- So I hope you've got your thinking caps on tonight because this one is a tough one, all right? I will admit it. (laughs) And it's taken me to the edge of my knowledge, but I have to say in preparing this lecture, it's brought back enormous amounts of things that I learned 20, 30 years ago. So it's been a refreshing journey. The sad thing is that not much has changed in 30 years, so that's the bad news. But let me sort of strike out, because I felt very much that what COVID and what the COP26 did was open the door to actually what I'm going to tell you today. And so I'm going to hopefully give you a slightly upbeat conversation about things that are hopefully not too esoteric, but I am going to stray back into the sort of 17th century a few times, okay? So I promise not to make it too much like a historical tour of philosophy. But here's the challenge. because, of course, universal values are things that people don't really talk about today. It's not something that is on the tip of your tongue. It's not something that we would think is relevant to everyday life. But what I hope I'm going to be able to do by the end of tonight is to give you a sense and a flavor of how it really is fundamental to the way we're going to live in the future. So this fundamental question of does nature have a universal value comes really at a time when we are facing enormous losses of biodiversity, ecosystems, a possible sixth extinction if we don't get things right, relying on nature-based solutions to tackle climate change and reductions of carbon in the atmosphere. So basically, it's all on nature, but we don't really have a universal value of nature, so here is the dilemma. Because if we think about, well, what is a value, what does a universal value look like, what it really means is that it has the same value or worth for all people or when all people have reason to believe it has value. Okay? So whether or not such a thing exists is still a conjecture, it's a conjecture of moral philosophy, but it is clear that we do have certain values, physical health, a symmetry in the way we are in our bodies. These are found across a huge diversity of human cultures, so they do exist. Whereas others, slimness, for example, is relative. I happen to live in Kenya, where large ladies are revered, and I'm kind of like the one that doesn't fit in, you see? So I'm putting on weight now. That's my COVID. Excellent.(audience laughs) So I'm moving in the relativistic way, right? But in a sense, this sort of relativism is actually opposed to the existence of universal values. But what I want to do is I want to think about Isaiah Berlin. And he had an understanding, which he wrote about in his essays, the four essays on liberty. And in the same way that Amartya Sen says that universal values are values that a great human beings in the vast majority of places and situations at almost all times do, in fact, hold in common, whether consciously and explicitly or expressed in their behavior. Now, many of you will know that Mahatma Gandhi considered that nonviolence was a universal value. What he was saying is that all people have a reason to value nonviolence, not that all people are currently engaged in nonviolence. There's a difference. If we think about where this comes into sort of the daily business of governments, there it sits in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. So the intrinsic value of biological diversity and so on and so, it's all about the values of that biological diversity. So it's an important meaning, that we have to do more than just simply count the species and map where they are. We have to understand what they bring, in and of themselves, to each other, as well as what they can bring to humanity. So the challenge, then, is that if we want action to halt the loss of biodiversity and, obviously, climate change, it's going to require action by everyone. All of us are going to have to be involved. And so the issue is, does the world consider conservation and stewardship of biodiversity in nature to be just such a thing to motivate us all to action? Some of you may have heard of a man called Sir John Harman. He was a former counselor, but he was also the chair of the Environment Agency. And he wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet called "The Green Crunch" about 12 years ago now. But what he says is very, very relevant for today because he says, "An ecologically intelligent world"where universal value of nature is recognized"cannot be smuggled past the electorate."It's going to need their support."And to get that is going to require much more"than the rationale we are offering today."That we need to take action over carbon in nature,"because if we don't, things are only going to get worse." And what he sees, of course, is that instead, we need the principles of action and language to bring all of it to life. In other words, it could be about stewardship. It could be about the valuing Earth, living in balance with nature, solidarity, care for the future. So whatever the phrase, whatever the language is, that's the point, that's what's got to motivate people. It's not something you can kind of do under cover of darkness. That is not going to cut it. And that's really got to be what drives society and our choices, but they have to be within practical reach. So when I began sort of thinking about these lectures last year, I was really back in Kenya. I was sitting in my mud hut, looking out over the Rift Valley. The view from my hut, by the way. Not bad, eh? Little village, mud hut, sun setting over the horizon of the savanna. I was listening to the sounds of millions of wildebeest and zebra and buffalo as they're kind of making their migration across the Mara. Listening to the hyenas creeping ever closer to the village because we have cattle and sheep and goats inside the village. Elephants moving in the forest, migrating birds circling in the skies above me. And at my feet, two faithful dogs, Maasai hunting dogs who decided that the life of a guard was just what they wanted'cause they'd get fed, and they loved that. Very sadly, they died in the line of duty. One got torn apart by a pack of dogs, and the other one got killed fighting off a lion. So very brave, my dogs were very brave. But what I was realizing as I was writing this was how deeply the intensity of the savanna and all of the flora and fauna get really ingrained in your consciousness, and what this really looked like, alongside all those textures and shades that we get from the British countryside. And in a sense, it evokes the same reaction, the same sentiment within me. And also, I mean, the kinds of times when I was spending at the sea, in the open expanse of the oceans and up in the Arctic, up on the ice cap. And so opening yourself to these kinds