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Colin Tudge

Enlightened Agriculture

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reprinted from https://besharamagazine.org/podcast/colin-tudge-enlightened-agriculture-cooking-great-rethink/

Nick: Today we’re talking to the British science writer, biologist, and broadcaster, Colin Tudge, known for his influential work on food, agriculture and ecology. A former journalist for the BBC, New Scientist, The Listener, and The Independent, he has authored numerous books, including The Variety of Life, Feeding People is Easy, and The Great Rethink. He is a passionate advocate for enlightened agriculture – farming that is sustainable, equitable, and rooted in ecological principles. He co-founded The Campaign for Real Farming and The Oxford Real Farming Conference, along with Ruth West, which promote alternative regenerative food systems.

Welcome Colin.

Colin: Thank you.

Jane: Hello, Colin. Can we begin by asking you about your book, Feeding People is Easy? There you argue that the world already produces enough food to nourish everyone. Yet there is still huge food inequality. What, in your view, are the main barriers which are preventing everyone from receiving the nourishment they need, both now and in the future?

Colin: Well, according to United Nations statistics, we not only provide enough food to feed everybody, we actually provide nearly twice as much as we really need to provide everybody with at least the macronutrients, enough calories and enough protein. The calculation is actually easy to work out from the top of your head. I probably will mess it up now, but the point is that the world produces about 2.5 billion tons of cereal a year, and that’s enough to provide enough calories and enough protein to feed the entire human population. But of course, the cereals provide only about half of our total input of food. The rest comes from tubers and other plants, nuts in particular, such as coconut and meat and fish, and all the rest of the things we eat. They provide enough calories and protein to feed another 7.5 billion people. In theory 7.5 plus 7.5 is 15. Well, the total population of the world at the moment is just over eight billion. So we’re producing almost enough to feed twice the population.

And yet, as the United Nations tells us, at least a million, a billion rather, people are chronically undernourished, and another couple of billion are seriously overweight in various ways, incommoded by inappropriate diet. Now, the reasons, of course, are not biological. They’re not physical, although we’re always told they are. We’re always told, we need more food, more food, more food, more of everything… just not true. And the more we go down that route of trying to produce more and more and more of everything we, the more we wreck the world, the more we make it impossible.

it's not realistic to safeguard the planet

The real reason why we still have hunger and malnutrition and famine are political and economic. The kinds of agriculture we need in order to produce good food for everybody are not the most profitable, and if they’re the most profitable, if they’re not profitable in the short term in the modern economy, they’re said to be unrealistic. It’s considered to be quite realistic to wreck the planet and quite realistic to allow a billion people to go hungry. But it’s not realistic to interfere with the ideology and the modus operandi of the present economy.

So that’s the reason. Our economy and the underlying politics and the mindset behind both of those things are simply inappropriate. We’re simply not focused on the task of how to provide everybody with good food. That’s the answer. Although it should be technically almost straightforward to do so.

Jane: Is one of the problems that a lot of these cereals are actually going into animal

feeding rather than human feeding?

Colin: Yeah. Well, the whole thing again comes back to the point that modern agriculture is geared to the maximisation of profit. It works within the economic system known as Neo-liberalism, which is a sort of branch of capitalism which we’ll come back to. This is geared to that economic system, and it’s geared to the idea that there is a kind of hierarchy of human beings. Some human beings are deemed to deserve more than others, apparently, and some nations are more powerful than others, and agriculture is geared to the maximisation of wealth, and to satisfying the people who are perceived to be, or indeed are, most powerful.

And if you really want to make money out of agriculture in the short term, then the thing to do is to produce high valued foods and sell them to the world’s richest people and the highest value of food is, in fact, meat – or dairy products, but mainly meat. So the whole of agriculture is geared to producing more and more and more meat, basically. And we have this thing called intensive livestock production which involves raising livestock on an industrial scale, and by industrial means feeding them concentrated feed, which is custom grown, rather than feeding them on lateral fodder and their normal, proper diets.

And so it is the case that although we produce all this cereal worldwide, at least half of it is actually destined specifically to feed to livestock in order to maximise the amount of money that you can get in return. Now, if we simply produced animals – I’m not a vegetarian. I’m certainly not a vegan. I think sometimes I’d like to be a vegetarian, but you know I’m just not. But there is a case for producing meat, because whatever system of agriculture you practice, whether it’s, you know, vegan-type, gardening or vegetarian type-agriculture, or permaculture, whatever kind of agriculture you practice, it could always be enhanced by the judicious inclusion of animals, if only to provide manure, but also to sweep up leftovers and eat surpluses and all those kinds of thing.

