Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: The meaning of the word nature simply means birth.
Like a woman is pregnant, she has a prenatal check. Natal word is the original etymological word for nature. Nature means birth. So we are all born. So we are nature. We cannot separate ourselves from nature. And the moment you realize that, you can start on the right path.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Annabelle Heseltine. I'm a journalist and broadcaster. And you're very welcome to the fourth episode of Hope Springs.
Today I will be speaking to an extraordinary man whose vision and passion has steered Resurgence, the movement and magazine which brings you this podcast for nearly 60 years.
Satish Kumar is a peace pilgrim and a former Jain Monk who in 1962, walked 8,000 miles from Gandhi's grave in Delhi to Washington protesting against nuclear weapons.
We will learn why his guru told him to take no money and refuse all meat, and why he later accepted an offer from EF Schumacher of Small is Beautiful fame, to settle in England as the editor of the Resurgence and Ecologist magazine.
I ask him why he founded Schumacher College, and we'll talk about radical love and why, since the realists have clearly failed to achieve world peace, it's time to give idealists a chance.
And I began our interview by asking him to tell me about the moment of trauma which set his own journey in motion.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: First of all, when I was four years old, my father died.
My mother was crying, my sisters were crying, everybody was crying.
And my father was just lying in state, not talking, not moving.
And I was quite puzzled and confused.
Four year old, everybody is not talking to me.
So I asked my mother, why are you crying and why father is not talking and moving?
And my mother said, your father is dead and now he will never talk to you and he will never walk.
So what is death?
So my mother said, everybody dies one day.
So I asked, will you die? And then everybody will cry.
Then will I die? And then everybody will cry.
And mother said, yes, we all die. And when we die, those who are living will cry.
That conversation still buried in my mind.
And so ever since that moment, I started to wonder, what is death and why people die.
And when I was about eight years old, I went to see the guru of my mother, and he was sitting by himself quietly.
And so I went to see him and I asked him, guru Dev, is there any way that we can stop people dying?
And the guru said, the only way to stop death is to stop or the end of the cycle of life and death, birth and death.
And that can happen only if you renounce the world and practice Total spiritual life.
So that was the answer which went so deep in my heart, almost in my bones it went. And I said, I'll do anything to stop dying people and so can I become a monk?
That was the moment. And so I went to my mother and I said, guru, say that you can stop death only by renouncing the world. And so I'm going to become monk and renounce the world.
So that's how it happened. And eventually I became a monk at age 9.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Is there a particular reason why you wanted to become a Jain monk?
[00:05:11] Speaker A: My family is a Jain family and my mother's guru was a Jain teacher. And so I was in a way brought up as a Jain from the childhood. Jain tradition says there are three things which makes life pure.
Number one is non violence, loving all living beings without any discrimination, without any judgment, without any ifs or buts. You love everybody and do no harm to anyone, to other humans, to other animals, to plants, to any life.
The second is restraint. You reduce your needs and do with less complete and utter minimalism.
So less possessions you have, more time you have for meditation, for contemplation, for spiritual studies, for learning, for thinking and for being.
And the third one is letting go.
Letting go of all your prejudices, kind of beliefs, anything which bind you.
The way to freedom is to let go.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: It's very much like the Buddhist idea of attachment and non attachment.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:06:52] Speaker C: And of course it's very much what Gandhi was all about. And at the age of 19, I believe you illicitly borrowed a book, Gandhi's autobiography, and as a result of that you escaped in the middle of the night and pivoted your life again. Would you like to tell me what happened then and why you felt the need to leave the Jain?
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Yes. Mahatma Gandhi was also very influenced by Jain tradition.
One of his teachers was also a Jain teacher.
But Mahatma Gandhi believed that it is not good enough to practice spirituality in a monastic order and escaping from the world.
When I read Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, he said very clearly in his book that you have to practice spirituality in the world.
You cannot escape from the world. The very night after reading that book, Mahatma Gandhi came in my dream and he said to me the same thing.
He said, how many people can become monks? Only few. So spirituality becomes exclusive to only those who can join the monastic order, whereas spirituality should be available to everybody. So that was such a strong message, almost opposite of what I was doing, that I was in a turmoil.
