BBC JOURNALIST, River Cafe chef and wild-bearded eco-warrior Rory Spowers is noted for many things. Among the most thought-provoking are transplanting his family to an abandoned tea estate in Sri Lanka for his book A Year In Tuk Tuks & Green Tea; defying the BBC’s orders not to mention climate change because it was ‘bad for ratings’, and riding across Africa on a three-man tandem once owned by British comedy trio The Goodies. As of last week, this perennial adventurer is the first ‘sustainability ambassador’ at Song Saa, Cambodia’s sole five-star island resort which might just be impressive enough to trigger a global revolution in environmental thinking. The Advisor meets “reconstructed eco-warrior” Rory Spowers and Dr Wayne McCallum, Song Saa’s director of sustainability, to talk green tea, man-eating tigers and why we need to fix ourselves before we can fix the planet. `
How did you discover each other?
Wayne: I found a copy of A Year In Green Tea And Tuk Tuks at the back of a second-hand bookshop just down the road. I thought: ‘three bucks? I’ll take it!’ [Laughs] Then I read it and thought: ‘This looks like an interesting guy; I’ll reach out to him.’ There’s a lot more to the book than the cover suggests. He’s thinking along the same lines that we might take the foundation; I thought the aspirations, goals, motivations and objectives were very similar to what’s inspiring us. At the end of it I thought: ‘Why not reach out?’
Rory, do you often get ambushed by pencil-moustachioed environmentalists?
Rory: [Laughs] The book has hardly made me a rich man: it hasn’t sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but it has definitely struck a chord. I’m still getting emails from people all over the globe who’ve just read it.
Looking at the cover, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s by just another pallid British bloke who’s decided ‘Bugger this. It’s too cold in London. I’m moving somewhere hot.’ What were you thinking when you uprooted your wife and two toddlers to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka in the hope of turning it into an eco-Mecca?
I certainly wasn’t expecting to – certainly had no aspirations to – buy such a huge piece of land. I definitely wanted to buy a bit of land and do something along these lines, but I was thinking two or three acres, not 60. It just sort of evolved. I went back to see this piece of land six or seven times and every time there were more and more local guys in shades breaking up paths and draining wells. It all stacked up to become irresistible. Even when I bought it I didn’t know this was what I was going to do, but there was something very magical about it: a secret garden waiting to be uncovered.
When Wayne first told me you were coming, he described you as ‘a reconstructed eco-warrior’.
[Laughs] I’m not quite sure what that means!
Wayne: I’d say ‘sustainability champion’
I prefer ‘reconstructed eco-warrior’. How did your nascence as whatever we finally decide to call you come about?
Rory: I grew up with very fanatical gardening parents. My father went on to build an arboretum of rare trees just outside London. I grew up landscaping, clearing paths and building lakes. It wasn’t quite jungle, but it started at 16 acres and grew to 160. My father claims it has more species of tree and shrub than Kew Gardens, but I can’t verify that! Then I was lucky enough to travel: India, Asia. Also philosophy, particularly Buddhism, became increasingly interesting; I got into yoga, that sort of thing. Then I went to Africa on The Goodies’ tandem, if that means anything to you.
That means more to me than you can possibly know.
That was my first book, Three Men On A Bike, which had some fairly hilarious one-line reviews from Australians and New Zealanders. One chap goes: ‘Ah, look! It’s a book I can actually read!’
And what did The Goodies make of all this?
They were our patrons. I kept in touch with Bill Oddie for many years. I reunited him with the bike in the early ’90s and made a film with him in India about the Ganges, mostly an environmental film; his best friend had been killed by a tiger in Jim Corbett National Park in the mid-’80s. It was taking Bill back to the spot where his mate got killed. The Goodies thought we were a bit strange, obviously. Then I did a long walk through India in ’96/’97. With that and the big trip to Africa I really started to feel a lot of the eco stuff, seeing first-hand what rather ill-advised, big top-down development had done to environments, ecosystems, habitats. The tour with Bill Oddie in 1990 was my first… I wanted to make films, really. I studied English Literature after a general arts degree; I never studied ecology. It became a passion. I even wrote about the history of ecological thought in Rising Tides.
