Jonathan Porritt: because these large agri-businesses are not remotely interested in the well-being of poor people in society today. They are interested, first and foremost, and in some cases exclusively, by the profitability of their business, even if that means that poor people are exposed to ever higher volumes of ultra-processed food, all the kind of unbalanced dietary inputs that we know lead people to very, very unhealthy outcomes.
Dr Rupy: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast. The show about food, lifestyle, medicine, and how to improve your health today. I'm Dr Rupy, your host. I'm a medical doctor, I study nutrition, and I'm a firm believer in the power of food and lifestyle as medicine. Join me and my expert guests where we discuss the multiple determinants of what allows you to lead your best life.
Dr Rupy: Eminent writer, broadcaster and commentator on sustainable development, Sir Jonathan Porritt is on the podcast today and I think it's pretty apt that he's being interviewed by one of the new researchers here at Doctor's Kitchen, Sakina Akoko, who is part of the generation that will have to adopt mindful climate change behaviours. Sir Jonathan was formerly director of Friends of the Earth, co-chair of the Green Party of which he is still a member, and used to be a trustee of WWF UK. And his book, Hope in Hell, was published in June 2020 that gives some indication of Jonathan's views. Jonathan and Sakina talk about a wide collection of topics including whether insect-based protein will save us and if veganism is the way to go, natural soil fertility and the importance of critters to biodiversity, how we can feed people with less meat and dairy if that's the way to go, cell-based meat and the malicious impact of big ag and industry lobbying, and personal responsibility as well as practical tips for the audience to be action-based. Now, Sakina has only been working at the Doctor's Kitchen for less than a year as a research assistant straight out of university and we've already got her experience in developing consumer digital technology products, writing well-researched and digestible articles, and now interviewing some incredible people on the podcast. I'm super impressed with her development and if you want to give some positive and constructive, I'm going to emphasize constructive, feedback, I'm sure Sakina would very much welcome that and I've attached a Google form that you can find on the podcast show notes on your podcast player wherever you're listening to this podcast. Remember, you can also download the Doctor's Kitchen app for free to get access to all of our recipes, specific suggestions tailored to your health needs. And in the meantime, Android users in particular, you can check out Eat, Listen, Read, our newsletter where I give you something to eat, something to listen to, something to read, something to watch, something to help you live a healthier, happier lifestyle for the week. You can check it out on the doctorskitchen.com, but for now, this is the conversation between Sakina and Jonathan Porritt.
Sakina: So in your book, you quote Nelson Mandela, the famous saying that he says, it always seems impossible until it's done. So I wanted to start with that today, the importance of hope and storytelling to drive change. And if you could tell us your thoughts about that.
Jonathan Porritt: Yes, well, it is a very important reminder that we are right up against it with many of these crises today, particularly the climate crisis and the so-called ecological crisis, the damage that we're doing to the natural world. And that's before you start thinking about some of the social justice issues and health issues and so on. So we've left it so late to do what we need to do to address these converging crises that a lot of people have lost hope. And the reason for thinking about that more strategically and using that quote from Nelson Mandela is quite honestly, you can never predict when a pattern of change is going to really accelerate and start making things look very different. And we just need to remind ourselves of that because otherwise, you might look at the state of the world and the state of the climate and the state of the planet, you'd say, it's too late. Game over.
Sakina: Yeah, absolutely. That's something that resonates with a lot of people, especially the younger generations because we do, we get all these messages that are very scary and alarmist, which is good because it drives us to move and to take action, but also it can seem so overwhelming to have all this information and what do we do? How do we take action and what is actually necessary? I know you talk a lot, you work with young groups, right? So what is their opinions on that? Do you feel like they help drive hope and and change or what is their approach?
Jonathan Porritt: I think it's really important. They would emphasize that the hope really is unjustified unless it's connected to action. If you're just as it were remaining in the same place, not doing very much and just hoping for the best as it were, a very passive, inauthentic hope which isn't underpinned by a determination to try and change the things that are going wrong, then for young people, that's a double insult, frankly. Because the adult world has essentially dumped this whole story about climate change, biodiversity and so on, on them. They've had very little to do with the problems associated with that, but it's dumped on them. And then they meet adults who sometimes say, yeah, but that's just the way the world works and it's not very much we can do about it, making adding insult to injury at that point. So for a lot of the young people that I work with in this space, action is the key to making that hope authentic. And for them, they would expect adults then to understand the priority that needs to be given to action-oriented responses because without that, it's just more flimflam. It's Greta Thunberg's blah, blah, blah story all over again. So expect higher standards from young people when they're thinking about what hope really means.
