SEAI 180 Degrees Season 4 Episode 2

The Community Catalyst, Davie Philip

Jim Scheer 00:05

Hi, I'm Jim Scheer, host of 180 Degrees, a podcast brought to you by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. In this series, I talk to Climate Leaders about how they first connected to the urgent need for climate action. We go back to their roots and talk about their journeys, discover what drives them, and what keeps them motivated. We also explore the essential ingredients required for leadership on climate action here in Ireland, and how we might impact internationally. Nothing short of a societal movement is now needed to ensure a livable planet for our children and future generations. In the words of my guest today, Mr. Davie Philip, to make sense of the world and respond to the challenges we face in meaningful ways requires us to think differently. Davie Phillip is a facilitator and a trainer with a focus on community resilience at cultivate.ie And a Network Weaver at the European Network for Community Led Initiatives on climate change and sustainability. Davie was a founding member of both Feasta and Sustainable Projects Ireland, Limited, the company behind the eco village project in Cloughjordan, County Tipperary, where he now lives. In this episode, I talked to Davie about life and the Cloughjordan eco village, its establishment as a living lab demonstrating how we might live in a climate changed world. Stay tuned for this fascinating conversation where we imagine what might be possible if we all come together on climate action. Davie Philip, very grateful to be speaking with you today. We're here in Cloughjordan eco village in Tipperary. For those of our listeners who are hearing you for the first time, could you start by telling us what you do and who you are?

Davie Philip 01:34

Thanks, Jim. It's great to be here. So I'm Davie Philip. I'm Scottish. I've lived in Ireland for 28 years. I came here to study in '96. I studied anthropology and philosophy in Maynooth University and got into sustainability. And I suppose since '97, I have focused on sustainable communities. I was one of the founders of Feasta, the Sustainable Economics Foundation in '98. And in '99, I was one of the cofounders of Cloughjordan ecovillage, where I'm based now. And in 2000, I set up the Sustainable Ireland Cooperative, we ran the convergence festival in Temple Bar, Cultivate Sustainable Living Center in Temple Bar in Dublin. And then we took over the Enfo building with Eco UNESCO and ran it as The Greenhouse for a few years, before we moved our whole cooperative to Cloughjordan. So we've been here since 2011, I think, and we now run the weekly Enterprise Center in the middle of Cloughjordan ecovillage.

Jim Scheer 02:32

That's a pretty impressive rap sheet, we're gonna get into a lot of what you just talked about and explore some of those projects. Could you go back first of all, though, to maybe when you were young fellow, or do you remember a time when you got connected to the planet or to environmental work? Was there a particular moment in time? Or did it come on you gradually? Or how did that pan out?

Davie Philip 02:54

It's an interesting question. I had a sort of different upbringing to most people until I was 20, I was a professional skateboarder. I got to travel the world riding my skateboard and getting paid to wear Converse shoes. And so I had that experience until I was 28. I started a skateboard clothing company and a surfboard/snowboard Skateboard Shop, which is still going in Glasgow. But I got disillusioned with that when I was 28. And I went to India for a year and a half, to study meditation and yoga. And it's really through there, again, a taste of interbeing, or oneness, in a sense, if you like, that really helped me sort of see sustainability in a different way and a whole system's way. So when I was in university, and Richard Douthwaite's book was on my reading list - who's an ecological economist - I really got it and resonated with his whole system viewpoint. And I realized he lived in Ireland. I called him up, we met, we became friends. I worked with him for 10 years. And I think that that sort of globally informed but locally active approach to sustainability, which now I would frame more as community resilience, or how our communities cope in these challenging times. So it's sort of underpinned my work, experience or taste of the oneness in India, which sounds a bit too woowoo I would say for me, even myself, but it really resonated when I saw Richard's work. And that's what really motivated me since '98 til now to just focus on sustainable community and sort of encouraging different methodologies, community led approaches to meeting our needs.

