Completely by chance I stumbled on the Prince of Wales’ lecture on BBC1 last night. You can read the transcript of his speech on his own website.
I liked what I heard. I thought it was an interesting and an intelligent speech. I know a lot of people criticise him for his views but I didn’t find anything significant to disagree with in this speech. Here’s a couple of paragraphs which will give you the gist of his argument……
So, Ladies and Gentlemen, we may well be told that we live in a “post-Modernist” age, but we are still conditioned by Modernism’s central tenets. Our outlook is dominated by mechanistic thinking which has led to our disconnection from the complexity of Nature, which is, or should be, equally reflected in the complexity of human communities. But in many ways we have also succeeded in abstracting our very humanity to the mere expression of individualism and moral relativism, and to the point where so many communities are threatened with extinction. Facing the future, therefore, requires a shift from a reductive, mechanistic approach to one that is more balanced and integrated with Nature’s complexity – one that recognizes not just the build up of financial capital, but the equal importance of what we already have – environmental capital and, crucially, what I might best call “community capital.” That is, the networks of people and organizations, the post offices and pubs, the churches and village halls, the mosques, temples and bazaars – the wealth that holds our communities together; that enriches people’s lives through mutual support, love, loyalty and identity. Just as we have no way of accounting for the loss of the natural world, contemporary economics has no way of accounting for the loss of this community capital.
The idea that we need to re-think our relationship to Nature by accepting we are an integral part of it, rather than separate and apart from it is, I believe, crucially important. The failure to grasp the complexity of life, reducing it to something simplistic, is harming us. We need to be aware of the dangers of radical materialism and simplistic egocentricism. The mechanistic and consumerist model is failing us, as the economic and environmental crises are revealing.
He is right to emphasise the need for sustainability and diversity rather than consumption and uniformity.
Heroes Not Zombies 
I too stumbled on Prince Charles’ talk by accident – yet caught almost all of it. I entirely agree with the comments by bobleckridge.
I felt that Prince Charles’ call to move beyond reductive, simplistic thinking was very well made and is long overdue. Equally important was the parallel he drew between the recent financial crash and the potential for a similar – yet far more devastating – environmental crash.
However, I believe his most important message of all was that it is at our peril that we continue to pursue policies based on a belief in perpetual economic growth. As he clearly showed, the world has finite – and dwindling – resources. And infinite growth based on finite, and shrinking, resources is impossible.
Some criticise Prince Charles for speaking out on such topics. However, he would not need to do so if a significant number of politicians – in any well represented party – had had the wisdom and courage to say what Prince Charles said.
It takes immense courage to see the big picture, and acknowledge very uncomfortable truths – even to oneself. It takes even greater courage to voice those truths in public. For being the ‘child’ who says that the Emperor has no clothes is never a popular role – still less a safe one. For Prince Charles to voice those truths must have taken the greatest courage of all. For nobody is more exposed to criticism than he is – nor less able to hit back.
Surely his courage deserves an equally brave response. It is not easy to accept that we, in our lifetimes, have all collaborated in so profoundly contaminating, consuming and destroying the world’s natural resources that we have been destroying our own and our children’s future.
However, if we have the courage to accept that and heed Prince Charles’ call to adopt new values and new ways of thinking, living and doing business we may yet prevent the fragile vessel of civilisation from crashing to pieces on the rocks towards which economic illusions of perpetual growth are daily steering us.
It has been said that a prophet is not without honour save in his own country. Can we not give the lie to that? Can we not – for the sake of our children – listen to Prince Charles and, moving beyond both blame and denial, transform the way we live so that our children DO have a future?
Surely Prince Charles only said what he did because he believed we could. He has fired the starting gun. If we don’t respond by running the race of our lives – against the ticking clock of environmental destruction – who but us can our children blame?
I agree with what he said. The talk was very interesting and he is quite right that we should be looking to the future and what, at the moment, we will be leaving to our descendants – most governments are not – they are living for the now and for themselves.
why is this lecture not available in video format anywhere?
No offense, but what is Charles talking about this for?
‘We need to get back to living with nature’, when in the history of humankind have we ever had such a relationship? Even tthe native Americans wiped out entire species. We have always sought to harness nature for our benefit and survival – like every other species. Of course, we should think about how we do that.
But, why don’t you check Charles’ ecological footprint (security, his housing costs, transport). The entire (rational) arguement for having this plum in a position of authority in society is based on tourism, and economic benefits, he brings. If those are not important, lets start by ‘sacrificising’ the economic benefits the UK gets from him and his family. He can then ‘live with nature’ and tell us all how he gets on, if we are still interested in what he has to say.
@AG2009 – I suppose we all bring what we already think to every speech we hear or article we read, but the reason I felt most positive about this particular speech was that it was consistent with a fundamental shift in thinking as laid out very eloquently by the philosopher Mary Midgely. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Midgley) Read her Myths we Live by, and Science and Poetry especially on this. The basic premise is that we need to stop thinking that “nature” is something separate from us as human beings, something outside of us to be used and exploited, but instead to understand that we and “nature” are indivisible. We are a PART OF, not APART FROM, nature. It’s an argument that shifts thinking towards a greater understanding of connections, of ecology and of the true complexity of the world.
exclusive humanism and associated subject/object distinctions are part of the subject matter of Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’ which, if it does not offer solutions, is at least a clear-eyed history of how we got into this cultural muddle