Lily Cole: Welcome to Who Cares Wins, with me Lily Cole.
Mark Boyle: We’re very used to right now in modern society not having to to wait for a long time for anything, we've got used to speed. So I'm kind of having to retrain myself in some ways, to live in a slower way, to have more patience.
Elon Musk: It's optimistic if we take action, if we take action and we push for sustainable energy generation. Then I think we can be optimistic.
Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions, tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.
I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking ,’who cares who wins?’
In his book, The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles Mann describes the history of the environmental movement as a fundamental battle between two philosophical perspectives, where wizards wants to innovate their way out of crisis and believe that it's through technology and innovation, that we will solve our greatest challenges.
Profits want to simplify, reduce, slow down and question the idea that we should be hurtling towards some radically different future than what perhaps our ancestors might've lived. My friend Mark Boyle is the quintessential prophet and I've long been fascinated by the way he thinks and impressed by the way he lives, always putting his theories into quite serious practice. After living without money for three years, he since made the commitment to live without any modern technology, stepping away from anything made since the industrial revolution, which means no electricity, washing machine TV, laptop, car, mobile phone, not even a pen.
Mark Boyle: In general I spend more time feeling really happy, feeling really alive, feeling really like this is the right choice. Maybe 5% of the time, it feels like no, this is crazy. I’m probably crazy.
LC: Mark made that decision because he believes that the technological progress we've seen is fundamentally unsustainable and damaging to the natural world and that he would be a hypocrite to be campaigning for the environment using, say his metal and mineral filled laptop. Of course, if you want to find out how Mark is finding this experience beyond reading his book, Way Home, you have to go and visit him, which is what I did a few years into his experiment. I went to Ireland to hear what he had learned so far.
MB: What I've actually learned from doing it is that I'm actually a lot happier. My sense of aliveness is a lot stronger. My connection to the natural world is a lot stronger. My mental and physical wellbeing is healthier. They were kind of surprising lessons I got from it, as opposed to being the original motivation. My plan is to continue like this for the rest of my life. If anything, I want to go further on the path to, you know, to gradually do things more primitively.
LC: What would that look like?
MB: It’d be living entirely off the land, you know, 100% from the landscape around me. To live off a particular landscape takes time. I've been back here five years now, and we're probably 90% of the way. Definitely not self-sufficient yet.
LC: Mark’s cabin is filled with books like Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth. His waste bin, collected over five months, contains less than mine does after a week. You might be able to hear Mark disappearing now and again, throughout the interview, as he tops up piles of wood for heating. Mark shares why he doesn't buy into the tech will save us narrative and his motivations that pushed him to embrace his tech free existence.
MB: I find the technological world to be inherently destructive and violent. And ultimately, unsustainable. If I unpicked one mobile phone, I can show you how devastating that one phone is, regardless of whether you use it once, or you use it a hundred times. The initial production often requires a global network of factories and transport systems and mining and quarries and resource extraction that most of us wouldn't want to be done in our names. Renewable energy would be a big step forward in terms of our impact on the planet right now. Ultimately, I don't think these things are going to make much difference in the end. They're still reliant on an industrial ideology that is laying waste to the entire planet. I've yet to hear one person explain to me how you can produce a solar panel without the damage to the natural world.
LC: What items did you have to get rid of when you first made that decision?
MB: When I gave up using technology, the key things people think about really are your phone, laptop, and therefore email, music in some ways because I’ve no radio, no way of playing electronic music. I play some tin whistle myself, and we have some sessions. Things like washing machines, toasters, central heating, car. The list goes on. If you think of everything you use electrically, and I've had to give all those things up and in doing so, things take a lot longer. I've probably never been happier. Lots of things I’ve given up, it comes with its own frustrations. It's not the easiest life at times. You know, it's a very elemental life, that involves being hungry sometimes, involves being tired. But for me, it's a very rewarding life, connects me to the natural world and it feels rich in its own way.
LC: How long do certain things take you?
MB: I suppose for people washing your clothes, it’s a matter of, you throw your clothes into the washing machine. You go off and do something else for an hour and you come back and probably put them in the dryer. For me, I've got to go first and get some spring water, bring the water back up, heat it in the range, which takes about an hour and a half to warm up, then start washing using soap wart and spring water.
And then the washing process itself is probably about 45 minutes of good labour. So in about, probably in about two and a half hours of kind of constant work, I’ve got my clothes washed. I guess that the link between our connection to the process and the amount of energy we use, you know, the closer the consumer is to the resources involved than the less likely we are to waste. The problems begin I think, when we're disconnected from what we consume.
