Turn on the good news

I don’t quite know why, but since a young age I’ve had a deep feeling that the world I was born into wasn’t quite right. I put on a uniform five days a week and went to school, where I would sit in the classroom with other children learning things that I was told were important, without ever really understanding why. I was told that I would need to get good grades in order that one day I could get a good job. But the adults who had good jobs seemed busy and stressed doing things that they couldn’t explain, dreaming of one day retiring so that they could do what they actually wanted to do, if they weren’t too late. To make it more strange, the adults would switch on the TV at the start and end of every day to watch the news, where I would see images of crime, war, natural disasters, pollution, and starvation. In my simplistic child’s mind, I couldn’t understand how all the adults could be so busy and stressed everyday, yet whatever they were busy and stressed with never seemed to solve these problems. Where was the good news? It wasn’t like the adults were all slacking off.

My head spun with endless questions that I still carry with me to this day. For example, why can't we provide food and water to all of the world’s citizens? Why do we pollute the very planet we live on? Why are we so cruel to the fellow species we live alongside? Why is war legal? And why are we so sure about how to live our lives, when we really don't know who we are or why we are here? These questions weighed heavier the more I looked, revealing a world that didn’t hold together under scrutiny.

As I grew older these questions led me to become increasingly interested in the concept of “sustainability,” which was a term I used as shorthand for wanting to create a better world for everyone and which I put at the heart of my career and personal life. I joined the Green Party, co-founded a sustainability-focussed business, and wrote a book on Sustainable Web Design. Meanwhile at home, my wife and I attempted to tick the boxes for sustainable living with our organic veg box, triple glazing, solar panels, electric car, and my favourite, our composting toilet. One year we picked a thousand cherry tomatoes that spontaneously grew out of the compost from our toilet. My naughty pleasure was offering juicy little tomatoes to friends, waiting for them to pop one in their mouth and then telling them that “they just grew out of our poo!” I often say that if you really want to learn about circular economics, start by closing the loop on your own poop.

Over the years I’ve written extensively online about various aspects of sustainability, been interviewed on the BBC and CNN as a sustainability expert and featured in the documentary film Responsible, pondering how businesses might help shape a better tomorrow. Yet, the more I do and the more I learn, the less I feel I know — a curious echo of my early questioning.

In the quarter century that I’ve been involved, sustainability has gone from a fringe movement to a mainstream topic embraced by celebrities, politicians, and even corporations. It’s now a multi-billion-dollar industry, with countless professionals working to make our lives, businesses, and systems kinder to our planet and our people. This should mean that we have made significant progress by now, but despite more effort than ever, we seem no closer to the utopian future that my younger self believed was within reach. In fact, if I make the mistake of switching on the news, I quickly get the sense that we’re slipping backwards.

Within the sustainability world, I’ve sensed a change too — a shift from the optimism and hope that my younger self was excited to be a part of, to a chorus of fear and blame, anger and shame, screaming that we are running out of time. While there have been pockets of progress, it seems that the broad ideas and tactics that have been promoted as the main solutions for decades have, on balance, not solved the big problems faced by humanity. This failure has contributed to a growing sense of despair, as we push the same ideas harder, only to find that these approaches aren’t as effective as we hoped them to be, while entrenched interests continue to push back with equal if not greater strength. Maybe now it is time that we take a step back to reflect on the deeper challenges at hand, and attempt to imagine new ways of thinking and being that might yield different results — from which new hope may sprout.

This book is therefore not your typical sustainability book; it’s been designed to give your mental muscles a proper workout, and in the process stimulate new insights, ideas, uncertainties, and possibilities, often from unexpected sources. In fact, we won’t have to go too far into our journey before you will probably realise that this is not really a book about sustainability, but about how we create a better world from first principles. That is what this book is all about — stimulating more creative, more holistic, more loving thinking to help us grow a positive, abundant future. If you are keen to expand your own thinking to wider horizons in search of new perspectives for a better world, this book is for you.

Beyond the window

In order to find new perspectives, we’re going to need to step out of our comfort zones and explore ideas that we too often shy away from, or don’t even realise are there to see. I’ll be honest that I feel nervous to write a book that pushes these boundaries, as if the progress police are always watching for anyone who dares stray from approved narratives. But that’s all the more reason to do it, because if we truly care about bettering the world then we need to keep stretching our thinking beyond where it was yesterday. It’s about time we allowed ourselves, and each other, to try colouring outside the lines.

There is an infinite world of ideas out there that are missing from the mainstream conversation, not just regarding the environment and social progress, but more broadly too. We need space to ask the unasked, to think what’s not yet been thought, and in doing so, maybe, just maybe, we can rediscover our lost hope and ingenuity. This book is therefore not about telling you what to think or believe, or prescribing solutions, but about taking you on a journey that constantly challenges your own thinking in order to help liberate your deepest thoughts, intuitions, and creative insights. To help you see the possibilities that are currently hidden outside of the window of acceptable thought.