And I was so staggered to see this message and read this message and have this dream that I decided to leave the Barastic order. But you are not allowed to leave the order because once you become a monk, you become a monk for life.
So I had to escape one night after midnight when everybody was asleep.
And eventually I found a Gandhian community where I could practice non violence and spirituality and restraint in daily life in the world and not out of the world.
[00:09:15] Speaker C: And your teacher was Vinobi Bhavi?
[00:09:17] Speaker A: That's right. Because by the time I left monastic order, Mahatma Gandhi was already assassinated. So he was not in the world. I never met him, I only read his book. But a great follower of Mahatma Gandhi was a man called Vinoba Bhave.
And he was a kind embodiment of spirituality. He did not marry and he practiced Gandhian, non violence and also very social, engaged in social activities, activism. And so he was a spiritual activist.
And therefore being with him, walking with him in India, around India, in the villages and helping people. So in a way, kind of professionalism and vocationalism coming together and so acting out of love, that was such a profound message of Vinoba Bhave that I was very inspired. So Mahatma Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave, two great figures together, made me kind of a spiritual activist.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: And what happened that inspired your great walk?
[00:10:39] Speaker A: One morning with a friend, I was in a coffee house in a city of Bangalore and I read a piece of news in the newspaper.
A photograph of an old man in England called Bertrand Russell.
And he was protesting against nuclear bomb and demanding peace among nations.
And while he was protesting against the bomb, he was arrested and he was put in jail.
And when I read this piece of news, the man of 90 years old, Nobel prize winning Lord Bert Russell is going to jail for peace in the world. What am I doing? Young man, sitting here drinking coffee.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: Age 25.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Age 25, yeah. And so with a friend I was at that time. And so I said to my friend, let us do something, let's work for peace, world peace. And let's go to these four nuclear capitalists of the world. Moscow, Paris, London and Washington.
And somehow my friend was so inspired and I was so inspired that we forgot everything. And we in the end decided to walk from New Delhi from the grave of Mahatma Gandhi and walk without any money in our pockets.
Because if you have money, you go and sleep in a guest house or hotel and you eat in a restaurant, you don't need anybody.
And if you have no money, then you have to meet people, talk to people. And that gives You a good kind of platform to speak. And wars begin in fear, peace begins in trust.
How do we demonstrate that we trust ourselves, we trust all people and we trust the universe.
Only having no money, we had to trust.
And so my friend and I went from India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Moscow.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: If I remember correctly, in your autobiography, no Destination, you talk about what it was like to be trusting the whole time in very different places, going through difficult times.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Yes, yes. I mean, it was a kind of hard path because walking through the mountains of Afghanistan, Hindu Kush mountains, and the deserts of Iran and the snow covered villages of Russia, sometimes there was no food. And we were also vegetarian.
[00:13:49] Speaker C: Because you were told by your teacher to be vegetarian too, weren't you?
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Because what do you do to animals, you can also do to humans. And therefore, if you are kind to animals, you will be kind to people. If you are cruel to animals, you will be cruel to people. And therefore, being vegetarian is also a symbol of peace, making peace with nature, that kind of unconditional love can only come when you are treating all living beings with compassion and kindness. And so walking without money, being vegetarian, and just walking through the mountains, through the desert, through snow, through all the kind of difficulties was not easy. But by putting our bodies and our minds and our whole self on the line and meeting ordinary people in the villages and saying to them that if we live in peace and if we have no fear of the other and we love each other, then there'll be no need for nuclear bomb bombs. And so it was not easy, but we knew that it would not be easy. And we're not looking for easy way, we're looking for a proper way, even a hard way, because making peace in the world, you have to commit yourself. And one of the very beautiful story, Annabelle, is that as my friend and I were walking, we were distributing leaflets about the purpose of our walk. And I gave these leaflets to two women who were standing in front of a tea factory near the Black Sea in Georgia.
And when these two women read that we are walking without money and for peace, they stopped us and said, if you are walking without money, how do you eat?
So I said, people just give us food, then we eat. If we don't get food, we don't eat.