And also, of course, a huge amount of the world, including Britain, is not really suitable for growing crops at all on a large scale. It’s too high, or too cold, or too steep, or too rocky, or too uncertain, whatever. But wherever you are you can always raise some animals, and if you can raise animals which you can in ways that are themselves wildlife friendly, then you can produce all the meat we really need, just by wildlife, friendly means, and without industrial additions.

And also, of course, if you want to produce a maximum amount of cereal, in order that you can feed half of it to livestock, you do this by adding artificial fertilisers, and protecting the crops against pests with artificial insecticides, pesticides – every kind of ‘side’ – fungicides, herbicides – all of which are made with oil, all of which are hostile in one to one degree or another. And so you wreck the world while you’re doing it. But so what? It’s profitable.

Nick: Well, I think you’ve already touched on this, Colin. But let’s go on, as this segues quite well into my next question, which is:, you’ve coined the term ‘enlightened agriculture’. I think this is exactly what you’re saying. But can you explain a bit more what that means? How does it contrast with the industrial agriculture that is dominant in the world today.

Colin: Well, I defined enlightened agriculture – I coined the expression I think it must be about 20 years ago – and it’s very simply defined as:

Agriculture that is expressly designed to provide everybody in the world with good food – food of the highest quality, nutritionally and gastronomically – without wrecking the rest of the world, and to do so forever.

And that is possible. And, well, I mean, I’ve intimated some of the ways in which that’s possible. I mean the main point really is that you produce livestock only in ways that are biologically straightforward, and, as it were, natural. Anyway, that’s the answer to your question. Agriculture is especially designed to feed people, etc. If you cared to, you could say: what would that entail?

Jane: One of the aspects of your ideas of enlightened agriculture is that you stress the importance of biodiversity, particularly in things like farming. Why is this so central to what’s required? Not just ecologically, but ethically.

Colin: Well, if you look at industrial agriculture, in order to maximise profit and make life easy, make it very easy to use big machines, make it very easy to maximize the use of agrochemicals, you want monocultures. You want big machines going across fields without interruption, if necessary, in places like the Ukraine, for miles and miles and miles in a straight line before they bother to turn around and come back again. Monoculture is the point. Monoculture means that the crops you’re growing are phenotypically identical, meaning they all look the same, and they all have the same physical qualities and also genotypically, genetically uniform.

Now, if you want to protect yourself against pests and diseases, which, of course, you do, then the very last thing you want is uniformity, because any one virus, or any one bacterium, or any one protozoan, or wherever it is, if it can zap one of them, one of the crop, one of the plants, it can zap the whole lot because they’re all the same.

And the best protection against pests is diversity, because if a parasite gets a grip on one plant and then it finds the next one along is different, it’s stopped in its tracks, in effect.

Well, so the industrial agriculture is in effect designed, not consciously but in practice, to make life easy for pests and diseases. That’s the first point. Now, the other point or another point is that once you start increasing the diversity, then in practice, you’re increasing the opportunities for other creatures to come in. In other words, for example, one of the ways to increase diversity is to use under-sowing. You under-sow the crop of wheat, or whatever it is with, for example, clover, which introduces a whole new substrate of vegetation. Well, that increases the chances for new kinds of creatures to come in. So you’re automatically creating a more wildlife-friendly environment.

There’s been some very good work being done at Rothamsted – that is an agricultural research station in Britain. In fact, it’s the oldest in the world – which shows if you really want to defeat weeds of a very pernicious kind, like black grass, in a sense, the last thing you want to do is to attack them with a specific herbicide that’s designed to zap that crop, which is what is generally done in an industrial system. What you really need to do, counter-intuitively, is to increase the diversity of wild plants that are growing in the crop. In other words, increase the diversity of what the farmer would call weeds, because if you have a diverse system, then a pestilential species like black grass simply can’t run riot because it has to compete with all the other wild plants that are around.

