Ep11: Imagining Futures with Brian Eno

For our latest episode, co-host Michael Pawlyn interviews musician, producer, visual artist and activist Brian Eno. Their conversation was originally recorded at The Regenerative Architecture Index event in London, organised by UK Architects Declare and Architecture Today.

Brian Eno is a pioneering musician and producer of ambient music and electronica, a visual artist and an activist. He is a Founding Member of the Long Now Foundation, a trustee of Client Earth, a global environmental charity composed of international legal experts on climate, energy and the environment, a patron of Videre est Credere. He launched EarthPercent in 2021, which raises money from the music industry for impact environmental charities working on the climate emergency. 

Show Notes

Donella Meadows was a scholar, writer and educator who was one of the most influential environmental thinkers of the 20th century. Her canon of works include The Limits to Growth, which was published in 1972 and sold more than 9 million copies in 26 languages. 

Architects Declare is a network of architectural practices across the UK committed to addressing the climate and biodiversity emergency. It was originated by architect Steve Tompkins and Flourish co-author Michael Pawlyn.

Built Environment Declares Movement is a global petition to unite construction and built environment communities to commit to take positive action in response to climate breakdown and diversity collapse. 

The Regenerative Architecture Index was launched by The Architecture Index and UK Architects Declare in September 2024 that sets to benchmark practices’ progress towards regenerative architectural practices.

Architecture Today is an independently published British architecture magazine founded in 1989, made available free-of-charge to Architects Registration Board-registered architects, and is published ten times annually.

Ed Gillespie is an environmentalist, climate activist and the author of Only Planet. Ed also co-hosts two podcasts, “The Great Humbling” with Dougald Hine, and “Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts - Book of Revelations”, with comedian Jon Richardson and futurist Mark Stevenson.

Citizens is a powerful toolkit written by John Alexander with support from Ariane Conrad to open up new ways of understanding ourselves and show us what we must do to survive and thrive as individuals, organisations and nations.

The “Big Here and Long Now” is an essay written by Brian Eno reflecting on the prevalent attitudes of individuals who focus on short-term gains and immediate concerns rather than considering long-term consequences. 

Project developer and author Stewart Brand and inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis are co-founders of The Long Now Foundation and originators of the 10,000 year clock. 

The Good Ancestor is authored by philosopher Roman Krznaric and an urgent call to save humankind and the planet through six ways to expand our time horizons to confront the great long-term challenges of our age. Listen to Sarah and Michael’s interview with Roman for the Flourish podcast.

‘Scenius’ is a term coined with Brian Eno that means communal creativity and genius, or as quoted from Brian Eno, “the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people… the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.” 

Lewis Howard Latimer was an inventor, electrical pioneer, self-taught draftsman and son of  self-emancipated enslaved people in the 1840s to 1920s who built the modern filament that contributed to the invention of the lightbulb and telephone. 

Hard Art is a cultural collective of designers, artists, filmmakers, writers, and more standing in solidarity in the face of climate and democratic collapse. 

James Gustav (‘Gus’) Speth is the author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy and most recently, They Knew: The U.S. Federal Government’s Role in Causing the Climate Crisis. He has served as Dean of the Yale School of the Environment, and as President of the World Resources Institute. 

Carmody Gray is an Assistant Professor of Catholic Theology at Durham University that works mainly in the areas of philosophical theology and theological ethics, with focus on science, nature and environment. She is also a columnist for The Tablet. 

Transcript: Special Episode with Brian Eno: 42 minutes

Brian Eno  

Imagination is the process of modeling futures. What if you did this? What if you did that? And of course, imagination and modeling futures is what both science and art are doing much of the time.

Sarah Ichioka  

Hello and welcome to the Flourish podcast, where we discuss design for systems change. I'm Sarah Ichioka. I'm an urbanist strategist and director of desire lines based in Singapore. I'm delighted to co present Flourish with Michael Pawlyn, who's the founder of Exploration Architecture and a leading architect in regenerative design based in London.  Hey Michael, how are you? Good? 

