Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then, please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. That's S-E-E Change Happen dot CO dot UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going.

Today is episode 86 with the title "Voices Uniting For Our Planet" and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Nicola Peel. Nicola describes herself as a solutionist, environmentalist and a speaker. And when I asked Nicola to describe her superpower, she said, being an inspirational speaker also, she's told and getting shit done. So, Nicola, welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne. It's nice to be here.

Nicola, voices uniting for our planet and getting shit done. I've got to hear more about this. Tell me more.

Well, it's exactly what we need right now. We need to see change happen. We need to get together and see our differences, not our. Sorry. See our similarities, not our differences, because we're really good at finding ways to divide us, this, us against them. And we see it so much in the environmental movement. And for me to even say that I'm an environmentalist, the first thing is, oh, what, you just stand there and protest, do you? It's like, no, I don't. I do a lot more.

And, yeah, and that's what I do. I get shit done. And that's real stuff with my hands, building infrastructures and helping people that most need it. So, yeah, that's really, I suppose, a little bit of an intro.

So you picked up on the stereotype, the image that people have in the head of an environmentalist, the hippie, the tree huggers that chained themselves to railings. That's the media trope. And media create these tropes to dehumanise, to disenfranchisE, to divert attention. So why is the media latching on to environmental concerns as a negative and creating these negative tropes, not amplifying them in a positive light? So I'm a big media hater, if you like. I like to bash the media because they influence everything we do. So why do you think environmentalists have this bad name, if you like?

Well, I suppose we have to like anything. Look behind who owns it, who has to benefit from it? I've got a good example, actually, with National Geographic. And I made a film, Blood of the Amazon, many years ago. I went from the headwaters in Ecuador, all the way down the Amazon river, and I made a film. And they were interested, but they said to me, yes, but you can't name any names. And the name was Chevron, Texaco. They were the ones that created this massive legacy in the Amazon. But they were interested only if I didn't name the.

You know, it never occurred to me. I thought, well, National Geographic, they're all about nature. They love nature. Of course they're going to be interested in the real story of what's happening in the Amazon. But then I picked up one day one of the magazines, and I'd never realised, I'd never really noticed it before. All the advertising from BP and from Shell and Big Oil who advertised in Nat Geo. And so it's like that with most media. If we look behind who owns it, where's the money? Follow the money.

And that's why, really, it comes down to the same old story, why they don't want to give us a voice.

There's a few American presidents ago, I can't remember which one it was. You probably know the story where the whole concept of climate change was almost, like, buried as a non thing. You probably know the story, but we were talking about climate change, the impact of the planet, the global warming. All these things were being scientifically proven and evidenced until, I guess, they got lobbied by the oil companies or the car manufacturers, whoever that may have been. And suddenly it all changed, didn't it? There was a couple of American Presidents ago, if I remember rightly well, Al.

Gore was the almost president, vice president, and if you haven't already watched his inconvenient truth, it says what it is on the can. It is an inconvenient truth to everybody. Nobody wants to change. And, yeah, he really clearly laid it out. We've known. Well, definitely the oil companies have known since the. What they're doing. So it's of their interest and their shareholders interest to make sure that they can just carry on business as usual.

Oh, cool, you're right. I remember that now. Yeah. Wasn't that around Ronald Reagan or just after Ronald Reagan? It was that. It was around that era, wasn't it?

We don't think it was that long ago. I think you might be talking about the Kennedys back then when he put solar panels up the White House. And then they were told they had to take the solar panels off of the White House. I mean, this is like way ahead of their time. And we're still talking about whether or not it's a good idea to get power from the sun.

As you say, we're invested in the status quo and the world is financed and run by these big global corporations based on oil control and power, isn't it? And even if you look at the dynamics of the Middle east, what's going on in the Middle east right now, a lot of the troubles in the Middle east all around power dynamics around oil and energy. When I say power, I mean power in both senses of the word, political power, as well as environment, production of electricity, et cetera. It's a tough thing to change, isn't it? Especially you look at the American car manufacturers have huge, great employment, often in the least employed areas of the US, the Rust Belt, where poverty and employment is really tough. That's where a lot of the manufacturing is, and making these kind of changes. Advancement isn't good for politics, is it?

No, definitely not. I mean, it's not good for a lot of things. And I kind of wonder if we need to change our names. We call ourselves still Homo sapiens, which was sapiens wise, and we don't seem to be acting very wisely at the moment. I think we could be. It's almost like, how about we change our name to Homo Petrolius? Because our whole reality revolves around the stuff. And absolutely everything we do, we get up in the morning and we'll plastic thing of milk and then we drive to work. And then absolutely everything we are surrounded by is made from it.

