DOUGALD HINE: This isn't 
about sustaining
the way of living of the Western 
middle classes anymore.
This is about how quickly and
with how little damage
we can negotiate the surrender of ways of living 
that we grew up taking for granted.
[Surrender - to get a chance
to live to tell the tale]
Speaking at the European Commission:
Dougald Hine
There was an advert that kept appearing
in my facebook feed
from an organization that wants 
to plant 8 billion trees.
And I'm going to just assume that
they are in good faith,
and that they are scared by climate change, 
as many of us here are.
And that they believe that their 
over-simple solution
is really going to make 
all the difference.
What struck me was the way that 
they messaged this.
Or can you use 'message' as a verb?
The way that they framed 
the message.
They...
They did this big kind of 
apocalyptic story
about how the world would be 
within your lifetime.
And then at the end, they said:
But if we plant 8 billion trees, 
I'm quoting:
'Instead of the post-apocalyptic dystopia,
everything continues as usual!'
The morning I read that, on the 
front page of The Guardian
there was a report of a survey showing 
that the number of young people
in the UK saying, 'life is not worth living', 
had doubled in a decade.
Stands at almost one in five.
'Everything continues as usual!'
Think about sustainability, as a phrase, 
as a word, as a concept -
how easily it slides into meaning 
'sustaining the current state of affairs
as much as possible at all costs.'
And...
I think that a bit like the commentators who were 
caught off guard by Brexit and Trump,
some of the mainstream proponents of Sustainability
have failed to grasp how limited
the appeal of 'everything continues 
as usual' is.
When I think now about 
what's at stake,
a phrase that keeps coming 
back to me is:
We have to negotiate the surrender 
of our whole way of living.
This isn't about sustaining the way of living of 
the western middle classes anymore.
This is about how quickly and with how little 
damage we can negotiate the surrender
of ways of living that we grew 
up taking for granted.
Just think for a moment about how 
much of the economic activity
you see around you could just go 
- overnight.
And if nobody became hungry or homeless 
as a result, nobody would miss it.
And I suspect that pretty much all
of us in the room,
if we ask ourselves that question, can see 
a substantial amount of activity
that falls into that category.
David Graeber wrote an essay called 'Bullshit Jobs', 
where he voiced the suspicion
that much of the activity going on 
within our economies today
is regarded as pointless by the people
carrying it out.
And the strength of the response to that 
essay confirmed his suspicion.
So... If you think about what 
a surrender looks like -
the rapid decommissioning of whole areas 
of the organized activity of a society
and the rapid revaluation of things 
that have been taken for granted
until very recently in that society.
Think again about what it would have 
been like in many parts of Europe
in the 1940s - that's what a 
surrender looks like.
To negotiate a surrender, you need 
a credible threat.
We're gonna hear plenty of threats 
today, I think.
If you need some human level of a
credible threat, then actually again,
I would point you towards this strange mix of movements 
that have erupted over the last year or so.
Not least the movements beginning from 
young people around this continent.
You also need the kind of quiet places of 
conversation away from the frontlines,
where strange combinations 
of people come together
to figure out what this looks like.
And that's one of the things that we're trying 
to do with A School Called Home
that we started in Sweden.
Finally, if this is a surrender, 
it's a very strange one,
because it's a surrender 
with no victors.
We're not all equally implicated, 
but very few of us
don't have a great deal to give up 
and to lose
within what we're talking about here 
if we're honest about it.
And so at a certain point I think bringing
understandings of surrender from...
peacemaking and military strategy
together with spiritual traditions,
together with the things that people who have worked 
with the treatment of addiction know,
we might begin to find some of the 
clues for what this looks like.
And they might tell us that 
surrender means: Giving up.
Being humbled, perhaps humiliated,
but having a chance - not a guarantee - 
of living to tell the tale.
So that's the thought that I'd leave 
you with this morning.
Thank you for having me.
JOHN DOYLE: God he's good,
isn't he?