Michael  

Hi Sarah, how are you doing?

Sarah 

I'm good. I'm good. It's been a long time since we sat down to record one of these. It’s so nice to have the opportunity to get together again. And reflecting on this special episode, I was thinking that one of the things that I have really appreciated the most about our collaboration is the way that each of us bring these really different and complementary things to our partnership–ideas, references, perspectives–and I was trying to think back to our writing and editing process for “Flourish” the book, and one of the key references that you were really keen to include was Brian Eno.

Michael 

Absolutely. I’ve been interested in his ideas for a long time. 

Sarah  

I knew who he was as a cultural figure, but not to the same depth of inspiration that you'd had. So, I think that his work is a key reference that I was gifted by you through the collaboration process, and of course, we go on to mention his ideas a number of times in the book. So, it's really fitting and exciting that this special episode is able to feature your conversation that you had with him. How did that conversation come about?

Michael 

Yes, so there is a bit of a context to this that would be good to describe. I was involved in launching an initiative called Architects Declare a Climate Biodiversity Emergency around the same time that you and I started writing “Flourish”, and that the two became very much parallel projects.

Sarah 

As a side note, I think it's really hard to underestimate how important that is in terms of your personal and professional contribution. So just want to acknowledge that what you co-founded in the UK, how many years ago now? 

Michael

It launched in 2019.

Sarah

Five years ago now, and has since become an international movement in how many countries? 

Michael  

So it's in 28 countries now, and we have over 8,000 companies signed up to a declaration of action. We deliberately set it up to be a very decentralized thing, so as long as they follow various guidelines, it's up to them. 

Sarah 

One of the things that you talk about with Brian is sort of movement building and scene building. And I think it's important to acknowledge that you've been a key movement builder. But I think it's fair to say that both our book “Flourish”, as well as the Architects and Built Environment Declare movement have been really heavily influenced by Donella Meadows’s ideas about how to bring about systems change, and in that respect, the Meadows approach is really about intervening at the level of a mindset or paradigm that drives how our systems behave. And the paradigm that we were addressing, or have continued to address together in our collaboration, is regenerative design and development.

Michael  

Yeah, exactly. And in Donella Meadows’s, list of leverage points in terms of priority just below trying to change the paradigm, the next most influential way to intervene in the system is to change the goals of the system. And an idea emerged in the discussions within the Architects Declare steering group of what became called the Regenerative Architecture Index. So we developed this into a partnership with media partner Architecture Today. And the aim is really to recognize those practices who are pushing boundaries in regenerative design, and we deliberately avoided a ranking of winners, and the emphasis is all about sharing ideas. So this interview with Brian Eno took place at the inaugural celebration event of the Regenerative Architecture Index. We were delighted to be sponsored by Interface, who also supported our first series of Flourish Systems Change podcast episodes,

Sarah  

So we have to imagine you as–I understand it from having seen the pictures on socials–we have to imagine you wearing a funny hat made out of kale, was it during this conversation?

Michael  

That was my Cavolo Nero sombrero.

Sarah  

Very posh organic greens.

Michael 

That was part of our theory of change, and it was partly inspired by Ed Gillespie, who said that the way to shift paradigms is to have more fun than the dominant paradigm and show that you are while you're doing it. In other words, throw a better party.

Sarah  

Nice. Well, it sounds from the recording like it was a great party with really engaged audience participation.

Michael  

So encouraging all the listeners to imagine they're wearing an equally wild and regenerative hat. Let's now hear from Brian Eno. I watched quite a few videos of Brian being interviewed in preparation for this, and I noticed that intros to Brian, you know, often go on for about five minutes, talking about his work with David Bowie and David Byrne, his pioneering of ambient music, his work on epic albums. But I want to leave as much time for discussion as I can, so I'm just going to say that as far as I'm concerned, he's one of the most fascinating people on the planet, and there are a few people who've contributed as much to contemporary culture as Brian. So will you please give a massively warm welcome to Brian Eno?