Sakina: That is important to link hope with action and authenticity as you say. I feel like with social media, it's quite common to have those trends and those hashtags for different movements and it's just a very momentary trend of trying to be conscious about some things, but actually behind the social appearance, there's not much work being done and there's not much information actually being consumed. So do you have any tips to be more action-based and some resources that maybe people can look into?
Jonathan Porritt: I think that there's been a bit of a setback because of COVID. In the run-up to COVID through 2019, early 2020, there was an incredible proliferation of young people's climate activism of one kind or another, not just strikes for Friday, but lots of different initiatives. And it was very easy for young people, relatively speaking, to find sympathetic colleagues in their own age group, whether it was at school or university or outside an educational context, and to share some of the actions that would come from that, whether that was protest or changes in the way people eat, travel, use energy, whatever it might be. COVID took a lot of the energy out of that movement. And now in 2022, it's a bit harder for young people to find that. But the resources are there, they're online, and a lot of young people will still, particularly at universities, will still find that student unions and organizations like People and Planet are real go-to sources of not just information but inspiration as well.
Sakina: Amazing. Thank you. So today, we talk a lot about food on the podcast and I know that today you were here to talk about food production and sustainable food production. So maybe in your book actually you talk about sustainability not being only environmental. Could you tell us more about that? What sustainability really is and the fact that it's not only applied to the environment.
Jonathan Porritt: Yeah, no, this is a big part of what I've been advocating for for a long time because there are some people who treat these environmental issues as they call them as if they were somehow completely separate from all the social and economic issues that we're dealing with. And obviously that doesn't make for very effective campaigning. So I've stressed throughout the book three extra dimensions which I think are critical. One is the social justice side of it. We're not going to get a low-carbon world for 8, 9, 10 billion people unless we emphasize the need for much greater social justice everywhere in the world. The second thing is the state of our democracy because democracy is under direct attack in so many countries today, whether you think about it from an American point of view or what's happening in India or even some European countries, countries like Poland and Hungary and so on. Democracy is now facing a massive onslaught from people who seek to weaken democracy. So I've made a big thing about that. And then the third issue which is really important for me is you have to connect this to the way people live directly. So the food-climate bit is of huge importance. And the problem about a lot of the climate campaign is that it's emphasized energy issues, transport issues, manufacturing issues, all those industrial things because yes, 75% of total greenhouse gas emissions come from those industrial activities. But now we're realizing that the other side of this which is land-based, particularly food production, is just as important to address now if we're going to make for a more comprehensive response to this. You can't do a proper, timely, purposeful approach to the climate emergency unless you're addressing the food system. The food system is inherently unjust and unsustainable. It is probably now the biggest single threat to our prospects for a low-carbon future for humankind.
Sakina: Could we dive more into some of these problems with the current food production and the food industry?
Jonathan Porritt: Yes, and I think in a way the industry, food industry has kind of got away with this for a very long time. But when you actually boil it down now and you look at where those emissions are coming from, particularly from meat and dairy consumption, we can see a very clear direction of travel. We need essentially to change our diets in all sorts of different ways. We need to very significantly reduce the amount of per capita meat consumption and per capita dairy-based consumption in our diets. Where it makes sense for people to do it, to move increasingly to plant-based, predominantly plant-based diets. And for people then to think about whether they want to adopt a vegetarian or even a vegan diet. Interestingly, at the conference today, of course, we did have a very clear reminder from one of the speakers in the panel that be mindful when you decide to become a vegan. Don't just imagine that your health will be improved. You have to think about it in a much more holistic, integrated way, particularly from the micronutrients point of view, because if you're ignoring that, you could be actually injuring your own health. So for me, the direction of travel is clear. I don't think it's necessary to say everyone's got to become a vegan or everyone's got to become a vegetarian. I don't think that's the priority right now. The absolute priority right now is to reduce per capita meat consumption by as large a fraction as we possibly can and help people find their way through to much healthier plant-based diets, which of course have improved enormously in the last 10 years. Enormously, the choice, the range, the quality, the creativity that goes into these plant-based diets is so different now that it's not really a burden. It's actually something that many people can embrace and celebrate because they know they're being healthier at the same time as they're doing what needs to be done from a climate point of view and an animal welfare point of view. And I have always argued, I'm a patron of an organization called Compassion in World Farming, and for me, the priority has always been the absolute evil of mass meat production, intensive meat production in factory farming. That is where the real evil lies because those systems are inherently exploitative, cruel, and unjust. So my campaign has always been, we actually need to get rid of all factory farming of livestock before we start worrying about whether or not people are still able to have a certain much smaller percentage or fraction of animal-based protein in their diet.