Jim Scheer 04:46

Got that and we're going to go in again to some of those, those topics - you mentioned communities and resilience. But just to stay with the individual for a moment, was it that connection to self that really... how important do you see that as part of the journey? It sounds like you started there and it went from the self-connection Well, I'm no more convinced that the way out of this ecological and climate emergency that we have is in, that our interior condition, the way that we think, the way that we engage with others, is going to be the determining factor, whether we're successful at meeting our climate goals, or even making our communities fantastic, vibrant places to live, we are going to have to start with ourselves. But let's not end there. We're gone well beyond the power one day, we need to be thinking, how do we do this collectively? How do we do this in our local places? How do we now, in a just transition, engage people that aren't interested in these environmental or sustainability approaches and agenda. So there's a big challenge, I think. And it just takes us beyond the individual. But we have to start there, we have to start as ourselves and then think about our relationships, connections and our local places, and especially now the relationship and connections to the nature and environment around us. So of course we're meeting, and you've teed it up well, in the midst of a climate crisis that's happening now, biodiversity crisis is happening now. Where are we starting from? So, how do you see, from where you're standing now, if we were starting today? How do you see the landscape of climate action and sustainability now?

Davie Philip 06:31

Well, anyone that's aware of the science or keeping up with the latest reports on the state of our planet, will realize we're in a very tricky situation, and we should have started decades ago. But we are where we are. We need to rapidly decarbonize and get off fossil fuels, and build the resilience of our local areas to be able to cope with the disruption we're locked into. So most of my work is really focused on adaptation rather than mitigation. Although I am convinced that we need to be doing both at the same time, both mitigating and reducing our climate emissions, but also building the resilient capacity, the capacity of our local places to feed us the power....and we could be doing a lot more locally than we are to shorten very vulnerable global supply chains. We could be growing a lot more of our own food, we could be thinking of our neighborhoods and moving even beyond our individual houses and thinking, into thinking about our communities, our places, getting a sense of place, getting a pride of place, getting an awareness of that place and changing the relationship to the food producers, the farmers, the energy providers in that place. And even becoming food producers and energy providers ourselves with the promise of the rooftop revolution, or people now seeing the potential to grow some of their own food or join a community-supported farm or local food initiative.

Jim Scheer 08:07

It's a very rich answer. There's so many great ideas in it. So we're here in Cloughjordan eco village in Tipperary and when I when I arrived, the place was a hive of activity. You have a camera crew outside, you were on an EU webinar with partners. Could you start by saying what's going on here in Ireland at the Cloughjordan eco village for people who aren't aren't aware of it? What's what's happening here?

Davie Philip 08:26

Well, Cloughjordan ecovillage started its journey in Dublin. A few of us were involved in activism, I suppose. And involved in Dublin Food Coop and getting into sustainability for the first time. And realizing that if we had somewhere like an eco village that people could visit, that people could come and do a course, go back to their own community and apply some of the approaches we pioneer here. Then we might be able to accelerate the journey to sustainability. So there's a lot going on in the Eco village there is now 55 high performance houses. We've got our own community supported agriculture project, a community farm. There's amazing research gardens and allotments for people to grow food and experiment in how we best grow food. We have a community amphitheater, a 300 seater community amphitheater. We planted 17,000 trees in our community woodlands, mostly native, although we have put in some sweet chestnut as the trees are marching north for climate change, that trees and vegetables that flourish in other places will potentially do well here. So there's some sweet chestnut in our woodlands. And we're talking from our Enterprise Center, We Create, and our Enterprise Center is really trying to show some digitalized approaches. So we have one of Ireland's only Fab Labs, a digital fabrication lab, where you can share plans across the Internet and make things locally with digital fabrication. Computer controlled machines like laser cutters or milling machines or 3D printers. We have a food hub, which, yeah, they're out there making a film on just now, which has an online farmers market to enable a local food economy and connections to local food producers. We have co-working, which you see in the cities. But now that we realize we can work anywhere, let's have co-working in digital hubs like this, rather than being isolated in our kitchen working away. So we still need spaces in our towns and villages and our city neighborhoods where we can work together. And then we do a lot of events here: conferences, training, workshops. So we're really experiment now with our digital studio where we can distribute events. We can have the speakers and facilitators here with a room of 40 people, where we could have other rooms of 40 people connected to those same events. We're exploring distributed events or blended events and training. So that's our Enterprise Center. I mean, it's got maybe 10 or so businesses from the ecovillage, our researchers, our eco villagers that live in Cloughjordan , that work here. So there's a lot going on in the ecovillage, it is fairly complex. And it's a rich experience. But also, as you would imagine, with so many people engaging with each other, it can be challenging also, it is definitely no utopia.