of environments, in a sense, brings that moral sentiment to the fore. But what I noticed and have continued to notice is the Maasai, along with many Indigenous peoples, have an inbuilt logic about their lives. And it's based on the patterns of resources, the scarcity and the abundance around them. And effectively, they don't need a separate economic logic. It's just a continuum. And it makes sense that they don't separate out markets and non-markets. Essentially, it is a continuum. And this is really contrary to what Herman Daly was observing, of course, around industrialized societies, which has got an economic logic of maximizing returns to an investment in the produced capital, rather than nature. And so it's true to say that there are peoples on this Earth who consider nature to have universal value. There is no doubt about it. And many people are opening themselves up to precisely this kind of thinking. But it made me think about the struggles that I see in my colleagues, who are ecological economists, conservationists, who are essentially on the front lines, trying to fight the battle against GDP. And honestly, I think it's a losing battle because it's almost like two totally different sentiments and things going on in people's head. There's a world over here doing GDP, working on this model. And then there's a world over here, thinking about nature and sentiment and morals and so on. So for me, it's sort of a losing battle. It's a very difficult one to see how and who is going win, if anyone's going to win. And I suspect that we'll all be losers if we can't find a way to bridge between these two worlds. So I really started to think about the evolution of value and values in mainstream thinking, particularly in industrialized economies. And what I can see, and I'm sure it's no surprise to any of you, is that there is a growing gap between private and social values, because of the widespread frailties in the human decision-making that we have, and also a sort of drift from the moral to the market sentiment. So if you think about what drives you to buy things, what drives you to the market, it's a thing to bring you up short, if you're standing in the supermarket, to really think about why and what's motivating me to buy the things that I do. So what I see is that these are real barriers. And if we're going to create a better understanding, we need to, first of all, explain our dependency on nature, which is sort of what I've been doing through a lot of these lectures, but we also need to take that all the way through, into the sentiments that people take with them when they go to the supermarket. Now, unfortunately, John Hobson, he wrote a lovely book called "Wealth and Life," he was very correct in his analysis of consumption because what he observed was that industrial economies have got just a built-in bias towards excessive production and consumption of economic goods. It's how we make our living. It's how we go forward. And a very controversial book at the beginning of the 20th century, in the 1920s, by someone called Richard Tawney, called "The Acquisitive Society," goes even further and essentially says the following."What society needs is a purpose,"a principle of limitation that divides"what is worth doing from what is not."And it settles the scale at which"what is worth doing ought to be done,"and where economic activity is the servant,"and not the master, of society." So it's a really lovely book to go and sort of go and have a look at. And then, of course, Herman Daly and others really expounded on this. And they were trying to think about, well, what's the optimal scale for an aggregate economy relative to nature? And I would contend, sitting as I was, and I do, in the Rift Valley with the Maasai, so that's about right. You've got the right number of people. You've got about 600,000 people spread over this very large area who are essentially running an economy relative to the nature that they can have. Now, that's not something we can all afford to do, because we're sort of squished into these different places, but that takes some responsibility. If we choose to live in this way, then we have responsibilities that come with us, to take care of nature that actually supports us. But just to bring it into reality, the example that really jumped out at me, looking at these surroundings, is the modern safari industry. What have they done? Well, they've actually captured in your minds the spectacular landscape, the abundant wildlife, into dream holidays, dream holidays of a lifetime. Somewhere between sort of "Out of Africa" and a David Attenborough documentary. You're out there. You land in the light aircraft in the bush. You're (imitates vibration) and you come to an end. And then there are elephants and there are giraffes all around you. And then you go out and you see cheetahs. And at night, you can see the animals coming in. You live in a luxurious tented camp. You've got signature dishes from chefs who are flown in, and you have 24-hour protection by the Maasai warriors. The price of the dream? Somewhere between $500 and $5,000 a night, a night.(audience laughs) Meanwhile, back in the Maasai community, the people who are guarding you, by the way, is generally an income of about $50 a month, okay? So we just kind of get this in proportion. However, were you to ask the Maasai warrior were they well off, I mean, how do they feel? Do they have well-being? Basically, yeah, because the social norms and values that they have means that everyone has food to eat. They have a place to live in. They've got clothes, they've got medicines. Children's school fees get paid, uniforms are found. And so it's really quite this issue of relativism around value is important. But it's also very important to recognize that the reason why there are wildlife out there for safaris to happen is because of the values that the Maasai held in terms of valuing wildlife, conserving it over hundreds of years, and only eating the wildlife when they were starving, literally. That's it. They do not eat wildlife. They do not go out and kill it. So essentially, it's intrinsic to the whole way that they live in that environment. So questions of social value and fairness inevitably come up. So in the principles of natural prosperity, which I'm sort of trying to articulate through these lectures, is that it really requires us to do much more than tinker at the edges of today's economic model, because that's not really going to cut it. We can't just simply add an extra layer of accounting structures into the way that we run the national accounts. We can't just simply have policies that keep track of the health of our natural assets, because it's almost like keeping a ledger of something that's dying. It's not such a great idea. So we need a