Sakina: So I wonder what are your views on insect and insect farming? Is that something you think about? I know something people have started to talk about as an alternative. Would it be just a distraction and another limited resource that we'll dive into and exploit? Or would it be, I don't know, I wonder, or would it be actually an interesting alternative for health and of people and the planet?
Jonathan Porritt: I've always been very nervous about people who jump from one bandwagon to another bandwagon and don't necessarily think about the longer-term consequences. If everybody felt they could derive the same percentage of animal-based protein from consuming insects rather than consuming chicken, pork, beef, whatever it might be, then the world of insects would be even more stressed out than it already is. We've seen appalling attrition in the insect world through poor quality farming, bad land use practices and all the rest of it. So we have to be very careful about that. Now, we are talking about raising insects in a different way. It's not that these will necessarily be causing the same damage to the biosphere, but even so, there has to be a sense of balance in all of this. One of the things I am very interested in is the use of insects to produce animal feeds because that's one of the alternatives, not just for direct human consumption, but to use the soldier fly, black soldier flies and things like that to produce an alternative to the soy-based animal feeds that we have today for some livestock. So it'll play a part in a more diverse approach to animal-based protein, but I am not, I don't think it's the alternative.
Sakina: Could you tell us more about the soil, the importance of soil health for the planet and our health, but also this insect use, I haven't heard of it before. Yeah, I would love to hear more about it.
Jonathan Porritt: So the soil health story is really critical and I've been really pleased during this conference to hear people just remind us all that without quality, healthy, vibrant soils, we're not going to be able to produce the kind of diet that we need to ensure healthy, vibrant diets for human beings. And that means in the long run, we're not going to be able to find ways of sustaining a healthy planet. Healthy soil, healthy humans, healthy planet. This is the thing that we have to understand. And one of the biggest downsides of modern farming, modern commodity-based intensive farming is that the application of huge volumes of chemicals, whether we're talking about pesticides or fertilizers, whatever it might be, have devastated natural fertility building in the soil. All of those natural structures in the soil which are based on essentially soil carbon, very rich soil carbon and a multitude, massive proliferation of different species of little critters in the soil. These chemicals have destroyed those natural fertility building systems in the soil. So when we talk not just about organic farming, but about other systems of farming, agroforestry and so on, reducing the volumes of chemicals applied to the soil to protect against pests or to encourage increased yields, that is absolutely fundamental. And I think more and more people now realize that if you're going to talk about sustainable food and farming, you have to start with the soil. You can't just jump straight to what a sustainable diet looks like. You have to start with what are we doing to protect and actually improve our soils in order to produce the balanced, nutritious diets that we need for the future.
Sakina: That's a very interesting approach and I feel like it actually links to the integrative medicine approach of having everything work together, all the plants and the natural elements work together to produce the best food in a sustainable way. And it's something we forgot with monocultures, right? We've deeply moved away from this natural approach of permaculture and all the plants helping each other out, which is the natural way. But I know a lot of pushback around that is how are we going to be able to feed the growing population? I know that's something a lot of people think about when they hear all these. So do you have any thoughts on that?
Jonathan Porritt: Yes, that obviously came up in our discussion in the panel discussion today at the conference because clearly we still have a very large number of people to feed in the world today. We're nearly at 8 billion people. It'll certainly be nine if not more by the middle of this century. But we do now know that we can feed that number of people with maximum emphasis on good nutrition through balanced diets, if we reduce our dependence on meat and dairy. Because the problem about the percentage of our nutrition that we derive from animal-based protein at the moment is the massive hectarage of land that has to be set aside to produce the crops, whether it's corn or soy or whatever else it might be, to feed the animals to feed the human beings. So if you actually take away a very significant percentage of total meat consumption, all of the land that is currently devoted to producing protein for feed, not for direct human consumption, but for feed, that land becomes available either for direct food production purposes for humankind, or it becomes available to underpin some of the new biodiversity protection measures that we need. So I don't think that we need worry about not being able to feed the world. In fact, I am pretty certain that this is a very malicious campaign being waged by big ag, by big agricultural interests to deter people from thinking more intelligently and compassionately about how to manage the balance between what we humans need and what the rest of nature needs.