Jim Scheer 11:28

Yeah, complex. But there's a real vibrance about about it as you talk about it. And even we were... we took a walk around the village, and we ended up in the main street of the town, and we bumped into others who are involved in different projects. And we could see old buildings being revitalized and a real energy in the town. And so you've ended up with a complex system and a society. But what were the key ingredients that it took to get here? Can you list some of those off?

Davie Philip 11:58

Yeah, I think in 1999, when we started this project, we imagined ourselves buying a farm and building a new village. And we spent a year with consultants and architects and building our community. And we realized there's so many towns and villages across Ireland, that actually we would be better placed to find land adjacent or in one of these villages and play a part in the rural regeneration. So unlike most ecovillages, we're actually an eco neighborhood of Cloughjordan, a very progressive little village, that when we found the land here in 2003, it was down to about 550 people in its population, from a heyday of nearly 2000 people. And actually the local community came and lobbied us in Dublin and said, there's land here, it'd be fantastic if you bring your project here, it would keep shops open and keep the train station open would keep the post office open. So there was a, they were a very forward looking little village or town. In the last census, the population was up to 850. And I reckon I'll be getting close to 1000 now, as people move here, because there's something progressive and vibrant going on. So it's an exciting place to live.

Jim Scheer 13:07

It really seems that way. You know, I got a sense that in cultivate there you were in Temple Bar, there was a lot of meetings, there was a lot of talking the talk. And you're out here now in Cloughjordan walking the walk, you know, and putting this in place. What did it take to take that step? Was it just the call from the community out here? Or what gave you the confidence to step out of the ideas and into the action?

Davie Philip 13:28

Well, I think forming as an educational charity, Sustainable Projects. Ireland is the educational charity vehicle that is developing the ecovillage. This was, remember, pre-economic downturn. So we found the land and applied for planning permission and bought it in 2004. The first houses didn't go into 2009. So in that period the economy started to have challenges. And you know, in 2009, we had deposits on all of the 132 sites that we have here. By that time, people were saying, oh, I'm in negative equity, I'm gonna have to leave the project, lose my deposit, not be able to move to Cloughjordan from one of the places across Ireland. So we've really suffered since that downturn. And then in recent years, the project's got a problem with waste water. So Irish Water haven't upgraded the town's system, meaning that the whole town can get no more planning permissions, which means that although we have 130 sites, a huge demand people wanting to come and join us, for the last five or six years we've not been able to expand. For a reason outside our control. So with the whole town now, we're looking other options, ways that we might even test a prototype new zero discharge or nature based wastewater systems, or pilot or validate these neighborhood infrastructures and get moving again, but right now we're a little constrained here and it's difficult to bring new people in.

Jim Scheer 15:02

You're starting now to talk about some of the challenges and some of the ceilings against which you're bumping up against. Can you say a little bit about the bottom up nature of the creation of Cloughjordan?

Davie Philip 15:13

Well, I think a community led approach is always going to be challenging because our communities are full of people with different worldviews, different politics and different outlooks in life. So when you bring people together, you've got to have some good processes or structures or ways of making decisions that engage everyone. And that's been challenging to find those to maintain them. And to keep the governance good - we're an educational charity, so we have to do good governance. But we're also an ecosystem of innovation with maybe 15 different organizations, NGOs, learning providers, based here in the ecovillage. So it gets very complex. And I don't think we're really educated and cultured to think about complexity, to think systems. We think quite linearly, we think reductionist ways where we see the parts rather than see the rich relationships between parts. So I think this is always a challenge when you're thinking about a project that both addresses complexity and where we're at, but also in itself is complex. How do we start to act like ecosystems? How do we see different entities supporting each other and bringing value to a place or a local region? So we're really approaching this and pioneering a community-led approach. Now community-led housing is a thing all over Europe, community-led or community-supported agriculture and food systems are a thing. But they're still fringe and marginal, we need to have these sort of permaculture, regenerative agriculture, Community Energy coops, you know, different community ownership approaches, more viable, supported, and recognized if we're going to make this transition.

