Source: International Green Awards
URL: N/A
Date: 20/11/2012
Event: Prince Charles warns of "suicide on a grand scale"
Attribution: International Green Awards, Prince Charles (HRH The Prince of Wales)
People:
[A message from HRH The Prince of Wales Lifetime Achievement Award Honouree recorded at St. James's Palace.]
Prince Charles: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm more than flattered to be included amongst those receiving recognition this evening at the International Green Awards. I need hardly say how incredibly sorry I am that I cannot be with you in person to receive your award, and to help celebrate the achievements of so many people and organisations who have raised awareness and acted to confront the challenges that face us. As it happens, I am about as far away as you can be, at the moment, so this rather low-carbon message is merely an echo from Down Under.
Now I must say it is enormously encouraging that you actually noticed what I've been up to, all these years, and have deemed my rather inadequate efforts worthy of your Lifetime Achievement Award. It certainly feels like a lifetime since I first felt compelled to say something - and, more to the point, do something - to highlight how fast we were heading towards a terrifying point of no return.
I feared then, and still do now, I'm afraid, that if we do not create a big shift in our thinking and approach, humanity and the Earth will soon begin to suffer some very grim consequences, whether it be the voracious way we are using up the Earth's natural capital, or our destructive application of so many chemicals or pesticides on the land and at sea, or the lax way we deal with so much of our waste. We cannot go on thinking that the Earth will somehow just cope and miraculously go on being so abundantly generous with her precious resources.
We all know that fossil fuels are running out and that supplies of fresh water are under increasing pressure. But so, too, less obvious elements of Nature's capital, things like potassium and phosphorus, the fertility of her soils or even the stability of her weather patterns. We are pushing Nature beyond her limits. We are breaching one planetary boundary after another, and if we go on as we are, the impact of these scarcities and declines on human societies worldwide will be of such a scale I can hardly bring myself to imagine it.
Now all those years ago, when I began to see that this could be so, I found myself labelled with every term that describes a crank. I don't actually recommend it as a pastime. But, extraordinary as it may seem nowadays - and perhaps this is why, ladies and gentlemen, you have given me this award - that intuitive feeling has been backed up by a mass of scientific evidence, from every possible field, confirming that our predominant approach is having a very adverse effect upon Nature's capacity to sustain herself. Our intensive industrialised techniques to grow or gather food, for example, are destroying the capacity of many natural systems, not only to replenish themselves but also to deal with the vast amounts of CO2 we continue to pump into the atmosphere.
This suggests to me that we are still a long way from properly understanding that we are not actually set apart from Nature, that we are not even a part of Nature, if it was some sort of gigantic machine, but that we are, in fact, Nature. We are Nature. We are participants in a complex and profoundly interconnected living system, which is equipped with many crucial checks and balances to ensure the entire system is both sustainable and sustaining.
It is therefore an act of suicide on a grand scale to rise so roughshod over those checks and balances and to flout Nature's necessary limits as blatantly as we do. And the longer we go on ignoring what is already happening, and denying what will happen in the future, the more profoundly we condemn our grandchildren, and their children, to an unbearably toxic and unstable existence. We simply have to turn the tide.
And this is why I consider the International Green Awards so important. If we are really going to meet the needs of more than 9 billion people by 2050 and keep Nature's capital intact, we have to bring about a substantial transformation in the way we do things and the way we see our place within Nature's miraculous system. Those of you who will be taking home awards tonight could not be more important in this essential process of transformation.
In my travels, I have encountered a growing number of rewarding examples of good practice, whether in agriculture, or the way fisheries are managed, or in forms of engineering that mimic the way that Nature operates, or via innovative financial mechanisms that reward, rather than penalise, those who are striving to do the right thing. Often, of course, they are on a small scale, which is why I've been doing all in my power, through my International Sustainability Unit, to bring the public, private and NGO sectors together to establish the kind of partnerships which can help to scale up the potential of such virtuous and effective solutions.
The International Green Awards play a part in this process. To those who doubt or even deny that there are better ways of operating, who cling to the disintegrating raft of Business as Usual, these awards demonstrate that we have the means of mitigating much of the collateral destruction our present approach is causing, if only - if only - we could bring ourselves to escape the economic straitjacket we've created for ourselves. By urgently adopting an approach which properly values natural capital, rewards the maintenance and provision of vital ecosystem services as if they were public utilities, and thereby benefits the poorest people on Earth.
So, if I may say so, your event this evening is not so much a moment to look back, commend and congratulate, as a chance to shine a light on good practice, and ask how it can be developed and expanded more widely, in order to avert the sort of terrifying catastrophes that now loom large on the horizon, and about which so many in the scientific community have been warning us, as have - if we are really truthful - our better instincts.
This, then, is the urgent task in hand. For all of us and for all of our sakes, your generous award this evening will help to give me the heart to continue the battle.