So to change the industry means changing everything. And that's just inconvenient. People don't want to change. It's so much easier to jump in your own car, fly away on holiday and just keep on living the good life. And this tiny minority of us that are able to do that are not prepared to stop just because a few radicals are saying that it's not good and we shouldn't be doing it. There's not the evidence of why. If everyone else is doing it, then why should I stop? Which perpetuates the problem of mostly it's all doom and gloom and, oh, if you become an environmentalist, you're going to be running around in a tatty old shirt and like, flip flops or something, instead of thinking, which is where I come into it. I don't want to talk about the doom and the gloom and climate change and the woes of how bad it really is.

There's enough people talking about that. I want to talk about what the future could look like. If we move towards the ecological age, where we actually work with nature rather than against it, then what would the world look like?

Talk about ages like that. And again, I think I saw something on the news recently that we've entered a new age of the planet, because you will now be able to detect this era in the striation to the Earth's core and crust when you do things. So that's how the Jurassic, mesotric, all these kind of layers are built up. We've now got one that shows our environmental impact as an age, haven't we?

Yeah. The Anthropocene.

Yeah, that's it.

It is the age of the human. You cannot get away from our impact. Whatever corner of the globe, you can be as remote as you like. In the Arctic, in the middle of the Amazon, you cannot get away from micro particles of plastic. You cannot get away from contamination, which is what the human legacy is right now.

You talk about micro particles. It's in toothpaste, isn't it? It's the little tiny abrasive things in toothpaste, little plastic balls that we're cleaning our teeth. Inevitably, we're ingesting them, being part of our. In all of our internal organs. Everything we eat has got micro particles of plastic in it. We're going to be oxygen, nitrogen, water and plastic before too long. Aren't we been born with plastic in us?

Yeah. I mean, you kind of remind me there of the spaceship analogy where the Earth, it's a bit like a spaceship flying through the universe, and we're all these passengers on the spaceship, and all the red lights are flashing. Water, oxygen, waste, biodiversity loss. The lights are all flashing and we're just hurling through space, actually not taking any notice whatsoever of these flashing lights. And, well, actually, what does this mean for humans if we carry on like this? And I've spent 20 years working alongside indigenous people in the Amazon, and I spend time with them where they have so little, but they're always laughing and they're always happy. It's very, very rare to see anybody depressed. And when I come back to the UK and I hear about the amount of depression and suicide, teenage suicides, and I look at these two realities where I've had 1ft in each reality, and the difference, it's just incredible. And it just reminds me over and over again that money does not buy happiness.

All the stuff that we continually fill our lives with, thinking that it's going to somehow bring us happiness. It just won't. And what we desperately need is to reconnect with that which is real, the world around us.

Is it because we haven't managed to sell the problem, sell the pain, to mean we see David Attenborough, see Blue Planet, we see all these programmes and we see the impact of us as humans on animals. We see turtles covered in plastic. We see you cut open birds and as you see Their stomachs full of fishing nets and plastics, and we're seeing that impact on animals or on creatures. We look at the rivers, the water companies pumping untreated sewage into our rivers. We see the environmental impact of it being covered in algae, the fish diet. It took almost a generation to clean the Thames up, didn't it, for all the pollution that was in the Thames. So we know when we impact water, how it kills off animals and creatures live in the water. We can see that impact all the time.

Is it because we don't see enough people dying in the air? Because the air looks clean. We don't detect dirtiness in the air. Probably our noses, our mouths, our lungs are probably used to filtering it and accepting the taste of air as it is. We got people complaining about the UlEZ in London. UleZ is sort of like, let's get this down to 20 miles now. Let's have a UleZ zone, people. Go, oh, that's going to make me go later for work. What about all the children are dying? We talk about lead in petrol.

We got to unlead it. We got lead in paint, we got rid of that. Sorry, I'm talking too much. Go. You're the expert.

You're just totally there. It's very, very true. If we could see the CO2 coming out of exhaust, if we could see carbon dioxide, the trails of black left by aeroplanes, the trails of black left by all the shipping and the transport. But we can't see it, it's invisible. So that would be different if we could see this lingering. And there are actually cameras, which are fascinating, where you can actually witness what air pollution looks like visually. So that is part of it, is that? Yes. We can't see it, so we kind of know about it.

There's been loads of information. People are in a state of denial. They don't want to know. It's too uncomfortable. So the imagery that we see know floods and everything, which is just these atrocities that are happening around the world, but still. In England, for example, we're in a little bubble here. We're in Goldilocks land. Nothing too bad.

Has happened to us, we can just Carry on. Hey, it might be nice, climate change, because it might get a bit hotter in the, you know, we can come up with all sorts of ideas about why we don't really want to talk about it. And then it's this other divide, it's getting bigger. Are you a climate denier or are you a Greta Thunberg follower? And it's actually really becoming very toxic. The world of. On what side do you stand so often when people ask me, oh, do you speak about climate change? No, I don't. I'm a solutionist. There's enough people showing you the graphs and talking about climate change.

I want to talk about the solutions. I want to talk about what we can do rather than what we can't do, because there's not enough airtime given to that. We don't have a vision of the future. Most people can't see it and if we can't see it, we're never going to get there. So, yeah, I think that's part of what my part in the jigsaw is.