Brian 

Thank you.

Michael  

So I thought we could start with cities. I often think that what we have at the center of our cities says a lot about our values. So, you know, in a traditional, traditional age in Europe, it would have been the church. So that was religion. In a place like Milton Keynes or Dubai, it's the shopping center, which is a bit depressing, because that's consumerism. So what do you think should be at the center of a city or a regenerative city even?

Brian  

Well, there's that very nice book by John Alexander called “Citizens”, and he talks about history being divided into three periods. The first is the subject period where the monarchs and the aristocrats ruled and the subjects were at the periphery of things, and that, the church in the center of the city, or the government building, or the palace in the center of the city, idea. And then he says, the next, the next type of citizen is the consumer. That was 1900 onwards, I guess, where your choices, your freedoms are, freedoms to consume, basically. And he talks about a third era, which is, which he calls the citizen era, which is where we ought to be now. We aren't quite, but we should be now. And this is where, at the center of the city is the is the sort of the forum where people decide things, where people get together and talk about things. 

Michael  

When you were in New York, you came up the idea of a Big Here and a Long Now. And I know you prefer talking about stuff in the present than the past, but there are quite a few things that you said a long time ago that seem to be getting more and more relevant as time goes by. So could you just kind of recap on how you came up with the idea of the Big Here and Long Now?

Brian  

Yeah. So I was, I lived in New York for five years, starting in 1978 and I was living in Soho, quite an exciting part of New York, and I'd been there a few months, and I was invited to a party, and it was a posh party a very well-known person giving this party. And at that time, I was staying uptown, and I took this cab to the address I'd been given, and it went, it got into a more and more decrepit and broken part of New York, with those parts of New York where steam comes up out of the pavement, you know, and there's people asleep in doorways and so on. And we finally arrived at this place, and I said, “Are you sure this is the right address?” And he said, “Yeah, it's the right address”. So I rang the bell, and a door opened, and I was in an elevator in this crumbling building that opened into this palace, essentially that the elevator door opened, there was this amazing room - must have cost millions, and I was fascinated that somebody would build a place like that in a, in that part of the city. And I asked the hostess, you know, do you like living here? She says, “Oh yes, I love it. I love being here”. And she talked on about it, and I realized that ‘here’ for her meant that apartment, that outside, she wasn't even concerned about. She never really saw it. She would go down and get into her chauffeur driven car and go somewhere else. And so I thought that's very interesting, because in Europe, you generally think, if you say, I live somewhere, you generally think of Southwark, or, you know, an area you don't just think of I live in. These walls you think of the what's around you the neighborhood. And I realized that New Yorkers didn't really think like that very much. And then, as I lived there longer and talked to people, I would say, what are you working on at the moment? And they would tell me what they were working on that day or that week, and never talk about whether they had a sort of a longer-term project in mind of any kind. And so I thought that's very interesting. In a very fast city like this, people live in a very small here and a very short now. So I thought, actually, I'm kind of interested in the opposite of those. I want to feel that I belong to a big here, and a long now. And the Long Now became the name of the foundation that we started with Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis.

Michael  

And you encouraged people to ask themselves a question, what is your long-term purpose?. And I think you were talking about not, five or 10 years, but what might people say about you 50 years after you've gone? That’s such a good question. 

