You’re involved

“Ecol­ogy? Look it up. You’re in­volved.”

So it began, on posters plas­tered across Van­cou­ver fifty years ago, the move­ment that mat­ters much to me, to us as a fam­ily. That my wife is Canada-born is in­con­se­quen­tial. It is Barcelona, it is Bris­bane, Bratislava, Bo­livia, Mom­basa, Manila – it is the air we breathe. It is our chil­dren and our grand­chil­dren. Bravo, Barcelona, for mak­ing a stand.

I’m not ex­pect­ing you to look it up, of course. We all know well enough now what the founders of Green­peace were – have al­ways been – say­ing. We have all known for a des­per­ately long time. It has just been that the pow­er­ful have blind eyes and that greed is a vile ad­dic­tion. I had long hoped for peo­ple-power to reach that crit­i­cal mass when gov­ern­ments and cor­po­ra­tions must heed, but time ebbed and decades can­tered by. Life was just too com­pli­cated, crammed, for the many to be moved.

I then fig­ured we could turn the cor­ner if, some­how, a com­pelling eco­nomic case could be made to end our mul­ti­ple, un­sus­tain­able ad­dic­tions as per­pet­u­ated by the prof­i­teers.

Fi­nally, though, it is prov­ing far sim­pler and more shock­ing than that. The rapid onset of cli­mate change and the ac­cel­er­at­ing, dire con­se­quences of flame and flood rightly evoke fear, maybe even guilt, in any­one with a con­science, and damna­tion from the young who stand to in­herit the mess. And with the pub­lic epiphany comes a rad­i­cal lifestyle re­view and that eco­nomic case.

There is a word I would like you to look up, though. Bio­philia. It speaks to that part of all of us who sense that in this age of ex­cess some­thing fun­da­men­tal is miss­ing. It re­minds us who we are, where we come from, what we need. It em­braces core is­sues of men­tal health, of gen­eral well­be­ing and ful­fill­ing mo­ments, hours, days and lives.

Cat­alo­nia is a store­house of na­ture, stun­ning con­trasts and a pro­found ap­pre­ci­a­tion thereof, so some of you may have al­ready read the words and works of E O Wil­son. The long-es­tab­lished bio­philia hy­poth­e­sis (1984) by the now 90-year-old Pulitzer priz­ing-win­ning nat­u­ral­ist, cham­pion of bio­di­ver­sity, and Fac­ulty Emer­i­tus at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, could not be more rel­e­vant.

The urge to re­late to land­scape and to other forms of life – whether cog­ni­tive, in­tel­lec­tual, emo­tional, aes­thetic or spir­i­tual – is in our DNA. Sever this con­nec­tion, borne of the truth that for 90 per cent of our ge­netic his­tory we have been com­pletely and in­ti­mately weaved into the nat­ural world, and (in the words of an­other great writer Is­abella Tree) we are float­ing in a world where our deep­est sense of our­selves is lost.

Wil­son speaks to power, eye to eye, when he says we are drown­ing in in­for­ma­tion while starved of wis­dom. And most rel­e­vant of all, we have to stop la­belling a few for push­ing the “en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist view as though it were a lob­by­ing ef­fort out­side the main­stream of human ac­tiv­ity, and to start call­ing it the real-world view”.

Now, im­per­a­tively, is the time. And it is not a neg­a­tive. There is so much good out there.

Show the world, Cat­alo­nia. Lead.