It's showing, painting that realistic picture, isn't it? And you say it's the solutions around, not just telling us what the pain point is, it's giving us the ideas and the way out of those. If you do nothing, this is the picture. If you do something, this is the picture. If you do lots, this is the picture. I think you're right. Seeing pictures of polar bears having their environment shrunk, or the fact that you've got seals who used to live on these ice flows now are more vulnerable to killer whales because their ice flows are dissolving too quickly. You see all these pictures of animals, it's so detached from reality because it's not in your back. Mean, was it? Recently, the Rishi Sunak and co decided to put back our pledge on electric vehicles by another five years, saying it was too tricky to get the infrastructure in place.

I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but unless you're committed to a path, it's always going to be difficult.

Absolutely. And there is no silver bullet. And even the idea of all going on to electric vehicles, that's not what we want either. We fundamentally need system change and that means public Transport, it means car sharing. The idea of everyone giving up their fossil fuel car and getting an electric car, it's just never going to happen. A We don't have the resources to mine what is needed to build an entire fleet of electric vehicles, but we can learn from other countries. I've spent a lot of time in South America where it's all minibus. Everyone gets around by minibus.

We have these massive buses that quite often drive around empty. But maybe that's not necessary. Maybe we need to look at our whole infrastructure of how we get around. We've been talking about carpooling for a long time. Nobody does it, though. So how do we create the change? We know what's needed. So how do we get from where we are to where we need to go? And is it enough for people to see the visuals? And I think when you have your own first hand experience and you see it yourself, which I suppose really made it even more real for myself. When I first started in 2000 in the Amazon, I didn't know that there was these massive oil spills in the Amazon.

But it wasn't just seeing the rivers running black and the effects on the creatures. It was when I started to see the children that were covered in skin lesions. And the highest rate of childhood leukaemia in the world is the children in the Amazon. Now, why don't we know about that? Because it's much easier to talk. Oh, yeah, nature's being contaminated. Yeah, it's the oceans or it's the forest, but the people, it's a different thing. If people were to see what I see of how sick the people are that live in the forest because they drink the water, then you say, well, hang on, this isn't right. Why are all these kids in the middle of the Amazon so sick? Oh, so I can just drive to Texaco and go and fill my car up.

How does that make us feel? So that's where I feel like we need to actually feel what's happening in a real way. This isn't just some know, it's real life, it's actually happening right now. I think maybe if you haven't seen it, you can't really understand it.

But it still doeSn't impact me. And I don't feel that pain. No pain, no change sort of thing. Maybe as an individual, I'm worried about. Well, not worried, but what difference can I make if I put this plastic bottle in the recycling or put it in the general waste? What's the impact? It makes no difference to any. No one's going to care, no one's going to notice. It'll just go into landfill. Who cares? So how can I understand the personal nature of this so that I can be on board with it, rather than just theory? How can I be personal responsibility for change? How can I do that?

Well, I do it because it makes me feel good. So whether we do it from a self centred doing the right thing actually gives you better mental health. And we can come at it from many, many angles. And I hear this all the time, I'm just one person. Whatever I do is not really going to make a difference. It's up to the government, it's up to the corporations, it's up to the politicians. We're very good at pointing the finger to everybody else, apart from, you know, what would happen if know started that the bottom rung is just putting the recycling in the right bin. There was recently I was chatting to a young Japanese girl and she said, I didn't know that England was a third world country.

And I said, well, why do you say that? She said, well, people here still don't know how to recycle. And I thought, yep, that's right. If you lived in Japan, you would peel the label off of your wine bottle and put the label into paper. You'd put the bottle into glass and you take the lid off and you put it into metal. They recycle everything. They have very little waste. They have a very intelligent system, which means that by really separating and recycling, it costs less in the end. So it's not even just the environmental impacts, financially, economically, it makes sense.

So we start on the rung of that personal radical responsibility of there is no such thing as away. This idea of I'm going to throw it away, where is that? We just move it from our house to somewhere else. So then the bigger picture of systems change. And for me it's everything. It's not just kind of individual, it's social, it's economical, it's political and it's legal. So we can pull the strands of each of those.

Sorry, I'm just chuckling under my breath here about what you said. When you throw something away, there is no away. And I had this vision of tidying up my cupboards. What you end up doing is just rearranging stuff or putting the stuff you already had somewhere else. So away is actually somewhere else. It's not actually away away anywhere, it's just different. You just moved it from place A to place B. You've changed its position in time and space, not its actual status.

Absolutely. The time where we move it, we don't see it because it's not in England, because we haven't got any landfill sites anymore. So we just ship it away to another country and have no responsibility or no idea if you ask most people, hey, when you chuck your stuff in the rubbish bin, where does it go? We just don't mean.

We saw in the recent by elections that the UlEz in London became a political wedge issue where one party decided that they were going to campaign against it and get their person elected, which turned out to be true. Whether it was over the Ulez, is it becoming a political football? The more left leaning you are, the more environmental you are, the more right leaning, the more capitalist you are, the more like you're less likely to care about the environment. Is that kind of a truism or is that kind of a generalisation?