Brian  

Well, we started to try to think in terms of a 10,000 year frame. So we thought that's so impossible to think in those terms, but let's try and we, I don't know if any of you know about this thing called the Long Now Foundation. So it started around the idea of building a working mechanical clock. It's nearly finished now. It's 680 feet high in a mountain in Texas, but the idea was to build something that would last for 10,000 years, and that would work for 10,000 years. So it's really an experiment in trying to think of about the future. You know what's going to happen in the next 10,000 years? Well, all sorts of things are going to happen. Some of them are fairly predictable. Some of them are what you call stochastic. They're going to happen, but you don't know when. Others are entirely random, like we might be hit by an asteroid or something. So let's try to imagine a future that is as uncertain as that, and to see what stance we should take towards it. Now, what difference does it make to our behavior now to think like that? We have a Long Now member here tonight, in the shape of Roman who wrote a very, very good book called “The Good Ancestor”, which is a sort of long now idea of thinking, what's my long-term impact going to be? What things am I doing now, and what difference do they make to the future? How do they fan out? And you know, futures are very susceptible to big changes from very small movements. Now it's rather like, you know, shooting an arrow off, if it's one degree to the left, it ends up in the far future and somewhere completely different. So we were trying to think, in an era when we become more and more sensitive to very, very short durations, you know, femtoseconds and yottaseconds and divisions of time that nobody ever imagined before, wouldn't it be appropriate that we also respond to the other end of that spectrum to very long durations. Now, humans do have a history of thinking in terms of fairly long durations. You know, it said that if you plant an olive grove, you won't get a harvest for two generations or three so people did do that. People did think about their children and their children's children, and made preparations for those and we in general, don't do that anymore, other than by stacking up tons of money in banks. 

Michael  

Do you think we might have passed the nadir? I mean, I remember in the kind of late 80s, early 90s, it was very difficult to persuade a client to take any kind of long-term view beyond the completion date. I think things have moved on a bit since then. 

Brian 

I think so. Well, I think people's awareness that the way we've lived for the last 200 years or so has created a sort of catastrophic situation. So I think people are more aware now that actions have long term resonances and are more aware that we have to start doing something about them. So I think it is a more familiar thought now.

Michael  

You were talking about a Big Here and a Long Now and then, you kind of extended that to include a wider we, and that actually works extremely well as a summary of what the Regenerative Architecture Index is about, a Bigger Here, a Longer Now, and a Wider We—

Brian  

Wider we, sounds a bit rude, doesn't it?

Michael  

Wider us. Is that better?

Brian 

It might be better. Yeah.

Michael  

And another idea that you came up with quite a long time ago that feels even more relevant now is. Is the idea of Scenius. Can you explain that? For those who haven't heard of it? 

Brian 

It's spelled S, C, E, N, I U, S. So one of the things that I've always disliked about art criticism and art history in general is that everything gets located around a few big names, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo, whatever, Picasso, as if those things kind of appeared out of nowhere. And I started to think about this really, because I went to a show at the Barbican years ago, which was a show of early 20th century Russian painting. Now that was an area that, as an art student, I was particularly interested in, and I really thought I knew quite a lot about it, more than any other era of painting, really. And in that show, I saw about 70 or 80 artists, besides the ones I'd heard of and I realized that scene was much wider, broader and flatter than I imagined. It wasn't a few big names like Kandinsky and Rodchenko and so on, and then all these other has-beens, nobodies. It was a thriving scene which involved not only the painters, but the critics, the writers, the gallerists, the curators, the salonists, the public, everybody was involved in making that scene. And I suddenly clicked that any cultural situation is a sort of ecosystem and all parts of it is important. You can't subtract a bit and say that's the that's the key part, or that bit doesn't matter. So I started thinking more and more in sort of ecosystemic terms about how things come into being. And this word genius, of course, bedevils the art world. There are geniuses like Picasso, and I thought, but really the creativity of a place comes from a whole interaction between many, many people doing lots of different things. And so I thought it's the scene really that matters, and it's the fertility of the scene. So I came up with the word scenius as an alternative to genius. So scenius is, is a name for communal creativity, if you like, the creativity of a whole group of people. And many of them don't particularly know what their part in it is. Most of them don't, probably, but they're doing it nonetheless. I've just written a little book. Actually, I just finished it on the weekend. Took me 45 years.

Michael  

That’s quite a milestone.

