How to Model Climate Solutions

Transcript

Bryony Worthington

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is model, actor, director, ambassador and occasional businesswoman: Lily Cole.

Lily's career began early when, at 14, she was recruited as a model, pitching her into the high-octane world of fashion. She remains a self-confessed geek, however, and completed her studies including a degree from Cambridge University. Though she loved indulging her passion for dressing up, her love of nature led her to becoming selective about the clients she would work with, and digging into various environmental issues, as any true geek is want to do.

In 2016, she started researching a book ‘Who Cares Wins,’ which was published in 2020. In both the book and the podcast that followed, she gave a platform to a wide range of people, always seeking to see both sides of the many debates, and also to inspire optimism thanks to the wide range of solutions that are out there, be they technologically driven, or founded on ancient traditions and wisdoms.

I was delighted to learn more about Lily's fascinating background, and to discuss these topics with her. Please join me in welcoming Lily Cole to Cleaning Up.

Michael Liebreich

Before we get started, if you’re enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure you like episodes, subscribe on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform, and leave a review – that really helps other people find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues, and sign up for our free newsletter at CleaningUpPod.substack.com, that’s CleaningUpPod.substack.com

Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital.

So Lily, welcome to Cleaning Up, it's an absolute delight to have you on. I'm going to start with the question we always start with, which is, would you be happy to just introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do?

Lily Cole

Hi, nice to see you, virtually Bryony. Gosh, I don't love that question. It always makes me— it's a bit like, when you go through an airport, you have to fill in the form of "what do you do" and it makes my brain go, "Waohhh." I do lots of different things, which is maybe why I have a bit of a resistance to that question. But I guess I straddle between the kind of climate world, a bit, and also the kind of art worlds in terms of like film and fashion and writing and creativity, and increasingly, actually directing. I'd say that those are the two areas that I probably spend most energy, thinking about and trying to create things in.

Fantastic, thank you so much, we will have given people an introduction, so they all know who you are. But it's always nice to hear peoples' views of themselves, you know, what you're currently working on. And obviously, the thing that perhaps you're best known for is that you were discovered at a very young age and became a very successful model. But then what I find really curious is that you then went on and completed a degree in art history at Cambridge — after having become quite well known. And I was just wondering, how did that work? How did that feel to have that kind of early life experience?

I mean, it was very peculiar in a way, and at the same time, it's all I know. So it's like, yeah, the only version of teenage that I know. I started modelling when I was 14 and I was working a lot. 15-17, that was probably like, the busiest time for me in terms of fashion and stuff. And I was always doing it simultaneously with school. So I stayed in — sort of, made a big, what felt like a big, decision at the time when I was 16 to stay on to do my A levels. And then I had this actually this wonderful history/politics teacher who I adored, and actually very recently passed away sadly. He was the one who sort of lobbied me to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. I wasn't intending to because I knew that I was kind of desperate to get into work and not feel so pulled between these different worlds. But he wrote me a very convincing letter as to why I should at least apply. And then when I applied and got in, of course, I ended up eventually going a few years later. So yeah, that's how that happened.

Oxford and Cambridge are quite intense experiences at the best of times. And were there times when your modelling life or your fame crept into that? Because colleges tend to be quite well-curated, and it's a kind of a safe space. How did you juxtapose the two lives?

In a way I think when I was doing A-levels, the juggle was more intense. Where I was literally taking school books on trips — actually, when you do hair and makeup, you have loads of time to read and write. And so I was sort of very kind of multitasking. When I was at Cambridge, the terms are actually very short, they're very, very intense, but they're only half the year in totality. So I actually had big chunks of time off, and I was acting more than modelling at that time. So I was able to sort of try and put work projects in the breaks. But it was an intense experience and I definitely didn't have the social life that many people get from university. That was the trade off that I was very happy to make. I already had quite a rich social life outside of university so I saw university as a bit of a geek, you know, as a place to learn, and made a few friends but I wasn't there to kind of socialize first and foremost.

I wish I'd done that.

I did get occasional paparazzi and that was very, as you can imagine, uncomfortable. Because I'd be just cycling around in terrible clothes like a normal student having to deal with that.

On your way to Sainsbury’s. Yeah. Really when was it the kind of love for the environment and nature started to be a feature of your life? Was it as a result of the fashion experience or was it always there?

It wasn't always there. And I would say that what fashion did is it made me think about social, environmental, political issues through a particular prism, which I'm happy to elaborate on. An economic prism basically, and like looking at economic structures and supply chains and production and business, as opposed to maybe strictly philanthropy. But I think that my environmental consciousness wasn't there at the beginning. I grew up in London and I think I was more, even when I was younger, taken by animal rights issues or kind of thinking about human poverty and issues that felt more immediately emotionally compelling — the environment maybe seemed a bit more abstract. But then when I was a teenager, I started researching, and trying to understand the different problems in our world. And it became very quickly apparent to me that the environment is a sort of rug underneath everything else that I care about. And so if we're not looking after the environment, and it was already very clear — and this was 20 years ago, in the data, that we weren't — then every other issue that one might care about will be impacted, and was already being impacted. So just how fundamental it is became very clear to me. And then, in parallel to that, I guess I started to fall more and more in love with nature. Maybe partially from travelling the world and being exposed to different places and environments. Maybe just growing up, I don't know. But my love for nature sort of continued to grow year on year. And now I guess my environmentalism comes both from that pragmatic perspective of like, "Guys, it's really important. It's a life support system." But also from a more emotionally connected place of: wow, we have this incredible, beautiful world and so much diversity in it and biodiversity and why would we not want to look after that? You know, so it comes from different places, I guess.