So they thought for a second and they said, are you hungry? Can we give you food?
So we said, yes.
They said, we work in this tea factory and we have very nice tea and a canteen and we can give you lunch. So we said, all right, anytime is Tea time. So we went in, and as we were drinking tea, one of the women had a brain wave. She got up, went out of the room and came back with four packets of tea.
And she said that these packets of tea are not for you.
So I was a bit puzzled. For whom are they then?
I would like you to be my messenger and give one packet of tea to our premier in Moscow, in the Kremlin. Second packet of tea to the President of France in Palais Elysees. Third packet of tea to the Prime Minister of England in 10 Downing street and a fourth packet of tea to the President of the United States of America in the White House. Which was Kennedy at that time? It was Kennedy. And so I said, thank you. What a wonderful idea. And please give them a message from me. I said, what is your message? My message to them is that if you ever get a mad thought of pressing the nuclear button, please stop for a moment and have a fresh cup of tea.
Invite your opponent, your enemy, to have a cup of tea with you and talk over a cup of tea. The tea is more powerful than tanks. Tea is more powerful than bombs. Over a cup of tea, you can solve all your problems. Tanks and bombs cannot solve problems. But a cup of tea is a cup of peace. A cup of tea is a cup of love. Talk to your enemy. Talk to your opponent. Everybody can talk to their friends. The courage required is to talk to your opponent and the enemy. And only over a cup of tea. You can relax and you can talk to each other. Such a powerful message.
[00:17:59] Speaker C: Huge. I'm reminded of you wrote the book the Buddha and the Terrorist about this. Talking, talking and bringing people in and really working through the problems together. It's such a powerful message in so many different ways, so relevant now. But I don't want to interrupt anymore the conversation about walking. So you walked across Europe.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: We, of course, we delivered the packet of pasty in the Kremlin, and then we walked through Europe, and then we were in Paris, and then we came to London.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: Were London and Paris and the Kremlin receptive?
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Yes, very receptive. We also met Bertrand Russell, and that was wonderful because he was the inspiration behind our walk. And so meeting him, and he said to me, you have walked fast.
I'm still alive. I'm so happy to see you.
[00:18:51] Speaker C: And out of prison by this stage.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yes.
And so. And then he said, but how are you going to get to America? Can I help you? And so I said, we don't want any money because we have not touched money. But if you Will kindly help us to get two tickets in a boat. That'd be very wonderful and we'll be grateful. And so Bertrand Russell organized our passage and a ticket. And so we sailed across the Atlantic and we arrived in New York. And then from New York we walked to Washington D.C. and we delivered the packet of peace tea in the White House. And then we ended our journey. By that time, President Kennedy was assassinated. So we ended our journey at the grave of John F. Kennedy. So we started from the grave of Mahatma Gandhi and ended at the grave of John F. Kennedy. And then we traveled back to India. And so two and a half years, 8,000 miles through 15 countries. That was our kind of peace walk.
[00:19:58] Speaker C: And did it attract a lot of attention at the time? Was it written about in the papers?
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Yes, yes, a lot of attention.
It was on the BBC, it was in the Guardian, it was in Pravda, Uzbestia, New York Times, Washington Post, all these papers and radios and television. Because our purpose was to promote and spread the word about peace and nonviolence. Now, all in a kind of continuum of using my energy and my optimism and my hope and active hope and using that for peace and non violence and for radical love, which you then.
[00:20:37] Speaker C: Wrote a book about later on, about the love that goes to everybody regardless and which is particularly pertinent at the moment with what is happening around the world with Ukraine, with Gaza, with Israel.
What is your message today about radical love? How can we find the strength and understanding within us to love people who are perpetrating such hyenas crimes?
[00:21:04] Speaker A: The thing is that these violent wars and crimes against humanity, they have been tried and tried and tried again and they don't solve any problem.
So my recipe is same as it was at the time I was walking around the world. It's radical love. It is good to love your friends, your family, your companions, your colleagues, people you like, people with whom you agree. That's a moderate love and everybody needs it and we need it like a bread and butter.
But radical love is to go a step further and love even those with whom you don't agree and sit down with them over a cup of tea and talk to them and see how you can love each other and accept each other and live and let live.