Sakina: Could we talk a bit more about industry lobbying in that case? And also the thing is with individual choices when it comes to health and when you're faced with those choices in the supermarket, for example, how much of the responsibility is on the individual and how much is actually on the industry and the environment, the food environment we're in? And do we actually have power over these choices or is it a bigger issue that we're facing?
Jonathan Porritt: Both Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and myself today in the session were focused on the imbalance between the concept of personal responsibility and the absolute imperative of governments regulating to support healthier, more balanced diets for people. And I feel very strongly about this. You can't do it without people owning some of the responsibility for their own diet. That's for sure. If you think everything's going to be sorted out through government regulation, then that's not very helpful either. But behind these debates, as I was pointing out today, these industry lobbyists have some very important, clear priorities when they're talking to government ministers. And there are three of these that matter first and foremost. One, they will always press ministers for weaker standards rather than stronger standards because they know their industry will be able to remain more profitable as a consequence of that. Two, they will always press for voluntary interventions rather than regulated or legislated interventions because they know that means a lot more people will still be vulnerable to the massive advertising campaigns that they're still able to work. And thirdly, they will always emphasize the importance to ministers of cheap food. And you can see why they do that because cheap food allows them when they're talking about this to speak as if they were defenders of the people. It gives them a populist platform to come across as those who care most about people in society. So cheap food in the interest of helping less well-off people in society, keeping food affordable and all the rest of it. And this has become a truly, in my opinion, a truly vicious misrepresentation of what's actually going on because these large agri-businesses are not remotely interested in the well-being of poor people in society today. They are interested first and foremost and in some cases exclusively by the profitability of their business, even if that means that poor people are exposed to ever higher volumes of ultra-processed food, all the kind of unbalanced dietary inputs that we know lead people to very, very unhealthy outcomes. So when they go into lobby ministers, the agri-business industry, they always stick to the same text. They're always talking about less regulation, not more regulation, voluntary principle, not higher standards. They're talking about cheap food. Whereas our world, the world of campaigning NGOs, we have a multiplicity of different things that we go and talk to ministers about. You've got to do this because of climate change or biodiversity or social justice or you need to protect the soil or whatever else it might be. And we don't have as disciplined an approach to lobbying ministers as the industry does. So today I slightly mischievously referred to the not very well-known syndrome of consistent collective naivety because I think our movement still is very naive about the balance of power in the way governments make policy today, particularly this government here in the UK right now.
Sakina: That's a very interesting and important point. I think especially that it's a billion-dollar industry, right? There are labs all over the world that try and make food taste better, sound better, and have the best crisp and the best to make us buy the cheapest at the cheapest price. And when you hear that all the money that's put into those labs to make food as appealing but as nutrient poor as possible, it's quite shocking to hear.
Jonathan Porritt: And it's absolutely strategic. We've got used to understanding the presence of big oil in our world has become massively problematic. And the big oil and gas companies are one of the reasons why we're seeing this accelerated move towards a very destabilized climate. We need to understand that big ag is as destructive and pernicious a presence in society as big oil. And frankly, at the moment, we're not there yet. We tend to give a lot of these big food companies the balance of doubt, as it were. We give them a certain amount of leeway that we no longer give the big oil and gas companies because we now know the big oil and gas companies are basically out to maintain their own interest at the expense of the future of life on Earth. Well, so are some of the big ag companies. And I was saying today in my talk, we have to spell this out because if people think there's any residual desire to help people through the creativity and the innovation and the work that they're doing on that side, that has nothing to do with it. It's everything to do with maintaining profit margins.