Jim Scheer 16:57

Got it. And what has you thinking that's important? I mean, we're clear we're connected to being in the climate crisis, to needing other ways of being. I mean, you're something of a living lab here, as I see it, and maybe you can maybe reflect on that. And as you were talking to you European colleagues, it sounded like you were sharing experiences about what's working, what's not, what are the blockers, and so what do you get out of that process and learning from each other across Europe?

Davie Philip 17:24

Well I think is a rich experience being involved in a more intentional community, or a community led project, there's a diversity of perspectives that can bring real value to a project. Typically, these things aren't as resourced as they could be, or aren't seen as valid. And yet, these are the things that the new European Green Deal, the new climate pact, the new LEADER in CAP, it will all be around a more community, local focused approach, to protecting biodiversity, to regenerating our local economies, to moving away from long, vulnerable, high impact supply chains, you know, dependent on fossil fuels. You know, can we unlock at last the potential of the rooftop revolution and get communities generating energy on church roofs, school roofs and community centers? You know, can we be making an income for our communities? Can we think about new coops or bring meaningful work to local places, and democratize our businesses so that we're not just a worker or a consumer, we're citizens taking responsibility for where we're at in the world, and looking for a meaningful way forward. So there is a lot of richness. But there's a lot of challenges, especially for the pioneers that have been working on trying to move these things forward. Now, we've seen in recent years, you know, the pioneers that push the energy efficiency and renewable energy. Now this is mainstream, we're going to be accelerating and moving away from fossil fuels in the context we're in. But a lot of the community led approaches aren't seen as something that is useful. And that's not by just the funders or the institutions, that's by the citizens themselves. So we've been doing, with Cultivate or Sustainable Ireland Cooperative, who I work through, we've been doing a project with local development companies to try and help communities see the community led approaches that could avail of LEADER funding and European funding. That's all going to be increased for the sustainability, community climate action, circular economy work. In some ways, Jim, it is a crisis of imagination. We can't actually imagine doing things any differently as we currently do it in a neoliberal economic system, as just developer lead. Can we do things in a different way? Now we've got a very rich tradition of cooperatives in this country. And yet, we've missed out or we haven't brought in the new approaches to community energy coops or community food coops or food hubs or even the new platform cooperatives that we're seeing emerging with the Open Food Network, where we enable local food economies. So we just need for people to see these so that they can imagine doing things differently than they currently do. And so to normalize this, to mainstream them, to bring them out of the fringes and the margins, and say these are valid ways that can help us feed ourselves, power ourselves, house ourselves in a different way than just, you know, being a consumer. This is about more of an active citizenship if you'd like.

Jim Scheer 20:42

Thanks, Davie. Yeah, there's, there's a real sense of what you're doing here being a demonstration project, in many ways, and like we talked about a living lab. But you posed a lot of questions in there? Can we find other ways of living and being? I guess we're expanding the conversation beyond just the technology change that's needed and talking about almost the system change. So when you think about system change, what do you put in that bucket?

Davie Philip 21:07

Yeah it's a good question, Jim. Especially in this time, now, where we're putting a focus on just transition, away from fossil fuels towards sustainability. And the need to engage people that don't normally engage in these things, to bring in the marginal voices and the voices that haven't been listened to. So it's a real challenge there around approaches to dialogue, or to think about our urban and rural regeneration in a different way. So we need places like this, that are living labs, that are testing and validating new community infrastructure, new models of tenure for housing, so the burden of debt isn't just on our shoulders. And we look beyond the individual housing to the benefits of living in a neighborhood where we might have connections or assets that we share with our neighbors, not as we currently have now, where most of the places we're living are dormitories - we watch TV and sleep there, and we do everything else somewhere else. We educate our kids somewhere else, we go work somewhere else, we're entertain ourselves somewhere else. Could we make our neighborhoods, our city neighborhoods, our towns and villages, vibrant places where we live, we work we play, we don't have to commute as much, we've got meaningful work right here where we are. And we can connect differently, not just to connect differently to ourselves, but connect differently to each other and connect differently to the natural world around us, you know, have a new sense of place that actually will give us strength.