There's a lovely photo of you. And I don't know how old you were, but very young, with a kind of misspelled sign saying, "don't wear fur." I think this was before you were discovered as a model. And then later in your career, you actually took a stand and you kind of made a point about that love of animals, right? Tell me about that period where you started acting morally?

Yeah, I think that photo was done in jest. I think the misspelling was on purpose. But I was only maybe like— because I was also wearing a fake fur coat, that was sort of the play in the image and holding this protest poster. I think I was probably about eight years old, so I was very young, I used to love dressing up as a kid. But I did really care about animal rights. From maybe age 10, I decided to be vegetarian, purely from an animal rights perspective, I wasn't at that point aware, few people were thinking of the environmental implications, health implications, etc. But yeah, so that was there for a long time. And then that was the first thing when I started modelling that I started to feel uncomfortable about was when I was asked to wear fur, and I did when I was 15 or so. When I was very young, I didn't feel confident maybe to question it, and sort of just accidentally found myself modelling a few times in fur, and then feeling really uncomfortable about it. And so that was the first step I took by saying to my agents: can we please say no fur to any clients I work with? Which is a slightly contentious thing to do, I know I lost some work. But it wasn't a wildly contentious thing to do, there'd already been big anti-fur campaigns in the fashion world. So it was an easy first step. And then that was like one step on what became a longer path of like, 'well, I also don't feel comfortable about this. I also really don't want to promote this.' And the part of what I felt able to promote and model got smaller and smaller. And as it diminished, I assumed that diminishment was the only possibility. But then, interestingly in time, another avenue opened up that's still open to me now, where I get asked, and I continue to be asked, by brands that are trying to make things in a better way to work with them. And so it turned in a nice direction.

And there was a specific trip as well that you took to Botswana to find out about... was that diamonds that you were investigating? Tell us a bit about that because it then led also to a little business opportunity that you started, which I found fascinating.

You've really done your research Bryony... sounds like you've read my book.

Well, we'll come on to that

So yeah, that was a fascinating experience. I was modelling for a diamond company and I did it without really knowing anything about diamond sourcing. And then got pulled into a media controversy around how that company was sourcing the diamonds and the ways in which it may be implicating indigenous communities in Botswana. And I met up with an anthropologist at the time to try and understand what was going on. And as I might have disclosed already, I'm a real geek, so I was genuinely interested in trying to understand the situation, and asking him a million questions. And at some point in the conversation, he said, 'Well, why don't you just come out and see for yourself.' And so I did, and we went to Botswana and travelled around for 10 days or so, discovering a kind of extraordinarily complex landscape. And also while I was there, I discovered — so the landscape around the diamond mining felt very, very complicated. But alongside that, I met these different Kalahari sand communities. And in particular these women who were making really incredible jewellery from ostrich egg shells. And so if you've seen ostrich egg shells, it's a very large, thick egg. And they would shape the shell into beads, basically, make holes, smoke some of them into darker colours, and then string together these incredibly beautiful ornate pieces of jewellery. And it seemed, at that time, to sell them for very, very low prices because there wasn't really a market there for them. And so they were haggling passersby that they'd be selling to. So from that we set up a trading route to try and sell the jewellery in Dover Street Market at much higher prices in London, all the money going back. A friend helped me set it up and all the money went back to the local communities. And I wasn't thinking of it in terms of fair trade, it just felt like a kind of simple, obvious thing to do in that context. And whereas so much of the landscape felt very confusing, that felt very simple in its ethics. And so yeah, I think, in a way accidentally, that became my first experience of a fair trade project. And then since then, I've gone on to try and do more projects like that in different ways. Which is interesting and I've kind of gone full circle because I'm now working with Sky Diamonds, which is a company who are making diamonds from harvesting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So they have in the Cotswolds, a couple of machines that collect carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and then do lab grown diamonds with the collected carbon dioxide, in a process that ends up being carbon negative, so reduces carbon dioxide levels through the process, because it's also fueled by renewable energy. And so it's interesting that now 20 years later, I'm working with diamonds again, and it feels a bit full circle in an interesting way. These are diamonds I'm very proud to promote

Diamond mining is such a fascinating topic, because I don't know if you've seen the documentary that came out about De Beers and how it's a commodity that's kind of kept artificially scarce in order to— it's a story really, isn't it that we've been told about diamonds that make them so precious. And there's this real contention about what's a real diamond? Can you declass, you know, what are so called fake diamonds — manufactured diamonds — from real diamonds. And what the documentary taught me is that there's just loads of diamonds everywhere, and so they're not as unique and precious as you might think. And actually those ostrich eggs are probably way more precious. There's probably far fewer of them and much more scarce.