profound shift in thinking and one that's actually about relearning how nature and how we can value it in our future economies and societies. So I want to address this topic of how do we value things universally and how does nature fit into this? So I'm going to start, a little bit of a sort of autobiography. You have to picture the scene. It's 1961. I've just been given a book for my birthday, and it's "Born Free" by Joy Adamson. And I'm not going to ask how many people in the audience remember this book, but this is actually the book that I took off my bookshelf. I took a picture of it, okay? Now, it's a nice story. It's an interesting story. A bit dated, but nevertheless, very important. So her husband, her third one, I have to say, a game warden, it was in Kenya, in Meru, was forced to kill a lioness that attacked him because she was trying to protect her three cubs. Two of the cubs were sturdy, and they went off to a zoo. But the third one, a little female that they called Elsa, was raised by the couple. And then it was trained to fend for itself in the wilderness. And the great thing is that this has been filmed, but they knew that they'd been successful when they eventually left her and found her having killed a waterbuck. So she's kind of got all of her natural instincts back in. She had three cubs of her own. And then there were sequels to this,"Living Free," "Forever Free." The stories went on. And then in early 1961, unfortunately, the lion, Elsa, she died. And there's actually a grave in the conservation area, in the game reserve where she's been buried. Now, these books were really popular. There were films made of each of them. Some of you might know the name Virginia McKenna, she was a famous actress at the time, and her husband, Bill Travers. And they were so moved by this story that they set up the Born Free Foundation. And if you fly to Kenya, you'll often see a little film to donate money to them. The point about it is not that this came from a couple and that there was a very English and so on and so forth, but what happened was this triggered a moment in the early '60s which led to incredible inspiration. A man called Iain Douglas-Hamilton who some of you might know is a major conservationist, had produced beautiful paintings and photographs of elephants. The anthropologist Desmond Morris actually credited "Born Free" with, as he says, affecting a whole generation's attitudes towards animals. And six days, six years later, six decades later, you can really see the impact that it had. Because as you sit in the Kenyan savanna, you actually understand that what they did has led to the fact that the savanna has got so much wildlife still in it. Since then, of course, David Attenborough has taken over that role and has stepped up, opening up huge amounts of understanding on everything. I don't know if any of you watched "The Green Planet," but it was just phenomenal. I mean, talk about noisy fungi just walking around, going around. It's quite extraordinary. And what he's done is he's got probably the biggest fan club one could imagine. Little girls, like this one, do it for David at the COP26. I mean, just amazingly inspirational. So there's clearly an opportunity here to inspire young people again with what the world means. Not just the iconic animals, but everything, from fungi and ants and birds and so on. So the question for me is whether this greater understanding and knowledge about sort of the non-human world is going to change people's views about the value of nature in our economies and society.'Cause it's all very well to go on a safari, but actually, does it make a difference to how we live every day? So now I want to turn to Glasgow. Glasgow of the COP, but now, let's go back to the 18th century. Time of the Scottish Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and home of the father of modern economics, Adam Smith. Now, for many, this period is incredibly interesting. It's the rise of his best idea, the idea of the invisible hand working through markets to create prosperity. Four centuries later, we're sitting there in the COP26, the UN's meeting, as you know, to try and turn what the Industrial Revolution has wrought on the world into the sustainable revolution. So no pun intended, but it's taken us 400 years to get there, but here we are, back in the same place. Oh, my goodness. And what's extraordinary is knowing how Smith originally wrote his works, which was on a moral sentiment, have literally turned into market sentiments. So in that period, that's what we have done. So society's values have really just become equated with financial value. And this is what has contributed to the climate crisis, the COVID crisis, I could say, because it all has hinged on the way in which our concepts of value have altered. Now, there are several paradoxes of value, and many, many minds, from Plato to Smith, have considered why, for example, water, which is an essential part of life, is virtually free, while diamonds, which have got very little utility beyond beauty, are as expensive as they are. Why do financial markets consider Amazon the most valuable company on planet Earth while the real Amazon appears on no ledger until it's been stripped of all its foliage and converted into farmland? So we have these paradoxes. So how can we reconcile, for example, the value of the dedication, the heroism of health workers when we're looking at their low wages and the perilous conditions in which many of them work? So these are all issues of how we get what we value. And concepts of value, then, they're rooted in philosophy, but what's happened is they've become much more recently annexed out of it because we've essentially put them into a little box that is somehow outside of economic and financial theory. So they kind of sit on their own. Oh, it's something that philosophers talk about. But actually, it's what we do every day. Values represent standards of behavior. They're the judgments of what we consider to be important to life, solidarity, humility, sustainability, resilience, dynamism, all the things that we think we value. It's the regard that something is held to deserve. It's important, its worth, its usefulness. But the interesting thing is value isn't constant. It's somewhat specific to time and situation. So take the value of daily needs during the COVID pandemic. Who would have thought that masks would be as valuable as they are today, okay? Now, over the centuries, there have been sort of two broad schools of thought about what determines economic value. And so you've got objective and subjective. And I'm not going to give you a whole sort of lecture on that. You can go to the library and read about things. But essentially, the objective value theory, that's Smith, Aristotle, Ricardo, Karl Marx, they lived during a time of unprecedented urbanization, of industrialization and globalization. And what they did was they placed the growth and distribution of value squarely in the context of this enormous social and technical change that was going on, okay? So it was very context-specific. What they would have found really weird was the way that we now think of economics as some kind of neutral technical discipline, kind of completely devoid of all of those dynamics. Something you do, you go to university, you study it and then you go and you kind of access information and you create wealth through, essentially, boxes and so on. And yet in his magisterial works, these two,"The Wealth of Nations" and "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," it has unfortunately being the first that has got the most attention. It's the thing that's probably been the most bought, but the least read.