I think it is true, sadly. It seems to be where we're going and it seems to be getting worse. And the rise of fascism in this country as well, and the rise of climate denial. So I've been confronted at a few events where I've been speaking at with people that are absolutely, totally in denial of climate change. And I say, well, okay, if you don't agree with the maps and the graphs and what the scientists say, do you agree that there is air pollution in cities? Do you agree that there's rubbish and plastic in the oceans? Do you agree that we're losing biodiversity at an unprecedented state? We are actually in the 6th mass extinction right now. We're causing it this time. So we know that that's happening. And so I'm trying to find the things which actually unite us, the things that we agree upon rather than what we don't agree.

And at the moment, because it's also siloed, you've got people that do amazing work socially with people that have absolutely nothing to do with the environment. And then you've got environmentalists that have nothing to do with social projects. But the Vesica Pisces, the bit in the middle, which is, well, we've got to remember that humans are nature. We're not separate from it. We're not as important as a worm. I mean, the Earth really needs worms. It doesn't need humans. But we are just another species on this planet.

I think sometimes we have to remember that because we seem to think that there's us and then there's nature. Like it's something different.

I suppose historically in the food chain, we're just food, aren't we? In the middle of big teeth, predators and worms. Worms at the bottom of the food chain eating us, or a big dinosaur, if you want, big predator eating us. So without our intelligence, if you like, or lack of intelligence, however you want to describe it, we are just food for somebody else. So, yeah, in the scale of things, that's how we evolved. We're food that evolved to run away and be more clever about running away, and then we became the predator ourselves.

But we're not most of intelligent of species. Most of them don't shit in their own nests.

No. Most of them know the difference, don't they? No, you're right. God. Blimey. Had to destroy my thread. Yeah. Someone said to me, it never occurred to me that when I was younger, and I'm in my late 50s now, I remember driving my car and you get out of the car and your car has been massively hit by flies and bugs, and you're always wiping something off you, especially at night, you come back and your car be plastered with bugs. Now I can't think of.

Hardly ever I get a splat on the windscreen, driving down country lanes or even motorways, I don't get hit. And that's a sign that we're losing our biodiversity in terms of insects and bugs because of pesticides and lack of vegetation, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah. And I think that that's the advantage that us of a certain age know, that we witnessed it. We actually saw that, whereas the last couple of generations, they never saw insects. So they don't know that they've lost them because they didn't have that experience. Soon it will all be textbook. It's like, gosh, to think that those creatures that we grew up with, the sound of the cuckoo in spring, may soon be lost forever. The amazing song of the Nightingale. Many people say, we don't know how many very few years we've got left of them.

We are absolutely on the brink of so many species just disappearing forever, and extinction is forever. We can't get them back. So that's why now there is such a need and a push to do whatever we can. And if that's, like, in our backyard, back garden, local playing field, just leaving an area to the wildlife, leaving that messy pile of broken down stones and branches. And that's what nature needs. There's nowhere for it to hide. Because humans have become so tidy, we've cleaned everything up and there's just no habitat left for them. So that's why the rewilding, which is also massively controversial, but thankfully, it is gaining momentum of people realising that, hey, what does wildlife need before we lose it for good? What does it need? It needs habitat.

It needs some messy spaces just left for nature and for humans to step away and give some space back to the rest of the natural world.

Yeah. Was it. Jeremy vine hosted something on radio two a few months ago. Isn't May designated the don't trim your roadside back of urge, let you go wild in May or something? He hosted this no mo May. That's it. No mo May. And he hosted this debate on his show on radio Two. And people were complaining about it being the council, trying to save money or to try and do this, and it was becoming dangerous that all these plants were growing everywhere.

And I was just thinking, really? This is really what we're arguing about here is people's jobsworth backyard. I want to see neat, trimmed banks. It can't make that much difference to the wildlife. That's the mentality we're fighting against, isn't it?

Absolutely. But most people like birds. I think if you say to people, well, hey, how would you feel if we didn't have any birds left? Because they didn't have any insects and so therefore they had nothing to eat. And we come back to the seminal book Silent spring that what happens if we have no birds? It becomes silent. Are we better or worse off as humans? Is that okay for us to be without other species because of our need to have tidiness and lawns that we're not prepared to give pieces of land over? And everyone can do that. That's what we need is more people saying, well, hey, okay, I don't have a garden, but we've got a park. How about going have a conversation with somebody and saying, hey, what about we just give a little tiny bit over, put a sign up, grow some more wildflowers? It can be absolutely beautiful. And that's actually one of the really shocking thing that comes from Nomo may that.

Yes, it has saved the council money, which is a good thing. But also, people have never seen what happens if you let your lawn grow. All of a sudden it's covered in flowers and then it's covered in bees and butterflies. It's like, wow. That's what happens when we just let things go to flower. And if you leave it to go to seed, then you get a whole other load of creatures coming through to feast on that too. So it's these little actions that really can make a huge difference.