As I understand it, I think lab grown diamonds are molecularly identical. So it is interesting how there's this kind of conflict in the messaging, in the industry to try and somehow argue that they're inferior in some way. But all of these things raise interesting questions around desire and beauty and why we desire these objects in the first place. I mean, I can certainly sympathise with the perspective that like why do we need diamonds at all? I mean maybe as cutting tools, you know. But why do we need them as luxury beautiful objects? I think we can apply that question to so many aspects of our lifestyles and reality. At the same time, I like to be quite pragmatic and work with the fact that humans, for whatever different reasons, often desire luxury, often desire beauty, and can we evolve our industries to feed that desire in more equitable ways.

My favourite recent discovery about the gem industry was, I went to Indonesia to go and visit a coal mine as you do. A coal fired power station, as you do when you're in Indonesia. And actually there they told us about a nuclear reactor that's been built in the jungle of Java. It's not connected to the grid, but what it does is it irradiates emeralds to make them slightly more sparkly. So that's why Indonesia has a nuclear regulator, to sort of look after that reactor, which isn't a power reactor at all. But the really fun thing was that these emeralds are being sold in Europe and actually it's a German company that built this machine to make the emeralds slightly more sparkly, which is incredible, right?

I'm so confused. The emeralds are already in the landscape, but then the nuclear plant makes them sparklier?

That's right, there are two classes of emeralds, it turns out. One which has this natural irradiance, which makes them more sparkly. And so what you do is you take normally mined emeralds, put them into this reactor, put them through a process and they come out slightly more sparkly and therefore more valuable.

And is the reactor doing anything else? Or is it only built for that purpose?

Pretty much built for that purpose? As far as I understand it. Yeah. Anyway, this is something we can carry on with bilaterally. Yeah, it's interesting.

Super interesting, yeah.

Just returning to your natural— you have this kind of natural business instinct, I think. And you've also incubated other types of businesses, do you want to tell us a little bit about what your current projects are?

Sure, although I think it's fair to say I've retired from my business career now. I was a business woman in my 20s. I guess I never really had an interest in business per se. But it became very obvious to me very quickly that economics, business, supply chains, are sort of running our world. And that if you have an interest in our world and how it works, those are the areas — at least I thought — to look at and tweak. And so that meant I became increasingly interested in working with better businesses and social businesses and what became later the B-Corp movement, etc. But in the process, I also ended up founding a few of my own companies, and trying to demonstrate ideas through new companies and new ideas. Several in the fashion space, some in the technology space, which is how me and you met each other through mutual friends in the tech space. And at some point, I realised, I think it was a really interesting journey, and I still do think that business is one of the most important areas for us to look at in terms of responsibility and change. I just realised at some point, personally, that I don't think I'm actually the best businesswoman in the world and not super inspired to run businesses and wanted to put more energy into more artistic endeavours.

But one of the products that you developed was a very sustainable sunglasses, right? With different inputs, different supply chains and a different design.

Yeah, exactly. So the first business I did with a friend was knitwear. And so we were trying to actually look at transparency in supply chains. And so we knitted goods in the UK, and worked a lot with the older community. And in a way, it was mostly grandmas hand-knitting beanies and scarves and things like that. And we would name the maker and put a quote from them on the label, which in 2009 was pretty radical as an idea, to just try and encourage people to think about the fact that when you buy something there are invisible people behind that product, there are hands making it; I mean, often machines too, but can be can be a lot of hands as well. We also looked at ecological dyes and local supply chains and all of those kinds of things to try and demonstrate what an ecologically sound fair, transparent supply chain could look like. So that was the first thing I did. Then I had another friend who was — it always ended up being like friends ideas, getting on board friends ideas, to be honest. So I had another friend who was a really good designer, and he designed these really awesome glasses. When he was on holiday, his glasses broke and so he twisted a piece of wire to hold the lenses together and then came up with this concept called Wires. And I supported him with that project and we ended up founding what became Wires Glasses, and then trying to make them in the most sustainable way possible. So the lenses were made from a caster bean product rather than petroleum, we tried to do modular design so people could replace parts of the glasses if they broke, etc, etc.

And then the thing that you've perhaps put a lot of effort and your heart and soul intowas was your book: Who Cares Wins, which I think was published in 2020. But it came on the back of four years of research. It was an amazing— I mean, by the way everyone who hasn't read Lily's book, Who Cares Wins, should do. It's a tour de force of climate solutions, and it's really beautifully put together, and you interview some amazing people. What was your favourite moment through that time? Was there something anything that stands out as something that you found particularly fascinating when you were doing your research?