Brian 

It's really short. It was a lot longer, but it took 45 years to make it as short as it is now. But it's about, this idea of, where does, where does creativity come from, who's doing it, and what is important about the interaction between all those people, and who are they? 

Michael  

I was going to come on to the book. 

Brian 

Oh, thank you. 

Michael 

Just sticking with Scenius for a moment, when I heard you talk about that, it made me realize what a poor history education I'd had when I was at school. History was basically Kings, Queens and how good we were at building steam engines, and that was about it. And and actually, you know, some of the so-called geniuses that we were told came up with things- i's simply not true. We're told that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but actually the filament he created was rubbish. It burnt out in minutes. And the actual inventor of the modern filament was Lewis Howard Latimer. And it's almost certain, the reason he's not more widely known is because he was Black rather than [white] as Thomas Edison. So there's kind of justice dimensions to your idea of Scenius as well, aren't there?

Brian  

Yes, and also there's sort of the dignity of what so called ordinary people are doing with their lives. And it turns out that when you study any scene like when I got very involved in it and looking into how the Russian scene had developed in the early 20th century, and so involved that I ended up living in St Petersburg for a while, I just wanted to find out what had really happened at that time, because It was an incredibly fertile 10 or 15 years, then so much was going on, and I wanted to find out who was doing it. And it turned out it was really, really lots of ordinary people involved, and a few people who became superstars. And I thought that's such a good message to say to people that. Look, you're all doing it already. It's just a question of who, who ends up getting recognized. It's a media issue, actually. Who do they choose to spotlight? 

Michael  

So coming on to your book, how change happens is a subject that I think deserves more discussion, really, and it's something that you've talked about a lot, I think, in really interesting ways. And one of the things you said a while ago, as well as in your book, is that humans are able to imagine things before they are real. Could you kind of expand on why that's so significant?

Brian  

What is the great human talent? The great human talent is to be able to experiment with things in your mind before you actually experiment with them in reality. So we can imagine a bridge. We can even make drawings about it, and we can even make stress tests of those drawings, if you like. So we can see whether something is worth doing in quite a sophisticated way, and we don't have to only find out by experiment, which, of course, in making bridges is a sort of dangerous activity. Let's just try it out and see if it works. Though quite a few architects do seem to do that. I have to say nothing. Nothing against architects.

Michael  

Don't worry, Brian.

Brian  

But you know, imagination is the process of modeling futures, isn't it? It's what if you did this? What if you did that? And of course, imagination and modeling futures is what both science and art are doing much of the time. The difference is that in science, you you discover and test. In art, I think, you imagine and digest and you model by what you're really modeling for is your own feelings about things. What would it feel like if I made this so you know, you could say that 1984 the novel is, is really a way of saying, what would it be like to live in a completely totalitarian society? Well, the great thing about art is that you can find out your answer to that without having to live in a totalitarian society. You can test out your feelings, so you can build up a repertoire of sort of experiences, they are virtual experiences. And we're very, very sophisticated at doing that. You know, from the age of two, if you say to a child, “once there was a giant”, the child imagines a giant suddenly that that becomes real. So, you know, we can do five orders of theory of mind. I know that he doesn't like what he's said about what she thinks about her dress. You know, that's, we do that all the time, but that's such a sophisticated kind of modeling process going on.

Michael  

You talked about how, when someone sets out a really bold vision, people start comparing reality with that vision, and it becomes an almost sort of invisible force pulling reality, pulling that vision into reality. 

Brian  

Yes. So I think one of the ways art works is you can think of an artwork as a sort of relic from a future that hasn't happened yet. So you make something and it comes from a world of some kind of set or nest of values, and from that you can kind of extrapolate out into the rest of the world. So one of the things I talk about in in my very short book is haircuts. Well, it's one of the only artworks that everybody makes or shares, apart from me and you, of course

Michael 

You had to mention that.

