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Natalie Bennett is a politician and journalist who was the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2012 to 2016. She was given a peerage (Baroness in the UK House of Lords) in 2019 and is working to abolish her own post by creating an elected upper legislative chamber. Her journalism in Australia, Thailand and the UK has been published in the Bangkok Post, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and many other newspapers. Her latest book is “Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society“.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips
01:09 Welcome
03:03 Natalie’s Intro
– “Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle for really formal occasions – this is not a formal occasion”
– Leading @GreenPartyofEnglandWales & the “Green Surge”
– “If we had a democratic electoral system… a fair electoral system… we would have got 40 MPs… democracy would be a good idea”
– Journalism @guardiannews @BangkokPostOfficial
– “My first politics is #feminism … I became a feminist at age 5 because I was told ‘because you’re a girl you’re not allowed to have a bicycle'”
– “…consistently being told not only could I not do something because I was a girl… I shouldn’t even want to do it because I was a girl.”
– “I swerved close to a PhD several times and then run screaming in the other direction”… a broad academic background… agricultural science then Asian studies degrees then a masters in mass communications (Donna Haraway, AI
– “What we have now, so called generative AI, is not intelligence it is actually big data… we almost had intelligence 20 years ago and we’re still at the point of almost having intelligence… I’m very much an AI sceptic”
– The environmental impact of AI
– Politicians lacking scientific background is “a huge problem”
06:59 What’s Real?
– “I’m very fundamentally… essentially a materialist… but what life generates is very complex”
– Attending a church school & then Sunday School “the polite thing to do… the same grandmother… who didn’t think I should ride a bicycle because it wasn’t ladylike”
– Sunday School at 8-9 yrs: “It was really boring… I said to my parents I didn’t want to go any more and so that was the end of that”
– “I accidentally almost won the scripture prize… it was very embarrassing”
– At 12-13 yrs “Most of my peers discovered religion… a really dishy male youth leader… because I was a contrary kind of child… I discovered #atheism … I’ve been an atheist ever since.”
– During Asian studies – interested in a form of Hinduism that sees god within every human being
– Interested in “The amazing capacity of life… the generative capacity of biology”
– Giving up on agricultural science: “Australian farming was not farming the soils but was actually mining the soils… we were taught that this was just normal… how incredibly destructive the farming was… but there was no suggestion it should change”
– Biodynamic farming, #regenerative agriculture and looking after the soil “If there’s a moment when I became a Green… it was that moment of seeing that something else is really possible”
– “You as an individual consist of ~50,000 species… I find the microbiome absolutely fascinating… that microbial world is so central”
– Next book: “How we’re stuck in the ideas of 20th century science… reductionist, positivist 20C thinking has done so much damage”
– Instead grasping complexity. Mike Levin episode
– Christianity: “The arguments just didn’t add up… even if you take away some of the ridiculous fripperies… some force being in control… that complexity argument… I’ve always tended to be against simplification”
– Modern problems of public epistemology… “Russian disinformation… but that’s a very narrow… explanation of the cause”
– “We’ve had 40 years of neoliberalism, before that we had 40 years of social democracy – the old answers are not working any more.”
– “People have a sense that what we’ve been doing has broken things… climate emergency, nature crisis, political systems that are not delivering, poverty, inequality, war… the old answers are not working”
– Paraphrasing Gramsci… “when the old is dying and the new is yet to be born a lot of toxic things appear in the inter-regnum”
– That’s why this [book] is called ‘Change Everything’
– “An education system that’s built around exams… training people for jobs… is not working any more… it’s making people ill”
– The Brexit referendum campaign. Resisting the idea that “people are really stupid… ill-informed… wrong… people are in a situation where they’re trying to find answers… some of those might objectively be the wrong answers… it’s not to say it’s their fault as individuals”
20:10 What Matters
– “I decided at age 5 that I wasn’t going to get married and have children”
– “I looked at the life of my mother and her friends… in 70’s Australia… they would say without a touch of irony ‘oh I’m just a housewife’”
– “I had a low boredom threshold… learning new things… I wanted to live in a rich flourishing world… My aim has always been… to ensure that we have a rich, flourishing human world and a rich, flourishing non-human world – a natural world”
– Reporting in the Bangkok Post on forced abortions in Thailand “it was because I jumped up and down… that ended up on the front page”
– Visits to schools, colleges and universities “my message to everyone is that we need a world where everyone makes politics what they do, not what they have done to them… people getting together to change things in their communities”
– Not being political as a child “because I grew up in an extremely individualistic society… I was already raging about how things were… but I didn’t know that you could get together with other people to change things… collectively or communally”
– “One individual can only achieve so much – I’ve never been a fan of the great man theory of history – it’s actually getting together with other people… that really makes the difference”