Wow, there was so much. As you mentioned, I researched it for about four years and interviewed a tonne of people. And the inspiration for doing it was that I'd been working at that point in what I'll call the climate space, to simplify it. But yeah, in the climate space at that point for what felt like a long time, and it felt like there was a rising consciousness around — actually, whilst I was writing it — a rising consciousness around the environmental situation we're in. So I started around 2016. 2018 is obviously when one of the landmark IPCC reports came out. Then we had the founding of Extinction Rebellion, the school strike movement. It was interesting to write and rewrite whilst it felt like there was this dawning mainstream consciousness. Of course, there's always been a big environmental consciousness but it felt like it was going into a new level, which is great. And at the same time, it felt like a lot of the messages that are out there are understandably terrifying, and a kind of doom and gloom narrative of all the reasons we should be terrified. Which, of course, makes sense. And I've fallen down that rabbit hole a million times myself. But I could also see in the 15 or so years at that point, I've been working in this space, how many solutions existed and how many movements were growing, and how many reasons there were maybe to be optimistic, and that if we didn't try and also shine a light on these ideas and projects, and maybe be a bit more hopeful in the possibilities that exist for us, then we would just keep falling down a rabbit hole of doom and gloom — in reality, not just thought. And so that was the kind of thinking behind the book. And I really wanted to try and celebrate the different solutions that are out there. And I guess one thing that struck me when I started trying to write it was just the complexity of all these different topics, and how if you go into any particular areas, so I divided the book into different themes. I gave myself a stupidly big challenge of trying to cover a wild array of different topics, from food, to fashion, to politics, to waste to economics. And every time you go into one particular area, you find so many different opinions and camps, and arguments and polarisation. And I also thought that was interesting, and also quite problematic. And so what I was trying to do, through the research and the writing, is present, trying to remove myself and my biases and my opinions as much as I could, to try and present a hopefully quite balanced picture of the different solutions that exist and the different arguments within these different camps. So that hopefully, the reader then can make their own way, find their own way through that information. I mean, do you find that Bryony? Like you've obviously been working in this space longer than me? I would assume longer than me?

Yeah, I'd like there to be slightly less infighting and more coordinated campaigning about the things we want to see the solutions that we want to see enacted, which do require us to advocate for them. Many of the solutions are not currently economic or go against a quite a powerful incumbent lobby, so we do need to up our game. And to stop the infighting would be one thing, right? That would mean more resources were devoted to the task and not through this idea of, I mean, your phrase is lovely, because in the podcast, you use the phrase, "Who cares who wins." And that seems to be,for some people, caring about winning is almost more important than the outcome. And that's a function maybe of the passions that it arises, the emotions, but it does mean that you dissipate your energies. And it can be very counterproductive.

I think that's also to be honest, just a wider cultural problem that we have. And maybe it's exacerbated by social media, and the immediacy and the emotions that the internet arouses in its way of dialogue — misinformation. Or maybe it's always been that way, it just feels more acute than ever that there is this kind of extreme polarisation, and the kind of culture wars across not just the climate space, but many kinds of important debates and important topic areas. And sometimes it feels like we've almost forgotten that democracy depends on debate. So debate actually can be a really healthy positive thing. Me and you, Bryony, have had debates around nuclear, I'm sure we'll have more. And if they're orchestrated with respect and openness, I think debate is really important and healthy, because we need to have different ideas and perspectives coming up against each other to find sensible ways through. But sometimes it feels like it has become a kind of right or wrong, you know. Like an attempt at winning arguments, being right and proving that one's right, rather than being willing to listen and learn and be open to being wrong, actually.

Yeah, open to being wrong, open to changing your mind, open to being evidence led. These are all qualities that would make it a lot easier. There's a really brilliant book called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, who describes the different types of morality that there are on the left and the right. And it's not that one is moral and the other isn't. It's just there's a different type of morality. And the left, who seem to be synonymous with early action on the environment, tend to have a very individualistic view of how you develop your moral code. And once you've decided that individualism, respect for the individual is part of the moral code. Whereas on the right, there's much more acceptance of authority, or being led and looking to experts, or leaders really, to tell you what to think. And it's just a sort of slightly different part of the moral spectrum, but it does mean that the left is perhaps uniquely difficult in arriving at a common goal or being organised or respecting authority. And so it's sort of an imbalance really, in the political system.

Yeah, I agree, it does seem that the progressive left seems to love arguing over the details and fighting with each other as opposed to finding areas to compromise and band together. But I would also critique even the binary left-right divide, and how that creates a kind of fundamental division in our society, which allows us to forget that we're all ultimately on this fragile spaceship together, and need to find ways to communicate with each other and be open to perspectives different to our own. We ultimately probably have the same goals in mind, at the end of the day. Most people deep down probably want similar things, including a healthy ecosystem for themselves and their future children. So how do we navigate conversations better to get there? I'd love to look at that book. I just came across — a bit of a curveball — but I just came across, I just read an article by the same author in The Atlantic on his new book, which was fascinating about the impact of social media on adolescent brains. He argues that the higher rates of depression, even increasing rates of suicide amongst adolescents globally, he argues, is connected to the rise of smartphones, and social media. It's a terrifying read as a parent, I'm a mother of an eight year old, but I'm also happy to be reading it now before we've navigated choices around her access to devices.

