Joanne Lockwood: Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the
Joanne Lockwood: Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have
Joanne Lockwood: interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation
Joanne Lockwood: around the subject of inclusion, belonging and
Joanne Lockwood: generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive.
Joanne Lockwood: To join me in the future, then, please do drop me a line to
Joanne Lockwood: jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk.
Joanne Lockwood: That's S-E-E Change Happen dot CO dot UK. You can catch up
Joanne Lockwood: with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.
Joanne Lockwood: So plug in your headphones, grab a
Joanne Lockwood: decaf and let's get going.
Joanne Lockwood: Today is episode 86 with the
Joanne Lockwood: title"Voices Uniting For Our Planet"and
Joanne Lockwood: I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Nicola Peel.
Joanne Lockwood: Nicola describes herself as a solutionist,
Joanne Lockwood: environmentalist and a speaker.
Joanne Lockwood: And when I asked Nicola to describe her superpower, she
Joanne Lockwood: said, being an inspirational speaker also, she's told
Joanne Lockwood: and getting shit done.
Joanne Lockwood: So, Nicola, welcome to the show.
Nicola Peel: Hello, Joanne. It's nice to be here.
Joanne Lockwood: Nicola, voices uniting for our planet and
Joanne Lockwood: getting shit done. I've got to hear more about this. Tell me more.
Nicola Peel: Well, it's exactly what we need right now. We need
Nicola Peel: to see change happen. We need to get together
Nicola Peel: and see our differences, not our. Sorry.
Nicola Peel: See our similarities, not our differences, because we're really good
Nicola Peel: at finding ways to divide us, this, us
Nicola Peel: against them. And we see it so much in the environmental
Nicola Peel: movement. And for me to even say that I'm an
Nicola Peel: environmentalist, the first thing is, oh, what, you just stand there and
Nicola Peel: protest, do you? It's like, no, I don't. I do a lot more.
Nicola Peel: And, yeah, and that's what I do. I get shit done. And that's real stuff
Nicola Peel: with my hands, building infrastructures and helping people
Nicola Peel: that most need it. So, yeah, that's really, I suppose, a little bit
Nicola Peel: of an intro. So you picked up on
Joanne Lockwood: the stereotype, the image that people have in the head of an
Joanne Lockwood: environmentalist, the hippie, the tree huggers
Joanne Lockwood: that chained themselves to railings. That's the
Joanne Lockwood: media trope. And media create these
Joanne Lockwood: tropes to dehumanise, to
Joanne Lockwood: disenfranchisE, to divert attention.
Joanne Lockwood: So why is the media latching on to
Joanne Lockwood: environmental concerns as a
Joanne Lockwood: negative and creating these negative tropes, not
Joanne Lockwood: amplifying them in a positive light? So I'm a big
Joanne Lockwood: media hater, if you like. I like to bash the media because they influence everything
Joanne Lockwood: we do. So why do you think environmentalists have this bad name, if
Joanne Lockwood: you like? Well, I suppose we have to like anything. Look
Nicola Peel: behind who owns it, who has to benefit from it?
Nicola Peel: I've got a good example, actually, with National Geographic. And
Nicola Peel: I made a film, Blood of the Amazon, many years ago. I went from the
Nicola Peel: headwaters in Ecuador, all the way down the Amazon river, and I made a
Nicola Peel: film. And they were interested, but they said to me, yes, but
Nicola Peel: you can't name any names. And the name was Chevron,
Nicola Peel: Texaco. They were the ones that created this
Nicola Peel: massive legacy in the Amazon. But they were
Nicola Peel: interested only if I didn't name the. You know,
Nicola Peel: it never occurred to me. I thought, well, National Geographic, they're all about nature. They
Nicola Peel: love nature. Of course they're going to be interested in the real
Nicola Peel: story of what's happening in the Amazon. But then
Nicola Peel: I picked up one day one of the magazines,
Nicola Peel: and I'd never realised, I'd never really noticed it before. All the
Nicola Peel: advertising from BP and from Shell
Nicola Peel: and Big Oil who advertised in Nat Geo. And
Nicola Peel: so it's like that with most media. If we look behind
Nicola Peel: who owns it, where's the money? Follow the
Nicola Peel: money. And that's why, really, it comes down to
Nicola Peel: the same old story, why they don't want to give us a voice.
Joanne Lockwood: There's a few American presidents ago, I can't remember which one it was.
Joanne Lockwood: You probably know the story where the whole
Joanne Lockwood: concept of climate change was almost,
Joanne Lockwood: like, buried as a non thing. You probably
Joanne Lockwood: know the story, but we were talking about climate change, the impact of the
Joanne Lockwood: planet, the global warming. All these things were being
Joanne Lockwood: scientifically proven and evidenced until, I guess, they
Joanne Lockwood: got lobbied by the oil companies or
Joanne Lockwood: the car manufacturers, whoever that may have been. And
Joanne Lockwood: suddenly it all changed, didn't it? There was a couple of American
Joanne Lockwood: Presidents ago, if I remember rightly well, Al. Gore
Nicola Peel: was the almost president, vice president,
Nicola Peel: and if you haven't already watched his inconvenient truth,
Nicola Peel: it says what it is on the can. It is an inconvenient
Nicola Peel: truth to everybody. Nobody wants to change.
Nicola Peel: And, yeah, he really clearly laid it out. We've known.
Nicola Peel: Well, definitely the oil companies have known since
Nicola Peel: the. What they're doing. So it's of
Nicola Peel: their interest and their shareholders interest to make sure
Nicola Peel: that they can just carry on business as usual.
Joanne Lockwood: Oh, cool, you're right. I remember that now. Yeah. Wasn't that around
Joanne Lockwood: Ronald Reagan or just after Ronald
Joanne Lockwood: Reagan? It was that. It was around that era, wasn't it? We don't think it
Nicola Peel: was that long ago. I think you might be talking about the Kennedys back then
Nicola Peel: when he put solar panels up the White House. And then they were told they
Nicola Peel: had to take the solar panels off of the White House. I mean, this is
Nicola Peel: like way ahead of their time. And
Nicola Peel: we're still talking about whether or not it's a good idea to get power from
Nicola Peel: the sun. As you say, we're
Joanne Lockwood: invested in the status quo and the world
Joanne Lockwood: is financed and run by
Joanne Lockwood: these big global corporations based on oil control
Joanne Lockwood: and power, isn't it? And even if you look at the dynamics of the Middle
Joanne Lockwood: east, what's going on in the Middle east right now, a lot of the troubles
Joanne Lockwood: in the Middle east all around power dynamics around oil and energy.
Joanne Lockwood: When I say power, I mean power in both senses of the word, political
Joanne Lockwood: power, as well as environment, production of electricity,
Joanne Lockwood: et cetera. It's a tough thing to change, isn't it?
Joanne Lockwood: Especially you look at the American car manufacturers
Joanne Lockwood: have huge, great employment,
Joanne Lockwood: often in the least employed areas of the US,
Joanne Lockwood: the Rust Belt, where poverty and employment is really tough. That's where
Joanne Lockwood: a lot of the manufacturing is, and making these kind of
Joanne Lockwood: changes. Advancement isn't good for politics, is it?
Nicola Peel: No, definitely not. I mean, it's not good for a lot of things.
Nicola Peel: And I kind of wonder if we need to change
Nicola Peel: our names. We call ourselves still Homo sapiens, which was
Nicola Peel: sapiens wise, and we don't seem to be acting very
Nicola Peel: wisely at the moment. I think we could be. It's almost like, how about we
Nicola Peel: change our name to Homo Petrolius?