Yeah, we get these wildflower seed bombs and we've got load of planters. We just fill these planters up with seed bombs and then we like about it is you got no idea what's going to come up and what colour of what it's going to look like. So we've got all these kind of different flowers coming up everywhere. Some grow, some don't, some work, some don't. And we love doing it. And I'm not saying we did it deliberately to be environmental, we just did it deliberately because we just wanted to have that surprise of what grows. And we like those. And we definitely noticed.

We lived in the rural Chichester area till recently, and we saw a lot of. When we started taking care of the garden with all these planters and links with all these wildflowers, we saw a huge increase in bees and wasps and flying things, and also smaller insects, and we saw a huge increase in sparrows and tits. And we even had serends, we even had peasants and partridges come in the back garden. And we noticed stark difference from the day we moved in and the first six months to the last 1218 months we were there. Just by our influence on our space, we increased the amount of birds and different species and the insects. Everything else okay, we got a few rats we had to do for the rats because we were too many nuts and seeds everywhere. But, yeah, we could see a marked difference between when we moved in and when we moved out, the diversity of the insects and the birds. And we're trying to encourage it where we live now, which is the exact.

What we've just said, that don't ever anyone think that one person can't make a difference if we're showing this on a small scale. What about large landowners that start to actually give a little bit more than just a tiny margin around the edge? The hedges that got taken out, we need to be putting them back. We need to be giving a lot wider edges around the fields. We start with the edge and we just kind of work inwards. But then we've also got a problem with this kind of idea that tree planting is going to save the world. And this massive tree planting, where often it can be the wrong tree in the wrong place, people don't really understand what they're doing. And one of my greatest passions, or what drives my work at the moment, is looking for ways to protect the forest that's already standing. As we're having this very conversation.

There's probably, let's just say 100,000 trees being planted, 100,000 little saplings putting the ground, and right now there's also 100,000 ancient trees being cut down. You cannot just allow ancient forests to be cut and think, oh, but don't worry, we'll just plant a few trees instead. It doesn't work. You can never bring back biodiversity. You can never bring back a primary forest. So I was very lucky because I got locked down in probably the most biodiverse place on the planet, where it was a place called Los Cedros Biological Reserve in the cloud forests of Ecuador. I'd gone to write a report. I said I'd be there for five days.

I was there for five and a half months. And being locked down in a place where I could swim in the river and stand in the waterfall and drink the water. How many people ever get the experience to swim in a river that you can drink? It just doesn't happen. But we have to keep that vision. We need to bring that back. And what is going on right now with massive companies just not being held responsible for the amount of shit, the amount of sewage that goes into our rivers? They pay their fine and then they just carry on. We have environmental laws, but they only just pay for a fine. Instead, we need to change it so it's criminal law.

We need to change it so we give nature rights. We need to absolutely just clean up our act.

Yeah. What you're saying there about the new planting, and it just reminded me, as you're talking about the sycamore Gap, just to see the age of that tree, and no one alive today will ever see a tree like that again in that location. It's hundreds of years to establish. And just north of Portsmouth, it's called Queen Elizabeth Country Park. And the history of that is it was planted in the era around Henry VI as a source of wood for building his fleet of ships near Portsmouth. So you look at that forest today or the park today, and they're quite mature, but that's how many? That's 600, 700 years of growth. So if you are pruning it down, you're putting saplings in today, it's going to take four or 500 years to become an established, integral part of the ecosystem. Not a few years.

And there's another place called Kingley Vale. It's got the U tree forest, and that must be all around planting for longbows and things, the U and some other ancient sort of things. And it's the highest density, I think, of U trees anywhere that I know of, anyway. But, yeah, it's very old and ancient. Ancient U trees don't tell anybody. And those trees have got huge trunks, massive trunks. And all the branches are like a haunted forest, and it's really quite powerful in there. So, yeah, you can't just plant that and expect it to grow overnight.

All our churches have massive utrees in them. And they've been there since, what, the 1617? Hundreds. And that's three or 400 years again. Right. Just going on a tree planting speech, it's not going to solve anything, is it?

Most U trees in most churchyards are over 2000 years old because they were originally pagan sites and the church built to squash the pagan religion. They built their churches where it was already a place of worship, which is why that you find ancient use there. Most of them have been carbon dated over 2000. In fact, there's a little tree just up the road here in Cold Wartham in West Sussex, and that tree was carbon dated at 3200 years old. One of the oldest trees in the country. But yeah, many of the trees are over 2000. So the fact that we are still cutting down the redwoods, these ancient redwoods in America, again, over 2000 years old, they say between 1% and 3% are left and they're still cutting them down. What I witness in the Amazon, these giant trees, anybody that watched avatar will remember the great tree, which is based on the Amazonian sabre tree.

