Transcriber: Sarah Ide Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
Have you ever wondered
why you incarnated at this time,
to this planet,
in this crisis?
I am going to try and unpick this a little bit,
but I ask of you
just to create a space in your mind for possibility consciousness.
Do not dismiss, do not accept,
Just - Mmmm.
In 2006, I had the strangest invitation.
I got a call from Channel Four
to ask if I would like to be on an eco observational documentary.
Didn’t know what the show was about,
but we knew we were going to have to live on an extreme environment.
There were the usual cast that was invited.
There was the gay guy, the model, the alpha male,
me, the tree-hugging hippie.
The TV researchers knew that I had been training with a female shaman for 10 years
so I was seen as a pretty weird guy.
They put us up in a hotel at Gatwick Airport the night before.
In the morning, they put us on a blacked-out coach.
We drove around for two hours.
We were all discussing, where are we going?
Borneo, to the Amazon, to the Arctic?
We stopped.
The doors opened, there were screams!
There were piles and piles of rubbish everywhere.
We were dumped in the middle of a landfill... in Croydon!
Now, the show was to highlight
what is one person’s waste, is another person’s gold.
When we throw things away, there is no away.
And actually, what we are throwing away, could it be repurposed or recycled?
Now, we had to build somewhere to sleep,
somewhere to shower, somewhere to eat, somewhere to go to the toilet.
After three weeks, we made this place our home.
We embraced it.
Because this could happen to any of us at any time.
New Orleans, the tsunami, the volcanic eruption.
Think about it!
Now, on the third week, one morning,
the local dustbin truck went round the streets,
as it does across all the country, picked up the rubbish,
brought it to our home, dumped it on our site.
We had to wear this protective clothing, masks - dare I say it!
We started siphoning through this stuff.
We had to decide, did it have to go to landfill?
Could it be recycled?
After about 20 minutes, I began to feel sick, nauseous,
headachey, like the worst hangover after your 18th birthday.
That kind of feeling.
Because I’d had some shamanic training,
I knew how to let go and release toxic energies in my body,
so I laid on the earth, I began to breathe.
Release, release, release.
I took a huge breath in, to replenish, to revitalize.
As I did, I felt this shock, like a bolt of lightning go through me.
I heard these words: “How you are feeling now is how I feel.
I’m sick, and I need your help to tell people”.
Now, that might sound strange,
but in your space of possibility consciousness,
this was true to me.
I wept, I committed to camera that I would dedicate my life’s work
to educating, inspiring, and finding solutions,
so people could help to mitigate what we now know is a climate crisis.
I became a celebrity of trash!
I was invited to panels to speak.
Within a year I launched the world’s biggest ethical lifestyle magazine
with National Geographic: National Geographic Green.
What we do today on My Green Pod is simply an extension of that.
One of the panels that I was invited to, is World Travel Market,
I was the sustainable guy.
I remember somebody in the audience,
this question came up a lot.
If you were a world leader, what would you do?
What is the one thing that you would get people to do to change?
And I always said the first thing I do is get people to stop.
Because until we stop what we are doing,
we are not going to be able to understand cause and effect.
And lo and behold,
the pandemic arrived, we all stopped.
As awful as this was, and I have lost a family member in this time,
It’s a blip
in the grand scheme
of what’s going to happen with the climate crisis
unless we can turn things around in the next nine years.
Now, the important thing about this, is that there were lots of businesses
and lots of organizations trying to change things.
We know that.
I have been working with a huge organization
that challenges the government.
Now, part of their research shows that 60% of the problem is human behavior.
In the latest IPCC report, there were two really poignant things.
One is that we are beyond the point of irreversible damage,
the second, that humans are causing the temperatures to rise.
So what are we going to do about it?
I was asked to do some thought leadership work with the UNFCCC,
the organizers of COP26, just around the corner.
They have been working
with a part of the organization called Resilience Frontiers.
They have been talking
to the indigenous cultures around the world.
Who are actually custodians of 80% of the world’s ecosystems.
The indigenous principles, there are many,
but two of them are really important.
One of them is that they treat the Earth,
Mother Nature, Gaia,
as a conscious, living being.
Think about that!
The second one is, before they take from the Earth,
they give something first.
It could be a prayer.
It could be a dash of water before they drink,
a bit of food before they eat.
But they are in a relationship, in co-creation.
Now guess what, guys?
We are all indigenous!
Every single one of us!
The problem is, we are born into a system that is not serving us, it is killing us.
The system that causes consumers to consume,
means to use it all up until it is gone.
We need to let go of that label
and perhaps consider how we can become restorers.
Now let’s look at the mother analogy for a moment, we all have them.
We are them.
Would we let our mother get that sick?
Would we take, and take, and take?
Yes, as toddlers, definitely as teenagers,
but as adults? No way.
And if our mother was sick, we would drop everything.
We would sit by her bedside.
We would nurse her back to health, until she recovered.
Why aren’t we doing that with the planet?
It's a big question.
Could I ask you all for a moment to indulge me, and close your eyes?
Take a few deep breaths
and really just gather up your beingness.
Just connect with that inner place of stillness.
And in that place of stillness, in your mind’s eye,
I want you to take yourself to the happiest place on Earth.
The place that makes you feel the best you’ve ever felt, the most alive.
How does it feel? Where are you?
Now, just for a moment, open your eyes, come back to the room.
Take another breath, reconnect with where you are.
Just by a show of hands, how many of you were shopping?
That answers my question.
We are born into a system that is taking us away from our truth.
So I ask you this, next time you buy something or eat something,
or use something, could you actually think where does this come from?
Could you clean up your lifestyle
and buy from brands that are not toxic?
Not feeding a “money makes the world go round” system?
We all know that is a lie.
I think that if we can take a step back,
let nature regenerate, restore itself,
just like we saw in the pandemic, in a matter of weeks,
you could see the Himalayas from 20-30 miles away.
Nature began to come back.
We could hear birdsong, we reconnected.
Imagine, if we could do that for the next eight or nine years.
Is it too much to ask?
Is that the state of consciousness that we need to evolve to?
And with this newfound consciousness,
maybe anything, and everything, is possible.
Thank you.