Case Study: John

John is an organic farmer, and is a key member of the organic movement. The interview took place in a pub close to his office.

John was unlike any other interviewee in this project in that he immediately grasped the thrust of the interview, and described an example of where he had deliberately set out to uncover the same action/values contradiction I was looking for:

John: [...] before you [a group of food retail executives] decide what you can

do, let’s just talk about it, let’s talk about whether there is any single person round this table that is content with the prospect of virtually all their staple foods being from genetically engineered organisms within a decade. [This refers to a presentation made by a senior Monsanto representative a few days before] Is there anybody round this table who’s happy with that?” Do you know, not one person said that they were happy with that.

PQ: Yeah, I can well believe that.

John: And that was really interesting, because that, suddenly they were

touched, and this is the point that I’m making, that there is a difference between the corporate mentality: “Let’s go for it chaps” and your own personal value system.

PQ: Yes.

John: And that’s what happened both in this conference where I raised this

point and round this dinner table.

He then went on to emphasise the importance he attaches to this contradiction:

that’s why what we’re going to do... we’re going to win.[referring to banning genetic engineering from agriculture] That’s why we’re in an incredibly strong position. We are in a very strong position on several ways. We are in a strong position because of that, because there is no doubt that on a personal level.... it is rather like the big arable farmer who uses pesticides on all their crops but has an organic vegetable garden, there are plenty of those around, the majority of large scale arable farmers do not use the pesticides that they use on their crops in their own back gardens.

The link between values and action has driven the whole of John’s career, so unlike the majority of interviewees, not only was he able to talk about his value system and the link to his professional activities, it was clearly an issue which concerned him from day to day. Unusually, he did not have to spend time putting his feelings into words, it was obviously something which he was accustomed to talking about:

[...] I had gone through my childhood and adolescence with a great interest in ecology and environmental issues, social issues so I put all that together and I wanted to do something about that in my practical life, and so the influences that were on me.... such that all those questions arose, so the point where I emerged from the threshold of a career and they were what was right for me. And so I then organised my training around becoming more knowledgeable about agriculture, first by working on an ordinary farm, and then doing an organic agricultural course, and then starting farming. And so it was always a beliefs, or a value driven career right from the start, and then having farmed organically for more than a decade I just became more and more involved with the Organic Movement [...]. [My work in the Organic Movement] is a perfect fit with what I did practically before and I think what is interesting, is that I’m in a privileged position you could say, of my professional position not being in any way at odds with either the practical um, delivery system for what I’m preaching, or my own personal ethical value system and that is, I suppose, you could say that’s relatively unusual today.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given this clear, long term interest in what amount to ecocentric value systems, John is able to articulate a coherent and well considered world view. For the majority of interviewees, while such values tended not to be something they were uncomfortable with, most had difficulty expressing them, which limited responses to rather short and superficial ones. In contrast John spent a large part of the interview explaining his value system, and would clearly have been able to spend much longer, had time permitted.

Despite his opposition to much of what modern science has produced, John is not anti-science. He believes that science can never be complete, and is only one restricted way of knowing, and that given a recognition of these limitations, science can be extremely valuable:

That’s where it gets muddled, that’s scientists putting values on stuff and forgetting that they are doing that, there’s nothing wrong with measurement as long as you understand the place of measurement [...] And I think what science has to jettison is the belief that it understands everything, or probably ever can understand everything. Um, I think understanding comes from a different level, it comes from being. Actually, it doesn’t measuring anything at all. And... and... but science is a servant of the observations which one has um, when one is in a state of, a good, I don’t know how to put it, but I think people when they are really functioning well have insights and observations and can reach levels of understanding which have a truth about them. [...] The measurement is like illuminating the truth of what we understand intuitively. So that when you have something that you think, you know, the man on the platform of the bus thinks “Well you can’t feed cows to cows I mean it is against nature isn’t it you know what I mean”? And the man on the platform of the bus says that, well of course he is right. Well, you know, 50 years later or a 100 years later science will validate that but the man on the platform of the bus can be right a 100 years before science gets there, and you have to, you won’t have to recognise that because the power science to illuminate his intuition isn’t there, or might not be there today. So I think we have to rely on a different balance and understanding

between the role of science, which shouldn’t be jettisoned, and the importance of functioning at another level, [...]