Jim Scheer 22:34

That's excellent. And as you're talking there, I'm really getting that sense of it being an imagination, it's starting from an imagination place, because this isn't a common conversation. You know, usually we're talking about well, there's a building and how do we insulate it. You've demonstrated some of the models here now we just went out and bought a sandwich from the Centra but in there was a stand from one of the local bakers, and you talked to me about supply chains. Could you tell us how that works? And as one of one of the examples - you've listed a lot of examples - could you zoom in on that one?

Davie Philip 23:07

Well, let's go for food. Because food is an easier one, we all eat three times a day, so we have a need for food. We're seeing how challenged our farmers are, especially the small and medium farmers .They are people that we really need to find ways to support and I think is communities like the farming community that are really suffering, but are ones that could really benefit if we thought about local economies and local supply chains. So let's look at food. Here in Cloughjordan we have a rich ecosystem of food providers. So we have our own community supported farm. It's a subscription basis, we all pay 16 euros a week - there's about 80 of us - and we have two deliveries of veg from a variety of about 50 different varieties of veg we do. But we also as you mentioned, Riot Rye Bakehouse and Bread School are based here in the ecovillage. The baker there, Joe Fitzmaurice, is one of the best bakers in Ireland, he's a real bread enthusiast, he makes sourdoughs in a woodfired oven. And he's really challenging the perspective of growth and development for businesses. He wants to show how a business can be valid at village level, especially a baker, rather than having him to supply Dublin or Galway, or, or even Europe. You know, he can supply his local community and have a quality of life. So his bakery is right next to his house. You know, we support that bakery through a bread club. So I support directly Joe's bakery, by subscribing to the bread club. So before Joe bakes in the Monday morning he knows he sold 60-70 loaves. He's got that guaranteed cash flow. So we as a community are supporting that local business through this subscription model. We have the same for milk. Now we used to have that when I was growing up. We get raw milk from a farm two miles away delivered in glass bottles to the door. You know, which is fantastic. We also have the same for eggs. And recently, we've just started a digital farmers market. The North Tipperary Online Farmers Market in something called the Open Food Network, which is a platform, a user owned platform, not a proprietary platform that sucks up the value and wealth to the shareholders, but keeps it for the users. And it really gets routes to market for small producers and routes to good food for local people. Now you could see the benefit for a farmer here, a farmer after a busy week might be organic, or have a niche product and come to farmers market, has to work all week and then come to the farmers market with every bit of produce he's got available, hoping it's not going to rain and he's going to sell that produce or he's going to have to take it home and maybe compost it or waste it. But with the online farmers market the platform has what there is an offer. We order on the platform, the platform takes care of the transactions. On Thursday, the producers, the food producers come and there's boxes out and tables, so they know which customers have bought that product, so the only bring what's sold. And they can be here for 10-15 minutes, unless we've got a meet the producer session, or staying for coffees and teas as consumers arrive. The consumers arrive and take away what they've ordered. So this, although it misses some of the social capital of a farmers' market, it is actually much better for the food producer, from an efficiency or time point of view, and a route, established route to market. On the online Farmers Market, on the Open Food Network platform, a farmer could start his own shop as well on this platform. So it just enables that sort of local economy to sort of start to work really,

Jim Scheer 26:45

It does sound like a works. And it sounds like there are a lot of benefits to it. On the zoomed out level, then, what what does it take for those kind of micro projects? I notice here you're also on a district heating network, so the energy side is coming from a biomass boiler and you're on renewables that way for energy. But what does it take, do you think, to bring this, which, if someone's listening and thinking this all sounds a bit niche, Davie, how do we bring it to normal? You know, are there three ingredients there?