LC: And how long does it take you to do other things like fish?
MB: If you want to fish, I have to cycle for 20 km to the nearest lake, probably fish for three or four hours, or until I catch fish. And then cycle back. It’s not always successful. You know, sometimes I may come away with three or four fish, sometimes none. And for me, that's another important aspect of the way I live is that it's really good to feel hunger sometimes, you know,. We’re so used in the West just being fed three times a day, often with too much food, we never get to experience the feeling of being hungry and that changes the perception of the world, even what it means to be human.
I've also found that it really hone your skills, you know, if you cycled 20 km to go fishing, you definitely get better quicker at fishing. If you know that you're not going to eat that evening otherwise, it focuses the attention.
LC: And are there months of the year that you don't have any vegetables in the garden?
MB: There is a time in the seasonal calendar, which is known as the hungry gap. It's a period where you get the least variety of food. You don't really look forward to that time of year, but when you come in the spring, then, and the food starts coming back out, you really relish that time of year, that burst of life, where you, it's almost a celebration.
LC: For many people, myself included technology keeps us connected to our loved ones and strangers across great distances. And yet technology paradoxically can make us less present to the people around us in real life. Think of phones at the dinner table or TV in bed. Mark once wrote to me, ‘I hear many people spend more time in bed touching and playing with their smartphones than their lovers.’ So I wondered when I met him, on a human level, how his relationships had been affected by this decision.
LC: How has this change affected your relationships?
MB: When you give up technology and therefore phone and email, uh, Skype and WhatsApp, and then it definitely changes your relationship with friends and family. I can no longer contact faraway friends very easily. And if I do it’s by post. Well, it was actually quite difficult this summer, in terms of my own personal relationship.
My ex-girlfriend was traveling in Portugal and I had no way of picking up the phone and talking with her, you know, it was, it's been three months since we spoke, actually four months. And in that time we broke up, which, you know, she wrote to me in only way, the only way she could communicate with me was through letter.
So it was quite hard. There's no route of expression for the emotions involved. So it was kind of like almost a one way communication. She was, she was traveling. So there's no way of even really writing back during that period. And. So, yeah, that came with difficulties, you know, we're very used to the modern age of Skyping or WhatsApping and that kind of instant communication. I’ve had to wait months to, to get any more understanding about my own kind of personal relationship. So you've got two months of sitting with kind of news and no way of actually talking about the emotions involved.
LC: I first met Mark in 2012, because we were both working on platforms encouraging free acts of kindness within communities, an idea I explore at length in my book. Mark built his first so-called gift economy online, but has since developed the concept in the real world by building on his land, what he calls The Happy Pig.
MB: So we set up a free hostel that's based on a kind of gift values. So people can come here and can stay for between a night, sometimes six months. Some people would come to just relax and get some time out of the city. Some people want to come and learn how to kind of live off the land and really get stuck in.
LC: How’s your relationship with money now? Like, I mean, you lived obviously without money for a few years.
MB: I lived without money for three years, between 2008 and 2011. That experience really changed my relationship with money obviously. Since then, I've moved back to Ireland to set up this project where the original intention was to allow other people to experience life with little or no money.
Right now I use money very minimally. Most weeks I spend nothing at all, but I guess my biggest expense is the kind of the social aspect of going to the pub sometimes with friends. Yeah, you can definitely get through 20 quid fairly easily in a pub.
LC: How would you describe an average day for you?
MB: One of the beauties of it is that each day is different, but there is a certain kind of core structure to the day. I wake up usually without an alarm clock, just with the natural light. And from there, at this time of year in autumn, I generally go blackberry picking or picking some kind of berry for breakfast. I'd come back. I gather some firewood, set this fire for the evening and then come back and make breakfast, do maybe washing up from there from the previous night, which is more complicated for the fact that I don't have running water in the cabin. And so I've got to go down and collect the spring water from the bottom of the lane and cart that back up. I use it to clean the dishes and from that point onwards the day starts to vary. Some days I spend working in the fields, another day I could spend a day writing then off fishing in the evening.
So each day it does become a lot more varied depending on the weather, the season and I guess it's almost what my own energy is like.
LC: Is there anything that you miss?
MB: I miss music, all the old bands that I grew up with, you know, it's, in some ways they kind of all died in one day, you know, there's no more immortality in the music world for me. From a practical perspective, I think the washing machine is the biggest loss. The difference in not having a washing machine and washing machines, you know, is huge, and that’s probably the job I like the least.
