Gaia Vince: Searching for solutions

I’d been working as a science journalist for many years, and during that time, my interests moved towards our impact on the planet and how the changes we are making to the planet are impacting us. It just seemed to be accelerating and affecting so many parts of ordinary life. I thought, well, I’ve had enough of sitting in an office in London and just sending other reporters out to have a look at stuff, I actually want to go out there myself and see this extraordinary time that we’re living in.

I just bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu. There was a sort of vague plan, but it changed. Interesting stories took me to different places, or natural disasters prevented me from going to certain places, or weather systems changed and I ended up staying in one place longer or shorter than I intended.

Once you’re on the ground, you contact the usual suspects, interesting research facilities, interesting-looking NGOs, interesting village chiefs. You talk to people in cafes. I set off thinking I’ll rent my place out for six months and if it works out, I might extend for another six months. I never at all intended to be still traveling three years later.

Human ingenuity is really quite extraordinary. In a lot of ways we face a hostile planet. We have to make our own food, we have to keep ourselves warm, we’re prey to the weather, prey to disease. And yet all around the world we’ve worked out ways of enriching our lives and extending them and dealing with things as they come up.

The other thing is just how incredible our planet is. You can still gasp with wonder at something as mundane as the sun coming up every day. You see it from a different angle in a different place and it’s just incredible.

The generosity, the kindness of strangers. I’m not sure if it surprises me, but it’s always so welcome. You live in a big, very crowded western city where people are fairly anonymous, where exchanges are often brusque, and then to go somewhere where people really have nothing and yet they will offer to try and help you. You realize that we are a very cooperative species. Human cooperation can overcome so many difficulties.

The damage we’re doing. We really are running out of water, and this is a really, really big worry. Also the desecration of farmland as it becomes desertified or soil becomes poorer. Biodiversity loss is sad, especially when it’s a big charismatic species like the elephant. There’s a lot that’s worrying.

I don’t think there’s going to be one solution that saves us from some of the terrible crises we face. There’s not even one solution to one of the problems. What it’s going to be is people using a lot of the different solutions that they’ve generated. And there are some really incredible and inspirational projects out there. You can go to a really remote part of Africa and people there will have mobile phones that are capable of connecting them to anywhere in the world. It’s helping people get their produce to market, it’s helping people manage disease, it’s helping people with disaster management. There’s also a new awareness that some of the problems we face need to be tackled at the community level. This idea we might be entering a new Green Revolution where people are planting more location-appropriate crops, sharing knowledge, is hopeful.

There’s not an either-or. Governments do need to change, and they are. But even within big countries it’s the individual on the ground making the changes.

I know a lot more about it because I’ve researched and I’ve spoken to people and seen on the ground what’s happening around the world. So yes, I have a better intellectual grasp of it — but also a better emotional grasp of it, because a lot of these situations touch you in a certain way.

Some things seemed a lot worse looking at them on the ground, and in some ways I’m a lot more hopeful. The state of coral reefs around the world is so much worse than I could have imagined just from reading papers or reports. You hear all sorts of terrible things about people living in slums, and of course there are huge challenges there. But at the same time, these are some vibrant, intellectually exciting and unique places. I think we’re going to see a lot more innovation from these areas.

I’m hoping to remind people that the Global South is not just some disaster zone you see on the news. Yes, this is where the impacts are being felt first, but it’s also where some of the solutions to the world’s problems are coming from. We are a global society now, and so all of us need to take on some of these challenges and work out what we’re going to do about them — because they’re not just going to go away.

Looking at how we might solve this, I think it is really important to look not just at species diversity, but at human diversity — to include the thoughts and experiences and viewpoints of women and to include voices from the Global South. They’re not really featured in a lot of these discussions. I think that’s very limiting because you miss out on potential solutions and on understanding what people’s experiences are and where you need to target solutions and interventions. That’s where we need to spend a bit more energy.