Davie Philip 27:13

There are two ways I'd normally answer that, that yes, we need to do what we can to promote these initiatives as alternatives for communities and citizens to get good food. But I'm pretty convinced now we are locked into a food crisis the likes we've not seen since World War Two, they're telling us. That means that it won't be a choice to establish a new relationship with your farmers, or for farmers to grow more food or produce more food for local markets, it's going to be a necessity. If it doesn't happen this year, it's happening in the next few years. So this approach, this transition to a localized approach we see as an inevitability, not just oh I hope it'll work. But I do think it takes sort of, again this pride of place, that you want to support your local producers or your local businesses because you see a value in having a strong local economy, the more euros we can spend in the local economy, it moves around that local economy, they say up to eight times, so you're getting a lot more value if we can establish and enable local economies. Now, obviously, we need to have global trade. And we need that to be as fair as possible. So I think this goes along well with other solidarity food initiatives, like Fairtrade, or direct links to communities and other places that might supply olive oil or coffee or these sort of things. We still need that global market, it is not a return just to the local or to the toil of the way we farm before. But I think at the heart of it, you actually need people to value the local, to value community, to see that this is actually a response to the climate and ecological emergency.

Jim Scheer 29:01

Yeah, really got that and you used the food example and I guess the energy example that mirrors that is probably that Ireland is currently 90% import-dependent for its for its energy needs. Here in the village. You're 100% local.

Davie Philip 29:15

Well, only for heat and we need more solar panels. So we're looking at that now. A local sawmill provides a waste product to us that we burn in our district heating system and it gets distributed around the house. It is set out for 130 homes, we've only got 55. So it could be actually cheaper for people but it is a more secure source. But this is our challenge. How do we quickly move away from fossil fuels and into renewables? But now, and at last, we're gonna have a feed in tariff so we can be incentivized to put panels on a roof. If we don't use that energy, at least we'll get a return financially. And I really hope that we can unlock the potential of community power, that we have a rooftop revolution, that community initiatives and centers and even churches can benefit from getting solar panels on the roofs and providing energy and both capital to their local places.

Jim Scheer 30:14

Yeah, got that. And a word that's come up a few times in the conversation, I just want to turn to it now in the context of the power of communities, and that local sourcing of, of energy and food, and those local systems, is resilience. And you've talked about resilience at the human individual level, and also at the system level. What is resilience for you and why is it important?

Davie Philip 30:36

Well, I think we understand the word from psychology and child development, you know, it's really a bounce back ability that if we get sick, or we get bad news, we recover. And the quicker we recover is our level of resilience so we can understand the word. Since 2005, the Transition Town movement, which actually started in Ireland, really put this community resilience at its focus. And it's similar, it's looking at how does this community how does this local place, respond to challenges, be able to look after itself in difficult times, and that's our community resilience. Now, there's a big difference, we don't want to bounce back to the shock that caused the disturbance, we want to take the opportunity of a shock to break through or move forward into a new way of doing something. There's also a new framing around community wellbeing, which is a really, I think, effective way because sustainability sounds like someone for greenies and environmentalists, even all over the Sustainable Development Goals, now we get real sense that sustainability isn't just the environment, it's about justice and equality in society, in the economy and jobs as much or as well as the environment. But what we actually need is to move beyond sustainability to a more resilience focus or regenerative focus, where we're actually regenerating our systems or ecosystems or community systems. We're regenerating because we can't just sustain what we have, you know, so and there's a need now, when we realize how much nature we've lost, or the impact we've had on biodiversity, to regenerate these natural systems. It's the same for our communities. We've a very poor sense of community now, we're gonna have to regenerate that sense of solidarity and coming together. So resilience and community wellbeing, or community resilience and community wellbeing, I think, can be frames that make it safer, or more attractive, for mainstream traditional communities to move into.

Jim Scheer 32:34

It sounds like a lot of the models are working here. And you're learning how individual systems can be more resilient. For the listeners who are sitting in the bigger cities around Dublin, or living in the suburbs around the country, how do these community principles that you're proving here in Cloughjordan, how do they apply to the suburbs around Cork or Limerick?

Davie Philip 32:53

Well, I think a community project like this, where we're really trying to prototype new approaches to food, new approaches to do things together, that this is valid for whatever, an urban neighborhood or a rural or peri-urban, suburban neighborhoods. To me, that's not something extreme, that's only for environmentalists. So there is an opportunity here, to improve our quality of life. This is really about the good life, the good life not in the way we've perceived it as status, or power, or wealth, but good life, in the quality of our life, in the quality of our relationships, in the spaces we have to develop ourselves to raise our children. So really, it's about good living, isn't it? And I think we've, again, this crisis of imagination, we can't imagine what good living is, apart from buying products and the status of how much money we have it. Can we move beyond that? I hope we can.