How has ecological thought changed with the so-called advance of human society?
That’s what’s always fascinated me: what are the things that led to where we are? Why have we, as a species, separated ourselves from the natural world to such a degree?
I watched the interview you gave at the launch of the 999 campaign, where you describe the need for “Real, tangible interaction with the natural world.”
If you think about it, it’s ludicrous: this idea that we can separate ourselves from the natural world. We’re dependent upon it. There are 90 million chemical reactions going on within our bodies every second; we are an integral part of the planet as much is anything else is, but we’re the only species that has separated itself because of this rather dubious gift of the human ego. As far as we can tell, we’re the only species that’s conscious of being conscious. One thing that’s hugely overlooked at the moment is the imperialist agenda of the post-Industrial Revolution, which totally seized on the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest and made it all about competition, but if you go back to Darwin’s original work in The Origin Of Species, he talks about cooperation between species even more than he talks about competition. We’ve only been sold one side of the coin. It was used to prop up expansionist, imperialist politics and economics right through to the present day.
What new biological thinking – particularly Chaos Theory and Capacity Theory – is showing is that all this exciting stuff going on in eco-economics is all inspired by natural systems. Most of the interesting breakthroughs in modern technology are based on scientific mimicry: if you look at the efficiency with which a leaf captures and harnesses solar energy compared to our most advanced photovoltaics, we’re just miles behind; spider webs made by insects who, without needing high energy to do so, can create something that’s eight times stronger than steel. Scientists are now looking at the abalone shell as a way to redesign our ceramics for things like the space shuttle. My brother has spent the last 15 years building a hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle which isn’t just tremendously inventive in terms of its technology, but also in terms of the governance within his company, which gives society and the environment an equal stake-holding. The car wouldn’t be sold to the consumer; it would be owned by the company and leased to the consumer, making the company responsible for the full life-cycle environmental impact: there’s no built-in obsolescence. While we have an economic system that continues to reward people who pollute and abuse resources, there’s an age-old debate about step change and incrementalism: however much you tweak and fix a system that’s fundamentally broken, you can never cross a chasm with two leaps. Everybody’s getting excited about big car companies producing hydrogen-powered cars, but it’s still woeful, actually, if you look at the average fuel economy of a car produced in the last 10 or 15 years despite everything we know and despite all the technological advances we’ve made, we’re still locked into a paradigm that’s never going to be sustainable.
A lot of the technologies people would like to see happen in order to shift towards a more sustainable pattern are simply not compatible with our current economic system. Until our economics reflect the true cost of society and the environment within the price of things, we’re never going to make it. If a car truly reflected its cost to society and the environment, we’d simply never be able to pay for one. While we continue to assess our economic prosperity based on things like GDP – which goes up every time there’s a disaster, every time there’s an accident, every time there’s a hospital bill, every time there’s a divorce – you’re doing your economics on a calculator that doesn’t have a ‘minus’ sign. You can make it look like we’re flourishing, but in fact an enormous amount of things within that indicate the complete reverse. Going back to the reconstructed eco-warrior bit, I was very strident and outspoken; I used to get on my soapbox and rant and rave about things. Rising Tides is very polemic, but then I realised that I was stabbing myself in the foot: looking back at the book, the environmental agenda is very much split because of making that alarmist, out-of-proportion or unfounded claim.
Every time something doesn’t happen, the world goes: ‘But you said this and you said that!’ ‘You never create change by fighting the existing model; you’ve got to create a new model that makes the old one obsolete’: that’s a quote I come back to often. We see it in fashion: it’s totally implicit. I don’t want to knock people protesting or campaigning, which are valid roles to play, but a lot of people are in this vein now; a lot of that energy is misspent or could be better spent being channelled into making the new model visible to people. That’s what The Web Of Hope [an online database of role models for sustainability, social justice and positive change] was all about: trying to create a global resource of role models for positive change. We don’t get enough column inches and people don’t know these solutions are there; they just throw up their hands and think there’s nothing they can do.
And a lot of those solutions get buried by Big Industry.