– As Leader of the Green Party “A leader’s job… everyone is a leader… indigenous thinking… Tyson Yunkaporta… the expertise and the leadership is shared around”
– JW: Flourishing as judged from the perspective of the being (or system) doing the flourishing (instead of from outside)
– Natalie’s “rewilding Westminster and rewilding politics” chapter in “Great misconceptions – Rewilding myths and misunderstandings”
– “What would our politics look like if it was a healthy ecosystem?… helps to foreground one of the big problems with British politics – the concentration of power and resources here in Westminster – we are the most centralised polity in Europe”
– “We have a government, Sir Keir Starmer, with 100% of the power with the backing of 33% of the people who voted”
– “We are human animals… The Shard in London… it is in a way part of nature… indigenous thinkings tend not to draw a line between nature and humans”
31:05 Who Matters
– JW: The dangers of the naturalistic “nature is good” fallacy
– JW: The tensions between “the flourishing of an ecosystem and the flourishing of the individuals within it… unpleasant suffering and pain… of individual sentient beings”
– Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Turn Away From Omelas”… “A city that’s flourishing and wonderful for everyone except it all depends on one child being kept in the most miserable, horrible conditions”
– “We need a baseline of decency for every person on this planet”
– Politicians talking about the need to create jobs when we have hundreds of thousands of caring, nursing, driving, agricultural vacancies
– “The current British birth rate is 1.44 children per woman… We’re about to see a collapse in human numbers… we have fast-aging populations”
– A moral and a practical argument “We need to treat human energy, time, talents, capacity as a scarce resource that needs to be treasured… we need all of those children of the future to tackle the problems our society is facing… we cannot afford to waste human potential… having children who at age 5 are stunted… who are mentally scared by experiences of war…”
– “We can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet is one of the foundational understandings of green political philosophy”
– Universal Basic Income… human rights but also “A UBI society is fundamentally different… in our current capitalist economy it’s bosses who decide how most people spend their time… in the old Soviet system the state told them what to do… in a UBI society people decide for themselves how to spend their time, energy and talents”
– “We’re trashing the planet and creating a thoroughly miserable society”
– Change Everything: “We have to do that to create a better society as well as to deal with the physical limits of this one fragile planet – we’re exceeding 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries”
– “Having done an agricultural science degree… there was an anthropocentrism [sic] in that that was unthinking. It took me quite a while… to get beyond that”
– “I saw some horrible things on Australian farms… pig farms… sheep farms… at that stage it was individual suffering… a sow in a farrowing crate who has cannibalised their own piglets… this is bad… [but] there was nothing in my world to say that anyone could think anything else was possible”
– “That it should be much better than it was – but the idea that it could be entirely different altogether was just not in the frame”
– In Thailand “focused on human suffering… there was an awful lot of human suffering to see… so you didn’t really think beyond that”
– “Only in the last 15 years or so… that I started to think more broadly philosophically”
– “I believe in rights for rivers… rights of nature… systems of life… defending the system… but it’s not actually rights for rocks”
– The Anti-microbial resistance issue “potentially as big a threat as the climate emergency – we’re at risk of losing modern medicine”
– Science showing us how complex and interdependent and multi-level nature is “we live essentially in a microbial world”
– JW: Caring about our environment intrinsically or because of its importance to all the sentient beings?
– “I’m not sure we have the knowledge where to draw the sentience line… slime molds being able to navigate through mazes… the whole wood wide web – how plants can communicate with each other and flourish their young… this is solid, pure science, this is not woo-woo stuff” (see our Justine Karst episode on the Wood Wide Web story)
– “Lots of non-human animals have cultures”
– “Bird-brain is an entirely wrong insult when you look at Caledonian crows and how clever they can be”
– JW: Is there a moral difference between a sentient and an insentient living entity? “Would you say that there’s no real moral difference between cutting a pig and cutting a tree?”
– “You have to eat something… I’m going to eat a carrot and not a cow”
– “One microbe on its own doesn’t mean very much… but when you have a whole population of microbes there’s some pretty sophisticated emergent properties… not to say that I’m saying that microbes are sentient…”
– “I’m concerned with system change more than individual behaviour… we need to make a world in which it’s easy to make the morally, practically, decent behaviour the simplest, cheapest, obvious thing for everyone to do”
– Becoming vegetarian ~12-15 years ago “but I’m not a vegan… for medical reasons I can’t eat gluten… I would struggle to find anything to eat a large amount of the time out there in the world…”
– “I spend my time trying to change the system, tackling factory farming, focusing on the most exploitative forms of animal agriculture… making the big systemic difference is more useful… [vs.] trying to find something to eat when I’m leaping on to the train”
54:13 A Better World?