Jim Scheer 33:50

It sounds like we're back to the imagination and the need for a lot more conversations around it. I think it's fair to say that we kind of got through the pandemic in a way that we probably learned some things about being together and working together. Did you see anything during that period of time that sort of brought some of the principles that you already maybe had bedded down here in Cloughjordan that we could learn from?

Davie Philip 34:16

Well, I think in the pandemic, especially in the deep lockdowns, if you have green space around you, if you have people that you know around you, so when you go for a walk, that you bump into a few people and have conversations, I think that was really important and that people realized maybe they're in the wrong place with the wrong people. And that if we get out of this I need to be in a better place. So I think there's an opportunity with a pandemic, of people rethinking their quality of life, and maybe well maybe if I moved to a smaller town or into a rural area again, we could have that quality of life. So I think there might be an opportunity of the pandemic. And we're also moving into a time now with the conflict where there could be an opportunity to quickly accelerate into renewables and avoid the dependency on fossil fuels, especially gas from Russia. But there might be the opposite of that, where it's just a drill for victory. And we need now to exploit fossil fuel and bring more fossil fuels in and lock ourselves into that. And at this moment, I mean, we started this decade, which we were told was a defining decade for humanity, that if we didn't make big changes in the way that we do almost everything that we would probably have an inhospitable planet by the end of the century. So I just hope that this catalyzes rather than distracts us from the job at hand, which we have to reduce our carbon emissions so quickly, that we should have started 20 years ago, when we knew about this. We also, as well as reducing our carbon emissions, we need to build the resilience of our local places to cope with the disruptions that we're locked into. We're not going to fix climate change now - we hopefully can mitigate against the worst of it - but we also have to adapt into dealing with what we're locked into. And I think projects and community initiatives like what we see at Cloughjordan, can really help all communities, urban or rural, think about how they position themselves to cope better in the uncertain future

Jim Scheer 36:17

Listening to you speaking there, you were sort of calling for us to get back to thinking about what we value. In terms of what we value, and from the top down what we valued for so long: economy, GDP growth, jobs, you know, all worthy goals on one level. But if they're against a background of an uninhabitable planet, they don't really count for much. We've talked a lot about the grassroots and the bottom up. How do you think the top down can better support a shift to a revaluation of what really matters or allow us to do that, and have a good way of life?

Davie Philip 36:51

Good, well I think there is an alignment now with the top down the European level with the new Green Deal, the climate pact, even the new CAP, a new LEADER programs will put sustainability front and forefront. It will also bring support to local communities, which is much needed. Now I think if we want to accelerate this community-led approach, which we're seeing even nationally with our community climate action programs, community climate action needs facilitating. So, a lot of my work is about building the competency of facilitators, coaches, animators to work with local communities. Now, that role can't just be a voluntary role; we need to professionalize or at least support the catalysts that could potentially - from inside our communities - that could potentially help accelerate this move in that local place. But you're right, it is all about values, our values dictate our behavior, trillions that are spent to manipulate our behavior to consume, to value status, to value power, to value wealth, not to value community, solidarity, universality, you know, those values are intrinsic.

Jim Scheer 38:09

Yeah, there's a group of young people around the world who are really driving a lot of this and they shouldn't have to be, but I think they can see it a lot clearer than maybe others. So, you know, we've seen that come to Ireland, we've seen, you know, protests and things like that, where, you know, these younger generations are really crying out to us older generations to get our act together and move towards I think these kinds of things you're talking about, so they can they can have the freedoms. How do you think we best respond to their call?

