Ted Trainer

Few in recent years have made a more significant contribution to our ecological salvation than Richard, and in my dogmatic opinion his most recent essay is stating many of the lessons we need to learn fast if we are going to get through to a satisfactory world.

This revolution requires no heroic sacrifices at the barricades. It requires patient plodding at the task of spreading the new ideas and values.

The achievements of the Spanish anarchist workers collectives in the 1930s show what miracles ordinary people can do.

The purpose of the video is to show firstly that very significant reductions on the demand side are necessary for sustainability to be achieved, and secondly that these can be achieved without hardship or abandonment of high tech, by shifting towards the kind of lifestyles and systems evident at Pigface Point and to settlements designed according to Simpler Way principles.

George has a long and heroic record of fighting for the environment. His latest campaign is to reduce the huge burden that farming inflicts on global ecosystems, by shifting much food production to high-tech “factory farming”. But he fails to see The Simpler Way solution.

It is imperative that a very different conception of development should be adopted as quickly as possible. It is not difficult to imagine a sane, sustainable, just and fulfilling alternative.