Juniper Tony - Harmony: a new way of looking at our world

A NEW WAY OF
LOOKING AT OUR WORLD

HRH
THE PRINCE
OF WALES
with
TONY JUNIPER
IAN SKELLY

The Earth seen from Apollo 8 as it orbited the Moon on 24th December 1968. As far as we know Earth is the only place in the Universe that harbours any life. This image is credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement.

As our planets life-support system begins to fail and our very survival as a species is brought into question, remember that our children and grandchildren will ask not what our generation said, but what it did. Let us give an answer, then, of which we can be proud. Part of my keynote address to world leaders at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, December 15, 2009.

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

T his is a call to revolution. The Earth is under threat. It cannot cope with all that we demand of it. It is losing its balance and we humans are causing this to happen.

Revolution is a strong word and I use it deliberately. The many environmental and social problems that now loom large on our horizon cannot be solved by carrying on with the very approach that has caused them. If we want to hand on to our children and grandchildren a much more durable way of operating in the world, then we have to embark on what I can only describe as a Sustainability Revolution and with some urgency. This will involve our taking all sorts of dramatic steps to change the way we consider the world and act in it, but I believe we have the capacity to take these steps. All we have to see is that the solutions are close at hand.

The Earths alarm bells are now ringing loudly and so we cannot go on endlessly prevaricating by finding one sceptical excuse after another for avoiding the need for the human race to act in a more environmentally benign way which really means only one thing: putting Nature back at the heart of our considerations once more. But that is only the start of it. We must go much further. Right action cannot happen without right thinking and in that simple truth lies the deeper purpose of this book.

For more than thirty years I have been working to identify the best solutions to the array of deeply entrenched problems we now face. I have tried to do this, for instance, by demonstrating the principles of what I believe to be truly sustainable agriculture through organic farming. I have tried to demonstrate the principles of sustainable urbanism which can add social and environmental value to towns and cityscapes through mixed-use development, by placing the pedestrian at the centre of the design process, by emphasizing local identity and character and by the use of ecological building techniques. For many years I have been working to create effective partnerships between the private, public and non-governmental organization (NGO) sectors, not only to address the serious threats posed by climate change, but also to create major initiatives to try to save what is left of the worlds rainforests, as well as other major natural ecosystems such as oceans and wetlands which are now under dire threat of collapse. I have also tried for twenty-five years to encourage social and environmentally responsible business; to suggest a more balanced approach to certain aspects of medicine and healthcare; more rounded ways of educating our children and a more benign, whole-istic approach to science and technology. The trouble is that in all these areas I have been challenging the accepted wisdom; the current orthodoxy and conventional way of thinking, much of it stemming from the 1960s but with its origins going back over 200 years.

The slash and burn method of farming widely adopted in places like South Sumatra, Indonesia, clears virgin rainforest trees by burning them, producing 17% of Man-made CO2 emissions every year.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised that so many people failed to fathom what I was doing. So many appeared to think or were told that I was merely leaping from one subject to another from architecture one minute to agriculture the next as if I spent a morning saving the rainforests, then in the afternoon jumping to help young people start new businesses.

What I have actually been trying to demonstrate is that all of these subjects are completely inter-related and that we have to look at the whole picture to understand the problems we face. For not only does it concern the way we treat the world around us, it is also to do with how we view ourselves.

In all my efforts I have tried to make it clear that all these subjects suffer the same problems because they have become detached from important basic principles the principles that produce the active state of balance which is just as vital to the health of the natural world as it is for human society. We call this active but balanced state harmony and this book is dedicated to explaining how harmony works.

It is a book in which I hope to share the results of much thought, observation and reflection over the past thirty or forty years. I want to show what I have gained and achieved from studying the essential principles of harmony how they work in Nature and how, if we ignore or flout them, the Earths precious life-support systems start to wobble and eventually may collapse. In some cases they have already fallen into a perilous state.

That is why our journey begins with a look at just what we are doing to our life-giving Earth after some two and a half centuries of intensive industrialization. We all hope for solutions and that is why I want to end this journey by offering what might turn out to be a few of them, but the solutions must be understood in their proper context. I know from experience that if any solution is not deeply rooted in the right principles it will be of no use in the long term. In fact, quite the contrary, it will tend to compound the problems we already have. That is why I also want to put our present situation in its true historical context. We have to realize that we are travelling on the wrong road, but we need to understand why.

It is very strange that we carry on behaving as we do. If we were on a walk in a forest and found ourselves on the wrong path, then the last thing we would do is carry on walking in the wrong direction. We would instead retrace our steps, go back to where we took the wrong turn, and follow the right path. This is why I feel it is so important to offer not just an overview of our present situation and not just a list of the solutions. I certainly want the world to wake up to the fact that we are travelling in a very dangerous direction, but it is crucial that we retrace how this has come to be, otherwise we will not head onto a better path in the future.

I would suggest that one of the major problems that increasingly confronts us is that the predominant mode of thinking keeps us firmly on this wrong path. When people talk of things like an environmental crisis or a financial crisis what they are actually describing are the consequences of a much deeper problem which comes down to what I would call a crisis of perception. It is the way we see the world that is ultimately at fault. If we simply concentrate on fixing the outward problems without paying attention to this central, inner problem, then the deeper problem remains, and we will carry on casting around in the wilderness for the right path without a proper sense of where we took the wrong turning.