So diversity. That’s another example of how diversity increases. Clover protects the crop as well as making it more wildlife friendly, and, of course, from an aesthetic point of view.… Well, some people like to see uniform crops of wheat, or whatever a little sea of wheat going off to the horizon. And actually it can be very, very enticing. But if you get your eye in, you begin to find it that rather repellent, and what you’re really looking for is a much more diverse system, where you can recognise different plants growing, of all kinds. There’s loads of plants that grow more or less specifically in traditional arable fields that are not too uniform, that are not too drenched in pesticide or herbicide, and loads of animals that like to live in in traditional arable fields, including things like well, the harvest mouse in Britain is a wonderful example of a sort of arable type, creature, and hares and all sorts of things. So, from an aesthetic point of view, and from every point of view, diversity emerges as a good thing.

Nick: I like how you’ve extended the definition of diversity, not just to other plants and other growing things, but also to wildlife. And you have this idea of wildlife-porous borders, so to speak, with agricultural installations so that wildlife can actually porously go in and out, come in to assist, as you’ve just been saying, with the health of the crop and the harvests.

Colin: Yeah. Can I here introduce the idea of ‘agro-ecology’, which is agriculture which is run on ecological lines? In other words, as a friend of ours defined it, you run every individual farm as an ecosystem with leaky borders and that means… well, it’s obvious what it means.

Nick: That was the term that was the term I was looking for. Thank you.

So, Colin, now, to one of the big sort of philosophical underpinnings of what you’re saying. In your book, The Great Rethink, you’ve argued that we need to reimagine not just farming and not just science and economics, but our whole worldview. You’ve said –and let me quote you here:

We, humanity, need to embrace a morality based in particular on the virtues of compassion, humility and a sense of oneness of people with people and of humanity with our fellow species. To underpin all this, we need to re-emphasise the importance of the metaphysical concept of what is commonly called spirituality, which includes the concepts of transcendence, and a sense of the sacred.

Colin: Yes, in a nutshell – well, at the moment the people who run the world, with most influence in the world, as it were, start with the economy. They start with the idea that you need to balance the books basically. And behind the economy lies a kind of political ideology of one kind or another. But basically they all have some kind of political ideology. So the world is run by economic theory and ideological preference.

And that isn’t good enough, you see, because, as we’ve just been discussing, it leads us in all sorts of crazy directions. I’ve been arguing in my books, particularly in The Great Rethink, that, actually, we need to get down to what I call the bedrock principles, and the bedrock principles are those of morality, and of ecology and morality, or moral philosophy, which attempts to answer the question ‘What is it good to do?’

And more than that, it wanders into the territory of asking: What exactly is goodness? What is this thing called good that we want to emphasise?

Ecology attempts to answer the question: How does the natural world really work? How many species are there out there? How do they interact? And although we know a huge amount, I mean, the amount known about all these things is staggering, but it’s a small proportion of what there is to know, and it’s a huge mistake to imagine that we know more than we do.

The point, then, about ecology is that it answers the other crucial question, which is: What is it really possible to do in this world without wrecking it? And what is it necessary to do in this world, if indeed, we want to make sure that everybody lives well, that everybody is well fed. What is it necessary to do?

So, you’ve addressed the three fundamental questions: What’s is it good to do? What is it possible to do; and What is it necessary to do in order to create a tolerable world?

Now I submit that the people who actually have most influence in the world, who are governments and corporates and financiers and the super-rich, a miscellaneous collection of oil shaykhs, and people like Elon musk, and so on – never asked it. They never address these questions. They simply assume that if you run the economy as the way that they like to see it run, and you stick to your ideology, whatever that happens to be, everything will turn out okay. And it isn’t true. They’re not addressing the fundamental questions.

Now people have said to me, and it’s a sort of obvious point: Although we can see that there is this thing called science of ecology which might provide us with certain answers, the idea that there is a bedrock principle of morality is a bit crazy, because, in fact, if you look at different societies at different times of history, they tend to be saying very different things. They tend to have very different moral, ethical standards. So many people say, even people, I would say, who should know better, that morality should be seen to be relative – relative to what people think, and relative to the circumstances, and so on.

But I suggest, if you look at humanity as a whole, if you look at the core, moral recommendations of all the great global religions and of many, many traditional belief systems, you find that there’s just a few fundamental moral ideas that come, as it were, roaring out which are more or less universal to them all.

One of those is compassion – real, genuine care for others, whether it’s other people or other creatures. The second that comes roaring out of the of the literature is humility. It’s obvious what humility is. But the Greeks, of course, regarded a lack of humility – which they called hubris – as the greatest sin and the greatest folly of all. And the more I think about it, the more I feel they’re right, because if you look at what’s going wrong with the modern world, the more you can see it to be hubristic. It’s hugely hubristic, for example, to invade Palestine or to invade the Ukraine. It’s hugely hubristic to fell a forest for profit, and to assume that you can just pick up the threads where you want to, etc. etc. So, compassion and humility.

