Personal Achievments

Although today marks the initiation of my writing, the actual idea of writing was a radio programme about a week ago consisting of interviews with three of this year’s Nobel Laureates. They were caught on the eve of the award ceremony and were asked to summarise their feelings about the personal acts of creativity that had eventually carried them to Stockholm. They represented this year’s judgements on the world’s best intellects in economics, medicine and creative writing. Listening to their own efforts to analyse their life achievements in forging outstanding careers brought up some of my long-standing comparative thoughts on creativity. They were actually crystallised into principles through the lives of these three Nobel prize-winners.

The economist represented the principle that important new insights come from crossing institutional barriers. He had graduated as a physicist, and moved into economics with the feeling that if the world is to equilibrate socially, theories are required to include the alleviation of poverty for the practical benefit of most peoples of the world.

The medical scientist illustrated the principle that modern science, mainly because of its high costs in equipment and technical know-how, moves forward through teamwork. He was one of several people sharing the prize for medicine, each of which had added a brick to the body of knowledge that defines the genes controlling cell division. He also pointed out another truism, that there are no breakthroughs in science driven by the lodestone of bettering the human condition. There is much to do, for example, before this particular discovery can be routed to control human cancer. Viewing science as a corporate activity also illustrates the point that ‘truth will out’. Individuals matter little in scientific progress. If Flemming had not discovered penicillin, someone else would have done so round about the same time. We have the scientific certainty that a blueprint, which specifies the design of a control system to defeat cancer, actually exists, and we can be confident that one-day it will by revealed and applied. In science the accidental aspect of ‘who comes first’ means that with the great speed of modern scientific progress innovators rapidly become history. I was reminded of this when I turned to a textbook of biochemistry published in 1991. It had this to say about the supervisor of research for my D.Phil.

‘There are two other common names for the citric acid cycle. One is the Krebs cycle, after Sir Hans Krebs, who first investigated the pathway (work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1953)’

He was one of about five researchers who were rapidly gaining evidence to answer one of the central questions of life; how is food turned into energy? He happened to be the winner, but in half a century, he is but a footnote. In this same textbook, four pages were devoted to an interview with Sidney Altman, who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1989. The award was for the corporate discovery of how the chemical translation of information about the nucleic acid genetic code could be manipulated by a complementary nucleic acid. Up until that time the only biocatalysts were thought to be proteins. In 1953, nucleic acids were just group of substances found characteristically in the cell nucleus but of totally unknown function.

My final principle of creativity emerged from third laureate, a woman. She was clearly awarded a prize as a writer, but because I tuned into the programme late, I am not sure about exactly why she was given a prize. Her reply to the question about the value of her work prompted the succinct reply that there was an intrinsic value in reaching and communicating a new personal understanding. This is the stuff of meditation, and makes the creativity of artists, writers and musicians a series of one-off productions. Because there is no natural hidden blueprint, their contributions are highly idiosyncratic building blocks for creating wayward cultures for which there are no hidden plans. In this sense, economic creativity has much in common with literary creativity, where opinions loom large in setting signposts and intellectual pathways to the future. Economic theorists are very much individuals.

Listening to the radio programme reminded me that, from university to the present time, I have always had an independent mental existence along the cutting edge of outstanding ideas emerging at all levels on the global scale. In science, there was my first encounter with the mental hotbed and intellectual ferment of the laboratory of a Nobel Laureate dedicated to finding out how cells produce energy; this was followed by work at the new chemical frontiers of biomedical research into the diseases involving hormones and ageing. However, at no time can I say I have been driven by ambition. One thing simply led to another. If there was an inner current I think it was reflected in the fact that, like the prize-winning economist, I have been dogged by a feeling that there are bigger social problems to tackle, bound up with life in an overcrowded world. From this point of view my destination was never clear-cut from the outset. An opportunity for a career move in my late 50’s took me into the complex area of environmentalism. Here there is an urgent need to develop new bodies of knowledge integrated with practical management systems to care for the Earth as a finite source of human material resources. But, there again, it was taking an opportunity that had unexpectedly emerged.