So in some ways too, I guess all the different gadgets, you know, for me, even like the ability to send a quick text message or email and to save you having to cycle a long distance or, you know, or go through kind of more lengthy process of writing a letter and bringing it to the post office and then waiting probably a week or 10 days for a reply. Sometimes that can feel frustrating because you want an answer right now. We're very used to right now in modern society, you know, we're not happy to wait for a long time for anything. We've gotten used to speed. So I'm kind of having to retrain myself in some ways to do live in a slower way, to have more patience and to not expect everything to be handed to me right now, which is a good lesson.
LC: And then the last question is, do you feel this is work? How has your concept of work evolved?
MB: What is work? In some ways I spend seven days a week working, in that I go collecting water, there's always jobs on the land to do. I'll write whenever I feel like writing. So if you think of those things as work, then I'm working quite a lot.
But those things don’t feel like work to me, just feel like things that I enjoy doing. I enjoy going fishing. I enjoy growing food. I enjoy the walk down to the spring in the morning to collect water and speak to some of the neighbours. So the lines between work and play start to blur. I think that's a good thing. I think not knowing whether work is work or whether work is play is probably a very happy place to get to. And so I think I continue being confused on the issue for a bit longer.
LC: On the topic of work and play, I found myself on the other side of the world in San Francisco, examining the untouched swimming pool at the house of one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.
Elon Musk: I felt the temperature, you know, it was always too cold.
LC: Wow, you’ve never been in your own pool? No, you have to do it.
Elon Musk: Yeah, well, certainly.
LC: Whilst everything Mark Boyle says makes rare, lucid and poetic sense to me, I worry about our pragmatic need to embrace so-called green tech in a world with few souls as brave or radical as Mark. If billions of people aren't willing to step back in time, technology arguably has an essential role to play in the drive towards sustainability. Green tech promises to de-materialise products, provide renewable energy, electrify transportation, and make cities smart.
So who better to discuss green technologies progress and potential with than Elon Musk, the CEO of Space X and Tesla Motors. The embodiment of the wizard philosophy and the hope that tech may save us. As an electric car owner myself, I wanted to know why he decided to focus on building them.
Elon Musk: With Tesla, certainly the whole point of Tesla it's electric cars and solar power and battery storage. I think at this point, the industry is heading strongly towards electric vehicles and almost every car company has now announced they’re doing electric vehicles, that’s the goal. When we started the company, the goal was to get the industry to move towards electric cars. At the time, there were no production electric cars, not even short range. But electric vehicles had been written off, as you couldn’t make the technology work. And even if you could, nobody wanted an electric car. So we had to show that you could make long range electric cars that looked good, handled well, were better in every way than a gasoline car. And then if you made one, that the recharge time would not be a fundamental issue.
And the industry as a whole is moving rapidly towards electric vehicles. On the idea of an electric car, it existed for a long time, 150 years ago. The issue was not the idea of an electric car, because that idea was around for a long time. The difficulty was making an electric car company succeed and not go bankrupt.
LC: Well done!
EM: So far so good, pretty dicey!
LC: Is the hope at some point that all of the Tesla cars will be powered through renewable energy?
EM: Yes. I think overall things are going well on the car side of things, going into electric. Things are going OK on solar power.
LC: Do you get frustrated? Because I do. And I'm not really a company like that. Do you get frustrated that there's not just a mass movement towards solar, for example, and renewable technology? That it is moving slowly.
EM: Yeah. I think like how would one measure the fundamental good of Tesla. And the fundamental good of Tesla would be to what degree has Tesla accelerated the advent of sustainable energy, by how many years. That’s how I would frame it, like by how many years did we accelerate it?
But for Tesla it would have taken 10 years longer, let’s say. Then that's how I would measure the good. We will get to sustainable energy for sure. The question is just how much environmental damage occurs between now and then.
LC: And are you worried that enough environmental damage would happen that it would threaten civilisation? Or are you optimistic?
EM: I think there are other threats to civilisation. It would, it would harm civilisation, but not end civilisation. It risks causing dislocation of half a billion people or more, with rising water levels and extremes of temperature and more energetic weather, and that kind of thing.
That would be terrible, and it would be the cause of a tremendous amount of strife. And it could be a triggering event for ending civilisation, if it sort of triggers WW3 or something.
LC: And is this something you worry about or do you feel optimistic that technology and potentially politics will solve these problems in time?
