’s always the question about what will come in to replace them, right? You know, what would come and fill in that gap in the ecosystem that that mosquito was previously filling? And could that pose its own problems? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

What about eradicating the viruses that they carry? I mean, I’m thinking about this from from Bentham’s point of view, who says that, you know, all that matters is pain and pleasure. And insofar as an entity can’t feel pain or pleasure. It doesn’t matter. 

What viruses do, though, seems to be to cause lots of pain but, at least these viruses, don’t do any good. I mean, is there an argument that says, well, the world would be better if these things just simply didn’t exist? 

DR RORY GIBB

I think… I think that’s true. I think one of the questions is the logistical challenge of achieving it when we’re looking at viruses that transmit not only within the human life populations, right? So, you know, I guess the great example of an eradication effort that was really successful was smallpox right and smallpox was a human-only pathogen and when you were protected against smallpox through vaccination you have lifelong protection it proved to be very amenable to eradication right. 

One of the things that’s I think really for me as a biologist like really interesting but sort of really complex from a health perspective is a lot of these viruses that we are concerned about are freely circulating within wildlife populations right and we only ever see them when they spill over from wildlife populations into humans right. 

So there’s sort of a continually evolving pool of viruses in nature right some of which we get exposed to and are a problem many of which humans are exposed to and never really cause very much disease or perhaps someone gets a bit sick and then they recover. 

So the question then is how, you know, how might you go about eradicating those viruses within the wildlife population, right? On the one hand, you could attempt it, so there’s some quite interesting work being done by sort of colleagues elsewhere on you know what a transmissible vaccine might look like, you know, could you basically try and develop a vaccine for rodents, say, to vaccinate them against lassa fever ,which is a virus that I work on quite a lot and that actually spreads through the population and sort of helps to kind of vaccinate the whole rodent population and drive the virus out that way?

There’s the kind of other piece of this picture which is, you know, do we instead focus on what that human wildlife contact point is, right? And how do we sort of set at the link, you know, if we say it’s going to be logistically and conceptually really challenging to figure out how to eradicate whole kind of clusters of viruses from nature that are continually evolving, how do we make sure that people are no longer vulnerable to those or exposed to those, right? And I think that sort of to the Bentham point, like I think historically in ecology, which is where, you know, kind of I’ve sort of come from, a lot of the conversations have focused a lot on, you know, ecological interventions, right? 

You know, how might we intervene in ecosystems by changing landscapes, trying to protect biodiversity, trying to regulate against sort of, say, the hunting of wild animals in ways that sort of might reduce those hazards in nature, right? And there hasn’t been as much attention maybe paid to the question of what are the, you know, what are the social factors as well that we can bring into play here that can kind of help to reduce those risks? So, it’s like, can we do both, right? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, no, but Bentham was inoculated against smallpox when he was quite young. But do viruses then do any good? 

DR RORY GIBB

So, to put my ecologist hat on, it’s easy from our perspective to see parasitic microorganisms, right, be they viruses or bacteria or whatever, as problems, but they play really, really important roles in ecosystems, right? They help to regulate populations of species. They help to keep everything in balance, right? 

And if you, as you say, imagine sort of trying to eradicate microorganisms from the picture, you lose a really important level of ecological functionality that helps the kind of natural systems that we have to sustain themselves and also to sustain the benefits that they provide to people, right? 

Just as one example through kind of regulating the populations of pest species, like that might just be kind of one tangible example, you know, a disease of rodents that kind of helps keep their population in check if it gets too big, right? 

So yes, if you start to remove, if you were to remove the entire diversity of microorganisms from nature, I think you lose a huge amount of functionality, right? If you were to focus on just those medically relevant viruses, maybe not so much, right? 

I mean, I think it probably really depends on the context. So I think removing viruses as a whole is sort of both impractical and sort of not necessarily desirable since so many of them do not cause major issues for us. 

But I think asking the question of what are those viruses that are most important medically that circulate within wildlife can we identify those wildlife populations that are likely to host them? Can we figure out who is most at risk? 

And then ask about, you know, what are the targeted ways that we can sort of address the problem, bearing in mind those kind of local contexts is probably the way forward, I think. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

That’s interesting. And how long will it be before dengue comes to Britain? 

DR RORY GIBB

So the question of when dengue fever would come to the UK is quite an interesting one. I think the answer is probably not super soon, for two reasons. 

Firstly, because we are quite a lot cooler at the moment than the mosquitoes that our major dengue transmitters like, and also that the virus likes for for effectively infecting the mosquitoes. And the second reason is that we actually don’t have dengue vector mosquitoes living here yet. 

However, they are marching northward through Europe, right? So, you know, Aedes albopictus, which is the main kind of dengue vector in Europe, is now in the – we are seeing dengue outbreaks occurring in Montpellier. 

So, you know, there are it’s it’s kind of working its way up. We do have a different climate, right, the continental climate. And I think that does create something of a buffer. And a lot of the prediction studies have suggested we’re looking at late this century, as opposed to in the next few years. However, if we look at what’s been happening with the climate in the last decade and a half or so, I think everything has moved a lot faster than we had anticipated, right? 

And so I think a lot of the work that, for example, the UK Health Security Agency are doing the vector teams there do a lot of work on monitoring mosquitoes along the M2, right, coming up through through Kent, because they often travel through shipping routes and travel and trade. 

And so trying to detect those those problematic species when they emerge and prevent them from establishing here. There are other vector-borne diseases that I think we should be concerned about more immediately. 

So there’s another disease called West Nile fever, which is hosted by by birds. So that’s those are the species that it naturally transmits within. But it’s transmitted by mosquitoes. The main mosquito that transmits it we have here is one of our most abundant mosquitoes. 

And as the climate’s warming, West Nile has been working its way up through Europe and becoming more and more of a problem. I think it’s much more likely that West Nile virus will arrive here before Dengue and will probably arrive in the next sort of 20 years, maybe less. 

And that causes a range of disease severities from kind of mild or relatively asymptomatic all the way up to encephalitis – brain inflammation. So it’s sort of… it’s a pretty nasty infection. And I think that that’s something that we are expecting to see, I would say, in the UK earlier than Dengue. 

Again, the sort of predictive studies around when this is likely to happen are suggesting sort of 2050 plus. I think there are a bunch of reasons to think that those sorts of big scale prediction studies don’t always get it. 

And so I think a lot of the work that is starting to happen here now by various teams in the UK is focused on that question of, like, what happens if it gets here sooner and how should we be doing surveillance? 

Like, you know, how should we be trapping mosquitoes and looking at birds? What should we be monitoring to try and make sure that when some of these pathogens arrive that we can detect them quickly? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And again, is a vaccine a possible? 

DR RORY GIBB

Yeah, I actually don’t know that. I mean, I suspect that a vaccine would be a solution for West Nile disease. I actually don’t know much about West Nile vaccination and the success of any vaccine candidates. 

It’s become a really big problem in the U.S. after it arrived there in about 1998, 99. So I suspect that it’s being very actively worked on. 

So the development of vaccines for emerging diseases, emerging zoonotic diseases, so that’s what we call diseases that transmit from wildlife to people, has a really, there’s challenging dimensions to it, right? In that, historically, it just hasn’t been prioritized by pharmaceutical companies, right? It hasn’t historically been perceived to be a particularly profit-making endeavor compared to working on therapeutics for non-communicable disease. 

This has been a consistent problem for vaccine development overall, but it’s particularly been a problem for emerging diseases, like things that we might want to prepare for that aren’t sort of to the scale of some of the very large infectious diseases, the big infectious diseases that infect humans. 

Since around 2014, when there was a very large Ebola epidemic in West Africa, that everyone was extremely underprepared for, and it was very badly managed, and a lot of people died, there’s been a concerted push by a lot of international, governmental, and non-governmental organizations to try and sort of push emerging diseases more into that agenda, and also to accelerate vaccine development. 

So there are a couple of organizations that are really involved in that. There’s one called CEPI, who I’ve done some work with. They’re an NGO that’s funded by governments and philanthropy and others to effectively accelerate the development of these sorts of vaccines in university settings mostly, right? 

So they are mostly being developed by academic teams, and then they are funding the development of candidate vaccines, and then they’re funding their trials, and they’re sort of funding their rollout, and they’re also funding research into how best they should be deployed, which is some of the work that I’ve done with CEPI before. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, did the COVID outbreak give a boost or an encouragement to the vaccine production industry? 

DR RORY GIBB

So on one level, I think the COVID pandemic really emphasized from a sort of global health and economic kind of policy perspective, like how destabilizing a pandemic of a novel wildlife born infectious disease can be, right? And I think that has sort of intensified the importance and sort of the funding landscape for funding the development of new vaccines and that includes through an organization like CEPI. 

How long that effect will last for? It’s hard to know, right? So we’re a few years out from the pandemic now and there’s a whole other series of kind of political and geopolitical social concerns that have sort of overtaken our discussions about pandemic risk again, right? 

And so I think it’s an open question how long, you know, the sort of that heightened sensitivity will last. I think it’s already fading in some senses and a lot of people who work in this area either from a research perspective or a sort of policy perspective, I’d say including myself on the research side are concerned about how we keep this in the, you know, in the conversation, right? 

And that includes for vaccine development, but it includes for sort of pandemic preparedness more broadly, as well as for kind of fundamental ecological work to understand, you know, as I’ve talked about, these relationships between, like, biodiversity and ecosystems, the species that carry diseases we care about and then where and when those infections might emerge in people. 

DR RORY GIBB

I’ve got to ask you this, do you think the COVID virus came from an animal or from a laboratory? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I think the overwhelming weight of evidence supports a wild animal, not a laboratory origin. Markets in the wildlife trade and wild animal farming are definitely one important conduit right of viruses from nature to people. 

I mean, I guess that’s evidenced by the fact that both SARS, coronavirus, epidemics, firstly SARS-1 in 2002 and then SARS-2, COVID in 2019 onwards, both emerged through that route, right? So, it’s definitely something we should be concerned about in many ways these sorts of spaces create a kind of incubator for pathogens to transmit between species, right? 

If you’ve got stressed populations of wild animals that are kept in close proximity to one another you are creating a kind of incubator condition. I would say that that is far from the only thing that we should be concerned about and I think it’s more about what are the other processes by which kind of pandemic or epidemic diseases emerge right. 

