For my appearance on Desert Island Discs, the details of which are hopefully being arranged even now between my agent and the BBC, I have decided to go down the Tony Blair route. Thus, instead of playing 8 songs I like, or which mean a lot to me, I will play 8 which will create instead what I hope is a new and more interesting persona, and will help to sell more books.
For those long-haired teenage years that never happened, I will have Aqualung, by Jethro Tull; for the ‘virtual’ hell-raising early twenties, a bit of Sid Vicious; JJ Cale will strum for the drug-fuelled decade that just wasn’t there, whilst Buena Vista Social Club will hint at a non-existent Cuban period. You can dump a bit of opera in to denote culture, some Francoise Hardy to demonstrate brooding sexiness, a Shakespeare sonnet ‘because words mean everything to me, Lauren’ and, finally, some rousing words from Martin Luther King.
‘It’s been my absolute pleasure,’ I will say when she thanks me on behalf of the grateful listeners, having named my luxury (a yoga mat), and my one remaining record.
The only thing on which I will be completely honest is my choice of book, which is to be The Tragedy of the Commons, a pamphlet written in 1832 by a young economist called William Forster Lloyd. It is short, stark and extremely boring, but I happen to think it’s the most important piece of writing for our human race.
One Spring morning, Lloyd found himself staring at a bunch of cattle on a piece of local common ground, and idly wondering why the animals were so ‘puny and stunted’, and why the common was bare, cropped and half-wrecked.
From his researches eventually emerged his celebrated theory of the Tragedy of the Commons. What he asserted was that, given a collective asset (eg the common), our instinct is always to overexploit it for our private benefit (meaning the owners of the increasing number of cattle who used it). Because the herdsman owned the animals, the profit came exclusively to him; equally, because the pasture was a commonly owned benefit, its gradual deterioration was shared by everyone. And because the privatised gain would always exceed his share of the communised loss, a self-seeking herdsman would always add another animal to his herd, until the common was ruined and they all had to go and find new land. Bear with me, because it’s a trick we’ve been getting better and better at ever since.
Maybe the best example of it in modern life is the relentless industrial extraction of more fish than it is in the gift of our oceans to sustain; but I have just spent 18 months researching cattle, and you can throw in anything you like from the deforestation of half the Amazon to satisfy our burger habit, to the killing off of biodiversity so as to have an efficient 800 acre mono crop sugar beet field. It is hard for a rational person to reach any other conclusion than that we are bonkers.
And the more I read, and see and learn, the more I am beginning to understand that we are running out of new ‘commons’ to move to, and that it really matters. So when I see the current leader of the G7 making jokes to the United Nations about Kermit the frog in what must be the most important speech a British person has made for decades, I want to weep. He had one chance, and he blew it.
So I will take that joyless pamphlet to my desert island, and I will read it each morning so that, even if only on my tiny patch of the South Pacific, to remind myself of my real place in things.
And then I’ll listen to those dire records, and wish to God I’d asked for some Neil Young.
Comments