And now these huge trees being cut down and one of those massive, massive sabre trees, they will get $500 in planks of wood. That's what poverty does, though. It will drive them to cut the trees down, firstly to sell a few planks and then to be able to clear it, to put cattle on, or to put soy, which will then be fed chickens sold. In Tesco, this is a direct relation right now, I have indigenous friends telling me that their forest is being cut down and for soy, and there's a direct chain going all the way to Tesco. And I actually brought this up. I was recently at a big conference called Anthropy, and there was somebody from Tesco speaking there from head of sustainability, and I said, why is this still happening? People don't know when they go in to buy something, they don't know that what they're buying is causing destruction in the Amazon. We've got to start becoming really aware and pressurising these big businesses to do the right thing, which is where I definitely want to give a plug to the great work of ethical consumer, which they have a fantastic book, magazine online, and if anybody wants to know who these businesses are and what they do, this organisation have done great research so that we can become responsible consumers in that which we buy.

I just think about, you talk about the supermarkets there and the chains. They keep telling me that they're cutting prices, they're driving down this, they're driving down that they're telling me that I have to have perfect apples and perfect fruit because that's what the consumer demands. That's marketing bull, isn't it? The consumer is not demanding anything. They're telling us what we should demand and then fulfilling that, they're giving us the rally cry and then following through saying, you've told us this, so we're doing it. So I didn't ask for round apples, I asked for an apple that I can eat. I was quite happy eating them off the tree in my parents garden, cutting out the maggot and eating the rest of the apple. We sit there at Christmas as a bunch of kids, cutting the apples up and cutting the maggots out, just chewing on these apples. Those are okay for us as a family.

What's changed?

There's a friend of mine, she said something which I thought was quite apt. She said, it shouldn't say organic carrots, those ones should just say carrots and the other ones should say chemical carrots.

Yes, I like that. It's shifting the language, isn't it? And as an EDI professional, I'm well aware that we label things with adjectives, but we don't tend to label the default, do we? We always label the non default. So people want the default. So you say organic carrot, that makes it sound like it's not the norm. If we had artificially grown or artificially fertilised carrots, or carrots, we're going to go, oh, carrots sounds nicer than this other description.

And it is. A lot of it is the wording and being able to know what's going on. Education is a big part of it. But education by itself doesn't make people act alone. I think that's the first seed. And when I'm giving a talk, I can speak to a few hundred people and I'm throwing out these seeds. Many will land on barren land and people won't take any notice. But then I feel like somebody else will say something which will water that seed.

And finally that person will be like, oh, actually, maybe I can do something. And my favourite saying is, thanks to the singer Joan Byers, action is the antidote to despair. And I really think that is such a brilliant saying. People say to me how I've been 25 years I've been banging on about the environment. How come you're not totally in despair at the state of the world? Well, that wouldn't help me and it wouldn't help anybody else that I was communicating with. And the only thing that keeps me from despair is the action that I take and all the projects that I've coordinated around the world to make a positive difference. That leaves me thinking, well, hey, if I die tomorrow, at least I can think, well, shit, I did my best. I did leave the world in a better place than when I found it.

And if we could all have that feeling, then we would all. NIMBY is a really good thing. We've made out NIMBY as something bad. Not in my backyard. If we all look after our backyards, the world will be a better place.

Wow. I love that. I tend to use the concept of plus one. I don't have to have a thousand. If I just one more than I had last year. One more change. One person, using a COVID analogy, get the R rate, get the infection rate of inclusion and diversity, get the R rate of environmentalism. If we can infect people with a bug to care about the planet, care about each other, and we got that number to two, before long the whole planet would be infected with thinking about the planet, wouldn't they? But we're just lazy, though, aren't we? You look at the reaction we had as a species in the UK to COVID, we were in denial.

There's conspiracies. It wasn't until you actually saw yourself dying, or someone you loved dying, that the penny dropped. But most people go, because we're lazy. Human beings are very lazy. We look to try and do the least we can. It's biological. We conserve energy. If we don't have to do it, we won't do it.

So how do we. How do we stop people just being acting to programming, which is being lazy?

Well, I think it comes back again to mental health. So if you go to a lot of countries, yes, they can do a lot of lying around in their hammocks, which we would cause. Cool. Lazy. But there's also a lot of being busy actually finding food and doing what needs to do to be human, to actually survive. But because we're in a reality where people don't have to hunt and gather, they don't have to go and find food, they have to just walk down to the shops, there's so much time. And people say, oh, I don't have time. But if we look at how many hours per day people spend on social media, if we look at how many hours people spend a day on their phones, and then at the end of the day, you say, well, what have you achieved? What have you done? Time goes by, and then people have got feeling down about it.

And then when you realise that you get active. And a really good example is people going along to community gardens. The benefits of going along and finding a community garden is that, hey, all of a sudden there's all these other people. So you get a social life, you get to grow some food, you actually start to make a positive difference within a group of people locally to you, there are so many benefits for actually doing the right thing, but it's a bit like we have to lead the people to show them what's possible. If you've never even heard of such a thing as a community garden, how do you know where to start? So that's part of my work, is as a speaker, to talk about all the positive things that we can do and joining together, so that we can all kind of like act faster and move faster together and have a good time while we're doing it.