There's another book you should read, it's called It's Complicated. Because again, I think the debate about social media is very easily polarising. And I do think, you know, I think we both agree, there's so many amazing, wonderful benefits to being in an interconnected world with information at your fingertips. But then there are all these risks and weaknesses that we have as humans, that the algorithms and the AI that are driving all of these platforms have long since surpassed us in understanding how to exploit our older brain, our desire to find out what might be threatening. And the sort of clickbait model, and the attention economy has worked out very quickly how to get us to respond. And those responses are often triggered by negative emotions, not the positive. So we're again in a very unbalanced environment where we're surrounded by things that are designed to shock and make us fearful and take extreme positions, where actually most people would be happier in the middle right, in a more comfortable, less polarising discussion. But our old brain has a way of, you know, luring us back into more lurid stories unfortunately.

Yeah. And in all the research in my book, I remember that being one of the areas — when I was writing about technology, and then I was writing a bit about kind of surveillance capitalism and kind of the cost of free, the fact that these platforms are free and how their business models work. And I remember that being one of the scariest areas of research, one of the areas I got least optimism from, given the implications and given also the trajectory that those industries seem to be on.

Did you see any signs of hope, or?

Well I mean least hope— the science and the physical realities probably give me least hope — the physics realities. But least hope in terms of industries and the different trajectories of change that we're seeing. It seems that there are many reasons to be hopeful that a lot of industries are slowly cleaning up their act, going in better directions, and that's sort of what I was looking at. Whereas, yeah, the implications of a free internet or a superficially free internet and the way that impacts on our psychology, on our economics, on our political systems was an area of real concern, especially for me because I used to be like a total tech utopian.

Well, I'm currently in California, and I know you spent some time here in San Francisco. And it's impossible not to get thrown into this tech-utopian belief system. But what I suppose I'd take hope from is that—

Tech-utopian gold rush.

Yeah, and it is a gold rush. And the gold rush at the moment is all about AI, which is another step forward. We've had mass platforms and mass communication tools, but now we're moving very swiftly into a world which the people who are building these systems themselves don't understand. So the idea that regulators and legislators and civil society can keep pace... that's what I think we need to be investing in. I think, as civil society, we need to protect the commons of our brains and hopefully, put some guardrails in around usage that mean that we sort of learn from the past mistakes, but I don't see a lot of that. I see some pockets, certain brilliant people are investing in not-for-profit versions of these to try and keep track and attract very talented people into a not-for-profit way of engaging with this. But you know, money is a very big driver in this part of the world. And everyone knows there'll be success stories from this new era. And putting up the guardrails fast enough is what worries me.

And just to switch it around for a second, what are you doing while you're there? And yeah, are there any things you've discovered, being there, that you're excited by?

Yeah, good to turn it around. Well, apart from, of course, being a Cleaning Up co host, which I'm really enjoying, I'm doing consulting. So I'm helping out not-for-profits. And I've done a couple of consultancy pieces for for-profits as well, all in the space of climate change and intersecting with policy mainly. And one of the fun things that you know, a very San Franciscan experience I had the other day, was being invited on to the USS Hornet, which is a decommissioned aircraft carrier. And they're starting to run tests on cloud whitening experiments to try and reproduce what shipping was doing, which was sending out particles, which were artificially brightening clouds and helping cool the ocean. So there's this experiment underway, and it's very public, they're not hiding it, just to start to explore whether there are technologies we can use safely, in the short term, to try and buy us some time. So that was a very San Franciscan experience. And, yeah, quite symptomatic of— there's so many people now applying themselves to this problem, and coming at it from so many different angles, I kind of see that as a strength actually. That we're not all just backing one solution. So yeah, that was, that was one of the more fun day trips that I've been on.

It makes me so uneasy to hear stories like that, you know, which is not to say that I don't agree with you that we need lots of people coming at this problem in lots of different ways, and to be open to different ways, like the need for diversity of solutions, which may include what sounds to me like geoengineering solutions. But it does make me uneasy that because we know— I looked obviously in the book at geoengineering, and ultimately we know, the oldest technology in the world, you know, that's had billions of years of r&d nature is a very safe solution to bet on, if we work out how to give nature more space to do its job. So I worry that the tech mindset of like, "Oh, it's okay, we can continue business as usual and continue creating kind of problematic systems, because we'll we'll be able to tech fix it in the future," is a kind of dangerous game and there can be unforeseen consequences from going down that path, when we have, at our fingertips, the r&d of nature. If we support that better, whether that's through more organic, regenerative agricultural systems, or ideas around rewilding or consuming less and ideas around degrowth and you know, the different ways in which you may think about giving more space for nature, to me feel like much safer bets. And I sometimes worry that the geoengineering solutions can be a distraction from the deeper changes that we need to make in order to enable nature. But I'll caveat that all with trying to keep an open mind, and agreeing that it's not a bad thing that lots of people are thinking about the solution in different ways. I don't know if that's where I would put my betting money.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I should clarify, I'm not doing any work for this project. I was just observing it. But the idea that we can— I mean, the challenge is that we've just been conducting a 100-year-long geoengineering experiment, and we've proven that we have changed the climate. And we have, we have outpaced nature. I mean, nature has been helping right: 50% of our emissions are being absorbed by the ocean and the terrestrial sinks. But my worry is that we may push nature too far. And those things that we've been relying on start to become not our friend. We start to lose the forests as sinks because the climate is no longer able to be able to sustain rainforests or that precipitation changes to such a degree or the temperatures change to such a degree, that nature can't keep up with us. And in that case, we really are back to what humans can envisage and build and do. But you know, I hope we don't get there. I just think it's, it's not, it's not impossible that we could get to that scenario.