Because countries like Russia and Ukraine, they can't change their location. They will have to live next door to each other as neighbors. They can't say, I don't like you, so I'm going away. You can't go away. They both have to be who they are and kind of accept each other's specialities or eccentricities or whatever they are. But violence is no answer. So war is bad for people, war is bad for environment, bad for our future generations. What are we doing? Just ego. It's a national ego or a collective ego. So we have to move from ego to eco and learn to live next to each other. My message is to sit down together and find a compromise, to live next to each other without killing innocent children, innocent women, innocent people, and even your soldiers. Look at Germany and France. They were sworn enemies for a long, long, long time. And now they are best of friends because they have learned to live and let live as neighbors and not kill each other. Same was with England and France, how many wars we had. Now we are best of friends. So if that can happen, Putin is not going to be there forever, Zelensky is not going to be there forever, but Ukrainians and Russians are going to be there generation after generation after generation. So they have to love each other and let live and let live with each other. There's no excuse whatsoever to go to war.
[00:23:45] Speaker C: I think my favorite book of yours is Soil, Soul and Society. And I think something that I wanted to raise, which some of the people who listen might think, why is she saying this? But I want to because I found it reassuring. What is your answer to the person who says, don't be naive, this is never going to happen.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Yes, people do say the Satish, you are too idealistic, come down to the real world.
And I say to them, please tell me what the real world leaders have done. What have they achieved? The world is being run and led by the so called realists. And those realists have not achieved peace. They have achieved more wars. Vietnam war, Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and they don't even win the wars in Afghanistan. America was there for 20 years and what have they achieved? Taliban is still ruling there and Iran is our enemy. Russia is our enemy. China is our enemy. Everybody's our enemy. Half of the world is our enemy. Is that a realism? So I say come down away from the real world and give idealist a chance. And I'm very happy to be an idealist and not join the realists who are destroying the world and creating global warming and climate change and lack of peace and killing thousands and thousands of people.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Gosh, we could talk forever, couldn't we? But I'm going to go straight on into leadership, because leadership, the way we've had it in the last 50 to 100 years, is in crisis, isn't it? There is no confident leader. I don't know how much that is because of the way the social media is, but I think it's much deeper than that. I think that there is a loss of confidence and a loss of vision. How do you see the new leaders? Who do you think should be the new leaders?
[00:25:38] Speaker A: I mean, we had great examples of good leaders.
I had a great pleasure of meeting Vachlav Havel, the president of Czech Republic.
He was a good leader and he led Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia at that time. But Czech Republic now into independence with lots of love and lots of realism as well as idealism together. And so I would say leadership needs courage.
At the moment we don't have many good leaders because they lack courage.
Easy to go to war, you don't need so much courage.
[00:26:18] Speaker C: In fact, war is often a useful way of deterring from other issues at home.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. So to make peace and be a good leader, you have to be fearless and not fear others. But say, I am big hearted, generous hearted, I am prepared to lead people into peace and into prosperity and into good life and we can make a better world. That true leader has to be ego. Less ego is not good leadership quality. Egolessness is the good leadership quality. More generosity, a kind of humility and a courage to let go of your ego needs a lot of courage. So at the moment there is a lack of courage and that's why we don't have good leaders. And our education doesn't help. Our education makes people timid.
So I think we need to change our educational system as well so that people are a bit more adventurous and more courageous and more idealistic and not just looking for their own personal glory, personal name, personal fame, personal money, personal wealth, whatever it is just for me.
[00:27:30] Speaker C: Me, me talking about education, you've walked the talk in the sense that you set up the small school here in Heartland in Cornwall in England. But I noticed that, you know, you very much talk about the three Rs being sort of old fashioned and you wanted to talk about the three H's. Would you like to talk more about the three H's?
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Yes. You know, in our universities and when a young person goes to study the teachers and establishment, they look at a young person and they see that person having no body, having no heart, having no hands, only head and even half head. Because we have two hemisphere in our brains, left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. So left hemisphere is the brain, which is more logical, more managerial, more administrative and more rational. The right hemisphere of the brain is more intuitive, more relational, more Imaginative, more creative, and more courageous.