(audience laughs) But what I see is that when I go into"The Theory of Moral Sentiments," and I went back and checked it, his writings do warn of the mistakes of equating money with capital, and divorcing it from the social partner that generates that. So his books are really full of warnings about that. And in fact, when we think about Adam Smith being the father of laissez-faire, that's partly true, but he never thought about businesses being transacted without any interference, because he saw it always in that social context. So the central idea of Smith's work, which is very important here, is that it's all about continuous exchange, because he saw it as a continuum of human interactions with nature, with each other and with the business of production. So exchanges of goods in the market, exchanges of meaning in language, exchanges of regard and esteem. These are the kinds of norms that set up the moral and social world in which we lived. And what he thought was that these norms were very much about wishing to be loved, to be lovely, well-regarded, to be well thought of. And then you get feedback from others as to how they perceive you, how they judge you. And then we create incentives that make you want to do more, to create a kind of mutual sympathy about those sentiments. And that's how people develop behaviors and that's how they develop their habits. So in fact, moral sentiments, they're not inherent, they're like social memes, like Richard Dawkins has called them. And what that means is that they can be learned, they can be imitated and they can be passed on. Just like genetic means, they can mutate, they can go through sort of cascades and tipping points. And that's really important because it means that we can learn about moral sentiment. We can take that back on again. We can bring it back into the core and center of our life. And if we make universal value of nature something that we want to learn and take into our lives, then we can certainly do that. So in a way, I think that all of the economists have talked very much in the broadest sense of how, from their social perspective, markets can operate. But in the early 20th century, a group of sort of neoclassicists, they completely launched an upheaval in value, which was like Copernicus changing where the positions of the planets were, then putting sun at the center, and Earth outside of that. Because what the economists did was they shifted the axis of value theory and the factors of production, labor and so on, to the perceived value of goods to the consumer, from objective to subjective. Now, according to the new group, people valued goods that satisfy their specific wants. So it's only because people value the goods that the inputs are what is valued. So value is in the eye of the beholder, not in the sweat of the laborer, as we would say. And since then, subjective value theory has gone mainstream. Basically, the combination of subjective value theory, where price equals value, and there's a kind of cursory understanding of what's gone into it, yields the optimal outcomes supported by this kind of unseen, unchanging moral sentiment. And what this does is it promotes the view that all market outcomes equal value creation, and that through them, the growth of the wealth and the welfare of nations. So you can see where we're going with this. That if you haven't even got nature on the first step, it's never going to make it all the way up to something that's going to be valued because there's a sort of disconnect because people haven't understood really why they should value it in the first place. So the concept of value synonymous with economic theory a century ago just isn't discussed. So we're in a bit of a dilemma because with all that's gone on in the world in the past decade, the financial crisis, increasing levels of risk from the loss of nature, now climate change, the effects of the pandemic, we really do need a debate on value. I think that's the whole point. So we need to consider what is the right balance between markets and the state and the natural world. We need to go beyond what Mariana Mazzucato talks about in "The Value of Everything." So just think about how the world has shifted. The market has become the kind of organizing framework for our economies. In fact, it's even become the organizing framework for broader human relations. It goes right into civic life. It goes right into family life. And in a sense, social constraints on unbridled capitalism have just lessened. They've just gone away. So the Thatcher-Reagan revolution shifted it. And that dynamic, which at the time was probably needed, has essentially unleashed a dynamism, which meant that we've gone to the point where policymakers just had to sit back and listen and learn because the market was always right, okay? And I know lots of policymakers who (laughs) literally felt that their inputs were not required. Thank you very much. But the problem is if you grant infinite wisdom to an entity, you kind of enter into the realm of faith, and faith can guide life, but it can blind policy. And this is a genuine issue for me because it's a cognitive capture that's led to a kind of self-cancellation of the policy or any of our judgments because only the market knows. And because of that, the trust dictates that only solutions to market failure are going to add more markets. We're just going to continue to take regulation out, and just keep on pushing what the market is seeing. So what kind of risks do this bring? And this is really the heart of it. Why do we need to think about values? Well, because the risks that are coming our way, and have already come our way, are pretty scary. Because what social value theory tells us is that the world is made of an idealized set of competition, of commodity goods, lots of things rationally happening in the marketplace. And when those assumptions