Solar pioneer and environmental campaigner, Dr Jeremy Leggett, has today linked the urgent need to restore nature with rising inequality and anger around the globe, ahead of being awarded the prestigious Blue Planet Prize, tomorrow (Wednesday 29th) in Tokyo, Japan.
“In today’s post truth world, there is an evident need for those of us classified in the liberal elite to communicate differently, so as to persuade the many in denial that threats to nature threaten us; our future. We need to focus on applied solutions, and my near 50-year career from ‘Big Oil’ to nature restoration, has led me to my favourite solution, the “Nature Prosperity Pump”, says Leggett.
The Nature Prosperity Pump is a model which grows forests in ways that enhance biodiversity, not deplete it, pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it into timber-rich buildings, restoring nature to drive prosperity, sustainably and repeatedly.
The result is a scalable model for housing provision, robust nature-based economies, and combatting climate change.
“Historically democracies have done most of the leadership whenever and wherever environmental protection measures are brought in. So failure to protect democracy is increasingly failure to protect the planet. Worsening inequality is a major factor in the growing threat to democracy… It has fed a rising anger in society”, says Leggett, “We cannot expect to communicate with people facing the cutting edge of inequality using the language of environmental disaster. We must argue for the lower energy bills, more affordable homes, and growing job numbers that would result in increasingly nature-based economies. Fossil-fuel phase outs would then happen by default.”
Jeremy Leggett has published a short video summary of his speech, available here.