So we are spending all our money and all our resources, billions and billions of pounds and dollars and euros, just training the half head. So I started Schubacher College for Holistic Education. So education of head, which means both sides of our brain, left brain and right brain, but also education of heart. We need to educate our children to be courageous, to develop compassion, kindness, generosity. If you have those qualities of heart, you will not have wars and conflicts and global warming and climate change and poverty and exploitation, because the heart qualities will help you to overcome those problems. Humans are not mere consumers. We are makers. We are artists. We are artisans. We can grow food. We can be gardeners, we can be cooks. And we can use our two hands to make something beautiful. At the moment, we are missing that sense of beauty. We are missing this sense of aesthetics.
I say, Annabelle, our crisis at the moment is not climate change, our crisis, not economic growth, our crisis. Aesthetics. We have lost the sense of balance. We have lost a sense of proportion. We have lost a sense of harmony. And these are the principles of aesthetics. And therefore, we don't use our heart. We don't use our hands. We are just sitting behind a desk, looking at a screen computer and not doing anything else. So Schumacher College is established to bring back the education of three Hs, not three Rs, but three Hs, head, heart and hands. And we have been going for 34 years, and we have 20,000 alumni around the world. And Sri Mahal is very successful. And we are studying ecology, environment, spirituality, holistic science and all the holistic economics, all the subjects we study from an ecological and holistic perspective.
[00:30:43] Speaker C: So I want to take you back to the 1970s when Schumacher wrote, small is beautiful. And it can be no coincidence that the Ecologist was founded in 1970. Resurgence, which we're going to talk about a lot more in a moment, were founded in 1966, got Friends of the Earth in 1971, the Green Party in 1971. The center for Alternative Technology was also founded in 1973. So there was this huge movement. I want to know how you got back from India to England, why you came to England and what happened with Resurgence and you.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: I was in England in 71 for a brief visit, and that visit was to speak about the freedom for Bangladesh.
And then before I went to India, I met E.F. schumacher. And E.F. schumacher at that time was an associate editor of Resurgence magazine. And the editor himself had gone to Africa, to Zambia, to be the personal assistant to President Kaunda. And therefore they were looking for an editor. And E.F. schumacher said that, satish, you are the kind of person we are looking for. Why don't you stay and be the editor of Resurgence magazine? And I said to Schumacher, no, I want to go back to India. He said, why? I said, I want to work with the Gandhian movement.
He said, but, Satish, there are many Gandhians in India. We need one in England. Stay here and make Resurgence a Gandhian magazine. Because Gandhian principles are same as Resurgence. Principles of non violence, of ecology, of spirituality, of aesthetics, of beauty, of art, of craft, of agriculture. All the values Mahatma Gandhi cherished are the values of Resurgence. And so I said to E.F. schumacher, I said, all right, you are very persuasive. If I become the editor, will you write in every issue? And he said, yes, if you become the editor, I will write in every issue. So he wrote 35 articles for Resurgence magazine. And so. And then I met Teddy Goldsmith as well, who founded the Ecologist. Exactly. And so resurgence started in 1966. So in 2026, we will be celebrating our 60th anniversary of resurgence, which puts.
[00:33:27] Speaker C: You as the grandfather of the whole Green movement. I think it's really important to make that point. You know, you have been out there talking about it, fostering the voices and the people who are the leaders, going out in different places. You have everybody writing for you. Resurgence is a magazine. It's a movement, it's events, and it's a philosophy which you've been propounding not just in England, but around the world.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Thank you, Annabelle, for all your very wonderful, kind words. I am very honored and privileged to be part of the Green movement for the last more than 50 years in England. And not only in England, but in Europe and America and India. And so I travel in Japan and China. And so Resurgence magazine is a holistic magazine which has a kind of platform to bring these divergent issues and converge them into one great flow of change. It embraces inner transformation out of transformation. It embraces arts, culture, as well as aesthetics and a political transformation and change, social change. So all those things are interconnected. Sometimes people become too much into a kind of narrow silos and say, only one issue matters and only one thing matters. But I say that everything is connected, everything is interrelated. You can't separate them. So Resurgence has been flying the flag of this interconnected and convergent issues all coming together and how we can solve all the problems by seeing this interconnectedness. And so it has been a great privilege to be the Editor of resurgence magazine for 40 years and now I am editor emeritus. But I am very much looking forward to the 60th anniversary of resurgence in 2026.