The third though, is the idea of oneness – with our fellow creatures as well as with each other. And if you look again at the history, or if you look at the present attitudes to wildlife, you find that at present the general idea, pursued in practice by the most powerful people in the world, the powers that be, one might say, is that the world as a whole is a resource. The natural world is a resource. We can use whatever the earth cares to provide, or whatever wild creatures we can bring under and take control of, for our own benefit. The world is seen as a kind of cornucopia; that is the present attitude, and it’s obviously deeply destructive, deeply unsatisfactory.

Better than that is the sense of stewardship – that actually it is our role in life and our duty in life to take care of our fellow creatures because we are the most powerful among them and I think we can apply the sort of chivalric principle, medieval principle of noblesse oblige here. In other words, if you have power, you have to use it for responsible purposes. Well, that’s gone missing.

But one snag with the idea of stewardship as it’s generally applied and understood, is that it still implies us and them. I mean, we are the powerful species. We can take care of the rest. And furthermore, with the implication that we have a right to take care of the rest. But if you really want to take serious care of the world, and if you really care about the world, you have, I think, to develop the idea of oneness. That these other creatures are not there for us and not inferior to us. They’re not there for us just to look after or take advantage of. They are our peers and our equals, at a spiritual level, as it were.

And the so I would say, yes, of course we need compassion, humility, and we need to root what we do in ecological principles and in the moral principles of compassion, humility, and oneness, rather than in some economic theory of neoliberalism, or whatever it is, or some political ideology, whether it’s Tories or Republicans, or Democrats or whatever.

That is what’s really fundamental. And that’s what we need to get around to. The idea of spirituality is the point about, in particular, the principles of morality are not subject simply to exploration by science or by rational thinking. You have to engage emotionally, for want of a better word, to understand what the moral principles are, to feel what compassion really means. And beyond mere emotional involvement, I think I would suggest, and many people agree, you need a sense of transcendence, which is that there is, as it were, more going on in the universe than is measurable by science. The sense of transcendence, I think, is what I would mean by spirituality – a way of thinking that goes beyond mere rationality, mere emotional response, mere aesthetics.

Jane: I think what’s nice about what you’re saying in the context is that very often when we when we talk about ecology or what we can do, there’s very much a feeling that it’s to do with creating wildernesses or leaving nature alone. There’s a lot of this in the ecological movement. Whereas what’s very nice about what you’re saying is that we need to bring this into things like farming, which we clearly do need to do, and which is a very sort of essential economic activity. So one of the things I know is that you run various programmes which encourage farmers to adopt alternative methods which are in line with these aims. For instance, you are involved in running a conference called the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which is attended by thousands and thousands of people every year from all over the world. So I wonder if you could just say, how are these ideas actually coming into practice in the world now, what sorts of trends are you seeing?

Colin: Well, the wonderful thing is, I think, that the ideas that are put forward at the Oxford Real Farming Conference obviously have such worldwide appeal. I mean, we get something like up to 2,000 people applying to come to the various venues in Oxford at the beginning of January from all six habitable continents, who come online, and it’s serendipitous. I mean, for example, we have a group of Nepalese volunteers who help to organize input from the Himalayas. So it’s a wonderful thing, and it could grow. It could grow to be 10,000. It could be 200,000. The feeling is out there that we need to do things differently.

And basically, what people are moving towards is this thing called enlightened agriculture, which is agriculture designed especially to feed people without wrecking the rest of the world. There are various trends that contribute to this. One, of course, is organic farming, the opposite of industrial farming, where you’re not making use of industrial chemicals and you’re not overploughing, and all the all the rest of it. You’re not wrecking the soil. Yep. Building from the soil up. That’s one thing.

Another is the idea, which is a huge serendipity, that in practice you should be focused on growing plants, in other words, on arable and horticulture and fitting animals in as and where they fit, i.e. they’re feeding on leftovers, etc. or feeding in areas where you wouldn’t normally want to grow crops, like mountains.

