Graeme Taylor: made for change
Graeme Taylor, author of Evolution's Edge
Canadian-born Graeme Taylor used to be an emergency paramedic before he found his way into academia and later becoming an award-winning author.
Whatever he does, he does it with passion. You hear the urgency in his voice as if there’s no time to lose. It’s probably always been his way.
But saving accident victims lives is nothing compared to looking after his latest patient – the planet. If Graeme had his way, it would be rushed immediately to the solar system’s intensive care unit. There’d be red lights flashing and sirens wailing while our Earth was prepared for major surgery.
Graeme, who lives almost spartanly with his wife, in a unit overlooking the Brisbane River and Queensland University at St Lucia, is also a social activist, having been involved in a host of issues since the early ’60s when he was working with social justice and peace organisations.
But his latest task is not small for a man who lives relatively humbly. He’s helping to organise an international coalition to prevent total environmental catastrophe and to restore the planet to health by creating an economically and culturally sustainable world system.
He believes the world’s hundreds of thousands of different yet responsible non-governmental organisations, large and small, should have one voice in the fight to fix climate change.
Graeme Taylor on climate change deniers: "They don't have a right to destroy my future amd that of my family, to kill the planet and kill my kids' future. I care and I'm pissed off -- it's so tragic!"
One of the world’s leading environmentalists and mover and shaker for social change, Paul Hawken, has written a book called Blessed Unrest which explores the diversity of the largest movement on earth, a movement which has no name, leader or specific location and is emerging to be an extraordinary entity that gives creative expression of people’s needs globally.
This has been part of the inspiration for Graeme who is lead author for a manifesto being put together with the World Transformation Initiative, a forum for the Great Transitions Initiative which is a growing international network of scholars and activists.
When we met in late November, Graeme was working on an introduction to that manifesto which would set the ground for this grand coalition to take effect.
“These groups from every country in the world are working on every conceivable issue, from taxation to aboriginal rights, stopping deforestation, preserving species right through to climate change,” said Graeme.
“These people are not coordinated. We’re not taking all this energy and putting it together in a common direction to ensure that we rapidly change the planet and put it on a constructive course instead of a destructive one,
“You only get listened to if you have numbers and if you have a clear voice.
“For the vast majority of the people on the planet, it’s not in their interest to have it polluted, to create wars, to let people live in slums. It’s only in the interest of a very few to continue with the suicidal policies we have.
“But those few, those big corporations are able to hire lobbyists able to manipulate the media. Unfortunately, it’s their voice that gets heard.”
Graeme, in his book Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World, is not all doom and gloom. In fact, many critics say it is the book ‘Most likely to save the planet’.
The only problem is getting the right people to read it.
He says the type of transition we need is to turn from ownership to relationship.
“We have to make a shift from having to being. Having more things doesn’t make you happy. We should start looking at the quality of life rather than the quantity. You can be a very lonely billionaire,” he said.
“You can cut down trees, pollute your air in the short term. You can have bigger houses, faster cars and more gismos, but in the long term process you’ve had no time for your family and you’ve helped destroy your environment. No happiness or good health out of that – you’ve just accelerated your own destruction.”
Graeme has also taken himself out of the Christmas-time commercial rat race. At one time when his kids were young and he had a full-time job he’d spend big time on Christmas.
“One year I was buying presents for 60 people and thought ‘this was insane’. I was spending money on buying stuff for people who quite likely didn’t need it and already had their homes stuffed with things,” he said.
“So I decided there and then that in the future I would do something different – write stories. I wondered whether they’d ever talk to me again, but they actually liked them.”
At Woodford, Graeme will appear at the Greenhouse on the Monday to talk about ‘Growing Crises: Growing Opportunities’. He’s just the man to give oxygen to the growing campaign to save this precious planet.
Author Graeme Taylor is a PhD candidate at the Griffith School of Environment in Brisbane and an honorary research adviser to the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict studies. Since 2003 he has also been coordinator of the BEST Futures project
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