[00:35:24] Speaker C: And it has to be said that although you step back in 2016, you have actually now written four books, I think, since then. Yes, going back to Schumacher, because I believe that he's probably the greatest influence and he talks about a different way of ecology and also economics. And I find today that there's increasingly growing movement, people talking about a different way of being, that it's not about GDP growing year in, year out. There's circular economics, there's the donut economics as propounded by Kate Raworth. Where do you think we are now in terms of going forward? Do you see a growing movement?
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Yes, yes, movement is growing. And I think there are hundreds of thousands of young people, particularly around the world, who are upholding the principles of ecological and social justice and ecological justice.
And Schumacher's influence is strong in terms of economics being in the service of humanity.
At the moment, our economics is the master and nature is the servant and humans are servant. Nature is only a resource for the economy.
Nature has become just a means to an end. The end is economic growth. And humans are also a means to an end. So humans are merely a resource for running the organization and making profit. So Schumacher's idea was that economics as if people and planet matter, not people and planet, as if economics matter. So he was a prophet of this idea that we should not confuse our means and ends. End should be integrity of nature and a kind of well being of humanity and economic should be in the service of sustainability, maintaining integrity of nature and maintaining human well being. And I think this movement is growing and now more and more people are realizing that we have to make business and economics and profitability to suit and be in harmony with natural world and human world. And I think this is the big challenge. So we are the growing movement around the world of ordinary people, particularly young people, asking that this is not right and this is a kind of authoritarian idea and a kind of we are all succumb to this one single idea of economic growth. Any country, economic growth is the master. So that challenge is big challenge. And I think I'm very hopeful. I'm very hopeful things will change.
[00:38:24] Speaker C: I found it enormously reassuring and inspiring to hear Paul Polman, who was the CEO of Unilever for seven years, talking about this too. So when you hear a CEO of a large corporation acknowledging that this is not a way forward, that you need to start to Put nature first and the Nazi Nature isn't endless resource to be plundered at will. I'd love to hear what you think about Paul Polman and the talk around large corporations, because people slag off large corporations.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Paul Polman is a good friend of mine and he has been to Resurgence Centre and we have published his articles in Resurgence magazine. But there are some other big corporations and not so big corporations and this movement called B Corps Movement. And there's a conference in Amsterdam called Be for Good Leaders. And lots of business leaders are thinking and changing their business practices and they are looking into ways of creating regenerative economics and as you said, donut economics. So their idea is that rather than having this linear economy, endless growth and no end to it, we need to replace this economic growth idea, this linear growth idea, to a more cyclical economy. So cyclical economy is whatever comes from nature. We use it and then put it back into nature without pollution, without waste. In nature, there is no waste, no pollution. Everything is beautifully designed. So we need to learn from nature. Nature is our mentor. Just look at an apple seed. You put apple seed in the ground and that one tiny apple seed becomes a tree and gives you 500 apples. And year after year from that one.
[00:40:13] Speaker C: Seed, you made the important distinction that there's a difference between learning about nature and learning from nature. How do you think we can transition from a situation where we see nature as there to serve us as opposed to understanding that we are all a part of nature?
[00:40:31] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, Arabel, the meaning of the word nature simply means birth.
Like a woman is pregnant, she has a prenatal check after the birth of the baby. Postnatal check, natal word is the original etymological word for nature. Nature means birth. Anything which is born is nature. So we are all born. So we are nature. We cannot separate ourselves from nature. We are nature. And the moment you realize that, you can start on the right path. At the moment we think that nature is out there separate from us, we are separate from nature. We are above nature. Nature's value is only when it is useful to humans. So this is a kind of.
Very kind of reductionist approach. So we need to say we are nature. And what we do to nature, we do to ourselves.