don't hold, there's a whole wedge driven between social and private value. So let's say if a few companies control the market, Microsoft, Amazon, some of these big companies, sometimes the prices go too high or production is too low. If the markets are incomplete or suddenly lose resilience and collapse, small shocks can lead to changes in asset prices, loss of jobs, loss of welfare. So there's a whole variety of things that get distorted when we go down this road. And then there's another risk, which is about the human frailty of decision-making. Pretty much all of us think that we're the best decision makers ever, very rational, relying on past behaviors. Yes, it's worked before. Even if new information comes in that tells us we're wrong, no, no, we keep on going. Absolutely. And we keep thinking that examples of what we're doing are more common than they are. Definitely check that one. So you get to the point where we have a situation where water in the desert is essential. Respirators in a COVID wing are absolutely critical. But if we value the present more than the future, then we're not going to make the right investments going forward. So despite climate change telling us that what is happening today, we didn't invest enough. Despite knowing about zoonosis, we did not invest enough. We still chopped down the rainforest. We still brought ourselves closer and closer to pools of disease. And all of these kinds of tragedies are not going to be fixed by just taking the market imperfections alone. We have to go much deeper than that. And then the third is a kind of drift from moral to market sentiments. And what is happening, then, is that these are corroding society's values. So the foundations of our society are really being eaten away because of the pricing of goods, of services, of civic virtues. They've been traditionally outside the market, and now they're inside. And the flattening of the market means that this is going to be carried on into the future. So it's going to affect the future generations. How do we rectify it? Well, we need the right kind of institutions. We need institutions that support the culture, the maintenance of a kind of social license, which has got values of trust, ethical customs, integrity and fairness. These are really critical to a market that's functioning with moral sentiment, not just market sentiment, but a lot of these values have been taken for granted. Just think about it, everything you do every day, do you have a moral discussion with yourself? No, probably not. But you could do. You could (laughs) wake up in the morning and say,"Right, okay, why is this happening?"'Cause these rules come from somewhere. They have been set down, not in stone, and people have studied them, Hayek and others believe that they're partly inherited. But as I told you at the beginning, these can mutate, they can change, and simple reflection can alter the way that we view it. And one area that's very important is the emphasis of the individual over the community. In other words, our selfish traits over altruistic ones is very important because what happens is that this imperils both the market's effectiveness in determining value and ultimately society's values themselves. So if we continue to move to a market society, we may actually consume the very social capital necessary to maintain our natural assets and create a kind of economic desert in the future, of both human capital and social capital. So if we keep eating away at it. Now these ladies are wonderful. They're my Maori friends. And they have a strong sense of community and of altruism. And they realize that that's imperative to go forward in that way. Because by having social capital with deep moral values, they can really bring ethical customs into the fore. But when they compare themselves with others in the South Pacific and other region, they can see that it's being corroded. And you can go to a lot of the Pacific islands and see that that kind of cultural attachment, both to the community and to nature, has gone away. If we lose it, we end up with companies with greenwashing, with social ESG washing, all right? In other words, they make it all look very good, but it could be very hypocritical because, in fact, it's just perhaps an attraction for employment. You know, we do it this way. Come and join us in our company. But at the end, it's about increasing profits. This is how insidious corrosion can be. The spread of market mechanisms can also corrode our values. So we're really moving into something which is based on wealth, the statusphere, in other words. So it's built on money. Now, that's not a bad thing. The logic of buying and selling is very good, but the problem is it no longer is restricted just to material goods, but it governs everything that we do. The allocation of healthcare, education, conservation, environmental protection. And so effectively, standard economic reasoning is that the spread of market exchanges should increase efficiency without moral cost. But when everything is relative, is anything immutable? And that's really the problem. So there are many philosophers who talk about market values going into places where previously they weren't governed by market norms. So not only environmental protection, but also protecting the non-human species themselves. And there's a lot of evidence that suggests this commodification. Remember the safaris. It can corrode the activity that's actually being priced. So money crowds out civic norms. And in a way, the moral error of a lot of economists, I think, anyway, is to sort of treat civic and social virtues as if they're scarce commodities. Well, they're not. We've got 7 1/2 billion people on planet Earth. And if everyone decided that nature should have a universal value, that would completely change that equation. Now, we saw it during COVID because we got solidarity. Suddenly, there was a solidarity. People woke up. It mattered. It mattered what your neighbor was experiencing. It mattered what was happening down the road. You got out, you went and got their shopping. You did things for people. So we know that it can happen, and virtue grows with practice. So what would be the nature equivalent of COVID? I don't know what the answer is, but what I'm saying is that's the kind of thing that one needs to do, is to think in that way. And if we flatten market values, then what we see is that welfare is just the sum of everything all stuck together, and it doesn't allow you to have intelligence about what is really vital to our survival and what is sort of nice to have. And what it does is it really affects people's perceptions, both of the future and of today. So we need a greater assessment of the cost and benefits of what happens when you lose moral values. And just, as I say, tinkering at the edges of GDP is not going to do it. So we need to think again about what is utility, what gives us happiness, what prevents mischief and pain, as Benson described it? And in a way, we need to go even further because we need to think about the balance, the struggle between complacency, just to accept where we are today, and where we want to be, this sense of urgency. Now, part of what gets people out of bed is a feeling of disgruntlement, sometimes, about distribution. Distribution matters. So where there are large benefits for disadvantaged groups, and only small costs for others, the policies can really enhance welfare, despite what markets say. But to many economists, gift giving, being nice to other people, is a sort of loss of utility and efficiency. So why do we do it? Well, because we like to be well-perceived. We want to feel that people love us, right? Remember, that's the moral argument. It's got nothing to do with the market. The market is just considered to be intrinsic value. So a lot of the problems of climate change and the loss of human, which began in the Industrial Revolution and which ended up in the COP, still cannot be sorted out because the losses of nature and the losses of species haven't really made it across the value threshold, haven't really got to people in the same way that COVID has. So tackling climate change, tackling the loss of nature, is a balancing act between urgency and complacency. The urgency of carbon budgets that can be consumed, literally, in the next, well, I would say five to six years, and complacency to just keep adding more carbon by buying cars and by buying goods. That's the kind of, oh, well, someone will take care of it. Someone's doing the accounting. Well, they're not, actually. Nobody's doing that accounting. So the urgency of the possible looming sixth extinction, the complacency of not valuing nature, and the destruction of habitats and ecosystems is what essentially should wake us up every morning. It's not that it's a negative thing, but it's to understand that all your actions are either falling in the complacency pot or possibly, hopefully, going towards the urgency pot, but you shouldn't all become completely frenetic. The way to get around this, of course, is to reorientate ourselves with a new set of moral values. And that moral value has to be bringing nature and how we think about the environment much more into the core of our life. So thinking about what drives people. There's a little story. Some of you might know it. It was a story by Henry, O. Henry,"The Great Magi." And it's an example, it's a children's book, it's a children's story, but it's a very nice example. It's about a husband and wife, Jim and Della, and they want to buy Christmas presents for each other, but they don't really have any money to spend, but each has a special possession that they prize above all others. For Jim, it's the gold watch. It's been handed down from generations. And for Della, it's her beautiful, long, thick hair. Della sells her hair to buy a chain for Jim's watch. Jim sells his watch to buy combs for Della's hair.(audience laughs) So you can imagine what Christmas Day felt like.(audience laughs) So they both had gifts that they couldn't use, but they loved each other, and that was what was priceless, because they valued what each had done for the other. So my sense is that valuing comes from purpose. It comes from striving to achieve something that is really important. There's the enjoyment of succeeding. And climbing Mount Everest. I don't know if any of you do. I used to do sort of crazy things when I was younger, go across the Greenland ice cap, climb mountains, go to the deepest part of the oceans, all that stuff. Loved it. And it was the doing of it, not just the arriving. The arriving seems just to happen just like that, right? It was sort of the sweat and the tears to get there. So this is quite different than being deposited at the top by a helicopter or halfway up, okay?(audience laughs) So what I mean is (laughs) I think that humans are driven, and they like to strive and they like the enjoyment of succeeding. It's what we do. Little, small victories every day, right? And as you could see in the first year of COVID, when millions benefited from the selflessness of others, their efforts were valued by millions. It was a case of humans literally supplying humanity. And this capacity to inspire others and to create and appreciate and value the efforts of others is really what is crucial. So outside the context of COVID, the value, let's say, the value of childcare, the value of housework, still remains undervalued, poorly paid. We don't really know how to add value to each other's lives in a consistent and predictable way because everyone is so different. So what we have to do, clearly, is to refocus education and economies on both the human world and nature. And we have to think about what's the balance between them, the understanding of cognitive and emotional connections between ourselves. We have to learn about how to live wisely and well, and we have to put a high value, of course, on interpersonal aspects of our lives, but underpinning it, it has to be the independencies that we have in nature. Literally every breath you take would not happen if nature wasn't functioning out there. Actually, in here as well, but anyway, that's another matter altogether. Unfortunately, we send a lot of graduates to university to study management, but they really don't know what they're going to manage when they leave.(audience laughs) That's the problem. They've got very little knowledge of people. Sorry, I'm being a bit pejorative, but there is a sense in which we're not training people to manage the right things. We're training them to manage money. And what we actually really want them to do is manage the world in which we live with all of that. So if you think about proponents of the universal basic services and what Keynes has said about it, it's about providing a reasonable income to every adult, regardless of circumstances, to use their time well. And I would say we need to have the universal basic nature, the services of nature, and understand what that means. So in a sense, we need to think about the real value of life. We have to prepare for the art of life itself. We have to learn how to enjoy more leisure because it is coming. It will come. There is no doubt. Atom Bank, only four days a week now, working week. Very interesting dynamic. So we need to understand how to enjoy this sort of fuller perfection of life, to really value the natural world and to educate people for this new world. That is the point. And opposing this are those who believe in a system of work where striving and enjoying are mutually exclusive. Work hard, stay long hours, and you will be rewarded. Hm. Let me take you back(laughs) to the 17th century because these are not new ideas. And I want to take you to a beautiful garden. If you ever get a chance to visit it, it's in Padua. And I want to tell you about two stories, about a garden and a gardener. Now, both places, you should visit them early in the morning or late in the afternoon. They're amazing examples of what I'm talking about. So here we are in Padua. It's the Villa Barbarigo. Not a very nice Italian accent there, but anyway, this is a philosophical garden. It's a symbolic park. It offers both a physical and an existential journey. It was conceived by Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo, and he was canonized later as Pope John XXIII, in case you wanted to know. And it was built by an architect, Luigi Bernini, famous of the Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Now, the complex was laid out in 1665. The villa and all of its grandeur and all of this was very important. And it was created to thank God for the survival of the noble from the plague. So it was giving to the greater good. The garden is around an allegorical journey,

where difficulties are faced, where there's always a solution, and that solution is coming from nature. A life where every now and again, terrible things happened, so life is precious. It needs to be lived intensely, with joy, and it can go on, waiting for eternity, in their case. This boxwood labyrinth is 400 years old. It's probably the oldest one of its kind in the world. It's very unique. And some of the trees in this estate are about 300 to 900 years old. So it's a beautiful place that tells you, in those days, how much nature was valued. That was the expression of a family that could have spent its money on many things, and spent it in this way, and then opened it to the public. It was a true public open piece. So it's a spectacular garden, but it doesn't have a price. There's no price for this in the market. And that's the challenge. There isn't a price, it's priceless. At the same time, here we are in Britain. One of Great Britain's most celebrated gardeners, Lancelot Capability Brown, was hard at work. And he was a revered, designed. He was an entrepreneur. He was a salesman. And his nickname came from his fondness for describing country estates as having great capabilities for improvement. So his parkland celebrated nature. They had rivers and lakes and beautiful trees and cedar trees. Again, from all over the world, from Asia and North America. They were big, open landscapes with lawns right up to the front door, wildlife and parkland literally up to the windows. The challenge was that sometimes he needed to move a whole village out of the landscape, but they always got another place to go, so I have to say that. But they really capture, in a sense, the essence of the value of nature. And again, not priced. Many of these have been valued and taken care of over generations. The owners have been careful to protect and preserve them. They didn't need policies to do that, way before policies started. And unlike paintings, which can be sold and move around the world at some eye-watering prices. The most expensive, of course, was about 750 million. It was a Picasso. These remain intact as indicators of an era when nature was valued. Nature was valued. So I want to end at this point because I actually live in a Capability Brown landscape. I'm very lucky. This is the view from my house. And when I was watching and looking at the landscape and I was sort of finishing this up and thinking, well, this is the embodiment of what it looks like, of what the universal value of nature could look like again and again. And it doesn't always have to be these pastoral landscapes. You can find places in the cities, you can find them everywhere. And I was sitting and I was looking up and I was thinking that actually in the summer, interestingly, the swallows and the birds that come are the birds that I see sitting in the Rift Valley. And I wonder sometimes if they're the same ones. Maybe they follow me backwards and forwards. But I do feel very connected. And what I appreciate is that in the mix, in Britain, in places in Essex and places where I work on the ground, there are people who are truly inspired by nature and are inspiring about the way in which they work in nature. From farmers to landowners to stewards, there are a lot of people who have that moral fiber and that commitment and that, I would say, moral sentiment, which is their market sentiment. And so what I wonder is whether we can create that same sense of inspiration to enable the next generation to sort of divorce the logic of a market society, recover the moral society, along with the Maasai and other tribes and Indigenous people and people who are close to the ground, to really bring that sense of wonder of nature and its universal back into our lives. Because I contend that if we don't do that, we will have a sixth extinction on this planet. And as David Attenborough has said, we're dependent on the natural world for every breath of air we take, and ultimately for every mouthful of food that we eat, but it's even more than that. We're also dependent on it for our sanity and our sense of proportion. Thank you.(audience applauding)- [Man] Well, contrast your(speaks with heavy accent) love in Kenya, and we are here in London, the heart of capitalism, very divorced from the countryside, if you're looking(indistinct) from London. And I must admit that I blame everything on capitalism. And I've got many questions and many comments, but I'll restrict myself to one question, and that is are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future?- I used to say I was optimistic, but I said that in a really naive, stupid way because it was my nature to do that. But I'm not pessimistic, but what I am trying to do, and these lectures are my small attempt, is to go to the root of what is needed, as opposed to just simply saying we've got lots of technological fixes out there. I mean, I've spent my life doing that. I've worked with policymakers. I work on the ground in Kenya. I work all over the world trying to create the solutions that will make a difference for people's actual lives today. But every time I, if you step away, you see that it only works when the moral sentiment is firmly embedded. And I don't think that it matters whether you live in a city or whether you live in the Kenyan Rift Valley, you can all, everybody can have a universal value for nature. So how do we get there? That's really the point. It's a different conversation to capitalism. It's not anti-capitalism, it's just a different take on our world.- I've got a question online here, which is a bit more philosophical.- Oh, okay. That was quite philosophical.- Well, it was quite philosophical, you're right. Asking for your reflections about establishing a definition of value. The questioner says,"Karl Marx distinguished between use value"and exchange value."So valuing nature can be either"appreciating its beauty and variety"or could mean putting a price"on forests, et cetera." Your thoughts?- It goes way deeper. It's way deeper than appreciation. It's actually survival. And if you think about COVID, it was about survival. And what did we value? Well, of course, we valued the healthcare system, but we valued our community and we valued everyone around us as well. So we valued many things that we can put a price on. Your cable connection to get the news, connection to the BBC, or however you're getting your news, your social media, those are things you can put a price on. But ultimately, I think that nature goes beyond Karl Marx, beyond those just two. I think there's another step back. It goes back even earlier to what I was saying, that even Smith has in his original books.- [Man] So I'm going to do something that's kind of frowned upon, but I'm going to combine two philosophies within this question. So like within German idealism, there's obviously Kant, and Kant kind of believes in the whole Kantian noumena, which is like the thing in itself. And it's interesting to kind of look into, the whole idea that as humans, we're kind of like too stupid to know something,(laughs) like to actually look into it and know it fully. And there's also the idea of phenomenology, like the idea of qualia, of how our experiences kind of differ with appreciating a certain thing. Do you think the fact that, because as humans, we're kind of too stupid to understand the truth, do you think we're kind of too stupid to see something before it actually eventually happens, like with nature?- Stupidity is a very interesting point, actually.(laughs) It's like the 101 guide to, so. It is not stupid to say that you have never experienced something, and therefore, can't have a reaction or a sentiment. That is absolutely not the case, but that's how it comes over sometimes. Can you find a way, then, to circumvent that kind of train crash or that kind of collision by allowing experiential learning to be much more widely accessible? And I think that's really where I would go with this. Because experiencing something physically, experiencing something through the autonomous system of your body, is much more likely to have an interaction with your psyche and with your intellect than simply sitting in a room listening, sad to say. Sorry, you've just sat through an hour of me,(audience laughs) but anyway. I wish I could sweep you all up and take you with me, but that's not going to happen just yet. But I think, if I'm right, I think we shouldn't belabor the fact that people who don't have the same experiences, and we're not all the same. So my sense is that we continue to learn all through life. And the more you expose yourself, literally, to those sorts of sentiments, the better it's going to be, the better it's going to be.- Thank you.- Thank you. I think my question is linked to the previous one. I'm thinking about the babies that are born right now. So I'm afraid that they are not interacted with the nature, and they cannot be if everything is going this way. So I'm thinking about how we can artificially or, I don't know, however, make them interact with the nature. Because I'm like kind of 30 years old. And I can imagine how my parents interacted with nature and how they are more afraid than me, but I don't know whether the baby is or the children right now, they are afraid as much as we are.- Oh, where to start? Okay, I think children are naturally curious. And for me, that's forever the best thing going, because curiosity is a way to experience. This is exactly the same point I was making. And children have a sense of, they do have morals. They absolutely do. It's not just you standing over them, saying what is right and wrong. If you just put children together, you see how they interact with each other, and wanting to be loved. Do you remember I said part of the moral sentiment is about wanting to be loved, to be well-regarded and so on? It would appear that that is a very forceful part of even children getting together. I see it, actually, a lot in the tribal community where I live, where the inculcation of the rules and the hierarchy is absolutely there. And the chief is the boss, so to speak, and even grown men bow to the discipline of the chief. But there's a sense in which fairness, and fairness to everything, animals, as well as humans, is, it would appear to be a very natural instinct. When you take away all the kind of industrialization, you strip it all away, and you've got children out there in the bush and out there in nature, they seem to be able to think about fairness for the non-human, as well as for the human world. So we are divorcing children from that, that way to play, to see a continuum between the human and the non-human world. And I think that's where we have to focus our attention. And it comes back to experience, touching things, picking centipedes up. Fantastic, right. So I think that's the point. (laughs)- [Man] You're making criticism of economists. I think it would be helpful. You can't cover everything in 45 minutes.- No. (laughs)- I appreciate that. To point out with the neoclassical economics, which is dominant in 90% of Western universities, I guess, is the equations are formulated in such a way that it's a self-correcting system. And it's also based on the assumptions that buyers know as much as the sellers do about products, and that prices came from information reflecting the usefulness or whatever, in fact, of the product. Well, Ratners, you may remember their jewelry, the chief executive said they're just paying a lot of old rubbish for a high price. (laughs) So there's an awful lot that's going wrong, but it's still being taught in a lot of universities in the West.- Well,- Unfortunately.- I'm very pleased to say. I completely agree, and it's not to knock every economist 'cause some of them are very good friends of mine, but(audience laughs) I'm very happy that the institute where I am, the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, we have a very, very strong core now of ecological economics, as it's called, which captures a lot of this, so the natural prosperity all the way through to prosperity with people. And Professor Robert Costanza, Bob Costanza, has just joined us. So we're hoping that we can really bring this world of prosperity and ecological and thinking about the universal value of nature much more into the forefront, particularly in the UK, in the policy world, as well as doing it out in the rest of the world as well, so.(audience applauding)