Does it need a generational shift, though? I mean, we look at our evolution as a culture, from a boozy, pub based culture to a coffee shop culture has taken a generation. I go back to my teens and pub was it. There was no coffee shops. It was alcohol fueled, obviously, that had social issues as well, surrounding it. And the government at the time, or over time, removed some of the licencing laws, it became easier to get a drink. You weren't having to finish everything in the last five minutes. You could drink on a sasset all afternoon if you wanted to. And the impact was people didn't feel that drinking was a resource that was limited anymore.

Therefore they didn't have to rush it. They could just dip in and dip out whenever they wanted. At the same time, the coffee shop culture kicked off and we became a bit more Parisian, if you like, in our high streets. And now you look at the generation today is drinking has changed completely. You may drink more at home or for mental health reasons, but fundamentally, it's no longer as ingrained in our psyche and culture as it used to be. And you look at other things. Smoking tobacco, it's taken three or four generations, and now talking about making it effectively illegal by 2030, or trying to find really radical ways, like New Zealand, of banning it. These are generational changes of attitude.

And I would dare say that my daughter and my son, who are in their late 20s, early 30s, are probably just on the early curve of caring about the environment even more than I do. So their children, the gen Alphas, the younger Gen Z's, are the ones that are really going to be in that era, like Greta Thunberg. And her cohort. That's where we're going to see the real change. Or can we wait that long, though?

I don't think we can. I think that that's what everybody kind of feels like, oh, well, we can't do then. You know, the younger generation is saying, well, hey, you lot caused the problem, you need to sort it out. It's your generation that has caused this problem. Why should we sort it out? So it can go backwards and forwards? And I meet some grey youngsters that really care, but then what happens is, because they don't have the support that is required. You get this environmental anxiety in the youth, which is just so terrible that none of their mates want to get involved. And it's not the cool club to be in, which is what is such a shame. It's cool to be smoking a single use vape.

There's absolutely no understanding. This is about as bad as it's got from when we used to drink beer and brew up our own hops and make our own homebrew to now we've got this gadget which is using plastic and lithium. Once it's then thrown away, a lot of them are ending up in the rivers, where lithium is highly contaminating to the rivers. So we can just use that once. It shouldn't be allowed. I mean, that kind of thing. It's just become extreme in this. Consumption, consumerism, capitalism.

They sell, so we will keep selling them. And it doesn't matter about the state of the environment. So it just shows how far we've gone to start to rein it back in, to realise and see those impacts and who's responsible? Is it the consumer? Is it the person that buys the vape? Or is it the shop that sells it? Or is it the manufacturer that actually creates it in the first place? It's like every level is responsible for creating this world that we're living in right now of just mine it, make it, dump it, mine it, make it, dump it. And we just don't see where it came from or where it's going to.

I am not going to change on my own if I feel I'm swimming against the tide of everybody else again. We're lazy, we could tend to go with the flow, peer pressure. We go the easy route. Everyone's telling me in the advertising and the media, what's going on. I'm being bombarded with this day in, day out. This is the right thing to do. We care about you, we're making these products. Marketing is all around playing with biases and persuading you do you want something.

And people are developing these products as you take the single use vapes. They're different colours, they got these fancy flavours and fruity names and they sound really attractive to young people. No wonder they're interested in them. People aren't going to change until the government, and I know you can't blame everything on the government, but you have to set the culture of the country. And if you look at the countries around the world that are making positive change, I dare say a lot of this has been set by the tone of the people who are setting the tone for everybody. And then they're putting pressure on big businesses and those big businesses that are either incentivized or they put them in pressure to do the right thing, to pass that down. And then people at the bottom go, oh, I'm now being told to do this, I will do that now. So almost like have to reprogram people.

And I do despair. We look at the return to office working and instead of hybrid remote working, I do wonder if a lot of that is driven by government peer pressure to big organisations to get people back into the inner cities, to keep the coffee shops, to keep the employment, to keep the transport system alive, keep London underground alive, because it doesn't make sense, really. Where's the incentive to get people travelling, commuting, COVID, we proved you didn't need to. And yes, they see mentoring, peer to peer learning, cooler chats, all this kind of stuff. It nurtures people. I'm not saying there aren't those benefits, but the answer shouldn't be drive to work. There must be another solution to those problems other than drive to work or get the train and park and get your car out. And I wonder what the motives are and who's driving all this.

And it says to me that it's not for the right reasons, it's for other reasons. If you might.