My new career, with its intellectual and organisational challenges of creating new subjects and crossing old boundaries really took me back to old interests in history, geography and art. These subjects I have consolidated and unified in my own mind as ‘cultural ecology’. In this broad framework of the science of ecology applied to sustaining human life. I first encountered important historical ideas of spiritual resources that have been embedded in native cultures through centuries of social evolution. These cultural roots of managing the environment are now consolidated within the research and educational theme of ‘sacred ecology’. Although it is a new knowledge system, cultural ecology encompasses a more ancient holistic view of the planet as a network of interconnected themes and relationships, which incorporate religious or ritualistic representation of resources. This kind of network or systems thinking has to be incorporated into local operations of modern environmental managers to meet the global strategies of sustainable development, if we are to retain the better fruits of industrialism. These days information networks means computers, and information technology is essential for me to create the interdisciplinary topic scaffolds for knowledge and it applications to environmental management in a community of beings. Some people say Newgrange was also a computer to connect the people with the cosmos.

Minus the few ornamental tree aliens, which are really uncomfortable there, the ecological heart of the Roath Park wild gardens is its waterlogged soil that is home to self-seeding goat willows and alders. It has probably looked more or less the same since the first human settlement of South Wales. For most of human history it was probably not seen as being part of a sacred community of beings. It survived because its intractability resisted the efforts of local landowners to improve it. It is an unlikely natural survivor in the face of traditional agriculture, which is not always adaptive. Traditional people do not always act as wise stewards of the environment. This became obvious to me when I encountered ‘wild-garden’ landscapes in Delaware and New England. These ecological islands are relatively late survivors of the colonisation of North America, from which the current lodestone of achievement, economic betterment, emerged to become the unstoppable force of consumerism. Until September 11 th this year the surge of capital markets emanating from the States of the northeast has dominated world development and shaped global consciousness.

Consumerism is now the worldwide process for achieving most people’s lifetime targets, and its beginnings, about three hundred years ago, are more evident in New England than Europe. For example, when the colonial towns of North America are compared, not with their industrial successors, but with their native predecessors, they begin to look more like market societies, the seeds of whose capitalist future were already present. The earliest explorers' descriptions of the New England coast had been framed from the start in terms of the land's commodities. Although an earlier English meaning of the word "commodity" had referred simply to articles, which were "commodious" and hence useful to people —a definition the native Americans would readily have understood—that meaning was already becoming archaic by the seventeenth century. In its place was the commodity as an object of commerce, one by definition owned for the sole purpose of being traded away at a profit. "Profit" was another word that underwent a comparable evolution at about the same time: to its original meaning of the benefits one derived from using a thing was added the gain one made by selling it. Certain items of the New England landscape—fish, furs, timber, and a few others—were thus selected at once for early entrance into the commercial economy of the North Atlantic trading countries. They became valued not for the immediate utility they brought their possessors but for the price they would bring when exchanged at market. In trying to explain ecological changes related to these commodities, we could safely point to market demand as the key causal agent. Shopping became a family achievement. In European history the spread of family wealth produced a similar model of the rise of consumerism in the Netherlands a little earlier, where it was largely driven by the natural resources of the East Indies.

The early colonial trade of North American in commodities involved only a small group of merchants, but they exercised an influence over the New England economy beyond their numbers. Located principally in the coastal cities, they rapidly came to control shipping and so acted as New England's main link to the Atlantic economy. The market sector of the New England economy was a tiny isolated segment relatively unconnected to the subsistence production of peasant communities in the towns. There is therefore an important distinction between ecological changes resulting directly from the activities of merchants and those caused by the less market-oriented activities of farmers. However, the farmers had their own involvement in the Atlantic economy, however distant it might have been. Even if they produced only a small surplus for market, they nevertheless used it to buy certain goods from the merchants—manufactured textiles, tropical foodstuffs, guns, metal tools—which were essential elements in their lives. The grain and meat which farmers sold, if not shipped to Caribbean and European markets, were used to supply port cities and the colonial shipping trade. Not all of this commodity movement was voluntary. Town and colony alike assessed farmers for their landholdings and so siphoned off taxes, which were used to run government and conduct trade. Although taxes bore some resemblance to political tributes in Indian societies, the latter were not based on possession of land and did not reinforce the sense that land had an intrinsic money value. Taxes thus had the important effect of forcing a certain degree of colonial production beyond the level of mere "subsistence," and orienting that surplus toward market exchange."

