Tim Jackson awarded Honorary Doctorate

British ecological economist and Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey Tim Jackson, received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Brighton's graduation ceremony last week. In addition to his achievements in science Tim is also an award-winning playwright with numerous BBC radio writing credits to his name.

On receiving his Honorary Tim gave an inspiring acceptance speech:

"To be honest I’m gobsmacked. Listening to the Dean’s Oration, I felt humbled, proud, quietly pleased, slightly puzzled. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought the moon is full tonight. Hang on a minute: The moon is full tonight!

When the full moon rises, said the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, the sea covers the land and the heart feels like an island in the infinite. Children understand this feeling. Lovers understand this feeling. Parents understand this feeling.

Who are these kids, you ask yourself? How did they get here? The truth is they’re strangers. Visiting us from another country. It’s called the future. Your children are not your children, said Kahlil Gibran. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Some years ago I was installing some insulation in our home on a Sunday afternoon. My then five year old daughter was helping me. We were pressing thin strips of adhesive-backed foam into the corners of windows and doors to keep out the drafts. At least, that’s what I was doing. She was doing something else.

Will this really keep out the giraffes? she said.

You can hear the five-year-old mind at work. How did giraffes get into our garden? Will this really keep them out? Everyone knows how tall and thin they are. What if they’re still in the garden when we go to school? Will they tangle us up in gangly limbs at breakfast time?

I’ve thought a lot about those giraffes. At first I mistook them for a childish interpretation of a weekend chore. But now I see I was wrong. The giraffes are there. They really are in the garden. The task is real. Keeping out the giraffes matters.

There are lots of puzzles in our failure to deliver a more sustainable world. One of them is the many easy things we routinely fail to do about it all. Install a little insulation. Time and time again. We know what helps. But our attention is missing. Our priorities are elsewhere. Our lives are taken up with mundane tasks.

Putting the kids on the bus. Getting to work on time. Surviving office politics and email overload. Foraging for groceries. Throwing together meals. Escaping for a few precious hours into primetime TV. Making it somehow from one end of the day to another. Locked in routine. Lost in anxiety. Keeping out the giraffes. This is what you’re heading for, dear fellow graduates.

It isn’t all there is, of course. Our lives routinely rise above routine. The daily grind is lifted from obscurity by the colour of our dreams. Our aspirations soar on rainbow wings. We continually crave a better life for ourselves and our children. Occasionally, we escape into moments of unadulterated pleasure. And from the loose fabric of fantasy and the radiant colours of desire we create and maintain a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.

What is the objective of the consumer? asked the anthropologist Mary Douglas in an essay on poverty written over forty years ago. It is to help create the social world, she said, and find a credible place in it. This deeply humanising vision of consumer lives is also a forgiving one. We would like to condemn materialism as greed and damn consumerism to hell. But we are locked into its social logic by our own symbolic attachment to stuff. Matter matters to us. And not just in functional ways. We tell each other stories through material things. And with these stories we create the narratives that sustain our lives.

This task – and I am coming to the point now – is a fundamentally artistic endeavour. Science provides the understanding. Artefacts offer a language. But the task itself is an act of creation. A creative gesture. It calls on our imagination, our hopes, our vision. It engages our values, our identity, our sense of a shared humanity. The secret life of society hangs on the gossamer thread of collective dreams.

Living is an artistic endeavour. That’s my point. Art doesn’t portray life. Life doesn’t imitate art. Life and art play swing-ball in each other’s back yard. The uniquely human adaptation of artistic expression is as strong a force in our shared history as the steam engine, the semi-conductor and the internet. Infinitely more so, perhaps. The stories we told, the visions we saw, the dreams we shared: these were the building blocks of civilisation, the harbingers of progress, the bringers of hope.

In making this claim, I’m not trying to privilege artists. Art and celebrity are crudely intertwined in the modern world. But celebrity isn’t the essence of art; only its expression in a confused culture, adrift from its moorings in shared meaning.

Nor am I trying to suggest that art can rise above our culpability for ecological damage or social injustice. That would be ridiculous. The lifestyle of a successful popstar can beggar the carbon footprint of a sub-Saharan nation.

Art mis-catalogued too many abuses and stood silent through too many atrocities. But it also suffered these crimes. It gave voice to the oppressed. Spoke up for the dispossessed. Understood our joy and commiserated in our sorrow. Whispered to us in our own language. The heart has reasons, reason does not know at all, said Pascal. Art speaks to and from the heart. In its purest form, the artistic endeavour is a form of creation. One that we’re all engaged in.

Science can sketch the problem. Technology can facilitate the solutions. Art engages the soul. It speaks to the moon-struck child in us. It whispers to the giraffes. It looks like the perfect addition to our arsenal of instruments in pursuit of social change.

And yet I want to resist the call to think of art this way. Because it subjugates artistic endeavour to reason. Making art instrumental robs creativity of meaning. And meaning is something, I suspect, we’ll badly need in times to come. I would rather keep art free to enjoy a far more vital role in the emotional fabric of our lives. Several roles in fact. Let me sketch them briefly in closing: vision; resolution; consolation.

I’m fascinated by the proliferation of post-apocalyptic visions of the world. From David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood. And perhaps most poignant of all, Cormack McCarthy’s elegiac The Road. Literature is replete with memories of the future. Many of them dark.

Equally striking are the visions of our inner worlds. I think for instance of Steinbeck’s allegories, Chopin’s nocturnes, Rodin’s sculpture. In Rembrandt’s early sketch of the roadside scene from the parable of the Good Samaritan, he offers an extraordinarily intimate portrait of the altruist within. Beneath the noise of human selfishness, Rembrandt reminds us, lies a fragile interior space worth knowing about, worth protecting.

These visions are not always comfortable. They’re not without conflict and suffering. But here is another of art’s lessons. As an environmentalist, I’m struck by our tendency to flatten the conflict landscape. To want to rush immediately to the promised land. But as a playwright, I’m acutely aware of the rules of the game. The essence of drama is conflict. The arc of the story requires a protagonist, a call to arms, a quest, a series of trials, a couple of reversals, transformation, a journey home.

Resolution through conflict. Art pays homage to the nature of the journey, its sense of struggle. The power (and partiality) of resolution: not as an instant, comfortable future, but as a goal hard-earned, easily lost and almost always temporary.

Art calls on us to admit that we don’t have all the answers. That our best efforts to combat climate change have so far failed. That our economies are literally and metaphorically bankrupt. That our politicians have let us down. That restraint lost its struggle with desire, justice its struggle against inequity. That our vision of progress was an illusion. A dream we once had. A story we told our children to stop them getting frightened by the moon.

And this is where we need the consolation of art. Its understanding of sorrow, failure, and loss. Its intimations of transcendence. Loss is only part of the arc of the story. Reversal is only temporary. Art teaches us to look beyond the glitter of triumph and the shadow of disaster. And to detect beneath them the echoes of immortality.

Vision, resolution, consolation. These are the tools from which to build a better future. Sustainability is the art of living well, within the ecological limits of a finite planet. Art is more than an instrument in this process. It’s the nature of it.

My son asked for a telescope on his 11th birthday and I was pleased – another battle won against DS this and X-box that. Your children are not your children; but still it gives you hope when their desire for understanding overcomes the relentless force of modernity. He pointed his precious telescope determinedly at the almost full moon. I’m going there one day, he said, looking up at me solemnly. His moon-eyes wide and knowing. Take me with you, I said. Knowing that he cannot. He just smiled."