So another really important factor driving these things is agriculture, so sort of industrial agriculture and the important example for that is influenza viruses right which sort of circulate and diversify within intensive poultry populations and that’s given rise to various highly pathogenic avian influenza strains which then spill back into wild birds and are now circulating the planet right so that’s not the sort of sole concern. 

I would say it’s a – and this is going back to my point, I guess, that different diseases have really different characteristics. They’re carried by different species. The species that carry them respond differently to the same sets of human pressures. And so, you know, if we want to understand or kind of anticipate what’s going to emerge from where we need a better understanding of what those sort of ecological conditions are that support different kinds of diseases so we can anticipate. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, what sort of, let’s say, reforms would ideally you introduce? 

DR RORY GIBB

Right, so I think we’re clearly in a position now, right, where mitigation of fossil fuel emissions and of climate change as a phenomenon is a massively important global public health intervention for this century, right? 

Not only because of infectious disease, but because of all of the other downstream consequences for health that emerge from. climate getting warmer and a higher frequency of climate extremes and losses of crop production and all of those kind of consequences that we’re seeing. 

So at the very big scale there are these big drivers that we can think about levers to address. One is fossil fuel and other greenhouse gas emissions and the other is biodiversity loss, so erosion and change of ecosystems and the species that live in them. 

And that’s for the reason that ecosystems don’t only regulate infectious disease, they do a whole lot of other things that we rely on as well. So they provide us with better regulation of the climate through sort of forest growth and the locking away of carbon and they provide us with pollination for food crops and regulation of pests and all of the other things that we need in order to sort of sustain our lives. 

And so there’s an argument that in a lot of ways pulling those big levers is incredibly important and that’s effectively like a mitigation of the damage that’s being done question. I think from the perspective of infectious disease those are big levers to pull and I think that you know they will have positive consequences for a lot of diseases but not necessarily for all of them because different systems are complex. 

So I think there’s a lot more to be done on the social side to adapt to changing patterns of risk. So that’s really thinking about how do we ensure that people and that’s disproportionately kind of marginalized communities in marginalized parts of the world are not being disproportionately exposed and made vulnerable to these pathogens as they emerge. 

And so part of that is sort of large-scale economic change, ultimately transformational economic change about how the economic and exploitative dynamics of the planet currently operate. 

But more locally, thinking about not necessarily checking urbanization so much as how do we ensure that the people who are living in rapidly expanding cities have access to the right sort of housing and sanitation infrastructure that those sorts of, that creating healthy environments is supported for everybody. 

And then also ensuring that people have access to health systems that people can get access to medical care when they need it free at the point of use and access to diagnostics and therapeutics and vaccines for these infections. 

I think in many ways, given the ecological complexity, one of the strongest arguments, and this has come out of some work that I’ve done recently, is that we should prioritize health systems strengthening globally as, like, a key, sort of key intervention against a whole series of disease threats that are shaped by ecosystems in parallel or kind of in tandem with those sort of big kind of levers that we should pull on the ecological and climate side? That was quite a long answer… 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

No, thank you very much indeed, really interesting. 

DR RORY GIBB

Great. Well, thank you guys. 

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 JON BRIDLE (INTRO)

Most extinction now is being driven by human overconsumption, and by a very small proportion of people on this planet – certainly a small proportion of people who’ve ever lived – and we need to start living on this planet as if we intend to stay here. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Okay, so my name is Jon Bridle. I’m Professor of Evolutionary Biology here at UCL and I’m also the director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research. 

My own research really is mostly focused on understanding our maximum rates of evolution in response to environmental change, to understand how quickly populations and organisms or populations will be able to evolve to cope with the huge challenges that are being put onto the communities that they’re part of as a result of climate change and biodiversity loss, so human activities largely. 

And that’s very pertinent at the moment, because we think that environmental regimes are now changing beyond the point that most organisms would have experienced them during their last thousand years of history.  

So, the average now is more like the extremes they would have been prepared for and as those averages move beyond, so the extremes around those averages become actually unusually and totally different to what they’ve ever experienced. 

And what’s interesting there is they might start to behave or they often start to behave in ways that are totally nonsensical. There’s all kinds of interesting examples where organisms have responded to anthropogenic pressure. One of the most celebrated examples is overfishing of cod. It has the life history of something that should actually be very common, but because it’s so overfished, it’s actually become more and more hard to find. And the evolution that happened to the populations of that species was that they developed much more quickly and they actually ended up becoming much harder to find. They stayed closer to the bottom of the ocean and actually their adult size is much smaller because they have to develop more quickly. So they’ve adopted a sort of faster life history which actually makes them less profitable to fish. 

So, examples like that are kind of evolutionary examples where populations have adapted, have evolved in response to pressure, often in ways that one can’t predict. Nature is continually surprising us by what it reveals to us as we study it.  

This is more something that happens within the lifetime of a genotype of an individual and different genotypes vary in how flexible they are throughout their lifetime. So, the idea of learning in some vertebrates and someone in many animals is the idea that you’re constantly able to acquire new skills in response to the environmental need. But also, that form of flexibility is a double-edged sword because it can also mean that other organisms can change your behaviour for their benefit. 

So, if you’re infected by a fungus or infected by something or if you’re manipulated by your peers you can do behaviour that’s actively destructive to your own welfare or to welfare of your family. So, this is a whole different issue here, where we’re talking about maybe the idea that societies of some human societies and some other primate societies function around social manipulation and driving individuals to do acts which are actually against their own interest or society. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, I mean, in a sense, is that what the human race is doing at the moment to the planet?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Well, that’s very interesting. So there’s a system in place where society is organized around the benefit of a few individuals and maintaining the privilege of those individuals the expense of the planet and actually the expense of the well-being of most people on this planet and most people who are going to be born in the future as well as all the other biodiversity on the planet.  And that’s the really fascinating thing that that system to basically transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy continually is becoming more more efficient and more and more finely honed and arguably a way of buffering the consequences of our destruction of nature from us initially even though our children and our grandchildren will be directly affected by the loss of the ecosystems that we depend on. 

So, it’s really fascinating how that’s happened, and, you know, you could argue that the presence of the evolution of a brain which allows you to be constantly reprogrammed and affected by your immediate environment and your reputation you have among your peers is actually a form of cognition that can lead to a lot of self-delusion. 

I mean, there’s a lot of argument about the idea that we’re encouraged to consume things that make us less happy, consume things that make us less healthy, spend our time in ways which are destructive to our family life and our own lives. You know there’s the famous quote that we’re borrowing money we can’t afford to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t care about. 

And the irony of that is that that consumption is destroying the planet and it’s destroying the ecosystems that we depend on as well as destroying the option and the futures of our own children and most of the people on this planet now. 

And that’s, you know, that’s an incredible tragedy and the added tragedy to it is we’re actually paying taxes to make that happen. It’s not how something happens naturally; it’s not a natural economic system that would make that happen; it’s because those types of activity are heavily subsidized by taxpayers. The public money is being used to make the destruction of nature profitable for a few individuals now. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

That would make perfect sense to Bentham. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Yes.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

You know, because I mean on the one hand, he would say, you know, you look at the structures that people are placed in and it’s not that these oligarchs, let’s say, or even people in Europe or in America, are necessarily bad people – but they’re just pursuing their interest, and if we were in the position of an oligarch or Bill Gates we’d probably do exactly the same thing. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Well, Bill Gates is an interesting example – but I think that’s quite a pessimistic view, because I think there’s a continual need for society to negate those things – or for capitalist society to negate those things – that really make people happy, which is the love and respect of their peers, their family, and the feeling of contributing to a community that values them.

If you think about left-wing and right-wing politics, I mean, one could argue that that’s a question about how wide you put your net of people whom you care about. 

If it’s just your family, I don’t think there’s any political system that says you shouldn’t love your family. There’s lots of reasons, like, from a biological point of view, why loving your children is a very important thing that’s evolved, right? But it’s the ability to reimagine and to love those people who are different, and who you don’t have a direct connection from, which is one of the things that we as evolutionary biologists really try to understand. 

And that brings us onto another sort of aspect of what UCL is famous for, from a biological point of view, which is understanding the rules, trying to understand the rules that govern what makes forms of life cooperate with each other rather than come into conflict, and what’s caused the evolution of complex organisms from single-celled organisms. 

So, this big leap from single-celled organisms that are sometimes form colonies, but are mostly independent, to multicellular organisms, essentially societies of cells which choose to devote themselves to the reproduction of the whole organism – the superorganism, if you like. I know I’m going all over the place.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

No, no, it’s all right. I want to just backtrack a bit and ask you about evolution, and particularly the term, because, as Bentham tells us, words are important. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Yeah.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And the associations of the word ‘evolution’ are usually quite positive, in that evolution means things are adapting better to the circumstances in which they live. But the way you’ve been talking about evolution is that it’s sort of crisis management.

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

I mean, that’s maybe how we couch it – as kind of, organisms have got to respond. It’s like a reaction, a sort of emergency response. But evolution is much more fundamental than that. I mean, it’s everywhere. I think people probably not really conceiving of evolution in that sufficiently broad sense are kind of losing that message. 

So people typically think of evolution as survival of the fittest, which is a very, very narrow and shallow way of thinking about evolution. I mean, what’s attracted me to study evolution, actually, is the fact that evolution is quite contingent on what’s available, what types of variation are available in that moment for natural selection to work with. And all it’s doing is basically maximizing the transmission of information from one generation to the next. And it favors genotypes, or it favors alleles, or bits of genotypes, which are able to do that more effectively in that particular environment. So, it’s not necessarily universally better or universally more fit. It’s just a system where organisms will evolve or genotypes or genomes will evolve to be more effective at transmitting their information. And they’ll get as complex as they need to be, if you like, but complexity has a cost. So, in many circumstances, they might evolve to become less complex. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, we should think of evolution as a descriptive rather than a normative term?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

I mean, this is the thing, I mean, people imagine this kind of ascendancy and this ladder of life, but I think it’s absolutely the case that, I mean, evolution is important because it’s creativity. There are new ways of living that are imagined through evolution, that become apparent through evolution, and the history of life has long periods of diversification, you go from the origin of life to increasingly diverse forms and the proliferation of life into many different forms.  

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And we’re losing that, do you? 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Yes. Yes. So, well, we’re simplifying a lot of communities because selection is very broadly being shaped increasingly by human activities. So those human activities impose certain types of selection that are quite consistent and quite strong. 