This window of acceptable thought is known in politics as the Overton Window, named after the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who in the early nineties proposed a model for assessing the viability of political policies. The model illustrated how political ideas at any particular time and place in history sit on a spectrum ranging from mainstream policy to “unthinkable” ideas. While there is really no such thing as an unthinkable idea, what Overton meant was ideas that are unspeakable due to being considered taboo, challenging, or unacceptable to an extent that they would be rejected by the public no matter how good they were. He therefore suggested that politicians who desired to have a successful career should always keep themselves and their proposals within the current window of acceptable thought.

While staying within the Overton Window might be good advice for politicians wishing to further their own careers, it can leave society with a lack of genuine leadership when it needs it most. We find ourselves today in turbulent times, facing a vacuum of inspiring ideas to collectively move us forward. It seems that the billionaire tech-bros are the only ones with a bold vision on the table, and it apparently involves writing humanity and Earth out of the story, turning us into cyborgs, and jetting a select few off to Mars. Maybe that’s what some of us want, but if it isn’t then we will have to allow ourselves to imagine and share alternative visions.

It is true that the window of thought does shift over time, but as the polarisation of ideas intensifies, it seems like our window is not widening, but narrowing. We are told to “follow the science” while media outlets publish content that tells us not just what to think and who to listen to, but also who and what we must not listen to. In this book, I’m taking the bold step of saying that we should actively seek out perspectives that we don’t seem to be hearing, whether they be on the opposite end of the political spectrum, wild conspiracy theories, lone dissenting voices, indigenous wisdom and ancient myths, strange ideas, or even things that are currently illegal. We should trust ourselves to be open and curious, without losing ourselves in other people’s narratives, or even in our own.

We must therefore look outside of Overton’s Window into Overton’s Garden, the garden of possibility that we have ignored for too long. Stepping into the garden outside the window will expose us to far greater diversity of ideas than we can see from inside, broadening our perspectives and offering us new, potentially vibrant possibilities. We have much to explore here, and you might be surprised just how diverse the contents of Overton’s Garden are.

Toward the end of this book though, we will seek to go even further and move beyond the garden into the wild lands beyond. This is because even though the garden is far richer, more vibrant, and spacious than being indoors under artificial light, gardens by definition also have boundaries. The word "garden" actually means an enclosure or fenced-in place and is related to the word “guard,” not describing the living things growing there but the fences or walls that keep everything else out. Hence we will be journeying through the garden to find new perspectives, with the garden itself acting as the gateway to a land of truly unlimited possibility beyond. A land where everything is connected and nothing is fenced off.

Before we venture out though, it is only right to inform you that stepping outside of the window of acceptable thought into Overton’s Garden and eventually climbing out of the garden into the unwalled wilderness of our minds, while opening the potential for new hope and ideas, won’t all be rainbows and unicorns. There are reasons that we don’t normally step beyond these boundaries, because it can be scary to explore outside the safety of society’s walls into the unknown, where monsters might be lurking. Not only that but outdoors we have to take the weather as it comes, rain or shine, and cannot switch the lights on when the sun goes down and things get dark. And having not looked at it for so long, we’ll find that the garden will no longer be manicured and neat, more likely being overgrown with brambles and plants that we call weeds.

This may well be a good thing, as even gardens are sometimes better when we loosen our grip on control, and if we rummage through the overgrowth, we might find hidden beauty, seeds of wisdom, healing leaves, and delicious fruits. Stepping outside of the window, and venturing beyond the limits of the garden is an act of courage, as we step into a great adventure in search of the not yet seen.

If at any point on this adventure you are tempted to turn around and run back inside, I encourage you to trust that there is light on the other side of any darkness, as the spring will always come if only we endure the winter. So, if you don’t mind popping on a warm jacket and a pair of gardening gloves to protect you from the prickles, I invite you to venture with me outside the window of acceptable thought, to see what’s out there in Overton’s Garden and beyond.

In Part One we’ll step into the garden to explore some of the overgrowth and weeds in the mainstream sustainability narrative that are rarely discussed, and how acknowledging them might help us to expand our thinking, focus our efforts more effectively, and might unexpectedly nourish us. In Part Two we will move beyond what we typically see as the boundary of sustainability and look at the fauna in the garden — human and non-human — to explore the fabric of our society that underpins almost everything in our modern world. We’ll find that while systemic change may be necessary, the ecosystem that we need to change might be very different from what we have believed until now and possibly more toxic than we’d imagined. This middle part of the book may be particularly challenging for some readers but I encourage you to stay with me through this shady patch of the garden, as well as the brambles at the entrance to Part Three, beneath which we will uncover the fertile ground of the human mind that may be the key to unlocking our potential, individually and collectively. Finally, we’ll take a giant leap over the garden wall into Part Four where I’ll be putting you to work planting new seeds of creative hope in the unbounded lands that lie beyond. My intention is that by the end, you’ll feel more empowered to find those seeds within yourself, embrace your inner weed, and grow yourself as a source of nourishment, medicine, and beauty, to support the healing and betterment of our shared world.