Don’t despair

10 November 2024

By Sam Peters, Planted Co-Founder

Floods in Spain, hurricanes in the United States and record sea temperatures around the globe.

Polluted rivers, plastic and sewage filled seas and ever decreasing numbers of insects and other critical animal species.

Politicians who don’t care, a conflicted media that doesn’t report on the things that really matter and an oil industry no doubt buoyed by the appointment of the USA’s 47th president elected on a ticket to ‘drill, drill, drill’.

Despair? You bet.

For those of us who truly care about the environment in which we live and the health of the planet our children will inherit, these hardly feel like optimistic times.

As global economies continue to stagnate, far-right politicians and media figures churn out evermore simplistic ‘answers’ around complex questions which usually result in the same answer: blame the immigrants and to hell with all that ‘green crap’. If only it were so simple. If only the answers to our world’s myriad problems were as simple as the soundbite nonsense which seems to sate the masses on increasingly divisive social media platforms such as Elon Musk’s X.

It’s the age old politics of divide and conquer. If we’re busy fighting amongst ourselves, then our attention is distracted.

And that’s part of the challenge for the environmental movement; how do we cut through the wall of noise created by the mass media platforms, many of them funded by big oil and organisations with a common interest in climate change denial, who are gripping the narrative at the moment.

Stick together and keep believing, is only part of the answer. But it’s a big part of it.

At Planted, we have never professed to know all the answers. But we have professed to be is a business which brings together some of the smartest and most progressive thinkers in design, environmentalism and nature, who care about our planet’s future and recognise the role design must play in finding solutions.

And we do profess to be building a community of nature-loving design folk who care about tomorrow, not just today.

We know it can be lonely working in a system designed to reward short-termism and the temptation to just jack it all in is ever present. Walk away. Accept we can’t push water uphill. But that is precisely what we must not do.

Keep the faith, believe we can be stronger than the sum of our parts and continue to support and promote organisations and businesses, many of them partners of Planted’s, who care about our planet and put people before profit.

As the great EO Wilson, the founder of biophilic design, once said:

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

We simply must protect the earth. We have no choice. And we must do it together.

And its in that spirit, we will be in Farringdon this Tuesday visiting the inaugural Journal of Biophilic Design conference, hosted by the brilliant Oliver Heath and curated by friend of Planted Vanessa Champion.

We’re excited to see what we’ll find but one thing is for sure; the venue will be full of passionate nature-lovers determined to design buildings, systems and structures which promote, connect with and enable nature to flourish.

Together, we are stronger. Together, we are Planted.

Ends