Yeah, but I would argue — I agree, and I'm not saying that the r&d around geoengineering solutions shouldn't happen, like it should happen as a fallback. But I think that we already have very kind of clear information around the many aspects of the problem we're in and how we're exacerbating that problem, moment to moment through our economic political systems. And we are still in a moment in time where it may be possible to undo some of the future damage and to reduce the amount of change that's underway. And I just worry that we're not going to have the deep changes that need to happen more quickly, to our economic, political, cultural systems, if we believe we can sort of magic our way out of it later down the line. So I guess my worry is that it actually could potentially reduce the possibility for us to work with nature, work with Gaia, to create a more stable system.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I know you've done a lot of work in terms of telling the story of indigenous people and how they used to be much more in tune with nature. And therefore— And actually, what's been amazing now is seeing very, very developed agriculturalists and foresters going back to indigenous people to find out the wisdom that they built up over tens of thousands of years about how you live in harmony and not exacerbate environmental risks. So, yeah, it's, it's definitely there's a lot to be said—

And they still hold on to now. And to my mind that piece, which is the cultural, psychological, spiritual aspect of our situation and the crises we're in, is, to my mind, the most essential part of the puzzle. And I've got a few more episodes of my podcast, Who Cares Wins, coming out on this point. Because I really do think if we don't go really deep into the roots of the crises, which lie in ourselves, in our way of thinking, in our way of relating, then everything else is a bit band-aidy. And we may be able to come up with a solution to solve for carbon for example, we may at some point be able to figure out how to stabilise global heating and climate change. But if we haven't gone really deep into change, we will still be having other aspects of the crises playing out whether that's loss of biodiversity or pollution, even mental health, you know, rising mental health issues. These are all connected in the system we're in. And indigenous wisdom and different ways of thinking about our relationship to the planet, our relationship to life, our relationship to one another, the reason to be alive, the things to value, to me, I feel like a lot of my hope is vested in these alternatives to the Western individualistic worldview that I grew up in and that is a dominant part of our world today.

Yeah. And it is fascinating to remind ourselves that there are different ways— these are all artificial constructs that we live within, and there are different ways of doing it. And it's constantly evolving. I've just read The Dawn of Everything, which is a brilliant... sort of revision.

Well done you, it's a huge book.

Yeah, well, I listened to it really more than read it. It's fantastic.

I started it, and it's amazing. Sorry to interrupt you, but let me just throw in one more anecdote there because it circles back to emeralds, interestingly. I was recently in Colombia, and I met with different indigenous people while I was there and was learning about different aspects of their history and worldview. And interestingly, they used to make, well they still do this, this concept of offerings of payments to the Earth, where they feel it's very important to make payments to the Earth and give back to the Earth what we're taking and find a balance between what we take and what we give. And in the past, these are quite literal, and there were communities that would create very elaborate golden artifacts and emeralds — to bring us back to your introduction of emeralds — and put the gold and the emeralds into the waters, into the Earth, as a payment back to the Earth, as a way of giving back to the Earth and trying to keep balanced spiritually. I don't know if I'm explaining it very well. But it was super interesting to just see a different way of relating. And one of the indigenous men I was speaking with, was giving the example of, if you don't have so much money or so many aspirations, then life can be quite simple. And, you know, you can have— "we don't have the luxury of chairs," he was saying, "here, we just have these wooden blocks that we sit on, but we have the luxury of air. And with the luxury of the air, we can breathe and breathe and enjoy." And if you don't have so much money or so many things, your life can be quite beautiful and quite simple. As soon as you have more, you can start thinking about bigger ambitions, whether that's you want to clear a forest, you want to clear wetlands or you want to build a bigger house. And all of these things will have higher costs and they'll also create more damage in the process. And he wasn't talking about economic growth using that language, but to me, it obviously reminded me of our dominance around economic growth and questions of "enough" and "what is enough?" and "what is a high quality life?" And, and I think those are the kind of cultural questions that feel really pertinent for us to maybe consider.

I think that's a beautiful way of looking at it. I suppose, in my mind, I think humanity has— we're quite frail, and those sorts of cultures tend to build strength in us, and resilience. But they're not very tolerant of people who are not the norm, who are not able to be physically able or have weaknesses in terms of susceptibility to illness. Because you are really— and I know that obviously those cultures survived for thousands of years by becoming very clever at working out how to use nature to sustain them. But there is something about the sheer size and scale of humanity now that means we need to embrace modernity, because it has helped, in terms of childhood mortality, or lifespans, or our ability to be more inclusive in terms of diversity of people's capabilities. In my world, we would be embracing all that's positive about human ingenuity, and we would have a more energetic world in which we can use all the benefits that we get from having energy at our disposal but in a much more concentrated, less-extensive ways so that we're making far more space for nature. But that does mean you know, I think to sustain this level of population now, you're going to have to embrace science, you're gonna have to use modern technologies to keep ourselves safe at a basic level, whilst making space for nature. And I feel that that is possible, that kind of win-win outcome. But it's a long way from where we are today. And it's not something that comes naturally to the environmental movement, this idea that you do need to embrace science, and reduce our footprint through the embracing of science. Our net footprint, it might mean that in certain places, you're doing things in a very intense way, whether that's growing food or creating energy, but you're then creating space for nature. Because the extensive, low-impact way of doing things is probably the worst of all worlds.