– “We’re in a really weird position in human history… human culture and lives around the world has probably got less variety in it now… globalisation, technology…”
– “The idea that ‘what we have now… this is just how it is and we cannot collectively decide to change anything’”
– Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis… “how people are living in 1990’s America is the absolute peak of human existence that we were always meant to get to and eventually everyone else around the world will get to the same place… that looks extremely ridiculous now as a thesis”
– “The idea that politics wasn’t about changing the system… electing someone to run the system and make those little tweaks”
– David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”
– “If there’s one thing we have to do with the current world is to restore to people the idea that they can collectively decide what society looks like”
– The dominance of big corporates, the 5-day week “I think the 3-day week is about right… what Keynes back in the 1930’s thought we’d all be doing by the 1970’s”
– “There’s nothing inevitable about the dominance of multi-national corporations and the pervasiveness of corruption [~5% of global GDP]… that’s the result of human choices… we can make different choices… we can decide to do things differently”
– “Allow as many people as possible to have their say”… participatory democracy, people’s assemblies, deliberative democracy “climate assemblies have proved far more radical than the politicians have been”
– “What’s the foundation of my hope?… biology, nature is amazing… the creativity of nature… we are human animals… we are part of that creativity so we have enormous possibility”
– “The idea that we can only live with a world that’s as boring and homogenised as it is now – doesn’t make any sense”
– JW: Tensions within Green movements – romantic, agrarian, conservative “historic periods of time to go to”, naturalistic fallacy, chemo-phobia, techno-phobia, the utopianism of the privileged “people who are in global terms very wealthy… are projecting a faux-concern for ecosystems… but only to the extent that it doesn’t require us to do anything different… ‘I will stop using plastic straws to save the fish but I don’t want to stop eating fishes’… taboo against challenging the animal agriculture industries “an ethical abomination… crashing through many of the environmental limits… AMR, biodiversity, deforestation, emissions, water pollution, air pollution…”
– “Every political movement has all kinds of wings”
– “This idea – there’s two sides of politics – the left and the right… socialists and the capitalists… there is more than two sides of the argument”
– “I believe that green political philosophy is a complete political philosophy… the foundation… the understanding that there’s enough resources on this planet for everyone to have a decent life, to look after climate and nature and people – if we share those resources out fairly”
– “I would say that there’s no such thing as a philosophically coherent right-wing green position”
– “The UK – we consume our share of 3 planets every year… we have to come back to one planet living fast… but you cannot just say… ‘everyone cut back by two thirds’… that literally leaves a lot of people dead… the people who are already switching off their heating and shivering in winter and skipping meals because they can’t afford them”
– “It’s not like we’re inventing something new… this is something that’s always been there… indigenous thinking… something that survived far longer than our system”
– Indigenous land management practices “they were actually managing landscapes… putting trees where they wanted fruit trees… fire-stick farming…”
– JW: Degrowth risks: “If we don’t change anything about the way we operate and we slow or reverse growth that is worse for the worst off people on the planet… in our current systems their only hope is growth… if we do want to have a different approach it potentially requires quite radical redistribution… the global average income is ~£10000-11000 per year… it gives you an indication of the degree of the challenge for just human wellbeing if we are going to find an approach that isn’t based on the current model of economic growth”
– “The growth model is the pie problem… the pie keeps getting bigger – some people are only getting crumbs – will they get more crumbs if the pie gets bigger… we have to slice the pie up fairly”
– “The Spirit Level”… “The more equal societies are actually better for everybody including the economically best off”
– “No one lies on their death bed and goes ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’”
– Imagining a political trade-off “We’re going to stop chasing GDP growth… we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet… what we can do instead… every year aim to cut the standard working week by 15 minutes… every four years you get an extra hour to do with what you like… we work our way down to a 3-day week… You’ll have less stuff in your life but you’ll have far more life!”
– “Instead of selling something difficult we’re selling something great”
– JW: “The way we think about growth now is it’s about money – and money is a useful way of representing and sharing and distributing value but it is not value. The value of money comes from the things we can do with it… housing, shelter, food, sustenance, warmth, comfort, security… there are other things even beyond that – family, friends, meaning, purpose… value is what really counts and flourishing is what really counts.”
01:12:58 Follow Natalie:
– @NatalieGreenPeer “I’m absolutely hyperactive on social media“
– Natalie’s Change Everything Substack – including a recent article on how the UK government are teaming up with Saudia Arabia on historical preservation as Saudi are working to erase much of their own history
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Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble.