Climate change, say the pessimists, will destroy our world. But in an exclusive interview, acclaimed author Philip Pullman, 61, champions a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope.
Andrew Simms: Environmentalists must engage people if there is to be a mass shift to lifestyles that do not cost the earth.
How do you strike the right balance between telling people the difficult truth about environmental problems and making them feel it's still worth getting out of bed in the morning to tackle them?
Philip Pullman in Christ Church College quad, Oxford
Philip Pullman: Frightening people is a very good way to make them passive and supine. You can be terrified into an abject denial of everything and you don't want to know about it: you just shut your eyes and your ears. But the most useful, the most helpful and most energising thing is to say: "You can do this, and this, and this, and you can press your Government to do that."
Environmentalists need to know something about basic storytelling in order to make their words effective. Samuel Johnson apparently said something I find very useful to remember: "The true aim of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."
Research is much easier than writing, so the temptation is to shove all the research in. But page after page after page of the stuff goes by and, of course, people stop reading.
I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it's almost infinitely rich, but it's in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it.
People feel helpless when they see pictures of devastated forests cut down and the glaciers melting and the poor polar bear sweating on its bare rock in the sea. "What can we do, what can we do?" People need to be told what it is that they can do.
And they also need to feel that civil action, civil society, civil forms of involvement such as Parliament, local councils and so on, are there for a purpose, should be used and can be influenced.
AS: Who influenced you as a storyteller?
PP: Milton was an enormous influence for me. As William Blake said: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."
You can tell that his imagination, although perhaps not his conscious mind, pretty passionately disliked God, because everything he gives God to say, every action God takes, is whining, carping, moaning, criticising, boasting. It's a very unattractive figure, the God of Milton. The son, Messiah, is slightly more attractive, and Satan utterly compelling.
McBride Glacier in Muir Inlet, Alaska Environmentalists also tell a story about us and ourselves and our place in the universe. In a sense it's a religious story, because that's the big question of religion. Why are we here? What is here, what does it consist of? What have we got to do now we are here? What responsibilities does being conscious place on us?
And those are questions which the environmental movement, over the past 25 years, and certainly since the global warming issue has come up, has been very much engaged in. What does it mean to us to be conscious of what we are doing to the world?
Some people attempt to maintain a state of denial: "It's not happening", or "It is happening, but it's natural and it's nothing to do with us", or "It's happening but we can fix it with technology." All these are attempts to deny responsibility for it; to deny anything that they might have to do.
So, the questions, the stories that the global warming prophets tell us (let's call them that, to distinguish them from the sceptics), take their place right slap-bang in the middle of the prophetical tradition, along with the prophets of the Old Testament.
But the prophets of the Old Testament were not very successful because they were generally hounded out of the city and cast adrift on the waves. People don't like hearing what prophets tell them: it's generally uncomfortable. It's full of doom; it's full of warnings; it's full of denunciations and threats to mend their ways or suffer for it.
So it's not a popular message. And the struggle that the climate-change prophets have had to undertake to get their message heard, I suppose, is similar. But I've noticed a real change in the past year.
To read more of the interview click here
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Philip Pullman was in conversation with Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation. This is an edited extract from Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? (Constable & Robinson), edited by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith.
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Profile: The devil in Philip Pullman
To the charge that he has set out to destroy Christianity, Philip Pullman has a devilishly smart stock answer. "Nonsense," he will reply. "God died a long time ago."
In for a penny, in for a pound. The forthrightness is just what one might expect from a high-minded man who ruled the classrooms of three middle schools in Oxford firmly for 14 years.Back in the 1980s, Pullman the teacher, living in a modest suburban house, was almost broke. With two sons to bring up, he could have been spotted cycling around the city unable, he has complained, even to be able to afford a glass of cheap wine. Cheese on toast was a typical family dinner.
Two decades on, thanks to the extraordinary success of his children's fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, he is a literary superstar and drives a large Mercedes.
He has moved from the small suburban house in Oxford - the city that has dominated his adult life (he studied English at Exeter College) and his books - to a substantial farmhouse in a village a few miles away. Not an extravagant man, he greatly fancied fashionable north Oxford, but baulked at the £1.25 million asking price when the home of Ian McEwan, a Booker Prize winner, was on the market.
For more of Pullman profile click here
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