Despite being highly educated and financially literate, we have inadvertently created a powerful class that ‘are more dangerous than a half educated’ one; deskilled to the extent that we can no longer ‘grow food, make clothes or build houses’. ‘Common sense is no longer common’ to our species, and we have become nothing more than ‘instruments of making profit’. ‘What is our education for?’ asked Satish Kumar to a small but attentive audience at the LSE on Tuesday evening.

The lecture that Celia attended was entitled ‘Sustainability living in practise’, yet the first thing Kumar did was denounce the term as ‘overused, misused and abused’. He suggested instead that ‘resilience’ might more useful to describe what we are collectively working towards at the moment; resilience as a whole species in the face of peak resource use, environmental harm and climate change.  He emphasised that humans are as much nature as anything else, and that ‘what we do to nature we do to ourselves’. Whilst the economy is traditionally seen as separate from ecology, Kumar argued that we must fundamentally redefine this in recognition of our position and relationship with the ecological system in which we are a part. First and foremost, he suggested, we should get back to the land (whilst 61m people eat food in this country, only 2% work on the land), start producing our own food and the LSE should change its name to the London School of Ecology and Economics!

A podcast of Satish Kumar’s lecture is available to download here