Source: European Commission
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlk2Hfm8OL4
Date: 06/12/2011
Event: Vivienne Westwood on climate change at the Innovation Convention
Credit: Innovation Union, European Commission, also Geoff Chambers for transcribing this
People:
[Vivienne Westwood on Climate Change at the European Commission Innovation Convention, Brussels, 2011]
Vivienne Westwood: Well, I'm a fashion designer. I've always put my ideas into my fashion and my politics, and those have changed. And, about five years ago I asked myself: “What would I say to young people today?” And I decided I would want to talk to them about propaganda. I started to put these ideas into my fashion. I started to design t-shirts with graphics on, all about this. And the idea of propaganda, I sum it up - I'll just talk a little bit about this, because this is where I recently started again to be very active - and I referred to something I once read in Aldous Huxley, and he said that the three evils in the world were: nationalism, which has taken the place of religion - by the way, the United Nations defines a nation, the only way, they can’t, first of all they can’t define it by its boundaries, they can’t define it by its race, or its languages - even Switzerland has got three languages - the only thing they decided that a nation had in common was the capacity to go to war. Anyway, so this is a nation, and if you, when we say it’s taken the place of religion, you only have to think of the stuff that comes out of America, and you only have to think of the whatever it’s called, the al Qaeda, the Arab threat to realise that religion is nationalism or an ability to wage war. Anyway, so, he, and I think it’s even more true today to say that this is one of the constituents, one of the evils of the world, and one of the constituents of propaganda, because I decided that this was a factor of propaganda.
The other two evils were organised lying, and today we have organised lying on an incredible scale, not just the kind that you’re aware of, but the whole frame of reference by which we understand the world is an untruth, it’s a lie, it has no perspective about what human beings really are capable of. It’s all been diverted into consumerism, let’s say.
Anyway, and the other evil, the most virulent of all the evils according to Huxley, and I agree with him, was non-stop distraction. If your head is full of rubbish, nothing else can go in. Anyway, so I decided that these were the constituents of propaganda, and that’s what I started to talk to young people about through my fashion, and I started to put these t-shirts in fashion shows and everything. And then I even wrote a manifesto, and the manifesto is saying that if you become an art lover, you’re a freedom fighter for a better world, because you’re starting to think. You get off the consumer treadmill, you invest in what you’re doing, going to look at paintings for example or listening to great music or theatre is to invest in it. You don’t just suck it up, it’s not consumerism. You get out what you put in. it’s not easy. Most people can’t be bothered with it.
Anyway, where am I? I can’t remember. Sorry. Anyway, so, I wrote a manifesto, and the thrust, the theme of the manifesto is that culture is the antidote to propaganda, and we are dangerously short of culture, and I might have time to talk about it a bit more, I'm not sure.
But what happened in the meantime is that I read an interview by James Lovelock, and I know I'm speaking to people who are avant garde here, people who can search for their human path, what they wish to become as humans. You’re not the underprivileged people who have to care about where their next meal is coming from and don’t have time for the human part of who we are, they've only got time to try and cope with their animal needs. And I'm talking to privileged people here. Anyway, so I do advise you if you haven’t done it already to read Lovelock's books, his the theory of Gaia. I consider him to be a genius as great as Einstein or Darwin. Indeed, his theory, his Gaia theory is a more complete theory of evolution.
And anyway, he said, that, well, I'll just explain first a bit of the background. The point is this famous plus two degrees. Once the emissions make the temperature rise to two degrees, it is unstoppable. The earth will migrate to a hot state. Nobody will be able to tamper with it. Everything will kick in, and it will end up at five or six degrees. Now then five or six degrees, what that means is if you draw a line just slightly under Paris, everything below that is uninhabitable, and that's the world we're facing. Anyway, but Lovelock thinks we're too late, he thinks we've already, the two degrees is already in the pipeline and that we're not clever enough anyway to do much about it. Anyway, but the statistic that absolutely shocked me was that he said that by the end of this century there would be probably one billion people left, and this is your imagination when that happens. Anyway, it is unimaginable but it is so shocking to think of it. Now then, scientists are all agreed that once you've passed this plus two degrees, then you can't do anything about it. The only thing they're not agreed about is how quickly it will happen, but for sure what we do today is more important than what we do tomorrow, and we're doing very little. Anyway, and governments don't seem to be doing much at all except posing to do things really.
Anyway, so I want to tell you what I started to do, because this is the most important thing of what I want to say. What I want to say is that people must inform themselves. What can one person do? The answer is, inform yourself. if you think differently because of all this information you're getting, you will behave differently. You'll talk to your friends, you will influence policy, you will, it will make an incredible difference, it willl change your outlook on the world, and you will have an effect, you'll start to do something.