Nicola Peel: Because our whole reality
Nicola Peel: revolves around the stuff. And
Nicola Peel: absolutely everything we do, we get up in the morning and
Nicola Peel: we'll plastic thing of milk and then we drive to
Nicola Peel: work. And then absolutely everything we are surrounded by is
Nicola Peel: made from it. So to change the
Nicola Peel: industry means changing everything. And
Nicola Peel: that's just inconvenient. People don't want to change. It's so much easier to jump
Nicola Peel: in your own car, fly away on holiday and just keep on living the
Nicola Peel: good life. And this tiny minority
Nicola Peel: of us that are able to do that are not prepared
Nicola Peel: to stop just because a few radicals are
Nicola Peel: saying that it's not good and we shouldn't be doing it. There's not the evidence
Nicola Peel: of why. If everyone else is doing it, then why should I stop?
Nicola Peel: Which perpetuates the problem of
Nicola Peel: mostly it's all doom and gloom and, oh, if you become an environmentalist, you're
Nicola Peel: going to be running around in a tatty old shirt and like, flip flops
Nicola Peel: or something, instead of thinking, which is where I come into
Nicola Peel: it. I don't want to talk about the doom and the gloom
Nicola Peel: and climate change and the woes of how bad it really is. There's
Nicola Peel: enough people talking about that. I want to talk about what the future could
Nicola Peel: look like. If we move towards the
Nicola Peel: ecological age, where we actually work with
Nicola Peel: nature rather than against it, then what would the world look
Nicola Peel: like? Talk about ages like that.
Joanne Lockwood: And again, I think I saw something on the news recently that we've
Joanne Lockwood: entered a new age of the planet, because
Joanne Lockwood: you will now be able to detect this era in
Joanne Lockwood: the striation to the Earth's core and crust when you do
Joanne Lockwood: things. So that's how the Jurassic, mesotric, all these kind of
Joanne Lockwood: layers are built up. We've now got one that shows our environmental
Joanne Lockwood: impact as an age, haven't we? Yeah. The Anthropocene.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, that's it. It is the age of the human. You
Nicola Peel: cannot get away from our impact. Whatever corner of the
Nicola Peel: globe, you can be as remote as you like. In the Arctic,
Nicola Peel: in the middle of the Amazon, you cannot get away from
Nicola Peel: micro particles of plastic. You cannot get away
Nicola Peel: from contamination, which is what the human legacy is right
Nicola Peel: now. You talk about micro particles.
Joanne Lockwood: It's in toothpaste, isn't it? It's the little tiny abrasive things in
Joanne Lockwood: toothpaste, little plastic balls that we're cleaning our teeth.
Joanne Lockwood: Inevitably, we're ingesting them, being part of our. In all
Joanne Lockwood: of our internal organs. Everything we eat has got micro particles
Joanne Lockwood: of plastic in it. We're going to be
Joanne Lockwood: oxygen, nitrogen, water and plastic before too long. Aren't we been born
Joanne Lockwood: with plastic in us? Yeah. I mean, you kind of remind me there
Nicola Peel: of the spaceship analogy where the Earth, it's
Nicola Peel: a bit like a spaceship flying through the universe,
Nicola Peel: and we're all these passengers on the spaceship, and
Nicola Peel: all the red lights are flashing. Water,
Nicola Peel: oxygen, waste, biodiversity
Nicola Peel: loss. The lights are all flashing and we're just hurling through
Nicola Peel: space, actually not taking any notice
Nicola Peel: whatsoever of these flashing lights. And,
Nicola Peel: well, actually, what does this mean for humans if we
Nicola Peel: carry on like this? And I've spent 20
Nicola Peel: years working alongside indigenous people in the Amazon,
Nicola Peel: and I spend time with them where they have
Nicola Peel: so little, but they're always laughing and they're always
Nicola Peel: happy. It's very, very rare to see anybody
Nicola Peel: depressed. And when I come back to the UK
Nicola Peel: and I hear about the amount of depression and suicide,
Nicola Peel: teenage suicides, and I look at these two realities
Nicola Peel: where I've had 1ft in each reality, and the difference,
Nicola Peel: it's just incredible. And it just reminds me over and over
Nicola Peel: again that money does not buy happiness. All the stuff
Nicola Peel: that we continually fill our lives with, thinking
Nicola Peel: that it's going to somehow bring us happiness. It just won't. And what we
Nicola Peel: desperately need is to reconnect with that which is
Nicola Peel: real, the world around us.
Joanne Lockwood: Is it because we haven't managed to
Joanne Lockwood: sell the problem, sell the pain, to
Joanne Lockwood: mean we see David Attenborough, see Blue Planet,
Joanne Lockwood: we see all these programmes and we see the impact of
Joanne Lockwood: us as humans on animals. We see turtles covered in
Joanne Lockwood: plastic. We see you cut open birds and as you see
Joanne Lockwood: Their stomachs full of fishing nets and plastics, and
Joanne Lockwood: we're seeing that impact on animals or on
Joanne Lockwood: creatures. We look at the rivers,
Joanne Lockwood: the water companies pumping untreated sewage into our rivers.
Joanne Lockwood: We see the environmental impact of it being covered in
Joanne Lockwood: algae, the fish diet. It took almost a generation to
Joanne Lockwood: clean the Thames up, didn't it, for all the pollution that was in the Thames.
Joanne Lockwood: So we know when we impact water,
Joanne Lockwood: how it kills off animals and creatures live
Joanne Lockwood: in the water. We can see that impact all the time. Is it because we
Joanne Lockwood: don't see enough people dying in the
Joanne Lockwood: air? Because the air looks clean. We don't detect
Joanne Lockwood: dirtiness in the air. Probably our noses, our mouths, our lungs are
Joanne Lockwood: probably used to filtering it and accepting the taste of air as it is.
Joanne Lockwood: We got people complaining about the UlEZ in London. UleZ is sort
Joanne Lockwood: of like, let's get this down to 20 miles now. Let's have a UleZ
Joanne Lockwood: zone, people. Go, oh, that's going to make me go later for work. What about
Joanne Lockwood: all the children are dying? We talk about lead in petrol. We got to unlead
Joanne Lockwood: it. We got lead in paint, we got rid of that. Sorry, I'm talking too
Joanne Lockwood: much. Go. You're the expert. You're just totally there.
Nicola Peel: It's very, very true. If we could see the CO2 coming out of
Nicola Peel: exhaust, if we could see carbon dioxide,
Nicola Peel: the trails of black left by aeroplanes, the trails of black
Nicola Peel: left by all the shipping and the transport.
Nicola Peel: But we can't see it, it's invisible. So that
Nicola Peel: would be different if we could see this lingering. And there are
Nicola Peel: actually cameras, which are fascinating, where you can
Nicola Peel: actually witness what air pollution looks like
Nicola Peel: visually. So that is part of it, is that? Yes. We can't see it,
Nicola Peel: so we kind of know about it. There's been loads of information.
Nicola Peel: People are in a state of denial. They don't want to
Nicola Peel: know. It's too uncomfortable. So the
Nicola Peel: imagery that we see know floods and
Nicola Peel: everything, which is just these atrocities that are happening around the world,
Nicola Peel: but still. In England, for example, we're in a little bubble here. We're in
Nicola Peel: Goldilocks land. Nothing too bad. Has happened to us, we
Nicola Peel: can just Carry on. Hey, it might be nice, climate change, because it might get
Nicola Peel: a bit hotter in the, you know, we can come up with all
Nicola Peel: sorts of ideas about why we don't really want to talk
Nicola Peel: about it. And then it's this other divide,
Nicola Peel: it's getting bigger. Are you a climate denier or
Nicola Peel: are you a Greta Thunberg follower? And it's actually
Nicola Peel: really becoming very toxic. The world of. On what
Nicola Peel: side do you stand so often when people ask me, oh,
Nicola Peel: do you speak about climate change? No, I don't. I'm a solutionist.
Nicola Peel: There's enough people showing you the graphs and talking about climate
Nicola Peel: change. I want to talk about the solutions. I want to talk about what we
Nicola Peel: can do rather than what we can't do, because there's not enough
Nicola Peel: airtime given to that. We don't have a
Nicola Peel: vision of the future. Most people can't see it
Nicola Peel: and if we can't see it, we're never going to get there. So, yeah, I
Nicola Peel: think that's part of what my part in the jigsaw is.