I mean, for example, applying pesticides to populations of insects, same mosquitoes, that will drive them to evolve in a particular way at all costs, because the most important thing there is they have to survive the pesticide. And normally what happens when you select on one particular thing, is you cause other things to become less good. And this is really interesting and fundamental, is this idea of trade-offs, the idea if you do one thing well, you can’t do something else well, because you only have so many genes that do things in your genome, you only have a limited amount of life, a lifespan that you can develop an organism or phenotype in. 

So, we know that when you select for pesticide resistance, if you compete those individuals in an environment with organisms that are not pesticide resistant but without the pesticide, they won’t do very well, because typically they have lower metabolism to cope with the pesticide. They might have lower fecundity, so lay fewer eggs. They might well be less good at evading predators or parasitoids or infection. 

So, everything that happens in evolution has a cost.  And that idea, that genomes evolve for particular sets of circumstances, is fundamentally what creates the diversity of life. If there was no cost to doing one thing and not another, then you just have one or two species that do everything that are quite simple. 

But, actually, the challenge for evolutionary biologists is to understand why life has proliferated into so many different places, when the joy of being a biologist is you go to anywhere in the world, any community, where there’s life and there’s lots of diversity. And it’s not just one species that’s very plastic. It will be different species that fill different niches, and they have different jobs. And we see that within the organism as well. We see that in terms of organ systems and the specialization of a body into different forms. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So is this sort of a warning about unintended consequences? Because there are things which we regard as nasty, at least nasty to humans and perhaps to other species, but by annihilating them that may cause all sorts of other problems for other species which are regarded as beneficial?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

We potentially have the technology now to eliminate malarial mosquitoes from populations by certain types of engineering techniques. The question is, what are the consequences of eliminating mosquitoes? Do they have other roles in communities that would actually cause other things to become much more common? 

One of the things about communities is if one thing becomes very abundant, something else would increase in number to reduce the abundance of those things, so nature abhors a vacuum.  

So they’re constantly finding ways, new ways of living, and it’s beautifully creative, and that creativity comes out of natural selection. The difficulty is when you start to see natural selection as a good thing or as a bad thing, as you say. 

You know, every time I have a tutorial group, almost always, there’ll be one student that says, well, surely extinction’s natural, because one species is just becoming dominant at the expense of another. But making that case for ethics out of naturalness is very dangerous, because then I’ll say, well, I assume you can justify murder in the same way, or genocide, you know. Anything that’s natural doesn’t necessarily good, right? This is pretty fundamental.  

And there’ll also be people who say, well, surely humans are no longer evolving because we have hospitals. And you think, well, that’s a really limited way of imagining what evolution is, that you’re just some forms of early mortality you’re preventing, but you’re preventing those forms of early mortality only for quite privileged societies on the planet. I mean, most of America doesn’t have access to health care, right? So many societies fail to provide even basic health care for their citizens.  And also, you’re ignoring the fact that what is really driving evolution is differences in reproduction rate. It’s not when you die at 70 or at 90 or at 50, it’s actually what’s happening in terms of the rate of proliferation of the spread of different genes at different points.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Is that because you only have to live to a certain age to reproduce?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Yeah, so well, then you draw me into talking about the evolution of aging, which is something else that was pioneered at UCL, which takes us back to this idea of thinking about the organism as a society of cells, the multicellular organism as a society of cells who have chosen or have evolved to cooperate to maintain an organism for X number of years. But the main role of that organism is a vehicle for genes to be transmitted to the next generation through your sex cells.  

Sex is a very hard thing to understand from an evolution point of view because it’s not necessary for reproduction. So what’s happening with sex is that a genome that is only transmitting half of its genes to the next generation is, and that’s the female genome is transmitting only 50% of its genome to the rest of the generation when it could be transmitting 100% by reproducing without sex, which is what most cells do most of the time when they undergo mitosis. So what a female genome is essentially doing is allowing the evolution of males, the male sex, to come in and basically parasitize them, an unrelated genome, then 50% of that fuses with your own genome. And so each one of your genes, it’s only got a 50% chance of being transmitted, a 100% chance of being transmitted. And we call that the two-fold it does is almost all eukaryotes have sex. It has to be sufficiently advantageous to be twice as good to have a genome that’s a mix of two different genomes than one that’s just a reproduction of the mother. 

So when you see a pregnant placental mammal, you know, around here there’s lots of females and some of them are pregnant, you can look at them as hemiparasites. They’ve essentially been parasitized by a male and they’re carrying around a huge cost to themselves physiologically, psychologically. And, you know, in terms of their fitness, they’re carrying around this baby that 50% of them is totally alien to them. And actually, placental mammal evolution involves inheriting genes from viruses that stop an immune reaction against that thing that you’re only 50% related to.  

So, the best explanation for that goes back to the beginning of the interview, the best explanation that we have is that ultimately it increases the variation. So, in the situation where the environment is constantly changing, it’s not good to be just like your parents, just like your mum. You have to acquire new genes which can allow you, that population will be able to respond to new challenges. And that distinction between the somatic eye and the maintenance of the organism and the transmission of information was, well, it was first thought of by August Weisman, a German scientist, but was really recognised as important by Lancaster, who was one of the first zoology professors at UCL.  

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Oh, when was that? 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Oh, they would have been 1870s, I think. So, Grant was the first person to teach evolution, at least in England, to teach evolution by natural selection to undergraduates. And he’d interacted a lot with Darwin in Edinburgh. By the time Darwin was living in Gower Street, just opposite the close to where Grant was working. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And we’ve got the blue plaque on the wall

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Yeah, we’ve got the blue plaque on the wall, yeah exactly. It’s funny, though – we don’t really know how much they interacted, because Lancaster was the person after Grant. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Okay 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

But it’s interesting. 

So, one of the things that really surprises people, I think this is one of the, I mean, we talk about biodiversity loss, or biodiversity is some one of those things that’s quite hard to see or to imagine, because people often think about exotic animals that live there in zoos or on television, or, you know, in exotic parts of the world. But really, biodiversity is absolutely everywhere. 

George Orwell has a fantastic essay about toads called ‘On the Common Toad’, written in 1946. And he wrote it in response to socialists who were saying that interest in nature was kind of trite and bourgeois and sentimental. And we should just be interested in factories and, you know, Bolshevik projects and all this stuff. And he argues, no, studying nature is what brings us back into what matters, the idea of beauty, the idea of the soul of man under socialism, which is Oscar Wilde.  

So, he talks about what we think of as mundane, the frogs born in the pond and the way that frogs live, brings us back into this world of communities. Because what we’re studying when we study biodiversity, we’re studying the evolution of communities and seeing communities everywhere. 

You know, we talk about ourselves as a society of cells. And that really is a big revelation for students when you say you are yourself as a cooperative society of cells. But you’re not just a society of cells. You’re also an ecosystem yourself. Because there are as many cells within you that aren’t human as are human. Within your guts, you’ve got trillions of cells which are not human. As many as you have cells that are human, that are the same genotype within you. And that is that is a huge revelation for people, especially when I talk to artists about these things.  

The idea of the self, in itself, is a strange concept that we’ve imposed on all this biodiversity that’s within us, as well as without us. There’s an ecology within a community within us, every one of ourselves. And if you’re a plant, you also have chloroplasts, photosynthetic cells, which also have different genomic origins. So, understanding how those conflicts are overcome to make these cooperative cells, that by and large work most of the time pretty well across many conditions, is one of the fundamental problems of being an evolutionary biologist. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And what are the implications of climate change for these processes?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

Well, that’s what we try and understand, one of the things we try and understand. 

And I think there are two things going on and each of those are crises that would be equally weighty on their own. 

So, climate change is a huge challenge. I mean, the magnitude of climate change seems quite small, two degrees, you know, at least two degrees, maybe four degrees, you know, in the next 30 years or so. One of the things we don’t know is how that’s going to affect the variability of climates. So, one of the things that we study is the fact that climate is actually as perceived by organisms is already very variable, but organisms evolve in order to cope with variation. Now you think about an intertidal zone, you think about an enemies living on a rock or a barnacle on a rock, the temperature change between being covered by the ocean, maybe the antique ocean or being exposed to a summer day in Dorset, that’s a huge difference in temperature and a huge difference in salinity and all these other aspects, a whole different environment of other organisms you’re coping with. Birds are attacking you if you’re, when the tide’s out and when the tide’s in, it’s like fish attacking you, right? So, you’ve got these two very different systems, but they can cope with that because they know it’s very predictable. The tides have a regime that they can evolve to match. The challenge of climate change is that variation will become much less predictable.  

And we have to, organisms will have to evolve to cope with, to make this new environmental regime predictable. And they might well be beyond the limits of what they can achieve. And so that species will go extinct if they can’t evolve to cope with those changes or change their phenotypes within their lifetimes to cope with those changes. 

And so we’ll have species dropping out of communities in a non-random way. And that species and those communities themselves may well become extinct entirely. And so you’ll lose information if you like, five billion years of evolution, you’ll be losing species from that, from that information, you know, that history with the only planet we know in the universe where life has evolved, you know, we’ve got five billion years of a legacy of five billion years, which we’re destroying in a blink of an eye. 

So climate change is a challenge. And it’s a challenge that many members of the public are very well aware of. And it’s something I hear about a lot. 

But the biodiversity crisis, even without climate change, would be a huge global emergency. And that’s mainly the main cause of extinction right now is not climate change. It’s the loss of habitat and the destruction of habitat, mainly for things like farming. One of the biggest sources of biodiversity losses is cutting down and moving ancient biomes like rainforest in order to grow meat to go and vertebrate products. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

There was a report, I think yesterday, that said that last year there was more rainforest lost in a single year than ever before, which is quite shocking, given that we’re all supposed to be aware of – well, you’re saying it’s not just climate change, in that case, it’s losing habitat – and we’re all supposed to be aware of this, and our politicians are supposed to be aware of it, and yet big business seems to be profiting nevertheless. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

So we can talk about that. I mean there’s things that, you know, very biological questions that come into play there.  

I mean, the first thing I would say is one of the things we do in the centre that I’m the director of, in CBER, is we try and understand at what point we’ll reach, where we reach tipping points in the persistence of really important biomes like rainforest, like coral reefs. We try and understand how communities are assembled by evolution, like ecosystems are assembled by the kind of ecosystems we absolutely depend on for things like rainfall. 

Rainfall in the prairies of North America and the Ukraine absolutely depends on rainforest around the equator. That, you know, millions and millions of tonnes of water, freshwater, leave the rainforest in clouds and through the Amazon. The Amazon itself has 20% of the world’s freshwater. So that raises a really important issue, in terms of how is it possible that one person like Bolsonaro can control 20% of the world’s freshwater?