By the way, if you do start to do something, you'll find that people will join you, or, you can already attach yourself to something else. Now then that's what I did. First of all, I did use my fashion shows to talk about it always. It's great, I do feel that everything is coming together for me, that I can use my credibility in the fashion business to have a voice sometimes and to say these things, and that's why I'm here today, but what did I do? We, myself and my colleagues, we searched out what was happening. Who was doing stuff? And we got this information mostly through the internet as to who's doing things. But we came across this charity Cool Earth. Now then already I was sure that the first thing to do is to try to do something about the rainforest, and whatever it is you do decide to do, you can only do one thing at a time. And this is what I decided to do, the rainforest is the most important thing. We need public opinion. Without public opinion we don't stand any chance, but, if we don't save the rain forest we don't stand any chance either, and I thought that was the first thing to do. And now I want to tell you about Cool Earth. And it is, er, it was started by, I've just, anyway, it was started b a politician called Frank Field, and he's very well known and he's been in politics for a long time, and he always gets elected, because he's a politician, a backbencher who always stands by his principles and fights for everything he believes in, not there just to keep his job, but to try and make a difference.
And he had been trying for ages, and was very frustrated at his attempts to focus on climate change with regard to the government and his role in government. It was just going round all the departments, all these suggestions and everything, and not going anywhere. He looked up and found that this man called Johan Eliasch had bought some land in the middle of the Brazilian forest and he um, a businessman, and he got in touch with him. This Johan got back to him immediately, and Frank said, "Look, we've got to be strategic about this. Would you like to talk to me?" And the plan was that they would work with indigenous people to make a fire wall around each of the three big forests on the equator. They're the most important forests. They produce ten times more atmosphere, absorb ten times more carbon because they're in direct underneath the sun.
So they are this incredible machine that gives us our atmosphere and, our, anyway, capacity to live - our lungs they're referred to, aren't they. And so if you want to visit Cool Earth you can see a plan that they have which is already in place. One village at a time, all linked, to stop the loggers getting through, because that is how deforestation happens in the first place, and then other things happen afterwards, but if you stop the loggers coming in, that's it, you protect the forest, and so their plan is cheap. If you - they've costed it all up, a projected cost, it's already in place, they have begun, and the total will be, by my reckoning, according to their figures, about 114 million pounds, to save the three big forests of the world. Now then you can compare that about the silly money that we talk about with regard to the banks.
Also, a very important philanthropist that I've been talking to had, just before Copenhagen, put together a big team of experts, and they took a long time, talking to governments and important powers, to try to find out what structures to put in place to save the rainforest. It was always top down, like this, not bottom up, which is what Cool Earth is doing. And the figure they arrived at was thirty billion per year for ever. I mean, and this is something so practical. Now then, what have I done? I'll tell you, it's very quick, I had a plan. I took some money out of my own company for the first time. I just tell you that because this is a real plan. The next plan, I talked to some models I know, and I said for the first time, I want - because models often support charitable events and things. Naomi Campbell's a, I mean, Kate Moss said to me, you know, "Naomi - give her a mission, she loves a mission", she said. You know, Naomi loves a mission, you know she's a fighter, she never stops.
Anyway, but, I asked them: "Give me money" 'cos I think it's really important that they do that, and they said: "Yes!" Anyway, so, we started to fundraise, and the big plan would be to get one or two investors to give more if possible of course, because it's such a matter of urgency, and money coming in means that we're all on target for 2020 to save this forest.
Any way, so, and so it's very very important to involve the general public, for them to get involved, to become much more active in their democratic responsibility to try to do something, and so I want to work on that as well, do events in clubs and all kinds of things to raise awareness, but also to have this publicity that you're going to get from this trick of asking models and famous people to help you first of all financially. Anyway so I hoped that we managed to do this. The very big idea is that governments - and I hope even the World Bank - will attach themselves to practical projects that are really working, instead of very often not knowing what to do, even when they've been given funds by countries to do things with it, it just sits there. So this is the idea, it's People Power we're talking about, and governments must join in. It's never happened before, we've never used our democrot- our democratic opportunities, you know, we just leave it up to governments and governments leave it up to business, and we're in this mess.
Anyway, so, that's more or less what I'm doing, the most important things I wanted to tell you about, and maybe if there's anything else I need to say, it might crop up in the questions later, and I'm ready, I think, to talk to our Chinese colleague, Mr Zhue, well he's called Zhue Lan so he's Mr Zhue, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it, I'm a big big fan of China. Chinese culture is the greatest thing that ever happened as far as we know, and it lasted for more than a thousand years, China the same size that it is now, since about 200 BC, it's been that size, and it's it was a sustainable society. Its culture is the high point of human achievement, and it was run of course by intellectuals, the mandarins had to pass an examination. They were scholars, they were artists, and it would be great if some of our politicians had to pass such an examination.
But anyway, so, it was, it turned out, they had a hierarchy of values, and you have to have that for a sustainable society. Anyway, of course, it was all sabotaged by the things that happened during the twentieth century, but I do hope, and I'm sure that the Chinese outlook, the Chinese attitude to life is, really it can't have changed completely because it was so strong for one thousand years. By the way, there was cruelty in this sustainable society. There was a sort of almost callous acceptance of the disposability of human life, probably mostly because of the famines that hit every now and again, and of course that happened particularly in time of war. The Chinese were a pacific people in this thousand years, but of course they were attacked by people every now and again, and dynasties were overthrown, but then those attackers became absorbed in the culture just in the same way that the Romans absorbed the Greek culture, the Chinese culture was more powerful, and the - anyway, but my love of China came from Chinese art, I think it's just amazing. Anyway, I'd like to talk to Mr Lan about finance probably. Thank you.