Joanne Lockwood: It's showing, painting that realistic picture, isn't it? And you say it's the
Joanne Lockwood: solutions around, not just telling us what the pain point is,
Joanne Lockwood: it's giving us the ideas and the way out of those.
Joanne Lockwood: If you do nothing, this is the picture. If you do something, this is the
Joanne Lockwood: picture. If you do lots, this is the picture. I think you're right.
Joanne Lockwood: Seeing pictures of polar bears having their environment
Joanne Lockwood: shrunk, or the fact that you've got seals who used to live on
Joanne Lockwood: these ice flows now are more vulnerable to killer whales because their ice flows
Joanne Lockwood: are dissolving too quickly. You see all these pictures of animals, it's
Joanne Lockwood: so detached from reality because it's not in your back.
Joanne Lockwood: Mean, was it? Recently, the Rishi Sunak and
Joanne Lockwood: co decided to put back our pledge on electric
Joanne Lockwood: vehicles by another five years, saying it was too tricky to get the infrastructure
Joanne Lockwood: in place. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but
Joanne Lockwood: unless you're committed to a path, it's always going to be difficult.
Nicola Peel: Absolutely. And there is no silver bullet. And even
Nicola Peel: the idea of all going on to electric vehicles, that's
Nicola Peel: not what we want either. We fundamentally need
Nicola Peel: system change and that means public Transport, it means car
Nicola Peel: sharing. The idea of everyone giving up their fossil fuel
Nicola Peel: car and getting an electric car, it's just never going to happen. A We don't
Nicola Peel: have the resources to mine what is needed to build
Nicola Peel: an entire fleet of electric vehicles, but we can learn from
Nicola Peel: other countries. I've spent a lot of time in South America where it's all
Nicola Peel: minibus. Everyone gets around by minibus. We have these massive
Nicola Peel: buses that quite often drive around empty.
Nicola Peel: But maybe that's not necessary. Maybe we need to look at our
Nicola Peel: whole infrastructure of how we get around. We've been talking about
Nicola Peel: carpooling for a long time. Nobody does it, though.
Nicola Peel: So how do we create the change? We know what's
Nicola Peel: needed. So how do we get from where we are to where
Nicola Peel: we need to go? And is it enough for people
Nicola Peel: to see the visuals? And I think when you have
Nicola Peel: your own first hand experience and you see it yourself, which
Nicola Peel: I suppose really made it even more real
Nicola Peel: for myself. When I first started in 2000 in the
Nicola Peel: Amazon, I didn't know that there was these massive oil spills in the
Nicola Peel: Amazon. But it wasn't just seeing the rivers
Nicola Peel: running black and the effects on the
Nicola Peel: creatures. It was when I started to see the children
Nicola Peel: that were covered in skin lesions. And
Nicola Peel: the highest rate of childhood leukaemia in the
Nicola Peel: world is the children in the Amazon. Now, why
Nicola Peel: don't we know about that? Because it's much
Nicola Peel: easier to talk. Oh, yeah, nature's being
Nicola Peel: contaminated. Yeah, it's the oceans or it's the
Nicola Peel: forest, but the people, it's a different thing. If people were to see what I
Nicola Peel: see of how sick the people are that live in
Nicola Peel: the forest because they drink the water,
Nicola Peel: then you say, well, hang on, this isn't right. Why are all these
Nicola Peel: kids in the middle of the Amazon so sick? Oh,
Nicola Peel: so I can just drive to Texaco and go and fill my car up. How
Nicola Peel: does that make us feel? So that's where I feel
Nicola Peel: like we need to actually feel what's
Nicola Peel: happening in a real way. This isn't just
Nicola Peel: some know, it's real life, it's actually happening
Nicola Peel: right now. I think maybe if you haven't seen it, you can't really understand
Nicola Peel: it. But it still
Joanne Lockwood: doeSn't impact me. And
Joanne Lockwood: I don't feel that pain. No pain, no change sort of
Joanne Lockwood: thing.
Joanne Lockwood: Maybe as an individual, I'm worried about. Well, not worried, but
Joanne Lockwood: what difference can I make if I put this plastic bottle in the
Joanne Lockwood: recycling or put it in the general waste? What's the impact? It makes no
Joanne Lockwood: difference to any. No one's going to care, no one's going to notice. It'll just
Joanne Lockwood: go into landfill. Who cares? So
Joanne Lockwood: how can I understand the personal nature of this so
Joanne Lockwood: that I can be on board with it, rather than just theory? How can I
Joanne Lockwood: be personal responsibility for change? How can I do
Joanne Lockwood: that? Well, I do it because it makes me feel good.
Nicola Peel: So whether we do it from a self centred doing the right
Nicola Peel: thing actually gives you better mental health.
Nicola Peel: And we can come at it from many, many angles. And I
Nicola Peel: hear this all the time, I'm just one person. Whatever I
Nicola Peel: do is not really going to make a difference. It's up to the government, it's
Nicola Peel: up to the corporations, it's up to the politicians. We're very good
Nicola Peel: at pointing the finger to everybody else, apart
Nicola Peel: from, you know, what would happen
Nicola Peel: if know started that the bottom rung
Nicola Peel: is just putting the recycling in the right bin.
Nicola Peel: There was recently I was chatting to a young Japanese girl and she
Nicola Peel: said, I didn't know that England was a third
Nicola Peel: world country. And I said, well, why
Nicola Peel: do you say that? She said, well, people here still don't know how to
Nicola Peel: recycle. And I thought, yep, that's
Nicola Peel: right. If you lived in Japan, you would peel the label off
Nicola Peel: of your wine bottle and put the label into paper. You'd put the bottle into
Nicola Peel: glass and you take the lid off and you put it into metal. They
Nicola Peel: recycle everything. They have very little waste.
Nicola Peel: They have a very intelligent system, which means
Nicola Peel: that by really separating and
Nicola Peel: recycling, it costs less in the end. So
Nicola Peel: it's not even just the environmental impacts, financially,
Nicola Peel: economically, it makes sense. So we start
Nicola Peel: on the rung of that personal radical
Nicola Peel: responsibility of there is no
Nicola Peel: such thing as away. This idea of I'm going to throw it
Nicola Peel: away, where is that? We just move it from our
Nicola Peel: house to somewhere else. So
Nicola Peel: then the bigger picture of systems change.
Nicola Peel: And for me it's everything. It's not just kind
Nicola Peel: of individual, it's social, it's economical,
Nicola Peel: it's political and it's legal. So we can pull the strands of
Nicola Peel: each of those. Sorry, I'm just chuckling under my
Joanne Lockwood: breath here about what you said. When you throw something away, there
Joanne Lockwood: is no away. And I had this vision
Joanne Lockwood: of tidying up my cupboards.
Joanne Lockwood: What you end up doing is just rearranging stuff or putting the stuff you already
Joanne Lockwood: had somewhere else. So away is actually somewhere
Joanne Lockwood: else. It's not actually away away anywhere, it's just different.
Joanne Lockwood: You just moved it from place A to place B. You've changed
Joanne Lockwood: its position in time and space, not its actual status. Absolutely.
Nicola Peel: The time where we move it, we don't see it because it's not in England,
Nicola Peel: because we haven't got any landfill sites anymore. So we just ship it away to
Nicola Peel: another country and have no responsibility or no idea
Nicola Peel: if you ask most people, hey, when you chuck your stuff in the rubbish bin,
Nicola Peel: where does it go? We just don't
Nicola Peel: mean. We saw in the recent by elections
Joanne Lockwood: that the UlEz in London became a
Joanne Lockwood: political wedge issue where one
Joanne Lockwood: party decided that they were going to campaign against it and get
Joanne Lockwood: their person elected, which turned out to be true. Whether it was over the
Joanne Lockwood: Ulez, is it becoming a political
Joanne Lockwood: football? The more left leaning you are, the more
Joanne Lockwood: environmental you are, the more right leaning, the more
Joanne Lockwood: capitalist you are, the more like you're less likely to care about the
Joanne Lockwood: environment. Is that kind of a truism or is that kind of a generalisation?