The most important sense in which it is wrong to describe colonial towns as subsistence communities follows from their inhabitants' belief in "improvement," the concept that was so crucial in their critique of Indian life. The imperative here was not just the biblical injunction to "fill the earth and subdue it." Colonists were moved to transform the soil by a property system that taught them to treat land as capital. Fixed boundaries and the liberties of "free and common socage" assured a family that improvements belonged to them and to their heirs. The existence of commerce, however marginal, led them to see certain things on the land as merchantable commodities. The visible increase in livestock and crops thus translated into an abstract money value that was reflected in tax assessments, in the inventories of estates, and in the growing land market. Even if a colonist never sold an improved piece of property, the increase in its hypothetical value at market was an important aspect of the accumulation of wealth. These tendencies were apparent as early as the 1630s. When English critics claimed that colonists had lost money by moving their wealth to New England, the colonists replied that they had simply transformed that money into physical assets. The importance of utilitarianism as a driving force of the colonists is now celebrated and reinforced educationally in the many outdoor reconstructions of colonial communities. In one of these I bought a board game entitled ‘Made for Trade- a game of early American life’. The preamble runs as follows:

“The eggs served for breakfast were laid just hours ago. Your everyday clothes are wool and linen and sewn by hand. Every room in your house has a fireplace, the only source of heat in winter. At sunset the room goes dark except for the very dim light of candles, grease lamps and pitch pine.

There is no such thing as Standard Time. The town next-door may be 20 minutes ahead or behind your town. People travel by horse or by walking. Streets are paved with brick or stone, if at all.

Welcome to early America and ‘Made for Trade’, the game that transports you to a typical American village in colonial times. You will make your way from store to store, shopping for goods, paying taxes, earning shillings on pay day. As money is scarce you and your fellow colonists will have to barter, or trade, for goods with each other, at the outdoor Market and at the shops. If you can’t pay your debt, you may even end up in the jail!”

Multinational corporations made for trade have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. All that changed on September 11 th . Today the world narrative belongs to terrorists. But the primary target of the men who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre was not the global economy. Their targets were the descendants of the New England colonists, and the later mass emigrations to the United States, which rapidly populated a relative wilderness. It was Americans that drew their fury. It was the high gloss of their modernity. It was the thrust of their technology. It was the blunt force of their foreign policy. It was the power of American consumer culture to penetrate every wall, home-life and mind. It was their perceived godlessness. The terrorist attack of September 11 th was a major attempt to annihilate a culture of free expression, embedded in a justice system’s provisions for the rights of the accused. They want to destroy a wide world routinely filled with exchange of every sort, an open circuit of work, talk, family and expressible feeling. In its place they offer nothing but the return to a pre-medieval male theocracy. They build their plot around anger and or indifference to bring back the past, motivated by one man’s warped vision of judgement and devastation.

However, there are other, softer movements devoted to deceleration of the economic global momentum. Their buzz phrase is sustainable development. Their aim is to fend off what they see as the inevitable landscape of consumer-robots and social inequality and instability. These groups are in opposition to shopping being taken up as a global achievement for all families backed by advertising, which elevates one’s status measured in the branded goods that are accumulated. We relentlessly turn nature’s bounty into personal stuff that is now beginning to accumulate in rented storage depots.