The result of that is that you produce, as I like to say, plenty of plants, not much meat, but maximum variety. That’s what they were aiming for. Now there’s a huge serendipity here, because if you look at modern nutritional theory and all the things that the various nutritionists are saying, there’s something like 30,000 different recipes out there, or different approaches to so-called diet. But the fundamental principles of the ones that are sensible are saying this: you need a diet that is plenty of plants, not much meat and maximum variety. So there’s a perfect correspondence between what the nutritionists are saying and what the agroecological farmers are saying.

There’s a third serendipity, which is that if you look at all the world’s greatest cuisines on an axis, a broad axis from Italy to China, then you find that all of them use meat very sparingly – as a garnish or as a thing to maximise flavour. They use it as a garnish, and they use it as a stock, and they very rarely, or only occasionally, only in feasts, have great hunks of meat, chickens, and turkeys, and roast beef, and all that. So the greatest cuisines correspond perfectly well with agroecological farming, which in turn corresponds perfectly well with the West’s nutritional theory, and in turn are in step with agroecological farming.

So I maintain that all we really need to do is to farm properly, as if we really wanted to provide good food for everybody without wrecking the world, and to cook accordingly. And if you look at all the world’s cooking, not just the greatest cuisines, you find that everything we really need to know is contained within traditional cooking of all kinds. Most of us don’t farm. But all of us, somehow or other, need to cook, so I would complement the idea of enlightened agriculture with the idea of enlightened cookery. Put the two together, and they’re very straightforward, and they all are basically human. And you’ve cracked it.

Having said that, I wouldn’t want you to think that I’m anti-science, because my own background is in science, and I regard agriculture as a whole as a craft or as a series of crafts, and I would regard cooking as a whole as a craft. But crafts, although they might be thousands and thousands of years old, always benefit from inclusions, judicious inclusions, of modern science and modern high technology. For example, agroecology benefits enormously from heat resistant vaccines, vaccines that you can actually use in the tropics without carrying around a deep freeze, for example. And traditional farmers, small farmers scattered over the hillside, and so on, make enormous use of the mobile phone, which is a piece of very, very high technology.

So I’m not saying we should not have high tech or tech at all, but we should use it as a subsidiary to assist enlightened agriculture and enlightened cookery, and indeed, good living for everybody. And again, we use science and high tech as a way of maximising wealth and as a way of concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people like, let us say, Elon Musk, just as an off the top of the head example.

Jane: One of the things that comes up here is you talk about all these thousands of people from all over the world who are attending the conference. Presumably all these people are also practicing some sort of alternative agriculture. This must represent a huge movement. So how are these people fitting in within this context, where the food industry is actually controlled by agribusiness.

Colin: Well, I would say, if I was being optimistic: these are early days. The idea that you should be farming in more relaxed and sensible and agroecological ways is fairly new. I’ve been talking to farmers about this, and one of them who comes to the Oxford Real Farming Conference said: Look. 20 years ago if you’d said in public places that we need organic farming, we need more grazing, or we need to underpin all this kind of thing with a spiritual conception of what life is all about, you would have been laughed out of court.

But the mood is changing, and now, well, people are thinking, yes, of course we should. You know, it’s obvious. It’s always been obvious. So the answer is that though I think the movement of what we might call ‘The New Enlightenment Movement’ – I like to think in terms of what I call ‘renaissance’ – you know, the idea that we genuinely do need a rethink across the board. Renaissance, of course, literally means rebirth.

We need to reexamine everything we do and everything we take for granted from first principles, and the first principles are those of morality and ecology underpinned by a concept of spirituality.

And that’s happening, I think, slowly, but all the individual farmers in all their individual countries are faced with the reality that they live in effect on neoliberal economies, in an economy which is geared to the maximisation of profit, and if you try to do things which don’t in the short term maximise profit, you are said to be unrealistic. So farming at all is difficult. It’s a very hard business. Farming in an economically hostile environment adds another layer of difficulty. So it’s difficult. But I think the tide is changing. The mood is changing so one could be.

Nick: Do you see this Renaissance as a positive movement in change, and in attitudes? On the other hand, we have this fairly massive, industrialised farming machine that is perpetuating, you know, the sorts of issues and problems that you’ve described. So is the transition, then an evolution of farming? How much of a revolution do we need?