Nicola Peel: I think it is true, sadly. It seems to be
Nicola Peel: where we're going and it seems to be getting worse.
Nicola Peel: And the rise of fascism in this
Nicola Peel: country as well, and the rise of climate denial.
Nicola Peel: So I've been confronted at a few events where I've been speaking
Nicola Peel: at with people that are absolutely, totally in denial
Nicola Peel: of climate change. And I say, well, okay, if you don't agree with the maps
Nicola Peel: and the graphs and what the scientists say, do you agree that
Nicola Peel: there is air pollution in cities? Do you agree that
Nicola Peel: there's rubbish and plastic in the oceans? Do you agree that we're
Nicola Peel: losing biodiversity at an unprecedented state? We are
Nicola Peel: actually in the 6th mass extinction right now.
Nicola Peel: We're causing it this time. So we know that that's
Nicola Peel: happening. And so I'm trying to find the things which actually unite
Nicola Peel: us, the things that we agree upon rather than
Nicola Peel: what we don't agree. And at the moment, because it's
Nicola Peel: also siloed, you've got people that do amazing work
Nicola Peel: socially with people that have absolutely
Nicola Peel: nothing to do with the environment. And then you've got environmentalists
Nicola Peel: that have nothing to do with social projects.
Nicola Peel: But the Vesica Pisces, the bit in the
Nicola Peel: middle, which is, well, we've got to remember that
Nicola Peel: humans are nature. We're not separate
Nicola Peel: from it. We're not as important as a worm. I
Nicola Peel: mean, the Earth really needs worms. It doesn't need humans. But we
Nicola Peel: are just another species on this planet. I think sometimes we have
Nicola Peel: to remember that because we seem to think that there's us
Nicola Peel: and then there's nature. Like it's something
Nicola Peel: different. I suppose historically in the
Joanne Lockwood: food chain, we're just food, aren't we? In the middle of big
Joanne Lockwood: teeth, predators and worms. Worms at the bottom of the food chain eating us,
Joanne Lockwood: or a big dinosaur,
Joanne Lockwood: if you want, big predator eating us. So without our
Joanne Lockwood: intelligence, if you like, or lack of intelligence, however you want to describe it, we
Joanne Lockwood: are just food for somebody else. So, yeah, in the scale of things, that's
Joanne Lockwood: how we evolved. We're food that evolved to run away
Joanne Lockwood: and be more clever about running away, and then we became the
Joanne Lockwood: predator ourselves. But we're not most of intelligent of
Nicola Peel: species. Most of them don't shit in their own nests.
Joanne Lockwood: No. Most of them know the difference, don't they? No, you're
Joanne Lockwood: right. God. Blimey. Had to destroy my thread.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. Someone said to me, it never
Joanne Lockwood: occurred to me that when I was younger, and
Joanne Lockwood: I'm in my late 50s now, I remember driving my car
Joanne Lockwood: and you get out of the car and your car has been massively hit
Joanne Lockwood: by flies and bugs, and you're always wiping something off you,
Joanne Lockwood: especially at night, you come back and your car be plastered
Joanne Lockwood: with bugs. Now I can't think of.
Joanne Lockwood: Hardly ever I get a splat on the windscreen, driving down country lanes or even
Joanne Lockwood: motorways, I don't get hit. And that's a sign that we're losing
Joanne Lockwood: our biodiversity in terms of insects and bugs because of pesticides
Joanne Lockwood: and lack of vegetation, isn't it? Absolutely,
Nicola Peel: yeah. And I think that that's the advantage that us of a certain
Nicola Peel: age know, that we witnessed it. We actually saw that,
Nicola Peel: whereas the last couple of generations, they never saw insects.
Nicola Peel: So they don't know that they've lost them because they didn't have that
Nicola Peel: experience. Soon it will all be textbook.
Nicola Peel: It's like, gosh, to think that those creatures that we grew up
Nicola Peel: with, the sound of the cuckoo in spring,
Nicola Peel: may soon be lost forever. The amazing song of the
Nicola Peel: Nightingale. Many people say, we don't know
Nicola Peel: how many very few years we've got left of them. We
Nicola Peel: are absolutely on the brink of so many species
Nicola Peel: just disappearing forever, and extinction is
Nicola Peel: forever. We can't get them back.
Nicola Peel: So that's why now there is such a need and a
Nicola Peel: push to do whatever we can. And if that's,
Nicola Peel: like, in our backyard, back garden, local playing
Nicola Peel: field, just leaving an area to the wildlife,
Nicola Peel: leaving that messy pile of broken
Nicola Peel: down stones and branches.
Nicola Peel: And that's what nature needs. There's nowhere for it to hide.
Nicola Peel: Because humans have become so tidy, we've cleaned everything
Nicola Peel: up and there's just no habitat left for them. So that's
Nicola Peel: why the rewilding, which is also massively
Nicola Peel: controversial, but thankfully, it is gaining
Nicola Peel: momentum of people realising that, hey, what does wildlife need
Nicola Peel: before we lose it for good? What does it need? It needs habitat.
Nicola Peel: It needs some messy spaces just left for nature
Nicola Peel: and for humans to step away and
Nicola Peel: give some space back to the rest of the natural
Nicola Peel: world. Yeah. Was it. Jeremy
Joanne Lockwood: vine hosted something on radio two a few
Joanne Lockwood: months ago. Isn't May designated the
Joanne Lockwood: don't trim your roadside back of urge, let you
Joanne Lockwood: go wild in May or something? He hosted this
Joanne Lockwood: no mo May. That's it. No mo May. And he hosted this debate
Joanne Lockwood: on his show on radio Two. And people were complaining about it
Joanne Lockwood: being the council, trying to save money or to try and
Joanne Lockwood: do this, and it was becoming dangerous that all these plants were growing everywhere.
Joanne Lockwood: And I was just thinking, really? This is really
Joanne Lockwood: what we're arguing about here is people's jobsworth
Joanne Lockwood: backyard. I want to see neat, trimmed banks.
Joanne Lockwood: It can't make that much difference to the wildlife. That's the mentality we're
Joanne Lockwood: fighting against, isn't it? Absolutely. But most people like
Nicola Peel: birds. I think if you say to people, well, hey, how would you feel
Nicola Peel: if we didn't have any birds left? Because
Nicola Peel: they didn't have any insects and so therefore they
Nicola Peel: had nothing to eat. And we come back to the seminal
Nicola Peel: book Silent spring that what happens
Nicola Peel: if we have no birds? It becomes
Nicola Peel: silent. Are we better or worse off as
Nicola Peel: humans? Is that okay for us
Nicola Peel: to be without other species because
Nicola Peel: of our need to have tidiness and
Nicola Peel: lawns that we're not prepared to give pieces of land
Nicola Peel: over? And everyone can do that. That's
Nicola Peel: what we need is more people saying, well, hey, okay, I don't have a
Nicola Peel: garden, but we've got a park. How about
Nicola Peel: going have a conversation with somebody and saying, hey, what about we just give
Nicola Peel: a little tiny bit over, put a sign up,
Nicola Peel: grow some more wildflowers? It can be absolutely beautiful.