It is certainly true that the scattered wild-gardens of the world are all that is left of its once limitless natural resources. Across my road the group of trees stands as a symbol for the most fundamental lesson of traditional ecological knowledge- that worldviews and beliefs do matter. Utilitarianism is ill suited for sustainability in a much tighter world than that which confronted the Pilgrim Fathers. Sustainability requires a new philosophy that recognizes ecological limits and strives to produce a balance between production and consumption to satisfy social, as well as economic, well-being. Like anti-terrorism, it also requires a world coalition to bring it about in a painless way because there is no logic in the armed martyrdom of apocalypse. The cultural gap is immense. There can be no dialogue with those who plan the premeditated murder of thousands of office workers in a couple of minutes; a crime against civilization they justify as an act of ‘benevolent terrorism’.

Nevertheless the events of September 11 th are being taken by many as a turning point in civilisation. Contrasting the natural wealth that sustained native communities on the island of what became New York, with what happened to them through European colonisations, we have to question how could we have squandered the accumulation of all that wisdom in the creation of a global market economy. Throughout North America there were more than a thousand distinct cultures, a thousand mutually unintelligible languages, a thousand ways of knowing. How can one compare intimacy with the facets of this knowledge to the possession of gold? It would take a lifetime to list the trees and flowers, the butterflies and fish, the small mammals, the kinds of deer and cats, the migratory and resident birds; and to say the most rudimentary things about their relationships, how they know and reflect each other. This, along with the native people, the colonists ignored. It was a wealth that didn't register until much of it was gone, or until, like the people, it was a tattered, diluted remnant, sequestered on a reservation. Old native community ways are attached to artefacts in museums, and at the moment no one can see how to resurrect them as an in-between culture of moderation.

It is significant that the modern super-rich are putting their money into acres and acres of wilderness. Once they would have bought a swanky yacht or a smart villa, or they might have scoured auction houses for Old Masters or jewellery with a romantic provenance. These days, they, and we are talking about the rich. The very, very rich, representing the commercial dynasties — Rothschilds and Gettys, Ruperts and Oppenheimers, Goldsmiths, Aspinalls, Buffetts, Rausings — and many others, who have made their money in more private, less-publicised ways, are quietly and anonymously buying up pristine land in some of the world's wildest, most remote corners. Those who can't make it to the more exotic rims are buying nearer home, sometimes just a few hundred acres, sometimes several thousand - the diffusion range, if you like, for those who can't afford the gold standard. But what they're all looking for is some kind of certainty that they will always have access to the natural world. Wilderness is the new luxury. Ecoconsciousness is the new cool approach for those that one would think have everything. What primitive man had for nothing — clean water and pure air, foods untreated with chemicals, abundant wildlife, diverse species, rich natural habitats, wild, sparsely populated spaces - these days costs an arm and a leg. Now that Labour Prime Ministers, scribblers and middle-ranking executives can all afford the "poolside Tuscan idyll", the table at the Ivy, the tailor-made suit, you can tell the truly, truly rich because what they own is swathes and swathes of land encompassing whole valleys and mountains, of wildest, unspoilt land. Those who cannot buy vast stretches of it for themselves, buy into it for weeks at a time. They head for the Antarctic, to the great game parks of Africa, to the Amazon basin, to the remote parts of Patagonia. We in the West are, it seems, in a post-materialistic society. Much of the world is bored by the mere accumulation of objects; bored, too, by posh hotels and standard gold-plated luxury. They want something more meaningful, an experience that matters, that moves and inspires them, and wilderness offers it. As it gets harder to get to the truly wild places, as they become rarer, so the experience becomes more cherished. Roughing it (just a bit) is a wonderful antidote to many of life's urban ills.

It's no accident that almost wherever one goes in Africa, particularly to the more remote and wilder places, someone with fantastic monetary rewards from consumerism has been there before. From the shores of Lake Tanganyika to the banks of the Rufiji river and a sand-fringed, Robinson-Crusoe-like island off the coast of Tanzania, Bill Gates has got there first. He may not yet have his own private stretch of wilderness, but what he likes to do in his off-time is roughing it in a wild bit of country where the air is pure, the landscape as unspoilt as the modern world allows. The wildlife is satisfyingly wild and the size of one's bank account is entirely beside the point when compared with all of that.