I’ve not written many blogs this year and I’ve not been to many lectures. What’s happening to me?
Well, I am spending a lot of time writing my next book and I also devote many hours to making videos for my Rob’s Oxford channel. But tonight I did go to a lecture, actually more like a debate, at Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History just round the corner from where I live.
It was titled “Is livestock grazing essential to mitigating climate change?” Not a very exciting topic for many, I thought, but I do have an interest in this topic through the field we have been re-wilding for some years at Stow. Anyway I could not have been more wrong, it was exciting and the main lecture theatre was packed to the gods, literally. Probably 200 people there and the place was abuzz even before the debate started. If I had done my usual 'just in time act' I wouldn’t have got a seat!
The speakers were Allan Savory, listed as a founder and leading proponent of Holistic Management and George Monbiot, simply described as a prominent critic, but generally known as a writer specialising in environmental and political activism.
Why did I put religion in the title of this blog? Well, I do not think I have ever witnessed such passion and division at a lecture in Oxford before this one. And the zeal of the supporters for each point of view certainly smacked of religiosity. It extended to applause and hooting, yet hooting, at times
So what was it all about? Actually I wasn’t quite sure. I certainly did not understand what the holistic man supported. Lacking only the surplice, he talked like a vicar, a passionate one. He lived in Africa but had spent the last two years in the USA. He had been a military man and seemed to think that military thinking was the only way forward for dealing with climate change. He did not seem to address the title of the debate.
Monbiot was much clearer. He knew that grazing animals and big corporations were the problem and rewilding together with vegetarianism or even veganism the solution. He was more explicit, more passionate and strongly challenged Allan Savory to address the topic under discussion.
At it simplest I think the Monbiot camp favoured banning grazing animals and Savory favoured biodiversity but I may have oversimplified. The audience seemed to know what was what and divided almost equally into the camps, I think.
Savory had the last word by reading a statement which sounded like a sermon and ended with the repeated statement that “we have to look after each other”. Amen.
Meanwhile the sheep in the next field are attacking my
rewilded hedge. Should I let then in? Not likely.