Nicola Peel: And that's actually one of the really shocking thing that comes from Nomo may
Nicola Peel: that. Yes, it has saved the council money, which is a good thing. But
Nicola Peel: also, people have never seen what happens if you let your lawn
Nicola Peel: grow. All of a sudden it's covered in
Nicola Peel: flowers and then it's covered in bees and butterflies. It's like,
Nicola Peel: wow. That's what happens when we just let
Nicola Peel: things go to flower. And if you leave it to go to seed,
Nicola Peel: then you get a whole other load of creatures coming through to feast on that
Nicola Peel: too. So it's these little actions that
Nicola Peel: really can make a huge difference. Yeah, we get
Joanne Lockwood: these wildflower seed bombs and we've got load of planters. We just fill
Joanne Lockwood: these planters up with seed bombs and then we like about it is you got
Joanne Lockwood: no idea what's going to come up and what colour of what it's going to
Joanne Lockwood: look like. So we've got all these kind of different
Joanne Lockwood: flowers coming up everywhere. Some grow, some don't, some work, some don't.
Joanne Lockwood: And we love doing it. And I'm not saying we did it
Joanne Lockwood: deliberately to be environmental, we just did it deliberately
Joanne Lockwood: because we just wanted to have that
Joanne Lockwood: surprise of what grows. And we like those. And we definitely
Joanne Lockwood: noticed. We lived in the rural Chichester area till
Joanne Lockwood: recently, and we saw a lot of. When we
Joanne Lockwood: started taking care of the garden with all these planters and links with
Joanne Lockwood: all these wildflowers, we saw a huge increase in
Joanne Lockwood: bees and wasps and flying things, and
Joanne Lockwood: also smaller insects, and we saw a huge increase in
Joanne Lockwood: sparrows and tits. And we even had serends, we even had peasants
Joanne Lockwood: and partridges come in the back garden. And we noticed stark
Joanne Lockwood: difference from the day we moved in and the first six months to the
Joanne Lockwood: last 1218 months we were there. Just by our
Joanne Lockwood: influence on our space, we increased the amount
Joanne Lockwood: of birds and different species
Joanne Lockwood: and the insects. Everything else okay, we got a few rats we had to do
Joanne Lockwood: for the rats because we were too many nuts and seeds everywhere.
Joanne Lockwood: But, yeah, we could see a marked difference between when we moved
Joanne Lockwood: in and when we moved out, the diversity of the
Joanne Lockwood: insects and the birds. And we're trying to encourage it where we live now,
Joanne Lockwood: which is the exact. What we've just said, that don't ever
Nicola Peel: anyone think that one person can't make a difference if we're
Nicola Peel: showing this on a small scale. What about large
Nicola Peel: landowners that start to actually give
Nicola Peel: a little bit more than just a tiny margin around the edge?
Nicola Peel: The hedges that got taken out, we need to be putting them
Nicola Peel: back. We need to be giving a lot wider edges
Nicola Peel: around the fields. We start with the edge and we just kind of work
Nicola Peel: inwards. But then we've also got a problem with this kind
Nicola Peel: of idea that tree planting is going to save the world. And
Nicola Peel: this massive tree planting, where often it can be the wrong tree in the
Nicola Peel: wrong place, people don't really understand what they're doing.
Nicola Peel: And one of my greatest passions, or what drives
Nicola Peel: my work at the moment, is looking for ways to protect
Nicola Peel: the forest that's already standing. As we're having this very
Nicola Peel: conversation. There's probably, let's just say 100,000
Nicola Peel: trees being planted, 100,000 little saplings
Nicola Peel: putting the ground, and right now there's also
Nicola Peel: 100,000 ancient trees being cut down.
Nicola Peel: You cannot just allow
Nicola Peel: ancient forests to be cut and think, oh, but don't worry, we'll just
Nicola Peel: plant a few trees instead. It doesn't work. You can never bring
Nicola Peel: back biodiversity. You can never bring back a primary
Nicola Peel: forest. So I was very lucky because I got locked
Nicola Peel: down in probably the most biodiverse place on the
Nicola Peel: planet, where it was a place called Los Cedros
Nicola Peel: Biological Reserve in the cloud forests of Ecuador. I'd gone to write
Nicola Peel: a report. I said I'd be there for five days. I was there for
Nicola Peel: five and a half months. And being locked
Nicola Peel: down in a place where I could swim in the river and
Nicola Peel: stand in the waterfall and drink the water.
Nicola Peel: How many people ever get the experience to swim
Nicola Peel: in a river that you can drink? It just doesn't happen.
Nicola Peel: But we have to keep that vision.
Nicola Peel: We need to bring that back. And what is going on right
Nicola Peel: now with massive companies just not being held
Nicola Peel: responsible for the amount of shit, the amount of
Nicola Peel: sewage that goes into our rivers? They pay their fine
Nicola Peel: and then they just carry on. We have environmental
Nicola Peel: laws, but they only just pay for a fine. Instead,
Nicola Peel: we need to change it so it's criminal law. We need to change
Nicola Peel: it so we give nature rights. We need to absolutely
Nicola Peel: just clean up our act. Yeah. What
Joanne Lockwood: you're saying there about the new planting,
Joanne Lockwood: and it just reminded me, as you're talking about the sycamore Gap, just to
Joanne Lockwood: see the age of that tree,
Joanne Lockwood: and no one alive today will ever see a tree like
Joanne Lockwood: that again in that location. It's hundreds of years to
Joanne Lockwood: establish. And just north of Portsmouth, it's
Joanne Lockwood: called Queen Elizabeth Country Park. And the history
Joanne Lockwood: of that is it was planted in the era around Henry
Joanne Lockwood: VI as a source of wood
Joanne Lockwood: for building his fleet of ships near Portsmouth.
Joanne Lockwood: So you look at that forest today or the park today,
Joanne Lockwood: and they're quite mature, but that's how many?
Joanne Lockwood: That's 600, 700 years of growth. So if you
Joanne Lockwood: are pruning it down, you're putting saplings in today, it's going to
Joanne Lockwood: take four or 500 years to become an established,
Joanne Lockwood: integral part of the ecosystem. Not a few years. And
Joanne Lockwood: there's another place called Kingley Vale. It's got the U tree
Joanne Lockwood: forest, and that must be all around
Joanne Lockwood: planting for longbows and things, the U
Joanne Lockwood: and some other ancient sort of things. And it's the highest density, I think, of
Joanne Lockwood: U trees anywhere that I know of, anyway. But, yeah, it's very old and
Joanne Lockwood: ancient. Ancient U trees don't tell anybody.
Joanne Lockwood: And those trees have got huge
Joanne Lockwood: trunks, massive trunks. And all
Joanne Lockwood: the branches are like a haunted forest, and it's really
Joanne Lockwood: quite powerful in there. So, yeah, you can't just plant that and
Joanne Lockwood: expect it to grow overnight. All our churches have massive utrees in them. And
Joanne Lockwood: they've been there since, what, the 1617? Hundreds. And that's three or 400 years
Joanne Lockwood: again. Right. Just going on a tree planting
Joanne Lockwood: speech, it's not going to solve anything, is it?
Nicola Peel: Most U trees in most churchyards are
Nicola Peel: over 2000 years old because they were originally
Nicola Peel: pagan sites and the church built to
Nicola Peel: squash the pagan religion. They built
Nicola Peel: their churches where it was already a place of worship, which is why that you
Nicola Peel: find ancient use there. Most of them have been carbon dated
Nicola Peel: over 2000. In fact, there's a little tree
Nicola Peel: just up the road here in Cold Wartham in West
Nicola Peel: Sussex, and that tree was carbon dated at
Nicola Peel: 3200 years old. One of the oldest
Nicola Peel: trees in the country. But yeah, many of the trees are over 2000.
Nicola Peel: So the fact that we are still cutting down the
Nicola Peel: redwoods, these ancient redwoods in America, again, over
Nicola Peel: 2000 years old, they say between 1%
Nicola Peel: and 3% are left and they're still cutting them down.
Nicola Peel: What I witness in the Amazon, these giant trees, anybody
Nicola Peel: that watched avatar will remember the great tree,
Nicola Peel: which is based on the Amazonian sabre tree.