So the whole idea of nationalism, you know, is utterly absurd when you think about the fact that everyone on the planet depends on resources that are mostly concentrated in those areas of the planet that are very, still very biodiverse.  Europe lost most of its biodiversity in the industrial and agricultural revolutions. But most of the biodiverse in the planet is around the equator and in the shallow tropical seas. The coral reefs, they’re being lost mostly because of climate change. There’s very interesting reasons why climate is a main driver, apparently, of coral reef loss. Rainforest is a more complicated combination of biodiversity loss and climate. Because we need to remember that biodiversity is what creates climate. The history of the earth was that particularly as land plants evolved, came onto land, they released oxygen into the atmosphere, took away carbon dioxide, changed the climate completely, made the world much more wetter, and so created terrestrial water in large abundances in higher latitudes, which other forms of life could use, and they spread out, you know, diversified in response to that. 

So, the climate is not a passive thing.  It’s created by organisms. And what we try and understand in CBER is, you know, both why does biodiversity matter and how does it matter? So how does biodiversity, why does biodiversity matter for human economies? 

And that’s a really zero-sum game. I mean, it fundamentally matters, because without biodiversity, there’s nothing, you know, we can’t photosynthesise, you know, we can’t project all the food we eat, it comes from other organisms, either directly or indirectly, right.  

So, you know, there’s a zero-sum game there. But the point is, where do we reach these tipping points where economies have to pay attention to that biodiversity loss? I mean, to paraphrase, you know, Pericles, you know, if you don’t take an interest in politics, you know, sooner or later politics takes an interest in you – well, that’s true of biodiversity. 

And we are rapidly approaching these tipping points, and we don’t know how close we are, maybe some of them have already been exceeded.  

But I think it’s very important that we, the danger of like saying everything’s too late, and that’s a huge danger in terms of motivating action, the sort of doomsayers saying, ‘Oh, it’s already too late’, and the preppers, you know, the fact is, there’s a huge amount of uncertainty. And nature is very good at recovering from, from these kind of perturbations. If you leave rainforest alone, it will grow back, and it will become almost as good as ancient rainforest. One of the problems is once you remove ancient rainforest, you release a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So, a lot of the carbon dioxide emissions are due to rainforest loss. So, there is this kind of like this connection between biodiversity loss and climate change, but there are two very different things. 

And most extinction now is being driven by, by human over consumption, and over consumption by a very small proportion of people on this planet. It’s certainly a small proportion of people who’ve ever lived.  And we look at the wealth distributions, the social, the inequality in terms of wealth, you can see that the people who benefit, as you were leading to before from this destruction of nature, are largely already very wealthy people, or very privileged people who are largely buffered, at least initially, from the consequences of it. The people who are suffering the most are the world’s poor who rely more directly on local biodiversity for the food. If they want to get some fish, they walk into the sea and they catch some fish or into the forest and they catch some mammals or they collect insects. Those people suffer directly.  But of course, as well as that intergenerational poverty, we’re committing our children to intergenerational poverty. And it’s our own children. And we have to start living on this planet as if we intend to stay here. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, I mean that’s again an interesting point from Bentham’s point of view, he says everyone to count for one and no one for more than one and that applies, can be seen to apply to the future. I mean there’s nothing we can do about the past, but this earth might last another five billion years.  But you know, that could be a lot of people over that time providing it’s looked after. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

So, we’re not, I mean, this is interesting, this idea of stewardship, it’s quite, you know, this idea of dominion, it’s kind of quite a Christian sort of notion.  

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Looking after… Yeah. ‘We’ve been placed here by God to look after this creation’

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

And that actually, this idea that the world itself isn’t divine, but we can achieve divinity through our use on this, our time on this planet. And also that man is created in God’s image, which kind of justified a lot of the colonialism, the destruction of other forms of human civilization and culture by Europeans. 

So that worldview of like in the world is someone we must look after and cradle, I think it’s interesting because it really makes the natural world seem sort of frail and in need of protection.  

And actually, it’s the very thing that we depend on. It’s the water that we swim in. And to quote, well, Otis Redding didn’t write the line, but you don’t miss your water until the river runs dry. Those tipping points are fundamental to how we think about the world. We think about these tipping points. We see them around us all the time. 

The tragedy of unintended consequences is writ large in Shakespeare. You talked about good people and bad people. There’s no bad people in Shakespeare. I mean, maybe Iago, but there’s reasons you might explain why he’s so horrible. But most of the people are valiantly and genuinely trying to understand what’s going on and trying to do the right thing. When Hamlet does the right thing, but two weeks too late, it takes him a long time to realize, are these cues I’ve been getting, are they accurate or not? How should I react to this terrible slur, this insult? So, I think this idea of the way that we behave is driven by the circumstances that we’re placed in. 

And the global economy places us in circumstances where our choices are very narrow because the entire situation is set up to serve billionaires, to transfer wealth and joy from the poor to the rich. And this is what the socialists from Bloomsbury were arguing 150 years ago, what Bentham to some extent was arguing. And I think the danger there is that we talk about things like ‘we should know about this. We shouldn’t be doing these consumptions.’ People always say, ‘oh, I shouldn’t be behaving this way because it’s bad for the environment’. But you’re coping with the structure, which is essentially bad, essentially created to prevent us seeing the consequences of our actions. So, we’re operating against a system that has to change.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So is there any particular change…I mean, in one sense, it’s very pessimistic. 

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

No, I’m trying to be optimistic – I mean we have to be, because the uncertainties are enormous.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, what can we do as individuals? As collections of cells?

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE 

As societies of cells. I mean, everything I would say is that we are facing a huge path, a bifurcation. 

There’s different futures ahead of us and one of them is one that we can bend the curve of biodiversity loss and actually we can act to create more biodiversity. You protect nature, if you stop, well it’s not so much protecting nature, it’s stop having a system that actively funds its destruction through public money. 

You know, we’re facing these two bifurcating paths and there’s a lot of pressure for us to take the wrong path.  The way the society is currently organised is to benefit a few for the cost of the money. This idea that it’s natural for us to destroy nature, I mean it’s not true, it’s because you put in place, you choose to vote, you choose to have systems in place, international systems which are working across a framework of nationalistic governments who are pretty much powerless to cope with those things. 

So, it’s an active choice, we can choose to destroy nature and destroy our own futures. You won’t destroy the planet, you won’t destroy life, you’ll just make life very, very difficult for many people for a long time and then for everyone. The rich aren’t inoculated completely, they will live in their gated communities and in their private healthcare and in their private cars, eventually they will too will suffer. 

I mean there’s that quote from the mayor of Bogota, he said, you know, a healthy civilisation is not one where the poor drive is, where the rich use public transport. 

So, I think one of the most positive things we can do is to recognise the value of a community and being part of a community and move away from this idea of individual families operating independently. 

I mean, this is quite Benthamite in a way because of course Bentham’s always criticised for being against individual liberty, about the liberty of the society and the two, you know, the best for everyone but even at the expense of individual freedom and of course there’s a tension always between those two things – but you think about why did the idea of the nuclear family happen?  

It was essentially a way of selling more fridges and televisions and cars so every family had to have, you know, those things but I say, you know, look in your house and say, do I actually need to have, you know, my own car, can I use the streets car, you know, can I go to a library of things and borrow a drill, do I have to buy my own drill, you know, or buy my own lawnmower. So that’s one step forward, is think about how you consume. It’s okay to consume things that damage the environment sometimes but think about, do that consciously. If you’re going to fly, fly consciously, think about the fact that you’re flying. I mean we, you know, if you’re going to consume meat, you know, make sure you enjoy it and make sure it’s good. So we have options about how we consume. Consuming less meat is probably one of the most important things that anyone can do, anyone who can afford to eat meat. 

What makes you happy is being part of a community and being loved and not driving a big car or, you know, consuming, having a very highly consumptive lifestyle. But it’s also about feeling like you have agency.  

And I think that the sort of rhetoric from conservationists can sometimes be ‘it’s all hopeless and it’s all your fault’ and that makes people feel powerless. So, I think one of the things we have to do is we have to sell dreams, not nightmares. I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King didn’t say ‘I have a nightmare’, he said ‘I have a dream’. And so I think, say what one needs to do is to consume more consciously, maybe consume experiences rather than goods. You know, having a good experience that doesn’t involve lots of material production can be expensive and can fuel an economy without necessarily costing the planet huge amounts of resources. 

Stop thinking about nature as something that’s outside you. Think about reimagining the communities that you’re part of, which are around, which are everywhere. You don’t think you have to go to the Amazon to see biodiversity. There’s biodiversity inside you and there’s biodiversity everywhere. And don’t think that a biodiverse future is one where you don’t get to do anything. It’s where everything, many, many, many more things are possible. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, that’s brilliant. Jon, thank you very much indeed.

PROFESSOR JON BRIDLE

Well, I didn’t talk much about biodiversity.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I think we did.

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

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.

DR FERGUS GREEN (INTRO)

The fossil fuel industry is an important player, not just in the production of fossil fuels, but in creating the demand for fossil fuels. And a lot of that is through perversions and corruptions of the democratic process. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

So my name’s Fergus Green, I’m an Associate Professor in the UCL Department of Political Science slash School of Public Policy. 

I work on climate change predominantly and I come at questions of climate change and the low carbon transition from the perspective of political economy, public policy, law and ethics and justice. But my work at the moment really is across three themes. 

So just briefly, the first theme is about fossil fuels and the climate motivated governance of fossil fuels, some of the politics around tackling fossil fuels as such, some of the ethical questions around fossil fuels. 

And then secondly, it’s about a just transition away from fossil fuels, what that ought to look like from a normative perspective, policies for ensuring that these transitions are just and some of the politics of trying to implement those policies. 

The third broad theme of my work looks at how climate change is intersecting with other big contemporary challenges. So I have some work on how inequality fuels climate change and how they can be tackled together. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right, and you talked about a just transition away from fossil fuels. So is the idea that what we call the advanced economy should reduce significantly the amount they consume?

DR FERGUS GREEN

Yeah, so these questions of justice in the transition arise at multiple levels. And I think at one level, it’s a question of justice between countries, certainly as a matter of international law. Governments have essentially enshrined that kind of principle that essentially the rich countries should decarbonise faster and greater as effectively a principle of international climate law. So there is that sort of moral and legal obligation of the rich countries to reduce faster. That’s usually framed in terms of emissions. 