Also, most of the media doesn’t want to know. Bruce Parry, who I’ve been working with on Tribe for the last two years, made a series about the Arctic. In the final edit, the BBC removed any reference to climate change because it was ‘bad for ratings’. It was that kind of experience that prompted us to make the films we’re making now: entirely independently financed and a chance for Bruce to go down all the avenues he wasn’t able to previously and really get at these ‘fringe’ alternative, esoteric things which may actually be very important.
As an individual, it’s easy to feel dwarfed.
Absolutely and the whole notion of what psychologists refer to as ‘psychic numbing’, when you get so overwhelmed by the magnitude of these things; there’s a worry that the generation now are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of it that they almost completely cut off, it’s a turn off. Then again awareness of what people can do through intelligent choices – through the Fair Trade movement, the organic movement, and I always thought food would be the issue that would shift things…
Speaking of food, you were once a chef at The River Cafe in London, which famously gave the world Jamie Oliver.
People are really starting to question the toxicity of the food they’re giving their children. This is an incredibly emotive issue: our most direct, tangible relationship with the natural world. Sourcing local produce, organic if you can, that’s really shifting and has become totally absorbed by the cult of the celebrity chef which is now rippling out in other ways. What I wanted to emphasise in the 999 It’s Time campaign was that shift from individual action towards coming together as a group, as a community, as a family or as a bunch of friends. It’s absolutely staggering to see the number of people coming together now.
Slow food, organic baskets delivered to your doorstep. Barnaby Olson, Song Saa’s resident marine biologist, says environmentalism is “like the icing on the cake: the last thing to on, the first thing to come off”. Isn’t it just a product of the one-percenters? You come to a place like this and people have more pressing worries, such as preventing their children from being sold into slavery.
Is it a luxury of the privileged? So much of it also is traditional common sense. You talk about biodynamics and permaculture: if you go to the small farms in Ibiza where I now live, they go: ‘But that’s what we’ve always done.’ The forest gardening stuff I was trying to introduce in Sri Lanka had its roots in very ancient local methods. There’s an aspect of forgetting, which has come about with industrialisation and the whole Industrial Revolution and this culture we’ve created around that, which is antithetical to a lot of traditional common sense, like the basic notion of harvesting rainwater in dry parts of the world. When I first travelled to India in the mid-’80s, you hardly saw a plastic bag. Now you can hardly move without seeing one. Packaging was once made with recycled newspaper and tied up with a piece of twine. That’s now happening again. There are lots of ways in which we stepped out of typical ecological processes as a consequence of industrialisation and it shouldn’t, at least in theory, take too much for us to step back into it. It’s also inherent that within that there’s this centralised direction everything has taken, whether it’s centralised energy production or massive monoculture and agriculture. It’s the same way the renewable energy debate has gone in the UK. We’re so polarised, it’s either this or that, which is typical of our modern mindset: if you’re anti-capitalist, you must be communist; if you’re anti-nuclear, you must be pro-wind. In fact anyone with their head screwed on in the energy debate will recognise that all of these decisions should be made on a regional basis; decision-making as a power should be devolved to the lowest possible level to local communities to decide what actually suits them. What’s applicable in Cornwall isn’t applicable in London or the Midlands or Scotland. We are, as a species, very ‘It’s either this or that,’ which fundamentally fails to look at all the other possibilities in front of us.
Which rather begs the question: ‘Is that why we’re in this mess?’
It is, partly; it’s a transcendence of a deeply dualistic way of looking at absolutely everything and that’s just the way we’ve cultivated ourselves. We’re stuck in this weird little loop.
It could be argued that the West has had its turn. Isn’t it fair that the East now gets its turn?
Absolutely! China and India are coming on-stream with massive burgeoning societies. You can totally understand that their aspirations are the chance for a turn-around. I think one area that’s massively overlooked by environmentalists is population and the fact there is actually a carrying capacity.
The planet can support two billion people is the oft-quoted figure. We’re nearing seven.
As of 2008, it was taking 16 months for the natural world to regenerate what we were consuming in 12 months as a species, so the planet’s net productivity was minus 20 percent – and that’s been going on since the mid-’80s. If we stopped using C02 tomorrow, we’d still be feeling the impact 30 years from now. Realistically, I don’t think we’re in for an easy ride. The solutions I’d like to see happen aren’t going to happen overnight, but I don’t think we’re going to completely wipe ourselves out as a species.