Nicola Peel: And now these huge trees being cut
Nicola Peel: down and one of those massive, massive sabre
Nicola Peel: trees, they will get $500
Nicola Peel: in planks of wood. That's what poverty
Nicola Peel: does, though. It will drive them to cut the trees down,
Nicola Peel: firstly to sell a few planks and then
Nicola Peel: to be able to clear it, to put cattle on, or to put
Nicola Peel: soy, which will then be fed chickens
Nicola Peel: sold. In Tesco, this is a direct relation right now, I
Nicola Peel: have indigenous friends telling me that
Nicola Peel: their forest is being cut down
Nicola Peel: and for soy, and there's a direct
Nicola Peel: chain going all the way to Tesco.
Nicola Peel: And I actually brought this up. I was recently at a big conference called Anthropy,
Nicola Peel: and there was somebody from Tesco speaking there from head of sustainability, and I said,
Nicola Peel: why is this still happening? People
Nicola Peel: don't know when they go in to buy something, they don't know that
Nicola Peel: what they're buying is causing destruction in the
Nicola Peel: Amazon. We've got to start becoming really aware
Nicola Peel: and pressurising these big businesses to do the
Nicola Peel: right thing, which is where I definitely want to give a plug to the great
Nicola Peel: work of ethical consumer, which they have a fantastic
Nicola Peel: book, magazine online, and if anybody wants to know who
Nicola Peel: these businesses are and what they do, this
Nicola Peel: organisation have done great research so that we can become
Nicola Peel: responsible consumers in that which we buy.
Joanne Lockwood: I just think about, you talk about the supermarkets there and the chains.
Joanne Lockwood: They keep telling me that they're cutting
Joanne Lockwood: prices, they're driving down this, they're driving down that they're telling me that I have
Joanne Lockwood: to have perfect apples and perfect fruit because that's what
Joanne Lockwood: the consumer demands. That's marketing bull,
Joanne Lockwood: isn't it? The consumer is not demanding anything. They're telling us what we
Joanne Lockwood: should demand and then fulfilling that, they're giving
Joanne Lockwood: us the rally cry and then following through saying, you've told us this, so we're
Joanne Lockwood: doing it. So I didn't ask for round apples, I asked for an
Joanne Lockwood: apple that I can eat. I was quite happy eating them off the tree in
Joanne Lockwood: my parents garden, cutting out the maggot
Joanne Lockwood: and eating the rest of the apple. We sit there at Christmas as a
Joanne Lockwood: bunch of kids, cutting the apples up and cutting the maggots out, just
Joanne Lockwood: chewing on these apples. Those are okay for us as a
Joanne Lockwood: family. What's changed? There's a friend of mine, she said
Nicola Peel: something which I thought was quite apt. She said, it shouldn't say organic
Nicola Peel: carrots, those ones should just say carrots and the other
Nicola Peel: ones should say chemical carrots.
Joanne Lockwood: Yes, I like that. It's shifting the language, isn't
Joanne Lockwood: it? And as an EDI professional, I'm well
Joanne Lockwood: aware that we label things with adjectives,
Joanne Lockwood: but we don't tend to label the default, do we? We always label the non
Joanne Lockwood: default. So people want the default. So you say
Joanne Lockwood: organic carrot, that makes it sound like it's not
Joanne Lockwood: the norm. If we
Joanne Lockwood: had artificially grown or artificially fertilised
Joanne Lockwood: carrots, or carrots, we're going to go, oh,
Joanne Lockwood: carrots sounds nicer than this other description.
Nicola Peel: And it is. A lot of it is the wording and
Nicola Peel: being able to know what's going on.
Nicola Peel: Education is a big part of it. But education by
Nicola Peel: itself doesn't make people act alone.
Nicola Peel: I think that's the first seed. And when I'm giving a talk, I can speak
Nicola Peel: to a few hundred people and I'm throwing out these seeds. Many will land
Nicola Peel: on barren land and people won't take any notice. But
Nicola Peel: then I feel like somebody else will say something which will water that
Nicola Peel: seed. And finally that person will be like, oh,
Nicola Peel: actually, maybe I can do something. And my favourite
Nicola Peel: saying is, thanks to the singer Joan Byers,
Nicola Peel: action is the antidote to despair.
Nicola Peel: And I really think that is such a brilliant saying. People say to
Nicola Peel: me how I've been 25 years I've been banging on about the
Nicola Peel: environment. How come you're not totally in
Nicola Peel: despair at the state of the world?
Nicola Peel: Well, that wouldn't help me and it wouldn't help anybody else
Nicola Peel: that I was communicating with. And the only thing that
Nicola Peel: keeps me from despair is the action that I take
Nicola Peel: and all the projects that I've coordinated around the world
Nicola Peel: to make a positive difference. That leaves me thinking, well, hey,
Nicola Peel: if I die tomorrow, at least I can think, well, shit, I did
Nicola Peel: my best. I did leave the world in a better place than when I found
Nicola Peel: it. And if we could all have that
Nicola Peel: feeling, then we would all. NIMBY is a really
Nicola Peel: good thing. We've made out NIMBY as something bad. Not
Nicola Peel: in my backyard. If we all look after our
Nicola Peel: backyards, the world will be a better place.
Joanne Lockwood: Wow. I love that. I tend to use the concept of
Joanne Lockwood: plus one. I don't have to have a thousand. If I just
Joanne Lockwood: one more than I had last year. One more change.
Joanne Lockwood: One person, using a COVID
Joanne Lockwood: analogy, get the R rate, get the infection rate
Joanne Lockwood: of inclusion and diversity, get the R rate of environmentalism.
Joanne Lockwood: If we can infect people with a bug
Joanne Lockwood: to care about the planet, care about each other,
Joanne Lockwood: and we got that number to two, before long the whole planet
Joanne Lockwood: would be infected with thinking about the planet, wouldn't they? But
Joanne Lockwood: we're just lazy, though, aren't we? You look at the reaction we had
Joanne Lockwood: as a species in the UK to COVID,
Joanne Lockwood: we were in denial. There's conspiracies. It wasn't until you actually saw
Joanne Lockwood: yourself dying, or someone you loved dying, that the penny dropped. But most
Joanne Lockwood: people go, because we're lazy. Human beings
Joanne Lockwood: are very lazy. We look to try and do the least we can.
Joanne Lockwood: It's biological. We conserve energy. If we don't have to
Joanne Lockwood: do it, we won't do it. So how do we. How do we stop people
Joanne Lockwood: just being acting to programming, which is being lazy?
Nicola Peel: Well, I think it comes back again to mental health.
Nicola Peel: So if you go to a lot of countries,
Nicola Peel: yes, they can do a lot of lying around in their hammocks, which we would
Nicola Peel: cause. Cool. Lazy. But there's also a lot
Nicola Peel: of being busy actually finding
Nicola Peel: food and doing what needs to do to be human, to actually
Nicola Peel: survive. But because we're in a reality
Nicola Peel: where people don't have to hunt and gather, they don't have to go and find
Nicola Peel: food, they have to just walk down to the shops, there's so much time.
Nicola Peel: And people say, oh, I don't have time. But if we look at how many
Nicola Peel: hours per day people spend on social media, if we look at how
Nicola Peel: many hours people spend a day on their phones, and then at the
Nicola Peel: end of the day, you say, well, what have you achieved? What have you
Nicola Peel: done? Time goes by, and then people have
Nicola Peel: got feeling down about it. And then when
Nicola Peel: you realise that you get active. And a really good example is people going along
Nicola Peel: to community gardens. The benefits of going
Nicola Peel: along and finding a community garden is that, hey, all of a sudden
Nicola Peel: there's all these other people. So you get a social life,
Nicola Peel: you get to grow some food, you
Nicola Peel: actually start to make a positive difference within a group
Nicola Peel: of people locally to you, there are so many benefits
Nicola Peel: for actually doing the right thing, but it's a bit like we
Nicola Peel: have to lead the people to show them what's possible.