But a number of scholars have also kind of looked at the question of reducing fossil fuel extraction and applied similar kinds of principles but with some additional considerations such as the degree of fossil fuel dependency. 

So there are questions of justice arising there and certainly in my work on fossil fuel production you know I’m focusing largely initially on rich countries – Australia, US, UK, Norway, Canada – these are kind of the big, sort of rich country fossil fuel producers and arguably, yes. they have an obligation to be reducing fossil fuel extraction as well as much faster, and also that can set an important example to other countries, and they could also use their diplomacy to try and persuade and assist other countries as well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And in terms of global trends, are there some countries doing well?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

So in terms of fossil fuel production, it’s probably best to separate between coal and oil and gas. 

So, in terms of coal consumption and coal production, generally the trends are downward – though China is a sort of significant exception there. There are some complexities in the China case that we can potentially explore but, yeah, broadly, sort of outside of East Asia, the story of kind of coal is largely one of reduction in terms of production and consumption. 

Oil and gas: the story generally is in terms of increases in production and consumption broadly speaking though there are some countries there are a number of countries that have committed to stop expanding oil and gas extraction and to wind down extraction in line with the Paris Agreement. 

Those countries have formed an alliance called the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. They include countries like Denmark which did have some you know oil and gas production and is committed to phase it out. 

Arguably the UK could potentially join the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, you know, if it implements some of its current policies. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Those are both small players. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

Yes, so mostly small players currently but also kind of it’s a relatively new organization potentially growing over time. You’ve got to start with the smaller, more willing players if you’re going to have hope to influence the bigger players. 

And I should say, you know, the UK believes in this logic because it set up something called the Powering Past Coal Alliance to focus on the phase out of coal-fired power generation along with Canada. And that organization also started with largely small coal users, but has gradually expanded now includes Germany and the United States. So, there is some potential logic to these kinds of small clubs that can expand. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

What about oil? We’ve got our own oil in the North Sea, and Norway’s extracting oil, but as we know, most of it comes from the Middle East. People are still driving round in their cars. People are still flying – increasingly, it seems. We academics are bad enough, for flying off to conferences here, there and everywhere! I mean, what are the politics here? What ought to be done? 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

So, I think on the demand side, there’s a kind of behavioral and technological set of questions around how we can live well without doing the things that require using oil and gas. 

We can certainly get around on the ground in terms of ground transport pretty well without oil and gas. We have public transport, we have electric vehicles, you know we can shift our behavior, we can design cities better so that they’re more mixed-use areas, we need to travel smaller distances. So there are actually a lot of things that can be done, and there it’s really just sort of about the economics and getting the policies right in order, to sort of incentivize the uptake of these behaviors and technologies. 

In terms of long-haul transport, in terms of shipping and air transport, there it’s harder. There, it’s more about the research and development of the technologies and so on and of course behavioural changes and that’s politically challenging. 

So there’s kind of more work to be done there. 

We need to be also reducing supply because supply and demand interact dynamically, right? And, you know, ultimately, one of the main levers that we have in terms of shifting behavior and incentivizing new technology is the price and, you know, economists have been saying for years we need carbon pricing, and the idea of carbon pricing is essentially to push up the cost of carbon intensive processes. 

The supply of fossil fuels shapes the price of fossil fuels as well and so if you’re building out a lot of fossil fuel production you’re lowering the price which is working completely contrary to your aims of carbon pricing to raise the price of fossil fuels and so we ought to also be restricting the supply of fossil fuels, because that will send a price signal to change behaviour and to change technology. And so this is one of the reasons, and there are some others, why we also, I would argue, ought to tackle the supply of fossil fuels.

And so, if we look at in the UK, for example, in the UK it’s a declining basin so already fossil fuel production rates and employment in the industry are declining, but the government – the previous government certainly still was issuing new licenses to explore for oil and gas, and also still giving consent to produce in licensed fields. Whereas the current government has committed to end new oil and gas exploration, and there is currently a debate about issuing consent to produce in already licensed fields like the big Rosebank field. 

And so I have argued, and my research has sort of looked at ways in which and the reasons why the government should, you know, for instance not just not issue new licenses but also not issue new production consent, and this has to do with kind of the need to phase down; the fact that we’re a rich country, we should go first, be an early mover and that also setting an example to other countries. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So mainly… Because you could affect demand, let’s say, for instance by increasing taxes on aviation fuel and petrol. That would not be popular. And the other problem is, is that it means the rich can afford it. 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

You’re absolutely right. So, this is one of the key challenges in terms of climate mitigation generally, right? Is that one of the key levers to get climate mitigation is to increase the costs of carbon intensive activities. And carbon intensive activities tend to be like household necessities for a lot of people to some extent. And they’re around energy and they’re around food and, you know, electricity and mobility. 

So yeah, it is politically challenging, but there are kind of various alternative policies and strategies that governments have tried that can be more popular, for instance, sort of green industrial policies. 

So, for instance, the US Inflation Reduction Act under Biden was all about sort of stimulating the supply of infrastructure for low carbon technologies. And so essentially bringing the costs down by the government subsidizing them, and then they become cheaper for, you know, for consumers than fossil fuel incumbents. So, there are different options that can change the sort of political feasibility of climate policies. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, because I mean, you said your third element you were interested in was in part to do with climate change and democracy. 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Absolutely, yeah. And democracy and inequality and climate, I think these are sort of three really important intersecting issues. And I think governments that want to tackle climate change, but try to do so through a very narrow, what I’ve called ‘carbon centric’ approach, that just deals with sort of emissions and the price of emissions tend to struggle politically, right? And so it’s difficult politically to isolate climate change from other broader challenges that people face, whether it be sort of poverty or economic insecurity – even a kind of struggling middle class, right? 

And so I think it’s really important to design policies that sort of effectively tackle climate change alongside economic inequalities, alongside people’s concerns about household budgets and so on. And that can be partly through the design of the policy, like I explained before. 

And it can also be through complimentary policies that address economic inequality. So I do think it’s important to address those things together. 

On the democracy side, one of the things that I haven’t really mentioned yet, but I think is really important to mention in terms of the reasons why we continue to expand fossil fuel production is the role that fossil fuel companies and the fossil fuel industry have played in creating the technological, social, ideological, political conditions for policies that lead to the expansion of fossil fuel production, consumption, and investment. And they’ve played an outsized role through their lobbying, through their campaign donations, through the way that they influence the revolving door between fossil fuel companies and governments and staffers and political parties, write their way through to the fossil fuel industry’s role in producing children’s storybooks that sort of glorify fossil fuels and their attempts to shape culture through advertising and so on. 

So, you know, the fossil fuel industry is also an important kind of player, not just in terms of its role in the production of fossil fuels, but in terms of creating the demand for fossil fuels as well. And a lot of that is through kind of perversions and corruptions of the democratic process. And so if we have better, more responsive democracy where there’s less corporate money and corporate influence over democracy, people have a greater say and greater input, then I think we’re more likely to get the combinations of climate and economic and social policies that can tackle these issues together. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So do you mean that these companies are getting at, if that’s the right word, politicians at the top level?

DR FERGUS GREEN

Well, absolutely. We have plenty of evidence of that, yeah. And they do that in multiple ways. 

So, there’s lobbying over policies and that’s not just opposition to climate policies, but you know, we’ve got to remember we have massive fossil fuel subsidies, we have negative carbon prices in a lot of countries, essentially governments are subsidizing fossil fuel production and or consumption. And so, you know, there’s a lot of fossil fuel industry lobbying that goes into those subsidies, as well as the kind of broader, facilitative environment for fossil fuel expansion.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So how do they do that in terms, how do they subsidize? 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

So, a lot of it’s done through fiscal policy. So for instance, governments might have tax write-offs for fossil fuel investments or sort of direct payments, there’s various mechanisms. But there’s been a lot of work, particularly the OECD has done a lot of work on calculating fossil fuel subsidies. 

The IMF has also done some work in this area. So that’s quite a sort of well known. problem we’re spending, depending on the measures you use, at least tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. 

So a lot of the fossil fuel political influence is not just objecting to or obstructing climate policy, it’s actively expanding fossil fuels.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean that’s quite shocking actually, I think. I certainly didn’t realize that. 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, well I mean these are huge and powerful companies and obviously fossil energy is an enabler of kind of imperatives of the state in terms of economic growth. There have been long been close historical links between the fossil fuel industry and the state. 

Think about the sort of the role of fossil fuels in the military, the role of the military in supporting you know fossil fuel development, whether it’s through the US military it’s supporting the sea lines of supply for oil around the world. 

So there are huge like entanglements you know between the fossil fuel industry and in the state, in multiple parts of the state, as well as, you know, lobbying. 

There are a lot of countries have state-owned oil companies and so on, right? So they’re directly a part of the state. 

And then you have these more subtle forms of influence, like the revolving doors, you know, with fossil fuel companies hiring government staffers and then going back into government and so on. So you have a lot of that. 

And then you have a lot of the advertising public relations and influence campaigns that start, you know, in early childhood where fossil fuel industry is trying to sort of normalize and legitimize their role in society. They sponsor sporting clubs and sporting events, right? We see these are the tactics that industries use to kind of maintain their social license to operate and seem like normal organizations.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I’m thinking of oil-producing countries, as well, buying football clubs.

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is not coincidental. This is part of a tried-and-tested set of corporate strategies that are used across industries to build social license to operate of industries that are harmful. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And I understand that you’re interested in the way that populism works in this respect. I mean, how would you distinguish between democracy and populism?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

What I can say is rather than perhaps, rather than that more sort of philosophical question, which I’m probably not the best to speak about – I think what we do see is, because of some of the things we’ve talked about in terms of a lot of climate measures do increase costs for people, at least in the short term – and they’re not accompanied by the other policies that I think are important to address inequality and to ensure people can live well, right? – that climate policy is easy for opposition parties to exploit. 

And what we have seen is that populist plays, particularly right-wing populists, populist parties and figures do exploit this kind of cost of living, potential cost of living impact or actual cost of living impact of climate policies. 

That’s one of the kind of arguments that they make against climate policy. We see that with opposition to net zero in the UK, for instance. Now that’s something that’s not unique to populist parties. Often any even more centrist parties that are opposing climate policy will often highlight the economic costs. It’s sort of an easy argument, but we do see right wing populist actors doing that, particularly stridently. 

