The Telegraph 19 Jan 08;
People need to feel that civil action, civil society, civil forms of involvement such as Parliament, local councils and so on, are there for a purpose, should be used and can be influenced.
Climate change, say the pessimists, will destroy our world. But in an exclusive interview, acclaimed author Philip Pullman champions a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope
Andrew Simms: Environmentalists must engage people if there is to be a mass shift to lifestyles that do not cost the earth.
How do you strike the right balance between telling people the difficult truth about environmental problems and making them feel it's still worth getting out of bed in the morning to tackle them?
Philip Pullman: Frightening people is a very good way to make them passive and supine. You can be terrified into an abject denial of everything and you don't want to know about it: you just shut your eyes and your ears. But the most useful, the most helpful and most energising thing is to say: "You can do this, and this, and this, and you can press your Government to do that."
Environmentalists need to know something about basic storytelling in order to make their words effective. Samuel Johnson apparently said something I find very useful to remember: "The true aim of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."
Research is much easier than writing, so the temptation is to shove all the research in. But page after page after page of the stuff goes by and, of course, people stop reading.
I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it's almost infinitely rich, but it's in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it.
People feel helpless when they see pictures of devastated forests cut down and the glaciers melting and the poor polar bear sweating on its bare rock in the sea. "What can we do, what can we do?" People need to be told what it is that they can do.
And they also need to feel that civil action, civil society, civil forms of involvement such as Parliament, local councils and so on, are there for a purpose, should be used and can be influenced.
AS: Who influenced you as a storyteller?
PP: Milton was an enormous influence for me. As William Blake said: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."
You can tell that his imagination, although perhaps not his conscious mind, pretty passionately disliked God, because everything he gives God to say, every action God takes, is whining, carping, moaning, criticising, boasting. It's a very unattractive figure, the God of Milton. The son, Messiah, is slightly more attractive, and Satan utterly compelling.
Environmentalists also tell a story about us and ourselves and our place in the universe. In a sense it's a religious story, because that's the big question of religion. Why are we here? What is here, what does it consist of? What have we got to do now we are here? What responsibilities does being conscious place on us?
And those are questions which the environmental movement, over the past 25 years, and certainly since the global warming issue has come up, has been very much engaged in. What does it mean to us to be conscious of what we are doing to the world?
Some people attempt to maintain a state of denial: "It's not happening", or "It is happening, but it's natural and it's nothing to do with us", or "It's happening but we can fix it with technology." All these are attempts to deny responsibility for it; to deny anything that they might have to do.
So, the questions, the stories that the global warming prophets tell us (let's call them that, to distinguish them from the sceptics), take their place right slap-bang in the middle of the prophetical tradition, along with the prophets of the Old Testament.
But the prophets of the Old Testament were not very successful because they were generally hounded out of the city and cast adrift on the waves. People don't like hearing what prophets tell them: it's generally uncomfortable. It's full of doom; it's full of warnings; it's full of denunciations and threats to mend their ways or suffer for it.
So it's not a popular message. And the struggle that the climate-change prophets have had to undertake to get their message heard, I suppose, is similar. But I've noticed a real change in the past year.
AS: Is there an allusion to climate change buried in your trilogy, His Dark Materials?
PP: The thing that really made me wake up to the seriousness of the problem was one morning, not long before a conference in Oxford on climate change, when I had to get up very early.
The weather conditions were such that the sky was clear and the contrails very distinct against the blue. I counted 17 in the sky over my house - 17, and that was rural Oxfordshire. I thought: all of that stuff is going on all the time, this is just unsustainable, it really can't go on. That was a wake-up moment.
But there are things to be done about it - this is not saying that we are utterly doomed, it's saying that we're doomed unless we look after ourselves, and we can do that.
In His Dark Materials, the characters discover a way of cutting through from one universe to another and, at the end of the first book, there's an explosion that rents the sky wide open. It wasn't a completely unconscious echo.
I've been aware of the terms "global warming" and "climate change" for as long as they've been around. Unfortunately, unlike the characters in my story, we only have one universe to play with. We can't skip through a hole into another one.
Something else which is very salient and connected, because of how we choose to spend our time and the impact that has, is the fragmentation of family life. Especially when all the members of the family have their own energy-burning iPod, their own computer, games console and television, and they don't exist as a unit at all, except by virtue of living in one house.
They all go off and do their own things, they don't talk. Most of their attention is not devoted to the unit, to the maintenance of the happiness of the unit, of the group; it's devoted to the gratification of themselves alone. And I think that's awful.
AS: What gives you a sense of wellbeing?
PP: My first answer would have to be a good day's work. If I have done my thousand words, my three pages, and it's gone well, then nothing else matters - I'm satisfied. If I've done it and it's gone badly, well, I can correct it tomorrow, it's there.
If I combine that with a little bit of exercise, a little bit of play, which for me involves usually making things with wood, or playing music, and if my family is well and happy, and I have something nice to eat - that would be a good day for me.
I am very lucky. And I'm wary of preaching about how we should live, because I know how lucky I am: very few people have the chance to do what they want to do and stop doing it when they want to, and I do. Mind you, for 30 years I didn't. I had to write in my spare time while I was doing other jobs.