Well just, one thing on the first point you made around inclusivity. I think it's important maybe not to generalise, there are so many different indigenous communities around the world, and many different— you know you can maybe come up with some commonalities, which is very interesting as an inquiry to do that there are some, it seems to be, commonalities between indigenous perspectives and ontologies globally. But there's of course huge difference within those different communities in rules and culture. So, I wouldn't want to say that they're all not inclusive, because I don't think that would be the correct assessment. But in terms of the other point around the benefits of science and technology. Yeah, of course, I completely agree. I'm not trying to romanticise the past or suggest that we should all be going back, winding the clock back. Interestingly, the indigenous community I just mentioned had solar panels. And I always find it interesting to see the intersection between modern technology and ancient wisdom. And of course our multicultural society, and the fact that we have fast travel and open — well we don't have open borders for many people — but mobility sometimes between borders, has allowed us different cultural exchange that even allows us to have conversations about different global perspectives. So all that to say, I think that the bringing together of different perspectives is where I hold hope. I'm not saying that one is necessarily going to trump all the others.

Yeah.

I do think that— It's been interesting in the last few years, there's been a rise in consciousness around indigenous voices and indigenous worldviews. I hope that continues. Of course, the Western paradigm is the most dominant one, and so I feel like it goes without saying that technology and science are going to keep going full steam ahead. And maybe what I'd suggest is that, how do we inflict that with different worldviews to bring more balance and nuance between these perspectives?

Yeah, and one way that we've sought to do that in the West is through representative democracy, right? It's through enabling people with different voices to be represented and then have that tier of governance that allows you to address the problems of the commons, the tragedy of the commons. So if individual pursuits start to infringe too much on the global commons, we have invented a system that enables us to take action and write rules, change the rulebook, to get different outcomes. And I feel like we're entering into a very political year this year. But there's a lot— actually another thing that's very interesting about Silicon Valley is there's a lot of talk of how does technology reinvent democracy? And in fact, you touched on some of these in your book — you know, how can we make democracy better? But my concern is that the boring way that democracy currently works, needs active engagement and active people participating in it in order for it to work. And I worry that there's been a disconnect, I think we've all started to feel like democracy is broken. But that's what a small group of very influential people want us to believe. Because actually representative democracy is amazing and is incredibly flexible and can bring voices forward. But it does involve engagement, you have to engage. And I worry sometimes that the boring and the known and the proven is not as exciting as thinking about how to reinvent democracy, when actually just a bit more engagement will be a good thing right now.

I mean, lovely to hear your optimism on it. I can definitely there's a lot of positives in the system we have. But I also spend a lot of time thinking about how broken it is, and how frustrating it feels that we have such limited— in some ways it feels like we have the illusion of choice, but then there's so little choice in terms when it comes to parties and political votes. But it's encouraging to hear your — as the political being that you are — that you have maybe more optimism than I do on that point.

Well, I just think it's given us a lot of the things that we've wanted. You know, the legalisation of same sex marriage, bringing women in to vote, ending slavery, you could go back and back. And it's always been some kind of participative democracy. I mean, you know, participation has grown and grown, we've got higher suffrage than we've ever had. But it does involve people of good character, with a talent and a desire to do it to to engage in that process, we need people to commit to it.

It's interesting that some of the examples you just gave of systemic big changes that happened, you know, I'm not a historian but from my understanding didn't actually happen through votes, necessarily. Like women weren't able to vote rights for women. They had to do civil disobedience in order to get votes for women. And many big social systemic shifts seem to have happened that way where people and civil movements have put pressure on the system not through the kind of classic voting. It's interesting to consider the role of civil disobedience in creating change and I guess the analogy now today with the civil disobedience movements we see in the environmental space.

I totally agree. And actually what I'm saying by my version of engagement is making sure that your voices are heard and using the civil rights that we have to protest, to influence that legislative process, that democratic process. But what I find sometimes in the movement is that we use all those tools — we've learned how to do civil engagement and civil society demonstrations — but they're not geared to a specific enough outcome. So I love Greta Thunberg's work, I think the Fridays for Future movement was amazing, and it's just sad that COVID interrupted its momentum. But the asks were very vague. They were ‘follow the science,’ which is not actually that helpful. And again, Extinction Rebellion, I have a lot of respect for that movement, because it did put the seriousness of the agenda, of the issue on the agenda. But again, the requests were a bit vague and too easily met and not smart enough in terms of understanding how the democratic and legislative system really works. So that's what I mean by engagement. Yes, absolutely you need that external pressure, but it needs to be connected into the systems we use for making rules in a much smarter way. So that's my plea is that we get smarter about how we're engaging with the systems we currently have. And a bit like your concern about geoengineering, we're not distracted by the shiny and new to the detriment of actually engaging what we already have and know that works, basically.