And that’s the more pressing concern: it’s not the planet that’s going to be wiped out, it’s the human race. The planet will be just fine, eventually.
There are all sorts of Gaian processes at work trying to eradicate us. From the Gaian perspective, we’re a cancer on the Earth. I think pandemics are not so far away; significant climate shifts, and again we believe most of these will happen on a gradual linear progression, but the evolutions and computations in nature are rarely a comfortable ride. It’s going to be messy. It’s just a question of when everything kicks in.
What did you make of Song Saa and what its founders are trying to achieve here?
I was hugely impressed; it’s really raising the bar – a new exemplar in this field. What’s interesting is they’ve embedded from the outset: work with the local community predated the evolution of the hotel; they’ve been moving along hand-in-hand. It’s not a bit of retroactive PR spin, which it often is in this case. They’re getting the groundwork in place for a model you could replicate on a much wider scale. It recognises the necessity of it being a two-way exchange; it’s not ‘You guys do this.’ There’s actually a much more intelligent approach.
Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd, famously garners headlines for ramming whaling boats, occasionally taking things too far and winding up behind bars. More conservative marine conservation agencies say that although they can’t condone his tactics, what ‘extreme environmentalists’ do quite successfully is make it easier for milder organisations to gain political ground. Is there room for the full spectrum of eco-warrior, from the suited and booted to the total anarchist?
Yes, absolutely. It softens the blow for other organisations. He’s a really rather remarkable man.
Who else inspires you?
The most refreshing new voice is a guy called Charles Eisenstein, who’s very involved with the Occupy movement. His magnum opus is A Sense Of Humanity and his most recent book is Sacred Economics. He’s really moved the whole thing along in a number of ways. He’s young and fresh and informed from a very spiritual perspective. Humble, but articulate; he’s not banging a drum and he’s not confrontational. He’s too intelligent for that. I’ve always been a huge fan of Paul Hawken in America, his economic thinking. George Monbiot has just written a new book, Feral, about re-wilding the landscape, which I’m reading at the moment. He’s a powerful voice and a very, very bright man.
Those who bang the drum the loudest are often silenced in horrible ways. When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth first came out, everyone scrambled to act. Then came the criticism.
Yes. They’re not putting themselves in a very clever position. When Rising Tides first came out and I was given the opportunity to speak, I was angry; I’d get into a bit of a rant and be very strident, but it’s a massive turn-off and it’s not very clever because you’re undermining yourself and exposing yourself to criticism. There’s a quote I use quite a lot and it’s about hope and optimism; there’s something very Buddhist about it as well: ‘Hope is wanting something because you know it’s inherently right, but without any attachment to the actual outcome; optimism implies an attachment to the result.’ I touch on this because of having gone down a certain route in my own spiritual journey, which in many ways seemed very odd. Ultimately I realised it wasn’t odd; all that was off was me having this attachment to the results of what I was doing. As soon as that went, I suddenly found myself being able to speak publicly and take part in debates without anyone being able to get my back up. Immediately, you’re in this much stronger position. Passion’s a great thing, I’m not disputing that, but it gave me an attachment to ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ Again, it’s this whole concept of conflict. As soon as you’re engaging on that level, you’re diminishing the power of the whole thing. Ultimately I believe that what’s necessary is coming from – dare I say it – a very spiritual dimension. I spent all those years trying to avoid it, but it is and that’s why the project with Bruce has been so fascinating. Anyone who wants to fix the problems of the world should probably start by fixing themselves. Jiddu Krishnamurti said to me: ‘We’re all very happy to wax on about the problems we see in the world, but very few of us are prepared to change ourselves.’ Quite often the people who are most vociferous in their critique about what’s wrong with the world are people who haven’t been prepared to look at themselves. This has become a big externalisation of their inner turmoil and I see a lot of that within activist circles campaigning for this and that. It’s an externalisation of stuff going on within that maybe they’d do well to address first. If you can find harmony here [touches heart], the actions flowing from it are much more likely to be harmonious with the outer world. It’s a very Buddhist thing.