[00:41:28] Speaker C: It's very powerful stuff that you were saying, and it's very moving to hear it. I want to take us back to the 1970s.
Why was there so many people? Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Schumacher, what was the mood?
[00:41:44] Speaker A: First time in the 60s, people felt the negative impact of technology and science and chemicals and all that. And one of the women, a scientist woman, who really woke up to this reality was Rachel Carson and she wrote a book called Silent Spring. And that woke people up. And she was a pioneering scientist.
[00:42:13] Speaker C: Chemicals, the chemicals that were destroying, which were put out to fertilize and to weed kill, but were actually killing the birds and the animals.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. But that was a kind of symptom behind that, what we were doing to nature in general. And that woke up many, many people. And so first time, in 1972, United nations organized a big conference in Stockholm. And that was the kind of beginning of UN waking up and other countries waking up. And then Teddy Goldsmith was the kind of founder of the ecologist. And also he produced a book called Blueprint for Survival. All these things precipitate this movement. And as a result, we saw Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and many, many other organizations emerging and making this movement. And now that movement is quite big, quite all around the world.
[00:43:10] Speaker C: We've been very slow to wake up.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: I mean, but the things have changed. Quite a lot of things have changed. When I started writing about renewable energy, people said, satish, you must be mad. You think that the needs of British industry and economy can be met by renewable energy? You must be fool.
But now, after 50 years, 35% of our energy is coming out of renewable resources. That's a big change, change in our consciousness. So when we started writing about plant based diet, people were sort of saying, oh, that's a freaky kind of hippie vegetarians. But now big industry are producing plant based diets. And so I think we should not be too pessimistic. Things are beginning to change. It will take time. It will take time because industrial civilization has built over 200 years. So you can't change this big juggernaut of industrial infrastructure overnight in 10 or 20 years. So I think it will take some time to move around. But once people wake up, change will speed up and I think we will have more change.
[00:44:31] Speaker C: There is one more thing that I really want to talk to you about, which as I've interviewed people, not just now for this podcast series, but I've been a journalist for what, 35 years. I've realized that so often the people who've gone on to do amazing things have had a disruptive trauma in their life. And it can be the loss of a parent, it can be a divorce, it can be an illness, God forbid, it's the loss of a child.
And it leaves me with a question which is if individually people can go on to achieve so much as a result, or as almost like a shoot coming out of this pain, what can we do as a world that is clearly in huge trauma, that is suffering in so many different ways, what can we do if we work together?
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Yes, yes. I mean, the healing of trauma is possible only with empathy and compassion and love.
Because the cause of trauma is separation, disconnection, separation between nature and humans, separation between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, separation between Russians, Chinese, Americans, Europeans. We are always thinking of separation, separation, me first. And that is causing trauma. So it's an ecological trauma, but also personal trauma. And therefore only way out of this trauma is to see that we are all connected and we are all different, embrace the diversity, biodiversity, cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, truth diversity, and not try to impose uniformity on the whole world, that one system is better, American system is better, or Chinese system is better, or Indian system. Let thousand systems bloom together and not have this uniformity. So to heal the trauma of humanity in modern times is to embrace diversity and cultivate love, radical love in our hearts. Only then we can heal the trauma. Enough.
[00:46:53] Speaker C: I think you've said everything.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:55] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Satish.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: My pleasure, My pleasure.
[00:46:58] Speaker C: Real honour to spend this time with you. Thank you.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: It's my pleasure.
[00:47:06] Speaker B: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please leave us a review wherever you're listening and recommend this series to anyone you think might enjoy it too. I'll be back in a fortnight talking to the pop star turned farmer, Andy Cato, who, shocked by the words on a billboard about the horrors of industrial farming, sold his music rights and plowed the profits into some barren soil in the Pyrenees. If you're worried about health, biodiversity loss and climate change and you feel like you're on a slow motion train crash, you can't do anything about it. Your food choices are a fantastic point of agency.
This episode was produced by Pete Norton and brought to you by the Resurgence Trust, a movement, a magazine and a manifesto for hope. To find out more about their work, click the link in the show notes of this episode. I'm Annabelle Heseltine and thank you for listening to Hope Springs.