Sakina: So do you think there is a place for a healthier food industry and big companies that actually
Jonathan Porritt: Yes, I do, of course, because in a way what I thought was very interesting in Henry Dimbleby's opening talk today, which was really interesting because he was talking about the government's response to his reports to them on the need for a different food and farming system. And at one moment in a rather interesting insight, he said, the big retailers and the food manufacturers and the fast-moving consumer goods companies, they're all trapped. And to a certain extent, even though they know there has to be profound change now in the food system because of all of these related issues surrounding obesity and ultra-processed food and impacts on the planet and the climate and so on, because they know that now, but he was making out, they don't know what to do about it. They don't know how to free themselves of this model of massively commoditized, industrialized agriculture based increasingly on ultra-processed food. They don't know how to free themselves of it. So in a way, they're as trapped as consumers are trapped. Now, frankly, I don't agree with that. They may be trapped, but they're nothing like as trapped as most people are in a food system that often works against their own interest. But that doesn't take away from the fact there's an opportunity for people to change now, to begin to think very differently about how to bring better, more nutritious, balanced food product into our diets so that we can find solutions to all of these problems. And some companies will do it. They start small and sometimes they get bigger. We've got lots of new startups now. Plant-based foods, for instance, was a minority interest to investors and capital markets 10 years ago. Now, multi-billion dollar companies are playing in that plant-based space. We've probably seen this huge surge of interest in cellular agriculture, call it what you will, lab-based meat, whatever it is, using cells of animals then to go on and through very sophisticated fermentation processes to create artificial meat or cell-based meat of that kind. Now, lots of people have reservations about this, but it's going to happen. And you can see how new companies and some of the old companies who are realizing what this might mean are now putting more of their money into that kind of approach. So capital markets can work if governments regulate those markets effectively. That's the bit that's missing.
Sakina: Lab-based meat is a very interesting. Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about this debate, but it does feel like it's still man-made. So I wonder with those products that come up and those new companies and the fact that we have an increasing knowledge in the importance of sustainability and better food production, how do we make informed choices without being carried away by the labels and the claims that companies might make about their products and how do we check, how do we fact-check that these are actually true and it is sustainably made and maybe even ethical, human ethical point of view. So how do we check all of these as consumers?
Jonathan Porritt: Well, that is going to be a big challenge. And caveat emptor is as good a watchword for consumers today as it's always been. Just because it's making out that it is greener, more sustainable, more healthy, kinder to animals, all of these claims have to be checked as rigorously as any other claims in the marketplace. On the welfare side of things, animal welfare side of things, I think there's very little doubt that if we were able to see higher volumes of affordable cell-based, lab-based meat displacing the use of livestock, real animals in the animal-based protein supply chain, there's no doubt that that's a massive uplift in welfare issues. And a lot of people who become vegan, for instance, or vegetarian, primarily because they're concerned about welfare, not always because they're concerned about diet or about climate, whatever it might be. People who have that as their primary concern in society will definitely want to see it possible for more people to swap out of animal-based protein rearing animals often in very cruel conditions in factory farms and taking advantage, if they still feel that their life would be impoverished without access to some kind of animal-based protein, taking advantage of this new technology. And we will see that happen. We're it's early stage, still early days in terms of this new industry, but five, 10 years out, this will be huge. It will be huge and I know a lot of people won't like that, but it will be huge. And I think what your question points to is how do we regulate it for the best possible outcome for people, planet and animals.
Sakina: And how transparent we can be in how they were, how it was made, what goes inside it and in terms of health and
Jonathan Porritt: Absolutely. And also the carbon footprint. Some of these fermentation processes, cell-based processes are very energy-intensive. So you might end up with a higher carbon footprint if you do it in the wrong way than you do from raising an animal in a certain way. So all of these things have to be taken into account.
Sakina: That is an interesting point for sure. I feel it's all things that we need to keep speaking about to make sure that it's not just new trends and new names and new technologies, but it's actually improving the issues we are trying to tackle. So could you tell us more about the main takeaways of today's talk then in terms of the solutions to create a more sustainable food and farming system? Is there any new, maybe not new actually, but just what were the main takeaways from the chat today? What did people bring to the table in terms of how we can change this and how it can be improved in the next 10 years?
Jonathan Porritt: Well, I haven't talked to any of the participants after our session, so I don't know what their takeaways were, but for me, I heard two things really. The first is that we tend to work in different silos. So this was predominantly a health and nutrition-based audience as a consequence of the conference that's been going on for two days before this. And the intersection between those interests and the interests of environmentalists, of course, is via food and nutrition and the ways in which we can get healthier diets. And what I felt was being made very clear today in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's comments, Henry Dimbleby's comments was, we've got to think in a more coordinated way across these different constituencies of interest. And for me, that's always been a missing part of the picture. If we can't put these things in a more integrated picture, then we're not likely to be as influential with the politicians as we need to be. The second thing I heard was that we are getting better at understanding exactly how big an uplift this would be for society in terms of better health outcomes for people, addressing really cruel issues about food poverty in this apparently a very rich and wealthy nation, and thinking about doing all of this in ways that simultaneously protect environmental issues, low carbon, biodiversity friendly, all of this kind of stuff. So that uplift is so exciting to think about that, that if we could just get people to think more holistically about it, you never know, we might actually see the transformation that we need.
