Return of the Green Knight

As you do, I recently bumped into Jonathan Porritt at the launch of the Green Party's European election campaign. He has been a member of the party all through his time as Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission but has been restricted in what he can do and say by the civil service code of purdah. He stands down from that role at the end of the year and we can therefore expect more exciting political developments.

In the mean time he has been busy writing. The speech I gave at the launch was a homily on the theme of 'living beyond our means', linking the environmental and financial crises. Little did I know that Porritt's Forum for the Future already had on the stocks a very useful report called Living Within our Means. The word Zeitgeist springs to mind. This takes much from his Earthscan book Capitalism as if the World Matters. I have taken issue with his conclusion in my own book, where I maintain that, because of the way it creates money, capitalism can never be a sustainable economic system. There is still much excellent stuff in both these sources, however.

One of the key achievements of the Transition thinking is that we need to be positive rather than gloomy if we are to appeal to a wider audience. Thus I am somewhat reluctant to dwell to much on limited means and focus instead on the daily celebration of joy. This is not difficult as I live just down the road from Jonathan in the People's Republic of Stroud. Perhaps we could at least rehabilitate the word thrift, the subject of a famous paradox discussed by Keynes and updated on my blog.

I look forward to the return of this Green Knight to the political arena. In the mean time we have launched a beer of that name as part of our European election festivities. And, on the subject of joy, we enjoyed a thrilling retelling of the story of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight at the micro-brewery attached to the Village Inn in Nailsworth. I can thoroughly recommend this as a low-carbon way to spend a Saturday evening.