He believes that a realisation of the limits of science is starting to appear within the scientific community, but is being stifled by a variety of factors:

It’s interesting though that it is kind of systems thinking, which is the manifestation, if you like, which science can relate to, is starting to gain ground very rapidly, more holistically, and it is starting to permeate into sort of scientific circles , and they find it very uncomfortable. But actually if you start digging you find that it actually gets back to simply, profound, philosophical stuff, which then bridges back into even deeper things again. I mean, I think that this is very disturbing to scientists at the moment because scientists are you know, evidence, they think that they are evidence driven. They think that they can only do something if they can rationalise it, and justify it and, and, find empirical research which shows whatever it is that they think is true. But in fact most science isn’t driven actually by that at all, but it is very disturbing for a scientist to admit that, and I don’t think that science was ever driven by those things and...

PQ: In a way I sympathise with a lot of the people who are pro-biotech

because these sorts of arguments are saying “Well everything you have been doing for your entire career is bollocks” and that is really threatening, and actually I sympathise with them on a personal level.

John: Which means that they’ve got to look really deeply inside themselves,

they’ve got to re-evaluate everything that has drove them all their lives. It’s a terrible, it’s a terrible shock to the system to have to do that. It’s all very well for the likes of me who seem by accident to have acquired a sort of compatible value system through some sort of accident of the evolutionary process, but I’m very unusual...

He is also acutely aware of the blocking effect of institutional inertia which he feels prevents changes which those inside the institutions would like to see made:

John: [...] But what we were up against was not actually um, trying to break

down somebody who had a different view, it was much more up against a sort of corporate...

PQ: Sort of inertia? John: Inertia, exactly. PQ: Yes, yes.

John: Exactly, which is the product with Brussels, which is then reinforced by

Whitehall and which is a psychological thing as well as a machine thing, which is then, that something has happened, you just allow it to continue to happen, but it is just too difficult to change it. So, for instance, I mean, at one point I said you know “Actually everybody here wants to see the same radical change but it isn’t going to happen”. And I was thinking about it, why isn’t it going to happen? Am I actually rehearsed in the meeting? Sitting there, you can just imagine the scenario, you’ve got the key MAFF officials saying “Well we want to completely change the agro/environment programme and about to replace the existing schemes with a new set of schemes”. Um, and the conversation would go, you know, Strang or whoever it is gets in as the new Minister. Er, the conversation would go “Well actually Minister, er we wouldn’t advise you to do anything that radical because what you have to realise is that government’s made a financial commitment to fund the existing schemes which we don’t

think are any good for the next five years and the public expenditure round is going to restrict you from introducing”...

PQ: It’s all ‘Yes Minister’ stuff isn’t it?

John: It’s totally ‘Yes Minister’ stuff. So the ‘Yes Minister’ dialogue

frightens the Minister off making any changes. And the civil servants were advising him or her not to make changes, to protect their own, the status quo, because of their own stake holding in it, in various complicated ways. So it is always safe, safe options, you know, and ultimately what it means is perpetuating what exists, however bad it is, [...]

Although John’s views are uncompromising, and are at odds with the dominant paradigm, he is able to maintain dialogue with his opponents because the food industry are obliged to enter into dialogue with John on his own terms because their need for Organic certification.

John: [...] we aren’t some sort of NGO jumping up at the back of the room

with a placard...

PQ: Because you certify things that they sell...

John: ...certifying them, the fastest growth area in their market and they have

had a relationship with us for a decade and their solutions are limited. We are not interested in just upping the ante and saying “Bastards” you know, that’s never been our position, so when we ask these kind of questions they know that we are not just asking them to get, you know, that kind of reaction out of them. So we’ve got several strengths which we are aware of when we go into this battle, we are going in as the position of marketing boys, we can speak their corporate language and of someone else, we are probably part of their culture...

PQ: Yes, yes.

John: ...and they are also very interested, because they know that the

consumers are coming towards us and we haven’t got this anti-reputation.

Thus in many respects, John provided what might intuitively be expected from someone in his position. Its use in this thesis is to show that a Naess style ecophilosophical world view is possible, and the values from which it stems. It is possible however that in John’s case Naess’s theories perform a more active role than simply a description of observable phenomena. Naess himself and his followers write extensively in publications aimed at non-academic environmentalists, and so it is possible that John is aware of Naess’s work. It is interesting to speculate whether the arguments John presents in this material are derived from a reading of Naess’s work, but such speculation cannot be resolved from the material collected.

This interview also demonstrates that such a world view is not confined to marginalised individuals - John functions effectively within the business community, and his lifestyle, while perhaps unusual in some respects does not

isolate him from the anthropocentric society in which he lives. In essence, John illustrates ecocentrism as a practical philosophy for living.