So perhaps I am entitled to preach a little bit. I'm entitled to say that in order to do the thing you want to do then you have to do it, whether or not you've got the time. If it means missing Neighbours, then miss Neighbours, or EastEnders or whatever. You must ask which is more important to you in the end.
I also like using tools and making things out of wood. At the moment I'm making a rocking horse, and I've been making it for about two years now. It's in its final shaping stage, I've just got a bit of shaving off its rather fat rump. I used poplar wood for the head and neck. It's quite soft and easy to carve. The legs are made of ash, because they will take a lot of strain and ash is a strong, springy wood.
And soon I shall paint it and then put it on a stand. That should be quite easy to make because it's just joinery, no carving involved. And then it'll be ready for my grandchildren, who have been saying impatiently: "Grandpa, do some more horse!"
AS: Have you done anything to reduce your own environmental impact?
PP: Around the house, all our light bulbs, apart from the ones in the kitchen, are low-energy ones. In the kitchen, there are these bloody halogen things. When we had our kitchen done three or four years ago, I said, "We want low-energy lights" and the designer said, "Oh, these are low-energy." Well, they're not, actually, they're 50 watts each. What he meant was they're low-voltage, which isn't the same thing.
We seldom have the central heating up high, because neither of us likes being particularly hot. In principle, I'd have everything: I'd plaster the house with photovoltaic cells and have wind turbines off every gable.
I've cut out international travel as much as possible. That wasn't hard to do because I hate flying. But I've got to go to America in connection with books and films. I say I've got to, but I suppose I could say "No".
I don't feel too guilty about electricity because we buy it from Good Energy, which supplies it from renewable sources. So I don't feel too bad when I'm playing my electric guitar.
AS: You have said that, as a writer, you are interested in the shape of things. What do you think is the shape of a good life?
PP: What do we mean by "a good life"? Do we mean a life that is pleasant and satisfying, which is what we normally mean by a good life, or a life full of moral purpose? A life may be very satisfying from within, but seem pretty tedious from without.
Or alternatively it may be full of anguish from within, but from the outside it may look inspirational. So lives and the shapes of lives, and life stories and their shapes, depend very much on where you are seeing them from.
The challenge of having to change behaviour so that good lives don't have to cost the earth goes deeper than having the right aspirational model. I think we've evolved in such a way that suited conditions on the savannah 500,000 years ago, a way of life that was acquisitive, territorial and combative.
The degree to which the processes of civilisation, or socialisation, can overcome that depends on the timescale. In the long term, I back evolution - if we survive this crisis that we're in. I was recently reading James Martin's book, The Meaning of the 21st Century. His point was that we are approaching a crisis.
It's like going down a river, approaching the rapids, and about mid-century we're going to go through the rapids, and it's going to be terribly difficult for all of us. But we can survive and if we can get through this, he says, it's going to be wonderful.
AS: How do you feel about life at the moment?
PP: Thinking about wellbeing, right now, I'm feeling pretty good. My health is intact; my family is all intact; my work is going reasonably well. It never goes entirely smoothly, because there are too many things that can go wrong and do go wrong, but then you know you can fix them. It's a continual challenge and a continual interest and a, well, occasional pleasure.
I find myself at the age of 60 quite unexpectedly rich. My mind boggles, because I've been very poor most of my life. My childhood was formed during the austerity years after the war. So I still feel influenced by that. Curious, isn't it, how we were much healthier as a nation after the war when the rationing was on?
In a sense it was easier then because everybody knew there was a war on; you didn't get people like Melanie Phillips or Dominic Lawson saying: "War? Of course there isn't a war. It's just a conspiracy to get money out of us. All the scientific evidence is forged. Real scientists know there isn't any such thing as a war."
AS: Talk to me about polar bears. Their perilous fate has become symbolic of global warming, but you give them a hard time in your own books.
PP: The armoured bears in my trilogy survive. Just. I've got a soft spot for them. I expect many of us have - those who haven't been eaten by one. It was in Edinburgh Zoo that I first became emotionally affected by polar bears. It was a hot day and the bear was just stretched out on the concrete, in a little pen no bigger than this room.
I thought: "This is absolutely monstrous!" An animal like that wants the ice and 50,000 square miles to roam about in. It's worse than slavery, absolutely appalling, to keep an animal in those conditions. This one was lying there looking as though it wished it were dead.
Now, they're all going to be extinct if there's no ice left, unless they put them all in zoos or round them up and put a fence round them and throw them a seal or two from time to time. But that's no life.
If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality and saw what was happening, they'd eat us. Eat as many of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.
AS: Do you think there might be a less carnivorous solution?
PP: One less drastic solution we hear talk of is a tradable carbon ration. If you have unused credit, you can sell to somebody else. I think that's wrong. We should have a fixed limit and that's it. This is a crisis as big as war and you couldn't trade your ration book in the wartime.
You were allowed three ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year.
That's what I reckon, but it won't happen because governments are too feeble. Governments are feeble now because all the Western governments have bought into the orthodoxy that the market knows best. And the market bloody well doesn't know best, the market is what got us into this mess.
Every social bond, everything that we thought was firm and established, gets wiped away. It is wiped away by money, by the mighty force, this universal acid of the market system. Magnificent.