Brian  

But you know, what is somebody doing when they're getting a haircut? They're making a lot of choices about where they want to locate themselves, culturally, if you like, do I want to look rebellious? Do I want to fit in? Do I want to look older? Do I want to look younger? Do I want to look fanciful? Do I want to look staid. All of those things that they're all decisions about culture, actually, in a way, about where you locate yourself in culture. And the fact that we can all, we can, read those decisions, indicates that we're all very skilled at playing that cultural game without even ever thinking about it. Most people never think about their haircut in those kinds of terms. But most of us don't think about culture in those terms at all anyway, and this is partly because we've managed to marginalize cultural activity as a sort of dessert. And the main reason I wrote this book, actually, I've talked about this stuff for years, but I was at a party a few years ago, and there was a 15-year-old girl. She was the daughter of the host, and I started talking to her, and I said, “What are you doing at school?” And she said, “Oh, well, I really like doing art, but they said I'm too bright to do art, so they want me to do, you know, science and technology, or financial tech, whatever, some shit subject”. And I said, “Well, why don't you insist that you really want to do art”. And she said, “Well, nobody wants to encourage you to do that now at school, because it's considered to be for the less bright kids”. If you've got a chance to make a lot of money, you should go for that and financial technology, that's where you do that kind of thing. So, I thought it's so sad that she doesn't have an argument to respond to that pressure with so and then I started thinking, Well, of course, most people in government don't either. That's why they when they cut budgets for things, it's always the theaters and the libraries and so on that go first, because we, even us artists, don't have a fucking clue how to defend what we're doing. It's amazing. I once asked 20 scientists, what are you doing? What do you think you're doing? How are you describe what you're doing? And they all came up with quite a similar answer. And everyone, each one of them was sort of saying, I want to understand how a certain bit of the world works. That's what you call science. When I asked artists, they sometimes were quite offended that they should even be asked to describe what they were doing, as though that would somehow possibly burst their creative bubble or something. But anyway, the answers were quite different and confused, and maybe that's partly something to do with the difference between art and science. But I thought it's terrible that we are so bloody inarticulate.

Michael 

You capture it really well in the book where you say, “science makes models of things, so we can understand how they work. Art makes models of things so we can understand how we work”. 

Brian  

Brilliant. 

Michael  

Who wrote that?! But I wondered, if you've got any kind of provocations you could give to architects about what should we be doing, or perhaps, what should we not be doing? Last time we were talking about the Discordian movement, how they're an obscure bunch who believe that there's no underlying order to the cosmos, and they opposed all forms of dogma, so much so that they coined a new term, which was catma. And a catma is an idea that only sticks around for as long as it's useful, and then it sods off, yeah. So is there anything that makes you feel particularly catmatic?

Brian  

Well, when you said, What's a nice thought for architects in the future, I immediately thought of Stewart Brand's book called How Buildings Learn, which I don't think was very popular with architects. Maybe it's very naive, I don't know, but I thought it was a great book. But there's a line in there where he says, he says 80% of architects never revisit the buildings they've made. And he says, you don't finish a building, you start a building. So, this is an idea that a building shouldn't be something that is unchangeable and impermeable. It should be built to evolve and to change. He also pointed out that most architects given this how long it takes to build things and how long it takes to be asked to build something. He said most architects get one chance to change their mind. That's when the first lot of buildings they've made appear. And then you could then sort of say, yeah, that was a good idea, but that one wasn't so good, and so on. So you get you get one chance. I get a new chance every day with what I'm doing. So this idea of leaving the building in a state, that means that it can adapt, that it can become something different, which comes down to some very simple things, like making walls that are easy to reshape, not having them in absolutely untouchable materials, unchangeable materials.

Michael  

Why don't we take some questions now.