The additional kind of populist element that we often see is populism is about sort of ‘us versus them’. And it’s usually about the elite versus the people. So, the more kind of distinctively populist responses and opposition to climate change that we see often highlight these kinds of both that elite versus the people kind of hierarchy and the sort of in-group, out-group culture wars that we see. 

And so, climate change is particularly quite vulnerable to that. It’s something that is agreed at international conferences. It’s extremely complex and technocratic. There’s this whole politics of knowledge around climate change that is very hard to get your head around, and so there’s a lot of sort of university professors and people with credentials pronouncing on what needs to be done and what the science says needs to be done and so on. So, it’s a particularly easy target for the kind of the sort of ‘cosmopolitan elite’, you know, sort of framing that populists often use. 

And then we also see populists putting climate issues in terms of the culture wars as well. And so… and that’s partly about inner city urbanites and cosmopolitans, you know, driving electric vehicles and buying heat pumps, whereas ordinary other people can’t afford that or don’t want that. 

And so, yeah, it is a challenge. And I think it makes it all the more important to have these broad-based strategies that tackle climate action alongside tackling the real issues we have of inequality and a lot of people struggling economically. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Looking at it from Bentham’s point of view, you know, he would say if you want to know why people do what they do, look to interests. You can see that in terms of the big companies who want to make as much money as they can. 

On the other hand, you can say, well, it’s people’s interest to drive their cars and, you know, keep their standard of living high and, you know, go on holiday to Spain. But Bentham also talked a lot about delusion, about how the ruling classes would pretend that something was in the interests of everyone, whereas it was actually just in their own interests. 

And, you know, the way to get people to realize what their true interests were was education. So, what’s the role of the university, in terms of, you know, countering the views that are leading to disaster?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, this term of interest is an interesting one. I think while people, I think, clearly have relatively objective needs, you know, be that obviously sort of survival and reproduction and, you know, health and nutrition and so on. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Or just being happy 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, yeah, exactly. A lot of these needs and those functionings can be supplied in ways, as I said earlier, that either aren’t energy intensive or aren’t fossil fuel intensive. And so, one of the roles of universities is to foster the development of technologies, you know, to meet some of those needs and sort of nourish those functionings, right, without using fossil fuels. 

Another important role of the university, which gets to more your comment about delusion or false consciousness, perhaps as you might call it, is the more sort of critical university faculties, which is to sort of help us to think critically about what it means to live well. 

And that’s, I’m thinking particularly of the humanities in that regard, right? So maybe in order to live well, we don’t necessarily need to go on holidays to Spain every year, right? And maybe there are other ways of living well. 

So I think, you know, that sort of, you know, I haven’t even mentioned the social sciences, which is my main area, but they also have a crucial role in helping us to sort of think through how as a society we might organize our responses to these big challenges, how we can do them economically and how we can sort of maintain social cohesion and how we can do them in a way that’s sort of politically feasible and so on. 

So, I think sort of, you know, I’ve sort of given a broad sweep of sort of science, technology, social sciences and the humanities and some of the key roles, I think that they can play in sort of helping us address. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, and is that something UCL could be particularly well-suited to further?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, absolutely. Very, very well well-suited to further. And I think UCL already has huge strength in a number of those areas. 

You know, I think, for example, of the role that the health sciences at UCL have sort of played on looking at the health impacts of climate change, because, you know, we talk about people’s interest. 

Well, people also have an interest, let’s not forget in living on a planet that’s habitable for human civilization. And that’s the big problem here, right? Of course, but that’s an interest that’s long-term and shaped by global forces, so we often forget about that. 

But, you know, one of the ways that I think that can be made concrete to people is understanding both the health impacts of climate change and why we want to therefore avoid that or minimize those impacts, but also the health co-benefits of many of the actions we need to decarbonize. 

And so, for instance, you know, we were talking about coal pollution and coal-fired power generation in China earlier. It’s a major source of premature death, illness, and just discomfort is the extent of air pollution. And air pollution is basically typically sort of a co-pollutant with greenhouse gases. It’s caused by, you know, coal-fired power generation and exhaust fumes and so on. And so, China’s efforts to decarbonize, which are quite huge, are partly being driven by the co-benefits of reducing emissions for people’s health and well-being. There’s also industrial strategy aspect to it as well. 

But coming back to UCL, you know, I think it’s been really a world leader, probably the world leader, in sort of looking at the health impacts of climate change and the health co-benefits of climate action. That’s just one example of many of where I think UCL is already a recognized leader. And I think there are also other examples which we’re starting to unearth now, through the Grand Challenge Climate Crisis, of where there are maybe smaller groups that are starting to work on climate change order that are making more niche contributions that we can kind of bring together and work together to actually tackle some of these issues in a multidisciplinary way. 

It would be remiss of me not to give a plug here for my own research group, which is the Climate Politics Cluster, in the Department of Political Science, and we have a really high concentration. We have quite a number of scholars who are working on the politics of climate change and thinking through some of these questions about how we design climate policies, in light of understanding the political implications of those different policies. 

So, how do we design them in a way that governments can tackle climate change and at least maintain their popularity, if not increase their popularity, and then allow them to potentially do bolder things in the future? 

Thinking in a much more politically sophisticated way about climate policy, this is sort of a key theme of the work that we’re doing in the Department of Political Science and our new Masters programme that we’re launching in September this year, 2025. It’s an MSc in climate change policy and politics. 

So, I think that’s just an example of some of the newer activity that’s really happening at UCL, and we’re also working with lots of other parts of UCL on different aspects of climate change to bring the political perspective to some of the other disciplinary perspectives. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, in fact, the political perspective is ultimately probably key. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

We think so! And we think it’s been given insufficient attention globally in terms of the mainstream climate community, in terms of its funding and so on. 

We often roll our eyes when people say, you know, ‘we’ve got the technical solutions, we’ve got the science, we know sort of the economics, and now we just need the political will’. And we sort of roll our eyes because political will is just this sort of black box that no one really understands, as if it just takes some Herculean political leader to come on and say, ‘yes, I’m going to do this no matter what!’ 

But that’s not how politics works. And we actually have a whole discipline of political science that’s dedicated to understanding the political system, political parties and voting behaviour and interest groups and has lots of different theories about how these different groups shape the political agenda or policy outcomes and so on. 

 We’ve looked at the roles of institutions and different democratic institutions, different institutions that affect the way interest groups are organized, and so on. 

So we have actually a huge body of political science work and now a sort of burgeoning, really actually quite mature subfield, of climate politics to understand all of this and I think that our task is to sort of really bring that to bear in terms of policy design, as I’ve said, and also, you know, to sort of raise our flag within these broader discussions so that we’re not just having technical discussions about what the optimal thing to do is or what the science is, you know, the science and the values say we should do. To actually: okay, how can we do it in a way that’s going to work politically? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean, I hope for the sake of all of us, you have some success. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

Thank you, so do we!

Haste: The slow politics of climate urgency edited by Håvard Haarstad, Jakob Grandin, Kristin Kjærås and Eleanor Johnson

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.

DR ANDREW SEATON (INTRO)

We burn more coal in the world now than we’ve ever done in human history. So, last year, 2024, I think it was about 8.77 billion tonnes of coal that was burned

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Andrew, welcome to the podcast, so would you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your research?

DR ANDREW SEATON

Sure. So, my name is Andrew Seaton. I’m based in the history department here at UCL. I’m a historian of modern Britain, so from about 1800 to the present. And I specialise in political history, social history, and also the history of medicine and the environment. 

So, I’m writing a book at the moment that’s called The Ends of Coal, which is an environmental history of Britain’s relationship to this really crucial resource of the modern world. And the idea of it is to try and follow the threads really of where coal went and what it did in a way that sort of gets us beyond that sort of rise and fall story that most people will have about Britain and coal, where coal was really, really important to Britain’s 19th century and its industrialisation and then sort of declined in the 20th century. Obviously, kind of epitomised by the miners’ strike in 1984 or 1985. So, you have this kind of rise and fall narrative, which in many respects is true around the world, and sort of production levels within Britain.

But, of course, coal is more than just how much of it is produced, it shapes the landscape, it shapes health, it shaped politics, it shaped Britain’s relationship to the wider world and I’m trying to sort of capture those broader significances really with this new work. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right and the shift therefore from coal to oil. You talk about the ends of coal, are we really finished with coal with fossil fuels? I mean would you link coal and oil together that just shifting from coal to oil wasn’t in a sense made much difference in terms of let’s say climate? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah I mean this is a real debate at the moment really within the scholarship in energy history, studies of the Anthropocene, the kind of geological era that we’re supposed to live in where humans have become an agent, a natural agent in themselves. 

There’s a lot of pressure being placed on the idea of energy transition. So kind of what you just described there from going from coal to oil and then maybe from oil to a green future. In recent years, scholars have really sort of problematised that narrative because as you’ve suggested, with the kind of advent of oil, if you will, on a mass scale in the world, it wasn’t as if the coal went away. 

We burn more coal in the world now than we’ve ever done in human history. So last year, 2024, I think it was about 8.77 billion tonnes of coal that was burned, which absolutely dwarfs the period that we would often assume to be where we would burn the most coal, which would be maybe the 19th century, the Victorian era, maybe the early 20th century, the amount of coal that’s being burned now, it absolutely dwarfs that number. 

So you know, scholars have really sort of thought then about, okay, what is this term that we’re working with, energy transition? And the consensus that seems to be building now is that the history of humans’ relationship to natural resources like coal, like oil, like wood, like nuclear fission, all these sources of energy, isn’t one of transition, where you go from one stage to another to another, but rather that it’s about addition. So you layer on top oil on top of coal, you layer renewable energy on top of oil. And there’s also very interesting work that’s done about the kind of relationship between those different resources as well, that they aren’t necessarily bounded separate things. 

So to take the example of coal in the 19th century, when Britain was really expanding its coal mines, many people have sort of historically seen this as a kind of move away from wood. But actually, wood remained absolutely vital to producing coal because you couldn’t have a coal mine without having all of the wood beams in that mine to hold it up. 

You needed wood on trains and so on to transport the coal. So there was this kind of and there remains this relationship between these resources, coal, oil, wood, whatever it might be, that is a kind of symbiotic relationship. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean the amount of coal that’s still being used is quite staggering and I know China mines lots of coal. So but we also hear about coal being mined in Poland and even though you know we don’t mine coal now we’re still importing a certain amount of coal and what they call biomass. 