Sakina: The collaboration side and the communication side of it is very, and in a similarly to integrative medicine and care for people is all the different practitioners working together, communicating and ensuring that all parts are covered. So how do you think we can improve that communication between different parties?
Jonathan Porritt: I think we need to be more alert to all of this. So I'm, most people would call me an environmentalist. I've always been involved in animal welfare issues. I've had a strong interest in health and nutrition for a long time. My dad was a medic and my mother was a nurse, so I've kind of been in the world of health for a long time. So for me, when I see that word integrative, I'm thinking, yeah, obviously these things are all so richly interconnected, but you've got to be open about these links. You've got to be curious about them. You've got to want to understand what this connectivity actually looks like and not be driven down a particularly narrow silo of intellectual interest and never look beyond that silo. People who do that, go narrow and don't do this and keep their peripheral vision open to what the world looks like, that means we miss a trick to think about these things in much more creative ways.
Sakina: So maybe as we're closing, maybe do you have any tips right now, so what you do when you go grocery shopping, how you consume, how you ensure, so tips, practical tips for the audience for me of how you consume better, how you're aware of this impact and what you do every day and the practical life in our current setting that is slowly changing.
Jonathan Porritt: Yes, I have, I've been involved in this world of better environments, better outcomes for people for since 1974, so it's been a long journey. And I'm one of the things that I've stuck to is I'm quite resistant about giving specific guidance to people about what they should or shouldn't do. I've always sort of wondered a bit about whether that's quite the role that I should play. But I'm very clear that it's possible to advocate for a really ambitious reduction in animal-based protein as a critical precondition of better health and environmental outcomes. And I advocate for that regularly. And what that means is that for me personally, I've a long time ago now, reduced the amount of meat that I eat very considerably, but I'm not a vegetarian, I'm not a vegan. And if for instance, I'm lucky enough to go and visit a farm where one of my colleagues in this world is a brilliant organic farmer producing absolutely unbelievably wonderful lamb or something like that. And lunch consisted of a beautiful dish cooked with their own lamb. Would I say, sorry, I'm not going to eat that today? No, I wouldn't. I'd enjoy it because that's all part of how I would see a more balanced diet. I'm a great fish eater as well, and there are all sorts of ethical issues associated with that now, which we're all having to think about much more carefully. So even a pescatarian, pescatarian diet is getting a little bit more problematic from a welfare and sustainability point of view. So even something like that, you have to be very mindful about every single purchase you make.
Sakina: And it's all in moderation, I assume, right?
Jonathan Porritt: For me, it's very, it simply did keep cropping up today. Just maximize diversity, maximize wholeness in what you're eating, so foods that haven't been processed or messed around, maximize that, whether you're talking about fruit and vegetable or nuts, whatever it might be, and maximize diversity. And if you do that, it's a pretty solid foundation on which to build a healthier lifestyle through a better diet.
Sakina: Thank you. So we started with your book and hope, and in your book, another really interesting point is the importance of storytelling and vision for the future to drive change because we can't get to a world that we haven't thought about before. So could you tell us a story about your vision, how you see things where we're going to be in 10 years or 20 years, the ideal world, just an optimistic vision about
Jonathan Porritt: It's a difficult question, but my not this book I wrote, but Hope and Hell, but the book I wrote before that was a book called The World We Made. And it was written through the words of a fictitious person from 2050 looking back at how we navigated from the very difficult position we're in now to a much, much better world by 2050. And I was able to bring that world to life, to talk about it in terms of how people lived in 2050, what we'd done to address the climate emergency, how we'd literally transformed land use patterns to create better diets for people and better food justice for people the world over. What we did to live more convivially in our cities, combat the problems about loneliness as well as the problems about obesity. So that was the place where I was able to literally say, it's never, we've messed up the planet, it's going to take a long time to get back to something that it used to look like, but we could have so much better a world in 2050 than we're currently on track for, as long as we get on with it now.
Sakina: I would definitely check out this book. Thank you so much for your time today. It's perfect on time. So thank you. That was a great conversation and I really appreciate the hope side and the optimistic side, but also the very realistic and tackling the issues and not being scared to say what has to be done. So thank you for your approach and your time today.
Jonathan Porritt: Thank you. Enjoyed it.