Question from Audience 

I want to hear your thoughts about, you mentioned that human beings can imagine something before they do it, and then later on, you mentioned this thing of the speed at which we build things. Yes. So quite often, when I try and point out it's worthwhile keeping a tree, I also point out that we can send a person to the moon, but we still haven't figured out how to build a tree faster. Likewise, carrots know how to make themselves over and over again without an imagination, I guess. But I just wanted to if you could riff on that a little bit with your amazing mind. That'd be amazing.

Brian  

He's the man you should ask about this really. This is so interesting that we're really only just now starting to actually learn from nature and starting to learn of this complexity and sophistication of it, and starting to be able to learn lessons from it. So, you know, we're natural controllers. Human beings are very good at control. We're very good at making things that make nature do the things that we want. What we haven't been so good at recently, during our control era, is surrender, which is letting something happen to us and seeing what it does, understanding it from being subject to it, sort of thing. It's a little bit, yeah. Anyway, that's a whole subject surrender. It's, in my book, it's about a third of a page.

Michael 

Thank you. Next one, and there's one over here.

Question from Audience 

There are people in prison at the moment, the Just Stop Oil activists. Are they prisoners of conscience or misguided fools, in your opinion?

Brian 

Oh, well, then I think they're doing really important work, it's a shame they have to do it in such a way that it pisses a lot of people off, but thank God they're doing it. I write letters to them in jail because I think they deserve a bit of cheering up. You know? Why aren't we all doing it? Why aren't we all out in the streets saying you've got to do something about this. We should be really. Michael and I both belong to this thing called ‘Hard Art’, which is a kind of eclectic assembly of people from lots of different disciplines that meets at my studio every couple of weeks, and it’s sort of the kind of center of what we're doing. How. How do we use culture to change people's minds, to make what we need to do seem, not only acceptable, but actually inevitable and really enjoyable too. We don't want it to be a terrible sort of grind that we have to do this thing. We want to say this is the most exciting project. The most exciting project now is trying to save this planet from complete destruction.

Michael 

Do you know that quote from James Gustav Speth? He said, “I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that 30 years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. We need a cultural and spiritual transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that.”

Brian  

Yes, that's completely true. One of the people associated with Hard Art is this wonderful Catholic theologian called Carmody Gray, and she talked to us once and said 50 years of data hasn't changed anybody's mind. It's got to be addressed to the feelings, actually. And the problem with data and statistics is that what it says to most people is this is nothing to do with you. This is something that experts will deal with you couldn't understand this. And so I think what we have to do is to make it real at a level of feelings. This is part of me. You know, people don't have any trouble. You don't have to persuade anyone to protect their children, for example, you really don't have to put too much effort into that. People want to protect their children. And it should be quite easy to point out somehow or other, that protecting your environment is a similar quest we shouldn't have. We shouldn't have to say to people, there's a 72% chance that within 11 years, there'll be 38%  less coastline or something like that. That isn't going to work. So, so what we've been talking about is, how do we make it the biggest cultural project? That's a long story, but we're still working on it, and we have very few results to show so far, but it's getting better. 

Michael  

We can come back to that. So we have one more question.

Question from Audience 

I just want to say I think everything that we're speaking about within architecture is playing into the Big Here, and the Long Now and how we make and consider decisions. You know, only build when you really need to, involve as many people in a co-design process as possible. And I felt quite in conflict with what you said about build fast. And I just thought, could you just explain a bit more about that recommendation that you gave?

Brian  

Well, there are a lot of things that we do build fast. We build fashions fast, and we build pop records fast. A lot of things that we love the speed of turnover. So I think what we have to try to sort out is which things have possibly devastating, long term consequences. We probably shouldn't build those things fast. There are some things we could constrain less and there are some things we should constrain more, like what water companies can do with water, we should take that more seriously, but we have a sort of blanket level of seriousness that applies to everything, and that, I think, stops improvisation. So we ought to think a little bit more about the long term of things.

Michael 

And Stewart Brand talked about different layers of a building. Some things you should, you should kind of build slowly, that might last for 1000s of years. Other things can potentially be much more ephemeral, and then it's much more important to use the right materials for those so they can be completely absorbed back into nature or endlessly recycled. 