I mean is that helping? Should we have a couple of mines still open rather than paying for the transporting of the coal that is still necessary for the iron smelters, steel, making steel at Skunthorpe? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, so globally the sort of highest producer and sort of consumer of coal is as he said China followed by India after that. 

Australia also has a very large role to play in the global coal economy. I think it’s the second largest exporter of coal. So even though Australia does consume a lot of coal itself, the population is quite low. So they export a lot of their coal overseas. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Where does it go to from Australia? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

So yeah, it goes to a lot of those main consumers of coal. 

So China, India historically, those kind of tiger economies in Asia, like Japan, South Korea and so on, they historically have relied a lot on Australian coal as well. And one of the things that I’m trying to do in my work, thinking about Britain’s historical relationship to coal, is thinking about places like Australia that of course were British colonies, right? 

And those coal industries were jump-started by British involvement in the late 18th century, the 19th century and after that as well. And so another thing I’ve sort of found very interesting in my work is the way that Britain exported coal expertise to places like India in the 60s and the 70s under the guise of development. 

So, you know, the 60s and 70s being these really important decades for international aid, in development politics, in trying to uplift countries that were former colonies of European powers and helping them to industrialise. 

The way that a lot of policymakers in development thought about that was that, you know, you needed to help these countries industrialise by giving them sufficient energy generation, electricity generation, and the way to do that was coal. 

And so what I’ve seen by going to the National Archives in Kew in London, which is where the records of the National Coal Board, which was the nationalised British industry, looking at those records, you see a lot of links in those decades, the 60s, 70s, between Britain and places like India, exporting all kinds of different expertise, whether that might be geology, depth mining, but also forms of technology like long wall mining, which is a kind of modern form of coal mining. Britain played a role in exporting those kinds of technologies to India. 

And so to your point about steel, now we’re kind of in a situation where Britain has closed its deep coal mines. There’s a couple open cast mines that are open, but the amount that they produce is very small. 

And with the closure of that, the steel plant in Skunthorpe, very interestingly, that came on the back of last September, where the last coal fired power plant was shut down in Britain. And there was a lot of celebration, right? 

Keir Starmer gave a speech about how Britain had ended coal and how great that was. And then just a few months later, Britain is re-importing coal from Australia to keep a steel furnace going. So this idea that Britain has ended its relationship to coal I think we can say is it is quite dubious. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right and I understand you’ve been recently to Newcastle in Australia. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Presumably called after Newcastle in England because it’s the place where coal was discovered and it’s still a centre of heavy industry in Australia, is that right? So, what were you going to learn by going out to Newcastle? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, so I went to Newcastle – I’d really recommend going it’s a really really nice place to go, it’s about two hours up the coast from Sydney up the east coast of Australia. As you said it’s kind of named after the original British Newcastle because there were large coal deposits that were discovered at the end of the 18th century in what became Newcastle in Australia. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Do you know Bentham’s connection to that discovery of coal? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

No I don’t actually know. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

The people who were supposed to have discovered coal were some escapees from New South Wales they left in an open boat at the end of March 1791 and eventually sailed all the way to West Timor at about three months voyage in an open boat eight adults two children I think it’s about three thousand miles and there’s a description of the journey by a man called James Martin and his memorandums have been published by UCL Press edited by my Bentham project colleague Tim Causer and apparently a couple of days out from Sydney they stopped in what they call Fortunate Creek which is now thought to be near Newcastle and discovered coal lying on the ground now this original account by James Martin was he’s now in the Bentham papers at UCL Bentham had this great interest in New South Wales because of his interest in punishment and the opposed the whole establishment of the colony at New South Wales on the grounds that the form of punishment there didn’t meet any of the requisite ends of punishment and rather the prisoners should be sent to the Panopticon prison that he hoped to build in London. 

But anyway, for some reason, Bentham got hold of these memorandums of James Martin, this original document, and it’s in there that they talk about finding coal at the end of March 1791. So that’s the tangential connection to Bentham. 

But is there a sort of a steel industry? They’re in Newcastle and they’re still mining and sending, is that from where they’re exporting the coal? Because I always thought it was sort of Western Australia where all the mining. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, so originally, as you suggested with that really interesting story about Bentham’s relationship, there is this kind of discovery of coal and the government of New South Wales get excited about it. 

They open a kind of government. coal mine, but eventually in the 1820s, 1824, coal mining in Newcastle was given entirely in monopoly to a chartered stock company called the Australian Agricultural Company, a company that still exists in Australia today. 

And this company was intended, as the name would suggest, to get involved in agriculture. But they also were very interested in the coal deposits in Newcastle. And so they were the company that actually brought the coal industry in Australia as a whole into maturity. 

And they relied a lot, I’m sure, to Bentham’s annoyance on convict labour to do that work. Now the convicts that were sent to Australia, many of them were very skilled. Some of them were engineers. Some of them had knowledge of depth mining and infrastructure or whatever it might be. 

And the Australian Agricultural Company relied on that kind of expertise to get those coal mines off the ground in Newcastle. Now fast forward into the 20th century, those coal mines mature, the monopoly ends for the Australian Agricultural Company. 

Other companies are allowed to extract coal from that region. There’s a huge steel mill that’s built in Newcastle. I think in the early 20th century it’s actually the largest steel producer in the British Empire at that point. 

Once you get into that after the Second World War, a lot of the mines in Newcastle either become unprofitable because they’ve been over mined or they’ve become exhausted. And coal production in the Newcastle region shifts up what is now called the Hunter Valley. 

So Newcastle sits at the bottom of the Hunter Valley. So I was doing a lot of work looking at those early 19th century mines, but I was also interested in that later 20th century story. So if you rent a car and go up to the Hunter Valley, there’s two things that you can see. 

First is you can see… incredible wineries. It’s one of Australia’s main wine-producing regions, so you can have very nice wine and nice lunch. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So not like South Wales in that respect. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Not like our South Wales in that respect, no. 

But the other thing that you can see is absolutely vast open pit coal mining. And you take these roads and on the side of the road the companies that own these open pit mines, some of them Australian, some of them internationally owned, China owns a lot of these open pit mines, they’re fenced off so that they don’t want you to see them. 

There’s a lot of signs warning you not to use drones and so on, environmentalists obviously very interested in these sites. But the scale of them means that they just can’t hide them and there’ll be points where the road dips and you’ll get this view of really this kind of lunar moon-like landscape. 

These absolutely vast excavated areas where you have mining. machines, drag lines as they’re known, these are the largest machines on the planet that basically excavate vast amounts of the topsoil. They kind of literally drag it off to get at the coal which in this area lies quite close to the surface. 

You’re not drilling too far down into the ground, you’re kind of dragging off the surface and excavating that. That coal is then put on trains and sent all the way down to Newcastle, that previous prior site of coal excavation where it’s put on ships and the harbour of Newcastle itself is a kind of classic story of deindustrialisation, it’s been regenerated, there’s nice bars, there’s nice restaurants on the waterfront, 

you know you can have a drink on the waterfront and you can watch these Chinese, these Japanese ships come into the harbour, go up to where that coal has been trained down to that port, put on the ship and then taken out to go to those countries. 

So it really is a kind of really interesting place for that layering of that earlier 19th century story with the way that coal is extracted and transported. There’s no current law in Australia which means that these companies once they’ve extracted the coal have to do anything with the huge chasms that they’ve left, which is quite different to Britain where in the 60s the National Coal Board was actually a kind of pioneer in regenerating a lot of this land, you know, filling it back in with the topsoil, planting trees, using techniques in soil science to kind of regenerate the land from its acidity. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

The National Coal Board was a, as it said, it’s a national organisation which was a non-profit organisation, so it wasn’t supposed to lose money, but it wasn’t supposed to make money – whereas the private mines were the most abusive organisations you can imagine. 

But talking about environmental concerns, how far back does environmental concern with the effect of mining? in Go. I mean, is it something you find in the 19th century? I’m thinking of people like Ruskin, for instance. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Absolutely, yeah. There’s a long, almost from the get-go, there’s concerns about the environmental harms of this form of extraction. Of course, important to keep in mind that the ways that they were describing it were different to how we would describe it now, right? 

The word environment didn’t have the kind of connotations that it does have now, but certainly these concerns with, you know, yeah, people like Wordsworth, Ruskin, really concerned with the kind of despoilization of the landscape in Britain. 

You also have campaigns within cities, Manchester, Birmingham, these large industrial cities where you had whole-scale industry, which was premised on burning coal for power. You also see clean air campaigns in the 19th century within those kind of urban environments as well, which do, interestingly, marshal kind of early thinking about climate on a local level and what does burning fossil fuels do to that. 

And then the other thing that’s really interesting about the 19th century as well is that you can also, if you look at the science, you can actually see some early scientists inching their way towards what we would now describe as the greenhouse effect. 

There was an Irish chemist called John Tyndall, who in 1859 gave this famous lecture at the Royal Society, where he basically burned some coal gas and he showed the way that heat would be trapped in a tube. 

And Prince Albert was in attendance when he gave this lecture, sort of showing in miniature the way that if you scaled that up on a planetary scale, the way that heat would be trapped if you burned carbon on a large scale. 

So these kinds of warnings about burning fossil fuels, and which we now would describe as kind of environmental concerns, were there in the 19th century. They didn’t move into the mainstream in a way that they did much later. 

But there is a question there about if these concerns have been there for a long time. We aren’t uniquely enlightened now in 2025, and those stupid people in the 19th century, they didn’t know what they were doing. 

Why weren’t those concerns about burning fossil fuels acted upon is, I think, an interesting historical question. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

One might say for the same reasons they do not know, because of the interests of people who were making fortunes out of finding them. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, that’s certainly one explanation, right? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I was thinking the other thing is the political need to please populations. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, I mean, there’s all kinds of explanations, right? A part of it is about capitalism and wealth and, you know, who holds power in society and where that wealth is drawn from in its relationship to fossil fuels. Others would be, you know, for all the people like Tyndall that existed, there were competing scientific understandings of climate at the time. 

And actually, for a lot of Victorians, what they were worried about was not global warming, but actually global freezing. They were coming out of, you know, the mini ice age, as it’s known, in the early modern period, and they were worried the world might slip back into that and start freezing up again. 