Colin: Well, the effect of what I’m suggesting would be revolutionary, literally in the sense that you turn everything through basically through 180 degrees and start again from where you left off. But I don’t like the word revolution, because it implies violence. It needn’t imply violence, but in practice it does. And of course a great deal can be achieved by reform, I mean, slavery was ended by a series of reforms, and women’s liberation is a series of reform, and so on, and so on, and so on. But reform takes time, and it is incremental. It’s not, as it were, across the board, and the changes that one government makes in the name of a reform can be reversed by the next government, whether it’s a democracy or not. So reform I regard as being not adequate. And that’s why I use the word Renaissance that we have to dig right back to the very basics of life, and start the whole thing again.

You’re absolutely right. Should we then just say that the transition which we need from the present industrial system to the agroecological systems that we need is an evolution. Well, yes, in a way. But of course, evolution, at least in a sort of Darwinian sense, implies that it just happens because that’s the way things are. Whereas the change, the transition that we really need has to be driven by human consciousness and awareness and mindset.

So it’s an evolution. But it’s a mindful evolution, driven and controlled by us, having got our minds straight, as it were.

Jane: What one thing that’s clear from the way that organic farming and such like has developed in the UK is that one of the great supports for it is that actually, people want it, so that there’s a kind of impetus within the market system. It’s growing from within the very kind of market system that we already have, in that where there is demand for something, then that can be supplied. So I’m bringing this up, because, in a way, when we talk about farming, most of us are not farmers, so we would think, Oh, well, what can we do about all this. But actually, I think in the end it is kind of driven by the customer, isn’t it?

If we want this, if we develop this, if we start cooking in these ways that you’re describing, if people want this organic and this kind of properly produced product, then presumably that will encourage this renaissance.

Colin: It will encourage it, but will it be enough? it’s a very big question, because, for example, if you go to one of even the more enlightened supermarkets you will find organic vegetables, for example, but you will find one shelf of organic vegetables and a whole lot of stuff that’s been produced by God knows what means. And you will find some meat, possibly that’s been produced from animals that have been grazing pasture fed, but a whole lot that is produced by intensive systems.

And the reasons for that are actually that the system is run to a huge extent by the producers, but even more than that, by the supermarkets themselves, by the retailers. They’ve taken over, and in order to maximise profit, which is what they see as their aim in life, their goal in life, their task, their duty– in order to do that, they want to reduce costs, and in the present world, where oil is still relatively cheap, and labour is still at a premium, you want to reduce the labour as much as possible, because that seems to be expensive, and where you’ve got more and more bigger and bigger and smarter and smarter machines that would take over from labour.

The economic pressures are in favour of industrial agriculture, and as long as that’s the case, then organic agriculture will remain a minority pursuit. And you could add that you can see that in present day attitudes that people say you know, well, I like organic food, but it’s far too expensive, which it is often because of the system, not because it’s intrinsically expensive, but because the economic economy is geared in that way.

So long as that’s the case, and also, of course, there’s enormous propaganda in favour of industrial agriculture. For example, this is anecdotal, but I think it’s important. In Coronation Street [a long-runnng British soap] a few years ago somebody tried to introduce an organic greengrocer’s, and the story was that all the crops wilted within about half an hour of being bought. Well, that’s just not true, you know, but it’s there in a popular soap as being the case that it’s protected by some kind of preservative. Or I saw the same kind of thing in The Simpsons [a long-running American cartoon] where Marge Simpson bought a load of organic stuff, and within hours it was all finished and gone. That’s just not true, you know. So there’s a propaganda and a misunderstanding momentum very much in favour of the status quo.

So, the will is there but the techniques, the economy isn’t.

Nick: Is there anything else, Colin, that you’d like to bring up before we conclude? Anything about your work, your school, your conference?

Colin: Well, I still have the idea that I would like to establish something which I’ve been calling ‘The College for Enlightened Agriculture’. College shouldn’t be taken to mean bricks and mortar, which it does mean, you know, with the foundation stone, saying, it should. A college, properly defined, is a group of people who share ideas and who want to go on sharing ideas, and a college can be a very loose collection of people done online globally.

But basically, anyone who’s interested helping to develop the kind of ideas I’ve been talking about, and many other people are talking about which doesn’t exist, and I haven’t been able to get the college, as I envisage it, actually moving, happening. But as a sort of well, as a sort of substitute, I suppose, you could say we have established a website called The Great Rethink (www.Collintudge.com) which I want to become a forum in which this kind of discussion happens. And what happens after that? How it grows after that is for time and chance. I’m getting too old to do this sort of thing, but that’s the last thing I’d like to say.

Nick: Wonderful. Well, thank you, Colin.

Jane: Thank you very much for talking to us.