Nicola Peel: If you've never even heard of such a thing as a community garden, how
Nicola Peel: do you know where to start? So that's part of my work,
Nicola Peel: is as a speaker, to talk about all the positive things that we
Nicola Peel: can do and joining together, so that we can all kind of
Nicola Peel: like act faster and move faster together and have a good time while we're
Nicola Peel: doing it. Does it need a
Joanne Lockwood: generational shift, though? I mean, we look at our
Joanne Lockwood: evolution as a culture, from a boozy, pub based culture to
Joanne Lockwood: a coffee shop culture has taken a generation.
Joanne Lockwood: I go back to my teens and
Joanne Lockwood: pub was it. There was no coffee shops. It was alcohol fueled,
Joanne Lockwood: obviously, that had social issues as well,
Joanne Lockwood: surrounding it. And the government at the time, or over
Joanne Lockwood: time, removed some of the licencing laws, it became easier to get a drink.
Joanne Lockwood: You weren't having to finish everything in the last five minutes. You could drink
Joanne Lockwood: on a sasset all afternoon if you wanted to. And the impact was people
Joanne Lockwood: didn't feel that drinking was a resource that was limited anymore.
Joanne Lockwood: Therefore they didn't have to rush it. They could just dip in and dip out
Joanne Lockwood: whenever they wanted. At the same time, the coffee shop culture kicked off and
Joanne Lockwood: we became a bit more Parisian, if you like, in our high streets.
Joanne Lockwood: And now you look at the generation today is drinking has
Joanne Lockwood: changed completely. You may drink more at home or for mental health
Joanne Lockwood: reasons, but fundamentally, it's no longer as ingrained in our
Joanne Lockwood: psyche and culture as it used to be. And you look at other things.
Joanne Lockwood: Smoking tobacco, it's taken three or four
Joanne Lockwood: generations, and now talking about making it effectively
Joanne Lockwood: illegal by 2030, or trying to find really radical ways,
Joanne Lockwood: like New Zealand, of banning it.
Joanne Lockwood: These are generational changes of attitude. And I would dare say that
Joanne Lockwood: my daughter and my son, who are in their late 20s, early 30s, are
Joanne Lockwood: probably just on the early curve of caring about
Joanne Lockwood: the environment even more than I do. So their children,
Joanne Lockwood: the gen Alphas, the younger Gen Z's, are the ones that are
Joanne Lockwood: really going to be in that era, like Greta Thunberg. And her
Joanne Lockwood: cohort. That's where we're going to see the real change. Or can we wait that
Joanne Lockwood: long, though? I don't think we can. I think that that's what
Nicola Peel: everybody kind of feels like, oh, well, we can't do then. You
Nicola Peel: know, the younger generation is saying, well, hey, you lot caused the problem,
Nicola Peel: you need to sort it out. It's your generation that has caused this problem. Why
Nicola Peel: should we sort it out? So it can go backwards and
Nicola Peel: forwards? And I meet some grey
Nicola Peel: youngsters that really care, but
Nicola Peel: then what happens is, because they don't have the support that is
Nicola Peel: required. You get this environmental
Nicola Peel: anxiety in the youth, which is just so
Nicola Peel: terrible that none of their mates want to get involved. And
Nicola Peel: it's not the cool club to be in, which is
Nicola Peel: what is such a shame. It's cool to
Nicola Peel: be smoking a single use vape. There's
Nicola Peel: absolutely no understanding. This is about as bad as
Nicola Peel: it's got from when we used to drink beer and brew up our own hops
Nicola Peel: and make our own homebrew to now we've got this
Nicola Peel: gadget which is using
Nicola Peel: plastic and lithium. Once
Nicola Peel: it's then thrown away, a lot of them are ending up in
Nicola Peel: the rivers, where lithium is highly
Nicola Peel: contaminating to the rivers. So we can just use
Nicola Peel: that once. It shouldn't be allowed. I mean, that kind of thing.
Nicola Peel: It's just become extreme in this. Consumption,
Nicola Peel: consumerism, capitalism. They sell, so we will
Nicola Peel: keep selling them. And it doesn't matter about the state of the
Nicola Peel: environment. So it just shows how far we've gone to start to
Nicola Peel: rein it back in, to realise and see those impacts
Nicola Peel: and who's responsible? Is it the consumer? Is it the person that buys the
Nicola Peel: vape? Or is it the shop that
Nicola Peel: sells it? Or is it the manufacturer that
Nicola Peel: actually creates it in the first place? It's like every level is
Nicola Peel: responsible for creating this world that we're living in right now of
Nicola Peel: just mine it, make it, dump it,
Nicola Peel: mine it, make it, dump it. And we just don't
Nicola Peel: see where it came from or where it's going to.
Joanne Lockwood: I am not going to change on my own if
Joanne Lockwood: I feel I'm swimming against the tide of everybody else
Joanne Lockwood: again. We're lazy, we could tend to go with the flow, peer pressure. We go
Joanne Lockwood: the easy route. Everyone's telling me in the
Joanne Lockwood: advertising and the media, what's going on. I'm being bombarded with this day in, day
Joanne Lockwood: out. This is the right thing to do. We care about you, we're making these
Joanne Lockwood: products. Marketing is all around playing with biases and
Joanne Lockwood: persuading you do you want something. And people are developing these products as you
Joanne Lockwood: take the single use vapes. They're different colours, they got these fancy flavours and fruity
Joanne Lockwood: names and they sound really attractive to young people. No wonder they're
Joanne Lockwood: interested in them. People aren't going to change
Joanne Lockwood: until the government, and
Joanne Lockwood: I know you can't blame everything on the government, but you have to set the
Joanne Lockwood: culture of the country. And if you look at the countries around the world that
Joanne Lockwood: are making positive change, I dare say a lot of this has been set by
Joanne Lockwood: the tone of the people who are setting the tone for everybody.
Joanne Lockwood: And then they're putting pressure on big businesses and those
Joanne Lockwood: big businesses that are either incentivized or they put them in pressure to do the
Joanne Lockwood: right thing, to pass that down. And then people at the bottom go, oh, I'm
Joanne Lockwood: now being told to do this, I will do that now. So almost like have
Joanne Lockwood: to reprogram people. And
Joanne Lockwood: I do despair. We look at the return to office working
Joanne Lockwood: and instead of hybrid remote working, I do wonder if
Joanne Lockwood: a lot of that is driven by government peer pressure
Joanne Lockwood: to big organisations to get people back into the inner cities, to keep the coffee
Joanne Lockwood: shops, to keep the employment, to keep the transport system alive, keep London
Joanne Lockwood: underground alive, because it doesn't make sense,
Joanne Lockwood: really. Where's the incentive to get people travelling,
Joanne Lockwood: commuting, COVID, we proved you didn't need to. And yes, they
Joanne Lockwood: see mentoring, peer to peer learning,
Joanne Lockwood: cooler chats, all this kind of stuff. It nurtures people. I'm not saying there
Joanne Lockwood: aren't those benefits, but the answer shouldn't be drive to work.
Joanne Lockwood: There must be another solution to those problems other than drive to work or
Joanne Lockwood: get the train and park and get your car out. And I
Joanne Lockwood: wonder what the motives are and who's driving all this. And it
Joanne Lockwood: says to me that it's not for the right reasons, it's
Joanne Lockwood: for other reasons. If you might. Absolutely.