Brian  

We also, Stewart and I came up with a diagram for sort of the whole of culture, which are the bits that really should be stable and which bits can move. So, it kind of goes from deep culture, the deepest beliefs of a culture, if you like, to fashion essentially and it's not to say that those are those fast-moving things are more trivial. It's just that they move faster. It's just like we're used to the idea that some insects live for a few days and some turtles live for 600 years, and it isn't a hierarchy of importance, it's just saying that there are many different levels of things that have to coexist and need each other. 

Michael

Great. Let's all join in. Thanking Brian. Thank you. 

Sarah

Well, that sounds like it was such a lively gathering and conversation and so much to think about in it. I think the biggest takeaway for me was Brian saying that he's written a little book. It was a lot longer, but it took 45 years to make it as short as it is now, because I think in the course of us collaborating on writing, but really any project now, I feel like there is so much noise and it's so easy with digital technologies to just go on forever.  And what’s needed right now to help sharpen our collective clarity of vision towards action is precision. So, I thought that was really a powerful message coming from this  world-renowned creative mind. But I was also really intrigued, Michael, this Hard Art group sounds so exciting and fun, and I know that you're participating in it now. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that experience is like? What are you working on with Hard Art?

Michael  

Brian Eno has become steadily more involved in the whole environmental movement, and he's been involved in Client Earth, which is an environmental charity that is largely about using law to create powerful change to protect Planet Earth and with Hard Art, that quote that I mentioned from Gus Speth, I kind of had that in reserve in case Brian asked me to explain Hard Art at the event. And I'm increasingly coming to the view that to address the planetary emergency, we need a cultural transformation as profound as the Copernican revolution. And that's why I think it's really important that artists and creatives get involved in this. Because up until now, the sustainability movement has tended to be quite technical. It's often involved a blizzard of facts. And I think we really need to expand on that. And I have met some artists, not in Hard Art, but other artists who kind of push back and say, “Well, why is it down to artists?” And the point that you and I made in Flourish is that we all need to get involved. We all need to maximize our agency so that we get this kind of expanding wave of agency maximization right up to the highest levels of governance. 

Sarah 

And it comes back to collaboration as well, right: how do you build the scenius around that expanded agency in a way that feels joyful. I think there's so many reasons to feel things like despair, to feel despondent, but just the idea of, how do we work together and come together to hold each other in joy and possibility and even fun, how it doesn't just feel like hard work? 

Michael

Yeah, exactly. 

Sarah

One of the other key thoughts that was coming up for me listening to your conversation with Brian was just how nice it is to hear from someone who's able to bridge them naturally between disciplines. That seems like a strikingly important part of the perspective that he brings to conversation. Does that resonate for you?

Michael

Yeah, absolutely. And he has a warmth and humour about him. And for me, he remains one of the most inspiring changemakers. And as a polymath, he's able to bridge art and science, which is so essential. 

Sarah  

So we know we've been a bit sporadic with these episodes, but we do have plans to keep producing special episodes when there are opportunities to speak to these amazing folks. One of the ways that you can help us do that is to be sure if you've enjoyed this episode or any of our previous episodes, to share it with colleagues, friends, family, who you think it might spark an interesting conversation with. Similarly, give us a positive rating, subscribe or follow our podcast. Every little bit helps to make sure that we're bringing these conversations to as wide an audience as possible. and building the Flourish scenius.

Michael  

Nicely put and yeah, we look forward to sharing another episode soon.

Sarah  

The Flourish podcast is recorded at Cast Iron Studios in London and the Hive Lavender studios in Singapore. Our co producers are Kelly Hill in London and Shireen Marican in Singapore. Our research and production assistant is Yi Shien Sim. The podcast is edited and features brilliant original music by Tobias Withers.

Podcast cover art by Studio Folder