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James, you started your talk today talking about the coming twenty years
and the intense competition there is going to be over resources, water and energy and so on. Could you
just say a word or two about that?
The next few decades will reveal huge competition over basic
fundamental resources for life
of which energy, water and food are the
stand-out examples and they're all interconnected they're all related.
So how we organise our markets our
our governance systems, our incentives
around how to
bring about greater resource efficiency, greater resource productivity
well I think it'll be a paramount challenge for our society in the coming decades.
Then you moved onto how we might approach these questions.
I think you mentioned a sales job, how do we find some optimism in what feels like a
terribly complex set of equations?
If you don't watch it you become
inert
neolistic, overwhelmed by the scale of problems
and it's essential for transformation to take place
on the back of optimism.
You have to think that the future
will be better once I've solved these problems
otherwise you disable yourself
from achieving what you need to do. From where you are James, can you feel that
sense of possibility now in terms of those big challenges
a new view of competitiveness for this part of the of the west of Britain?
Perhaps surprisingly having spent over twenty years working on environment and development
issues I retain optimism
that it's possible
for a shift of consciousness to take place, for
enterprises to grow
around resource productivity
and for regions to find new development paths that are
genuinely sustainable where where economy and environment not in conflict where
the natural resource base is properly valued. And where
human scale developments could take
where there's a greater harmony between
how people live
and and the way in which
resources are consumed, so yes I think this there's opportunity here.
In the west of Britain on a scale which matches anything else in Britain that's
my proposition, do you have a view on that?
If you look at the resource base that they are discussing here, the Severn Estuary,
it's an incredibly rich natural resource, it has a great cultural
history,
it has a great economic history, there is
brainpower available for transformations to take place. It has always been, at least
in the economic history
of the United Kingdom connected to the world at large
there is an outward looking
perspective here, so
whatever these pioneers developed
turned into some kind of
rich economic base here
in the Severn Estuary you can imagine being
learned from and applied and distributed
and exported to the rest of the world.
I hear that as very exciting, a very exciting prospect
and just to finish, you said, lets start from the ecology and work upwards.
In terms of setting some objectives for this exciting prospect?
If you start with ecology
you you get a better understanding of your resource base.
Now we haven't done nearly enough
to properly value
those resources, we don't know enough about
the true value of soil quality,
hydrology,
diverse natural systems.
We're still experimenting we're still learning, and our legal system and
our economic models have not properly valued them. But
we're curious
we're open-minded about that possibility
and we have to have examples we have to have some leaders to follow
why not use this particular rich ecology
as a base and then learn how we might experiment with our social organisation
with our enterprise structures
so that we hook those to the delivery of outcomes
that are sustainable
that we reward the delivery
of a resource efficient sustainable economy.
I heard that reward word. You use that several times over. So, that's a reward back to the communities
of interest? Exactly,
to those that are participants in that system. So
we may well have reached the limit of what we can expect
a private corporation to do
to deliver the public good.
Private corporations all shareholder owned
they are profit orientated, they can behave responsibly of course but they can't ever
be
solely responsible for delivering the public goods
and these are public goods problems. An ecosystem collapses, a public goods problem.
Governments on the other hand
which we have charged with
representing our public interest
have deficiencies when it comes to implementation
the way its administration's work
the way our bureaucracies work are not sufficiently rewarded for the delivery
of outcome.
You made the point that this is about long-term as well.
In many respects
both the corporation and
the government our on too short run cycles
and they are not designed to fit
with the kind of development that would honour a
generation to come.
Whereas we have that,
we think those things,
we have that psychology, we do understand
the need to connect what we do now
with those that follow us, that's really deep rooted
in our philosophy.
But we haven't got the right vehicles for it.
We haven't built the right
delivery mechanisms
for that wish
for our actions to benefit the future rather than to punish it.