Absolutely. Let's just have a look at who's running the country, running the world at the moment. Who are the big players and what are their interests? Their interest is not in the good of humanity or the good of the world, it's about making money and it's this revolving doors of who's in government and what positions that they're in. They have absolutely clearly shown that we have no leadership at all in this country. So if it's not going to come from above, is it going to come from below? How has change happened before? There has been these uprisings that have come from a grassroots level of people pushing their politicians, their businesses into doing the right thing. But I think if we wait for the governments to do anything, then we're going to be waiting way too long. And what we really need is to be able to have a vision. If we think, hey, what's the world going to look like in 50 years time? Are we all going to be still driving around in cars? Are we all going to still be doing the same thing? Will the world? Nothing ever stays the same.

So I think it's really important for us all to have a vision of the future. What do you want it to look like? And if you want it to look a certain way, how are we going to get there from where we are right now to where we need to go?

Yeah, it's destination planning, isn't it? You got to start somewhere. I'm a great believer in transformational leadership, where you paint the picture and you say, this is what fantastic looks like, this is what you can achieve. Rather than the carrot and stick and the pushing people towards a destination, you just create attraction to that positive vision. I don't think we're doing enough of that. This is how it could be if we all did this. But there has to be a real gravitational pull towards that destination. I don't want to be worse off, I don't want to be inconvenienced. I don't want to have to walk everywhere if it's raining, if suddenly a bus arrived at the end of my road every day, every half an hour, and went to where I wanted to go, I e the train station, I would get on that bus and I would go to the train station, but suddenly it only arrives three times a day.

Once for the early morning commuters at 06:00 in the morning and once at 07:00 at night. But if I want to get the bus to the station at two or three in the afternoon, I can't. So the issue is we're not investing in enough infrastructure. This chicken and egg thing again, HS Two. I'm not saying it was the great, best idea in the world, but it should have got cars off the road, should have got lorries off the road. As I say, I don't know if it's the perfect answer, that kind of infrastructure, but I've seen MRT, local transport systems canned, I've seen bus stops closed. We look at the rail network of old, then the car came along and all the railways, all the little branch lines got cut out. We got to try and help reinvest in the infrastructure.

We got whole new town developments that are 20 miles from nearest railway station and no bus infrastructure. This is crazy stuff. We're doing. Our town planning, our city planning has got to reflect a better way of connecting us, especially if we keep encouraging people to go back to work. So, I don't know. I'm as frustrated as you. I guess.

We can see what needs to happen. I think that that's a starting point, is that we have to start having the conversation. We need to start talking about what's going on. We need to name it, what's going on, what's happening on this planet. It is an eco side. We need to use that word. That's the truth. That's what's going on.

And we're still not taking it seriously. And I think that a lot of that is because, say, people haven't seen it with their own eyes, they haven't smelt it, they haven't actually seen that whole reality of how bad it can be. These massive open pit mines around the world, which that's what it takes to have that vape. You need to have these huge, great big mining realities going on, causing vast amounts of contamination, so that we can go and buy something without thinking what the materials are it's made from. So I think, yeah, there's so many, many parts of this equation, and I think we just need to do anything. Anything at all is better than nothing. And if that means recycling one more bottle, finding out who you're banking with, making those changes, that actually drives a society, which is, say we said before, it is political. How many people speak to their MPs? Very, very few.

And the MPs often say, oh, well, my constituents aren't really interested in what's happening in the environment, so I just do what my constituents want. Well, if that's the truth, we need more people engaging with whoever their MP is to say, hey, what can we do? And what are you planning to do? So that pushing power that we have as an individual to pressurise those people who are supposed to be representing us, to look at how we can unite socially with other groups and say, hey, how can we all work together? That's what is needed. As nature communicates through the underground mycelial network which connects every tree in the forest, we need to start doing the same as humans. We need to start connecting a lot more so that we can all work together and amplify each other's voices and concerns. And that way it feels like we will have a much better chance.

Amazing. And on that note, I could talk to you all night. We've been chatting for an hour and a half already before in the green room and I've no doubt we're bumping to each other again soon and we'll have another conversation. So no Nicola, amazing conversation, thank you. I'm sure everyone listening would love to get in contact with you. So what's the best way of getting in contact with you? Your website, LinkedIn. How do we find out more?

Yeah, my website is my name nicolapeel.com that's got my social media tags on it. I also do the Solutions podcast and I through Patreon. So anybody that wants to hear me interviewing interesting people every month, then look for solutionist.

Amazing. I'm going to go and cheque that out in a minute. That's brilliant. So Nicola, thank you so much for your time and for you, the listener that's got all the way to the end and really, really proud of you for making it this far. Thank you for tuning and listening. If you're not already subscribed, please subscribe to keep updates on future episodes. The Inclusion Bites Podcast that's B-I-T-E-S. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever platform you use.

We're there. So please do look us up. As you can imagine, I have a number of other amazing guests. I mean, our guests just get better and better. I've got more guests lined up. It could be amazing as well. So please, please listen in. Of course, if you want to be a guest as well, I'm always welcoming new people onto the show and if you've got any comments or suggestions, please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk

UK. If you've got any ideas on how we can improve, I'd love to hear them. And finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood and it's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.