Davie Philip 38:44

Well, I'm so glad for Friday's for Future, and the groups like Extinction Rebellion, for waking us up and sounding the alarm and declaring... getting this emergency declared, but it's been quickly forgotten. And I think we're selling out the youth. Because we are saying that you're gonna have to invent things like carbon capture and storage or technology we don't have in the future to deal with our mess. And the proposition for a young person looking at the future right now, is there's no doubt that this is causing anxiety, they call it now climate anxiety or eco anxiety. So young people are losing hope. They're not seeing a future. There's not a future for them, like we had when we were growing up, or our parents had, where the future was getting better. The future is not getting better now. And we need to look realistically, we need to look this squarely in the face and go: we're not with technology just going to fix everything. We're going to fundamentally have to shift and do things differently. Now, we can design a system that works and is good for us. Or we can just think that we can just keep going to infinity and beyond with the technologies we might have in the future. I just think it's more prudent to actually look at where we're at, honestly, and say well what can we do? We can make those responses much quicker than we're currently making them.

Jim Scheer 40:05

Honest, he's come up as a couple of times as being really straight about what's going on. You talked about climate anxiety - are there times when you're down about what's going on around the world when you read the latest reports or the science? And, if so, how do you cope with those times?

Davie Philip 40:18

Well, that's a good question. And I think it all comes back to our inner condition, you know, so I think it's important in a way to have a meditation or a mindfulness practice. It's important to go for walks in the woods and getting out into nature and having that connection, for our mental health. You know, so the idea of resilience is not just about new technology or community approaches, it's about really addressing the crisis of loneliness and isolation and mental health challenges we have now that could be dealt with at the same time we deal with climate change, if we're smart about what we're doing. You know, so building stronger communities that values care and solidarity is probably as good for mental health as it is for our biodiversity health, but we need to do them all. So what sustains me because, I mean, if anyone reading the science, there's the potential you're just gonna give up hope, because it's not looking good. You know, and it's worse than we think. And we're so ill prepared to cope with what's about to happen. And that's this decade even, not far away now. I mean, we're already seeing heat waves at the start of the season that are just unprecedented. It's like something out of a Kim Stanley Robinson novel, you know, this is like what we thought would happen in decades' time not now. So we need to wake up, we need to tell the truth, we need to look at what we can do as citizens, and what we can do when we come together in solidarity, to build community. And that can be joyful. So that keeps me buoyant, that we can actually redesign our economy into a wellbeing economy, which has prosperity without economic growth and debt, where we can feed ourselves and make sure everyone on the planet is fed. You know, we have an opportunity here, let's not lose it, I think

Jim Scheer 42:17

Yeah, it's amazing when I hear your talk about and what the state of play, just even the sense in the room, you know, and then when you talk about possibility and what you're doing here, I can feel the energy coming back up again. Could we look to the future then to sort of get towards a wrap up here? What do you see for the future? When you look at, say, 2050 for Ireland, what does it look like, from where you're sitting?

Davie Philip 42:40

Well, I don't think it actually looks much different from what we see now. It's just the all our homes will be really energy efficient, and powered on renewables. And we will have a much bigger focus on the neighborhood and our community around us, not just individual houses. So I don't think our, say, neighborhoods and towns and villages will look much different. If we get through this and we accelerate this transition, then I could see the potential to have healthier communities, healthier people, better connections to the businesses around us, opportunities to have meaningful work in the places we live, fantastic green space and blue space that is good for our mental health. And our kids are free and you know, not just on computer games but are out there playing in the woods, you know, that's, so that's the picture I sort of see. It's just what we're doing now, just a little more cooperatively than individually, and a bit more focus on quality life than just consumption, and a bit more focus on our community wealth, rather than just our individual wealth.

Jim Scheer 43:55

Would you say you're optimistic for the future?

Davie Philip 43:58

I'm always optimistic. But I'm also a realist. So I can stay optimistic if we keep moving and we accelerate the actions that we're doing now. And that we have more opportunities for communities to do the right thing in energy and food and mobility and transport and do that in a way that brings real community wealth and keeps the value of our places intact to make these amazing places to live, work and play in. And that we can thrive and not just survive in this uncertain future.

Jim Scheer 44:34

Davie Philip, thanks for your imagination, your passion and your time today. Thanks, Jim. Thank you for listening to today's podcast. We hope you enjoyed our conversation and it's left you in action and hopeful for our future. Please visit SEAI.ie/podcast for information on each of our guests this season and links to further relevant material to support you around your own climate actions, or resources if you're suffering from any climate anxiety. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to 180 Degrees and rate the podcast to help us spread the word.