I think that actually, in some ways, it was quite wise of Greta Thunberg to not give specific solutions, because the landscape is so complex, and so I think, 'follow the science' is actually quite a sensible call to action. And actually, in my mind, a mistake that Extinction Rebellion made was supposed to be quite specific when they asked, for example, I think carbon neutrality by 2025, was one of their demands. And it was never really clear where that came from, why that date was chosen, the science behind that specific date. And of course, as we get closer to it, it becomes a milestone that's not being met. And so then what happens next? So I actually sort of disagree in the sense that I don't think specific calls to action would have been necessarily helpful. What we need is or is a wide awakening to the scale of the problem. And then hopefully from that a galvanising of all the different members of society, business organisations, NGOs, politicians, individuals, citizens, to try and find solutions, work with solutions in the disparate, different ways those might emerge. Yeah, that'd be my two cents. And of course, we do see from the climate movement and from the youth movement, many different solutions suggested along the way, whether it's the calls for loss and damage funding, increasing calls, that I think are very interesting, to do debt relief for poorer countries, to help them transition to greener economies. So we do sometimes see solutions come up— rewilding has been a big one. Yeah, but I don't know that there is one solution or one silver bullet, and the complexity, I think, is integral to the nature of the problem.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think one thing that we might be starting to do, which I think is a solution commensurate with the scale of the problem, which is to think about — we're just talking about climate here but it has an impact on biodiversity — just a fair and structured exit from fossil fuels, which hasn't been on the agenda for the longest time. It's been very cleverly kept out of the climate agenda. And what was encouraging, I think, recently is that the movement is coalescing around this pretty simple concept that we don't need fossil fuels anymore, we know how to replace them. They've got so many disadvantages and disbenefits associated with them that we can imagine life without them being far better. And this narrative that the industry is trying to play back, which is that, 'we are essential, life can't function without us,' is starting to sound increasingly hollow. So I feel like focusing in on that very obvious fix, which is let's move beyond fossil, and let's do so in an orderly way, a fair way, not not in a disorderly chaotic way, that's an ask that's commensurate with the scale of the problem and I am really encouraged to see that emerging from lots of different fora now.

And on that point, insulation, that seems like a very boring but obvious one that would help massively especially in countries like the UK, where insulation would reduce heating energy requirements massively. It's a simple solution, sometimes the unsexy low hanging fruit is where we need to look. For me also, agriculture is one of the key ones. Agriculture manages half the world's land. And we're all interacting with it everyday through the food we eat, through the products we buy, whether it's fashion or beauty products or skin products that have agricultural components in them. And it's, right now, chemical warfare for the most part across most of the land that agriculture touches, but is, on the flipside, an opportunity for extraordinary quick change in solutions if we change the agricultural systems that support biodiversity, support nature. And I've been always quite curious that it doesn't seem to be such a central part of the climate conversation. I feel like it's changing a bit, but I hope it continues to go in that direction.

Yeah, I think the conversation started in the UK with the Common Agricultural Policy reform, where because unlike in energy — although there are hidden subsidies in energy, we're not actually paying the energy companies except for the product mostly — whereas with agriculture, huge amounts of taxes are spent on subsidising, certainly in the West, agricultural practices which are actually then damaging the things we care about. So flipping over the subsidies into only for public good, or only for solving environmental problems would be a massive shift. Culturally hard to do, but the UK actually took that stance, which I think is not yet finally delivered, and the devils in the detail, but the basic statement there, 'we're not going to keep paying for all of this damaging activity,' was a bold move, and more countries should do the same.

Yay, then let's end on a note of optimism.

Absolutely and we could probably go on and on. Because as I've said, your book and your podcast covers such a rich terrain of issues. And I really appreciated your description of yourself as a piece of ribbon trying to tie together these disparate factions and I hope you'll performing that.

I think it's sellotape. Sellotape is the word I used.

That's quite interesting because that's a very modern piece of technology there, Lily

I know, it just has a funny sound to it, I like it.

So thank you for doing all you're doing, and for all the various ways in which you're making yourself have a very impactful voice in this. We'll wrap up here, but thank you again. I look forward to seeing you in person before too long. And if you're ever in San Francisco, let me know.

Thanks, darling, it was lovely to speak to you.

Excellent. Have a lovely rest of your day. Take care.

So that was Lily Cole. As ever, we'll put links in the show notes, including Lily's Book and podcast, the fascinating diamond documentary and a couple of businesses and other books we mentioned. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, subscribe and leave a review as this will help others to find us.

You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. And sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com to hear more news and views from Michael and I. Thanks to LV Maxwell, Eliza Tewson and our producer Oscar Boyd for helping make this recording possible. And thanks to you for listening.

Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital.

How to Model Climate Solutions - Ep161: Lily Cole

Bryony Worthington

Lily Cole

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