It wasn’t an uncontested landscape that Tyndall was trying to voice his ideas in. But as you’ve said, there’s many echoes with today. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

What about William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question? Because didn’t Jevons have a connection with UCL? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

He did, yeah. So William Stanley Jevons was an economist and political philosopher, really. He was born in Liverpool in the 1830s. His father had an iron-making company. He came from a middle-class background, but some difficult familial circumstances. 

His dad’s iron company entered bankruptcy after the end of the railway boom. So he kind of had these sort of ideas of scarcity, if you will, from a young age. He goes to UCL, as you said, and he studies mathematics here at UCL, and chemistry as well. 

He then goes, after he graduates from UCL, he actually goes to Australia for a while, another Australian link there. And in the 1850s, he’s an assayer at the Royal Mint in Australia, so he’s checking the kind of quality of metals used in coinage. 

But he, at that point, gets very interested in political philosophy. He’s reading Bentham, he’s reading Malthus, he’s reading Mill, and he wants to sort of go back to Britain and make a name for himself. 

And he makes a name for himself with an 1865 book, which is called The Coal Question, an inquiry concerning the progress of the nation and the probable exhaustion of our coal mines, which, as you can get from this lovely, very long 19th century titles, which tell you exactly what they’re gonna do, this is a book that is, first of all, in awe of the power that coal has, and has had in Britain. 

So, this is written in the 1860s, and sees coal as absolutely fundamental to Britain’s wealth, both at home and overseas in the empire. But there’s a problem, Jevons argues. He argues that population pressures in Britain are basically causing too much coal to be extracted, too much coal to be used, and that’s going to exhaust the coal mines in Britain. 

You’re gonna have to go deeper and deeper underground to get coal seams, is it gonna become unprofitable? And coal production, he actually predicts in the book, is gonna be replaced by America, by discoveries in Appalachia. 

That’s gonna become the centre of global coal production, he predicts. So, it’s quite a gloomy book, it’s obviously very informed by Malthus and Thomas Malthus’ ideas of population and how that creates resource scarcity. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, this is the idea that population will outstrip subsistence? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Exactly. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

It’s normally talking about food, but Jevons is applying that to coal?

DR ANDREW SEATON

Exactly, yeah exactly. So, he was a big supporter of emigration actually, particularly to places like Australia. You know you needed to get people out of, quote unquote, over-populated Britain, send them out into the empire, that would reduce some of these pressures on resources. 

But Jevons was also a liberal and for that reason he, you know one solution to this dilemma might have been to put tariffs on sending coal, exporting coal out of the country right, to try and keep it in the country and save this precious resource. 

But he thought that that would actually harm the whole… Political economy of the way that Britain worked and it would actually cause more harm than good.

But it was a very popular book and very influential It sold out in its first run the Prime Minister William Gladstone invited Jevons to number 10 Downing Street to discuss it with him and it kind of echoed after that point actually as a really important touchstone in thinking about scarcity and natural resources 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

It’s really interesting and because I know I know in economic terms, there’s often said -there’s the story that the idea of modern economic develops from Bentham through Jevons to Alford Marshall. And I’m obviously thinking about questions of utility. 

Yeah, and Malthus had a big impact on Bentham as well because… Well, the whole idea of political economy change, following Malthus and about how to deal with population pressure, and I suppose in a sense, what you were saying earlier about more coal being used now than ever before. I mean, there are more people, and we all have greater demands for energy – although people in America and Europe are using much more energy per person than people in other parts of the world. So, is this just going to get worse and worse as there are more and more people and more and more…you know, people want more and more energy?

DR ANDREW SEATON

Well, it’s interesting because if you look at the history of environmentalism a lot of the key thinkers in that intellectual movement have been concerned with this question of population and this idea of scarcity and so, you know if we go back to the 1960s the 1970s really where there were key thinkers and key reports that basically argued that kind of overpopulation was the problem and that was the heart of the environmental ills that the planet faced. And that was the thing that you needed to tackle. 

So, to give a couple examples of that, one would be a guy called Paul Ehrlich who was an American biologist. He published a book in 1968 called The Population Bomb, which became an international global bestseller. 

He was invited on to chat shows. He was interviewed by all the main newspapers, and so on, really got a lot of fame for this book. And he basically argued that rising population was causing resource scarcity, which would then lead to essentially nuclear annihilation. 

States would be entering into conflict with each other because of food, because of energy resources, because of water, whatever it might be. Another one would be the Limits to Growth Report in 1972. This was a report that was released that also pointed to population growth and resource scarcity. 

And that had a lot of influence among economists, actually. So, this idea about population growth has really played a role in thinking about environmental problems. But as you’ve pointed out there, we really have to think about who is using energy on a per capita basis, right, like the average European, the average American, even now compared to the average Indian or Chinese person is consuming more energy by orders of magnitude more than people in Asia. 

And so, you know, sometimes when we think about energy resources and scarcity and population, it can sometimes be applied in quite a, both blunt and sometimes quite dangerous way where, you know, it sort of fuels arguments for population control, which obviously has a very vexed history in the name of the environment, which I think historically we have to be a little bit careful of doing. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, so it’s about, not just numbers of people, but how much they consume. Just coming back to the title of your book, The Ends of Coal, can you tell us about what you mean by the ‘ends’, plural? 

DR ANDREW SEATON 

Yeah, so in the UK, we have this kind of rise and fall narrative where we have a sort of start point and an end point. 

And the start point would be industrialization in the 19th century, the application of coal into industry in a large scale, Britain industrializes, coal production peaks in 1913 in the UK, and then after that point it declines, even with the nationalization of the industry in 1947. 

And then you have pit closures, you have production going down, and then you have the miners’ strike in 1984, 1985. Now to a lot of people, both historians, political scientists, commentators in the media, that was the end of coal, right, when Margaret Thatcher defeated the mining unions, and after that point the industry was broken and became privatized in the 1990s. 

There’s large parts of that story that are true, but what I’m trying to do with this new book is not just map a kind of end of call, this singular moment of finality, but rather follow the multiple ways that it shapes politics, society, the environment and the landscape, people’s health. 

So, I’ve given you a few examples of those today, but another would be on the topic of health, mining communities today, people that are suffering from pneumoconiosis, lung condition from working down the mines, there was no end of coal for them, they still carry the legacies of those conditions today. 

Within mining communities themselves, so we’re talking about the Northeast, we’re talking about South Wales, the rates of things like depression, the use of anti-depressants in those communities because of job losses and so on, is much, much higher than the rest of the country. 

So that’s one example of where… that story of a kind of rise and fall, an end of coal in 1984, you know it’s very, very precise these narratives work, I think doesn’t actually tell us the full story and so what I’m trying to do in this new book is situate that story about production within those wider threads, those wider ends of coal. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, no I mean I come from a mining village, an ex-mining village in Lancashire. The last pit was closed in the 1960s but relatives used to say to me, ‘you mustn’t go down the pits, get an education.’

But I think, in a sense, Lancashire did better because it closed the pits earlier and there were alternatives, whereas you’d sort of look at some of the places in Durham, Nottingham, Yorkshire which you know the mining villages, like you’re saying the problems are so much more acute because the mines closed later and there wasn’t quite the car industry to go to. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah. So, it’s all, again, about timing. A lot of it’s about timing, because I think if your mine shut in 1965 that was very different to its shutting in 1985 because the National Coal Board and a lot of historians describe this as a kind of moral economy that the National Coal Board operated where you know there were more coal mines shut under Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister than there were under Margaret Thatcher, but when those closures were happening there was serious thinking about ‘okay, where are these workers going to go, what other industries can they be put into?’ and they, you know, a lot of people either found different jobs within the coal industry themselves or they were helped to find a job in a car factory or a textile factory or whatever it might be. 

In 1985 that kind of thinking just wasn’t going on. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, we were still sort of an industrial country in the 60s whereas 20 years later it was a very different situation. I mean, I suppose you could say well we’ve made some progress – but have we? 

You know you think of you know we’ve got wind power now. know, you can sign up to power companies and say, oh, you want green fuel. I mean, is that making any difference? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah. I mean, I think there’s obviously different ways you could spin the story. 

And I think one is that you could go down a very pessimistic line and you could say that, well, yes, the amount of renewables is going up. And if you looked at a chart, that would be true. The amount of renewables that we produce in the UK using wind or water or whatever it might be in the 2020s is much, much higher than it was even 15, 20 years ago. 

And that is obviously good. But then when you put things in a global perspective, again, we go back to that point about additions rather than just moving from coal and oil to renewables, right? Yes, there are more renewable energy, but there’s also more coal and oil. 

So, you can go down quite a sort of pessimistic road like that. But I think undoubtedly is difficult to look at the rise of renewables and say that is not what we need to do. Clearly, we need to have more of that. 

But I think one of the things that really and hopefully the historical work that I’m doing will help us think about this a little bit more is really getting at this idea of what we mean when we say decarbonisation. 

To go back to that example that you said about the steel mill in the UK, we can be quite quick to celebrate the supposed moments of decarbonisation when actually there are all these intimate links with industries that still rely on fossil fuels. 

So, to give you another, and it would be plastics, the amount of coal that is producing plastics in the world is incredible. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

We just assume it’s some oil plastic, don’t we? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it is, that’s certainly true but the energy generation in places like where we get the plastics from, so again we’re going back to China, a lot of it is also derived from coal. 

It’s about 55% of electricity generation in China is from coal. So, these big factories that are making all of the consumer goods that we rely on is either chemically derived from fossil fuel products, plastics, or in their production is also made using fossil fuels. 

And so, I think there’s a question there, about when we’re talking about decarbonisation and the steps that we can make in the future, we often just think about electricity generation and that is obviously important and for the good and we do need to think about that. 

But we also need to think about those other things like steel production, cement production, plastics, all of these other kind of materials that are still incredibly bound up with fossil fuel use. How can we either find replacements for fossil fuels there or probably more likely how can we reduce consumption, particularly in areas like plastic, I think. You know, so you can also get some big payoffs there I think as well.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Is it important to say like, well, we can all do a bit?

DR ANDREW SEATON

I think so, yeah, you know there is an argument out there that, ‘okay, it doesn’t really matter what we do in Britain because other countries are going to outpace us in terms of burning fossil fuels and so on’. But hopefully, as I’ll show in my work, countries like Britain have a deep historical relationship to this problem, right – the extraction of fossil fuels, the forms of politics and ideas that came about through that, the health legacies, the environmental legacies. And so, I think there’s a responsibility there that we have in a country like Britain, to be part of thinking about what comes next. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Andrew, thank you so much. That was really interesting. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Thanks for having me.