Stuck Monkey: The Deadly Planetary Cost of the Things We Love

"It’s a fantastic book. It’s not an academic book, but it is written by a really good and long-time writer in these areas. You want everyone involved in economics and climate change to just be pulled up short every now and then and ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ The monkeys, of course, are us. At the beginning of the book, James Hamilton-Paterson describes this tribe of hunters who hunt monkeys and eat them. The way they do it is they put a banana in a jar with a narrow entrance, and the monkeys can’t resist the banana. They put their hand in, and even though they could get their hand out, they don’t because they’re just addicted to it. What he is essentially saying is, ‘Look, before you get too carried away with various other explanations, remember there’s something fundamental about us humans and what we’re doing. That’s why our planet is going the way it’s going.’ Essentially, it’s about the fact that deep in our human nature is an insatiable desire to consume. We just can’t resist it. He goes through pets; through flying and transport; through fast fashion. He points out, in each of these areas, how destructive these activities are, how much damage they’re doing. It brings home, at a personal level, what we humans are up to. Several years ago, I went past a demonstration outside an oil company, and there were school kids there on a climate strike. It was wonderful. These were bright kids, really caring passionately, prepared to get out on the street and engage. But I wondered how many of them were flying off on holiday, by themselves or with their family, to a beach somewhere, and doing all the consumption that’s involved in flying. I read somewhere that the traveling footprint of environmentalists compared to everybody else is roughly the same. It’s this disconnect between what you’re doing and what you’re protesting about—blaming these ghastly companies. “Deep in our human nature is an insatiable desire to consume” In the book, Hamilton-Paterson does fall, at the beginning, into the trap of saying it’s these giant corporations. It isn’t! The book actually tells you it isn’t them—it’s us that’s doing the damage. It really brings it home to you. It ultimately poses the question that nobody really wants to address (and he doesn’t really answer it), which is: ‘Are we doomed? Is the reason we’re destroying our planet because human nature plus technology is going to do this, that we’re just programmed to do this, that evolution has made us like this? Or are we capable of constructing a framework to constrain and confine our natural predilection to consume more and more and more?’ I think that’s an open question. I think all environmentalists have to think quite hard about setting a frame that constrains the pollution that you and I and everybody else does in a socially just way—rather than simply think it’s someone else’s fault. Hamilton-Paterson’s book is so well written. It’s confronting everyone’s prejudices. He deliberately starts off with pets because people like pets. The book is in your face, in a very easy-going way. I thought it was a brilliant book. And it’s sobering. That’s the word I would use. I never intended to write anything other than academic books, but a publisher came to see me in about 2010 or 2011 and said, ‘I’ve read all your stuff. This is the book you should write. It’s all about climate change and why we’re getting it wrong.’I was completely bowled over by this but thought, ‘OK, I’ll rise to the challenge!’ I wrote a book called The Carbon Crunch , which was designed around the question: ‘Why, after (at that stage) twenty years of effort, have we achieved so little?’ Indeed, a lot of what I’ve subsequently written is still about, ‘Why have we achieved so little?’ I got distracted in 2012, when I was asked by David Cameron to chair the Natural Capital Committee. I’m very unpolitical. If a politician asks me to do something and they’re elected, I’ll do my best. We had a remit in the Natural Capital Committee to develop natural capital thinking and work out how to impose that. We worked on the 25 Year Environment Plan , the Environment Act, the Agriculture Act (with Michael Gove) and that whole programme. While I was doing it, I thought, ‘I quite liked writing The Carbon Crunch !’ The first part of the Natural Capital Committee was about what natural capital means, so I wrote a book—which is deliberately designed to be accessible—called Natural Capital . I stand by it all, still, now. As we went on, we got to the application and the development of the 25 Year Environment Plan. It’s about the only thing I’ve ever done that’s now in law. I wrote a book called Green and Prosperous Land to explain how we could do it, what agriculture would look like, what our cities would look like, etc—again, for a popular audience. After that I thought, ‘I’m finished. I’ve written everything I want to write.’ But then I read the introduction to a climate change committee report by John Gummer, its chairman. It was their advice to government about whether to adopt a 100 per cent net zero target. He wrote that when we get to the net zero, we’ll no longer be causing climate change. I was so angry because this is so obviously not true."