EM: I think, I mean, it's hard to estimate exactly. I’m fairly optimistic. If you think things will not be fine, and you take action, then they probably will be fine. But if you are complacent and say everything will be fine, we don't need to take action, then they will not be fine. It's like a self unfulfilling prophecy.
It's optimistic if we take action. If we take action and we push for sustainable energy generation, then I think we can be optimistic. Yeah. We want to thread the needle in the right way and not be complacent and thus prolong the situation and have a worse environmental situation nor be despondent and think, okay, there’s nothing we can do.
We want to be in the middle of there and say like, if we really do our best and try very hard, then probably there will be some environmental harm but it won't be too bad. That's the right approach. And, and I think if people just really keep pushing it in that direction, then we'll have a pretty good, pretty good future.
And there will still be issues. And there'll be some environmental damage along the way. But if we keep pushing, I think overall things will be good.
LC: I’d only intended to interview Elon about his adventures on planet earth, but we quickly spiralled into a black hole discussing the practicalities of space travel along with his 12 year-old son, Kai.
EM: Actually, I want to send Kai to Mars. Kai, do you want to go to Mars? Step right in. Step right up. Who wants to go?
Kai: Well, when the colony is officially developed, yes.
EM: Well, who’s going to benefit if not you? Well somebody has to do it! It doesn’t have to be you. But there definitely have to be some people that are going to take the risk of going there and building up a self-sustaining city on Mars.
LC: Where did the idea come from? Where did that desire come from?
EM: Well, this is not actually some sort of personal desire to go to Mars. It's just that I think we should become a multi-planet species and spacefaring civilisation. I think it would just be a far more exciting future if we're out there among the stars, than if we are forever confined to Earth.
LC: So it doesn't come from a place of worrying about planet Earth. It comes more from a place of excitement and exploration?
EM: I think it’s both. That’s an important defensive argument for humanity or life as we know it to be on many planets in case something happens to one of the planets. Then at least the light of consciousness will not be extinguished. As far as we know. I find it more motivating the idea of adventure and excitement about the future and going out and finding out what's out there.
LC: And how far are you away from sending someone to Mars?
EM: I think we might be able to do it as of four years or five years. We’re building a big rocket.
LC: Okay. And have you got people signed up to go?
EM: Oh, we won’t have any trouble finding volunteers or even people who will pay for it frankly.
LC: Have you been to the biosphere two project?
EM: Yeah, I have.
LC: Me too. So that's quite an interesting analogy, right?
EM: I went there ages ago.
LC: Do you know this project?
Kai: Yes.
LC: And they ran, we were talking to the scientists who set it up and they, I can't remember the story exactly. But they, like, there was one thing that was wrong…
EM: you know, I think it was like they absorbed oxygen.
LC: Exactly that, and they couldn't work out why.
EM: Yeah, it was pretty, like they should have given it a trial period to figure out what the heck's going on. But basically the concrete was sucking up oxygen, I believe. Something to that effect. And so they were all having like hypoxia, like basically oxygen starved in this, because it was a completely self-contained environment.
LC: So that's the perfect analogy, right, of what you're saying, that like one thing is awry…
EM: It’ll be a little easier, in fact, well, maybe a lot easier on Mars because Mars has all of the ingredients that we need for our civilisation. So there’s a lot of water, ice. It has an atmosphere which is mostly CO2, but it has some nitrogen and argon. The red colour on Mars is rust, iron oxide. Pretty easy to get iron, big steel. Long-term you could do what's called terraforming Mars, so you could warm up Mars. You would have a liquid ocean about a mile deep on about 40% of the surface. But the fast way it would be a series of giant thermonuclear explosions.
Kai: What, what alternatives would there be from nuclear explosions?
EM: You could have reflectors in orbit that reflect…
Kai: It would have to be colossal.
EM: Yes. Yeah.
Kai: That does not seem feasible.
EM: You could take Phobos and Deimos, those are Mars’ two moons and you could convert Phobos and Deimos into a giant reflective solar shield. You just need to polish it. You can basically make most things reflective.
LC: This is your brain at night.
EM: I was like, I know that there's a few ways to skin the cat and that's one of them, but that would take, it would really take a long time. Whereas thermonuclear power, that's easy.
LC: Are there any other ideas I should be aware of? Things you're excited about or technology you think I should look at?