Nicola Peel: Let's just have a look at who's running the country, running
Nicola Peel: the world at the moment. Who are the big players and what
Nicola Peel: are their interests? Their interest is not in the good of
Nicola Peel: humanity or the good of the world, it's about making
Nicola Peel: money and it's this revolving doors of who's in government
Nicola Peel: and what positions that they're in. They have absolutely
Nicola Peel: clearly shown that we have no leadership at all in this
Nicola Peel: country. So if it's not going to come
Nicola Peel: from above, is it going to come from
Nicola Peel: below? How has change happened before? There
Nicola Peel: has been these uprisings that have come from a
Nicola Peel: grassroots level of people pushing
Nicola Peel: their politicians, their businesses into doing the right
Nicola Peel: thing. But I think if we wait for the governments to
Nicola Peel: do anything, then we're going to be waiting way too long. And what
Nicola Peel: we really need is to be able to have a vision. If we think, hey,
Nicola Peel: what's the world going to look like in 50 years time?
Nicola Peel: Are we all going to be still driving around in cars? Are we all going
Nicola Peel: to still be doing the same thing? Will the world? Nothing ever stays
Nicola Peel: the same. So I think it's really important for us all to
Nicola Peel: have a vision of the future. What do you want it to look like?
Nicola Peel: And if you want it to look a certain way, how are we going to
Nicola Peel: get there from where we are right now to where we need to
Nicola Peel: go?
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, it's destination planning, isn't it? You got to start
Joanne Lockwood: somewhere. I'm a great believer in transformational
Joanne Lockwood: leadership, where you paint the picture and you say, this is what fantastic looks
Joanne Lockwood: like, this is what you can achieve. Rather than the carrot and stick and the
Joanne Lockwood: pushing people towards a destination, you just create attraction
Joanne Lockwood: to that positive vision. I don't think we're doing enough of that.
Joanne Lockwood: This is how it could be if we all did this. But
Joanne Lockwood: there has to be a real gravitational pull towards that destination.
Joanne Lockwood: I don't want to be worse off, I don't want to be inconvenienced.
Joanne Lockwood: I don't want to have to walk everywhere if it's raining, if
Joanne Lockwood: suddenly a bus arrived at the end of my road every day, every half an
Joanne Lockwood: hour, and went to where I wanted to go, I e the train
Joanne Lockwood: station, I would get on that bus and I would go to the train station,
Joanne Lockwood: but suddenly it only arrives three times a day.
Joanne Lockwood: Once for the early morning commuters at 06:00 in the morning and
Joanne Lockwood: once at 07:00 at night. But if I want to get the bus to the
Joanne Lockwood: station at two or three in the afternoon, I can't. So
Joanne Lockwood: the issue is we're not investing in enough infrastructure. This
Joanne Lockwood: chicken and egg thing again, HS Two. I'm not saying it was the great,
Joanne Lockwood: best idea in the world, but it should have got
Joanne Lockwood: cars off the road, should have got lorries off the road.
Joanne Lockwood: As I say, I don't know if it's the perfect answer, that kind of
Joanne Lockwood: infrastructure, but I've seen MRT, local transport
Joanne Lockwood: systems canned, I've seen bus stops closed. We look at the rail network of
Joanne Lockwood: old, then the car came along and all the railways, all the little branch lines
Joanne Lockwood: got cut out. We got to try and help reinvest in the
Joanne Lockwood: infrastructure. We got whole new town developments
Joanne Lockwood: that are 20 miles from nearest railway station and no bus
Joanne Lockwood: infrastructure. This is crazy stuff. We're doing. Our town
Joanne Lockwood: planning, our city planning has got to reflect
Joanne Lockwood: a better way of connecting us, especially if we keep
Joanne Lockwood: encouraging people to go back to work.
Joanne Lockwood: So, I don't know. I'm as frustrated as you. I guess.
Nicola Peel: We can see what needs to happen. I think that that's a starting point,
Nicola Peel: is that we have to start having the conversation. We need to start talking about
Nicola Peel: what's going on. We need to name it, what's going on,
Nicola Peel: what's happening on this planet. It is an eco side. We need to
Nicola Peel: use that word. That's the truth. That's what's going on.
Nicola Peel: And we're still not taking it seriously.
Nicola Peel: And I think that a lot of that is because, say, people haven't seen it
Nicola Peel: with their own eyes, they haven't smelt it, they haven't actually seen that
Nicola Peel: whole reality of how bad it can be. These massive open
Nicola Peel: pit mines around the world, which that's what it
Nicola Peel: takes to have that vape. You need to have these huge, great big
Nicola Peel: mining realities going on, causing vast amounts
Nicola Peel: of contamination, so that we can go and buy something
Nicola Peel: without thinking what the materials are it's made from. So I
Nicola Peel: think, yeah, there's so many, many parts of this
Nicola Peel: equation, and I think we just need
Nicola Peel: to do anything. Anything at all is better than nothing. And
Nicola Peel: if that means recycling one more bottle, finding out
Nicola Peel: who you're banking with, making those changes,
Nicola Peel: that actually drives a society, which
Nicola Peel: is, say we said before, it is political. How many
Nicola Peel: people speak to their MPs? Very, very few. And the MPs
Nicola Peel: often say, oh, well, my constituents aren't really interested in
Nicola Peel: what's happening in the environment, so I just do what my constituents want. Well,
Nicola Peel: if that's the truth, we need more people engaging with whoever
Nicola Peel: their MP is to say, hey, what can we do? And what are you planning
Nicola Peel: to do? So that pushing power that we have
Nicola Peel: as an individual to pressurise those people who are
Nicola Peel: supposed to be representing us, to look at how we
Nicola Peel: can unite socially with other groups and say, hey, how can we
Nicola Peel: all work together? That's what is needed. As
Nicola Peel: nature communicates through the underground
Nicola Peel: mycelial network which connects every tree in the
Nicola Peel: forest, we need to start doing the same as humans.
Nicola Peel: We need to start connecting a lot more so that we can
Nicola Peel: all work together and amplify each other's voices and
Nicola Peel: concerns. And that way it feels like we will have a much better
Nicola Peel: chance. Amazing. And
Joanne Lockwood: on that note, I could talk to you all night.
Joanne Lockwood: We've been chatting for an hour and a half already before in the green
Joanne Lockwood: room and I've no doubt we're bumping to each other again soon and we'll have
Joanne Lockwood: another conversation. So no Nicola, amazing
Joanne Lockwood: conversation, thank you. I'm sure everyone
Joanne Lockwood: listening would love to get in contact with you. So what's the best way of
Joanne Lockwood: getting in contact with you? Your website, LinkedIn. How do we find
Joanne Lockwood: out more? Yeah, my website is my name
Nicola Peel: nicolapeel.com that's got my social media tags on
Nicola Peel: it. I also do the Solutions podcast and I through
Nicola Peel: Patreon. So anybody that wants to hear me
Nicola Peel: interviewing interesting people every month,
Nicola Peel: then look for solutionist.
Joanne Lockwood: Amazing. I'm going to go and cheque that out in a minute. That's brilliant.
Joanne Lockwood: So Nicola, thank you so much for your time and
Joanne Lockwood: for you, the listener that's got all the way to the end and really, really
Joanne Lockwood: proud of you for making it this far. Thank you for tuning and listening.
Joanne Lockwood: If you're not already subscribed, please subscribe to keep updates on future
Joanne Lockwood: episodes. The Inclusion Bites Podcast that's B-I-T-E-S. You can find us on
Joanne Lockwood: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever platform you use.
Joanne Lockwood: We're there. So please do look us up. As you can imagine, I have a
Joanne Lockwood: number of other amazing guests. I mean, our guests just get better
Joanne Lockwood: and better. I've got more guests lined up. It could be amazing as
Joanne Lockwood: well. So please, please listen in. Of course, if you want to be a guest
Joanne Lockwood: as well, I'm always welcoming new people onto the show and if
Joanne Lockwood: you've got any comments or suggestions, please do drop me a line to
Joanne Lockwood: jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk UK. If you've
Joanne Lockwood: got any ideas on how we can improve, I'd love to hear them. And finally,
Joanne Lockwood: my name is Joanne Lockwood and it's been an absolute pleasure
Joanne Lockwood: to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next
Joanne Lockwood: time.
Joanne Lockwood: Bye.