EM: There’s artificial intelligence. When you think of it as more like, it's like the genie in the bottle. Because the proponents of artificial intelligence will say, well, it's going to cure cancer and all these things. So it's like, okay, well, you know, something could do all those good things, it could probably do some bad things too. So you kind of like lose control of the situation, but it will not be up to us. It will be up to this super-intelligent machine. This is what gives me the least cause of optimism is AI. Like all these other problems are attractable. We can talk about electric cars and solar power, and that will allow us to have sustainable, renewable, clean energy.
We can become a space faring civilisation with rockets, we can provide free education through the internet. These are all like, these are problems that, you know, we can work on it and make better. AI, I'm like, wow, what do we do there? You know, if you have some super powerful genie out of the bottle, they won't get back in.
And I'll say, I feel like it's sort of a nuclear arms, race. The physicists all knew, well not all, but let’s say predominantly knew, that you could create an atomic bomb, but they were not going to make it. However, if the Nazis got the bomb, that would be really bad. You don't wanna deal with the bomb, so we've got to make the damn bomb.
So then we had the bomb, then the genie’s out of the bottle. We’ve got nuclear bombs.
LC: Ironically Einstein wrote all these books about passivism.,,
EM: But he co-signed the letter to Roosevelt about making the bomb. It was actually this guy, Leo Szilard who really was pushing it, like, we'd better make the damn bomb or the Nazis will make it, and then we're screwed.
LC: And you think it’s a similar psychology behind AI, trying to get to the front of that race basically?
EM: Yeah.
LC: Do you think there's likely other forms of life in the rest of the universe?
EM: There might be, but where are they? It's pretty strange. Like the universe seems to be about 13.8 billion years old, which is very old compared to human civilisation.
LC: So that makes you think that there has been life before?
EM: Probably, maybe that went in and out of existence. It's no longer there. There must be something going on. Either way, it’s just very improbable for life to exist. You know there’s something called the Drake equation. In order for life to exist there are all these criteria that for life, as we know it to exist. But there are a lot of stars. And so if you say, okay, all these things lining up is very unlikely, but they're also very large number of stars. So you combine the very large number of stars with the very unlikely probability of life. You should still see a lot of planets with life, and yet we see no signs of it.
LC: Well, that might just be that we can't as it’s too far away.
EM: Yeah. That's one of the explanations. It's cool. It's usually called the Fermi paradox. If there are aliens, where are they and why do we see no signs of them? Very odd.
LC: Are there any other, um, ideas you have that you want to do before you die?
EM: Thanks you for asking you these questions because it is prompting me to think more about these things, because I get stuck in the day-to-day battles and it's important to lift your gaze from time to time and say why are you doing this? What's the goal? I guess, for the flight team, to go to the moon, go to Mars. And hopefully AI is not too terrible, is very pleasant and just takes care of everything. But then what would be our relevance? How would we find value? It would just be like having a very big trust fund or something, and then you lose meaning in some way. I don't know.
LC: So, what do I think? Well, I can't help finding both visions compelling in different ways. If I had to put money on one, I think the philosophy of the Moneyless Man, Mark Boyle is a safer long-term bet for our species survival. Indeed gatherer-hunter communities living similar lifestyles have existed for hundreds of thousands of years on our planet.
But life isn't always about playing safe. We are an adventurous species. We want to have fun. And there are lots of modern comforts that I feel very, very grateful for. I mean, personally, I love having a washing machine. I love being able to connect with my friends and family around the world, and I wouldn't want to give up those tech luxuries anytime soon.
I also can't help but find the idea of spacefaring super exciting in spite of its awful connotations of colonisation and the fact that we really need to work out how to live sustainably on this planet before we start taking over other ones. I do hope the technology will green itself and will allow the comforts that many people take for granted to become more sustainable and more accessible.
That said, I think there's a lot we can learn from the wisdom of people like Mark, who see the world in a different way, and that our hurried embrace of techno capitalism should be more mindfully considered, always measured against its risks and costs.
By going offline. By slowing down. By adopting voluntary simplicity. By putting our fingernails into the soil and rediscovering our connection to both our local and natural community, we might find ourselves healthier and happier.
So who wins? Or maybe there is no winner and that's the point; that there's something to learn from both the prophets and the wizards amongst us, that we need them all. And that our choices might reflect both paths in different ways. You can hear more from both Mark Boyle, Elon Musk, and many other prophets and wizards in my book, Who Cares Wins, which is out now in hardback and ebook, and I narrate in the audio book.
Join me next week on this podcast where I'm going to discuss the highly contentious issue of food.