China and conservation
China is the future of global conservation, according to Tim Smit. Patrick Bark ham meets the maverick businessman-environmentalist who created the Eden Project.
Is this country actually leading the way?
Forget those hoary myths about China building a coal-fired power station every week, says Sir Tim Smit, the man behind the Eden Project in Cornwall. In fact, he predicts, the country will soon lead the global environmental movement. “China is the most extraordinary example of development in the history of humankind. Their achievements are shockingly underplayed in the West. In my view, the repair of the environment is seen as one of the cornerstones of China’s self-confidence and its emergence into its next phase – being the dominant civilisation in the world.”
Such statements usually come with dire warnings for the West. But Smit, 63, is that most endangered breed of environmentalist: an incorrigible optimist. He’s also fairly convincing proof that businessman-environmentalist is not an oxymoron. And, as well as being a provocative talker, he undertakes an unusual amount of doing. He doesn’t just tell stories but propels them into reality. “You can do amazing things at amazing speed if you’ve got a story that others buy in to,” he says.
For the past two decades, Smit has been best known for the Eden Project. Born in the Netherlands, he studied at Durham intending to become an archeologist but instead made his million as a composer/producer for the likes of Barry Manilow and The Nolan Sisters. After “retiring” to Cornwall and restoring the Lost Gardens of Heligan, he set his sights on creating a “great green cathedral” to plants in an old china clay pit near St Austell.
Smit was convinced that “a lost world in a crater would appeal to anyone who’s ever been 12”. More remarkably, he convinced everyone else too, and the £86 million Eden Project opened in 2001. This environmental beacon has rewritten the rules of attractions and received more than 19 million visitors in its first 16 years.
Smit is currently talking more about China than Cornwall, though. He has long pondered creating ‘Edens’ on every continent but worried about such ‘themeparkery’. This year, he’s taking the plunge, developing projects in China, Costa Rica, California, Dubai, New Zealand, Tasmania and the Seychelles. As the latter is a member of the African Union, Eden will soon span every populated continent.
That’s a lot of air miles for an avowed environmentalist. Sceptics may wonder how Eden’s involvement in Dubai’s Expo 2020, say, can save the planet. But Smit – incessantly curious, fizzing with challenging ideas and magnanimous if proved wrong – is willing to explain.
Museums, exhibitions, zoos – all the great scientific institutions – are failing to save the world, he argues. If these organisations were “even half as good as we all claim to be – and I include ourselves – the world would be a different place, because the education messages that we think we’re so successful at transmitting would’ve changed people’s behaviours.” Uncomfortable truths about the sixth great mass extinction, runaway climate change, air and marine pollution and potentially catastrophic soil erosion are not getting through.
Smit’s solution – Edens on every continent – is not cultural imperialism but an attempt “to get the benefit of a whole range of cultural responses to the environment so we can learn from each other about what is working where,” he says. For instance, Eden is poised to buy the largest remaining privately owned sequoia forest in California. It contains 300 trees more than 3,500 years old. In so doing, Smit has learned that a “language of pessimism” is hopeless in the United States.
“They don’t want to know. But if you paint championing the environment as an opportunity, oh yeah, they’re with it,” Smit says. That said, his vision for the sequoia Eden is still challenging. “Something like 43 civilisations have risen and returned to dust while those trees been living. Wouldn’t it be great if you could convene people in an education centre to have conversations about what long-term might actually mean?”
Most of these new Edens are serendipitous; Smit possesses a gift for grasping opportunities and developing them in a way that few of us would dare. One is a rainforest Eden in Costa Rica on formerly drought-stricken farmland ‘rewilded’ by a Danish philanthropist. This came about after a chance encounter in a London lift; Smit gave a friend of the philanthropist’s son a minute to make his pitch. Smit’s Chinese work materialised after a Chinese businessman – “the equivalent of Richard Branson but cooler” – gave an interview in China declaring that the Eden Project was the most exciting thing he’d ever seen. After hosting delegations from all around China, Smit was invited over and is now launching three-and-a-half projects in the country.
The first, where spades should hit the soil in June, is a visitor destination highlighting the marine environment. Its waterside position in the city of Qingdao is equivalent, claims Smit, to the site of the Sydney Opera House. But, crucially, like Eden in Cornwall, it is “on poisoned ground”. Smit wants each Eden to reflect local culture and concerns but each must also restore “ruined” land.
The second project, in Yan’an city on the Yellow River, will showcase the importance of soil. Locals realised that if they felled trees, their clay soils turned into mud, washed into the river, raised its bed and caused devastating floods. Yan’an is also famed for being Mao Zedong’s revolutionary headquarters and endpoint for his Long March. As Smit remarks cutely: “We want to become the second most famous tourist destination in Yan’an.” Smit’s third Chinese venture is most recognisably ‘Eden’: a new centre bringing together food and farming within two giant quarries in Tianjin, the coastal city for Beijing. And his final “half” project is an Eden China HQ in a vineyard growing on a 35-acre landfill site. Unsurprisingly, Smit’s meetings with Chinese politicians – including President Xi – and private companies funding these schemes has given him a more nuanced understanding than the West’s perception of coal-burning and toxic yellow smogs. As well as China’s massive solar industry, Smit says the country has planted more trees than the rest of the world put together in the past three years. It’s aiming to plant new forests the size of Ireland in 2018 alone. Smit doesn’t presume to precisely describe the mindset of its leaders but perceives “a blind faith that they are clever enough to sort this [global environmental crisis]. And now is the time.” China, he believes, “will be good for the world”. So too, he thinks, will Dubai. Environmentalists may wonder how a desert city famed for its vast air-conditioned
skyscrapers, hotels and malls could possibly go green, but Smit characteristically challenges such assumptions. He was invited to critique plans for “the sustainability pavilion” at Dubai’s Expo 2020, a jamboree for the new technologies of global capitalism. “I said, it’s horse-feathers. It’s terrible, just boring – about climate change, evolution, the world going to hell in a handcart,” recalls Smit. “They asked if Eden would become creative director. So we went, ‘Ah. OK, if you’re brave’. And they have been very, very brave.”
Dubai’s Eden-led sustainability pavilion will be a “living piece of theatre,” says Smit. “Most people don’t remember much from Expos so we set ourselves the challenge that everybody who comes through this place will remember five things from our Expo until the day they die. It’s all about telling stories.” Dubai challenged his prejudices too. “They are really serious about sustainability and they understand the paradox of sustainability in Dubai. As they say: ‘It’s where we live, it’s all we’ve got.’”
Smit continues: “Dubai had a few fossil fuel millions and decided to spend its savings on making itself a visitor destination and an airport hub. It’s done that brilliantly. But Sheikh Mohammed [ruler of the Emirate of Dubai] is really passionate that by 2030 it’s going to be the most sustainable place on Earth and I wouldn’t bet against them.”
Smit’s other Edens look more conventionally sustainable – raising awareness of Antarctica in Hobart, Tasmania, and pollution in Christchurch, New Zealand – but Smit sparked a diplomatic storm after likening New Zealand to “a beautiful person with cancer”. Intensive farming, he argued, undermined the country’s hugely successful “100% Pure New Zealand” marketing campaign. “I don’t know how comfortable my next trip is going to be,” he says, grimacing.
Less controversial is Eden’s partnership with the Seychelles government to tell the story of the remarkable coral reefs of Aldabra in the Indian Ocean, 1,125km from the archipelago’s capital. “It’s the size of Isle of Wight, populated by 14 scientists and shaped like a bagel with the biggest lagoon you’ve ever seen,” enthuses Smit. “It’s got the most fantastic coral at low tide and when the tide comes in you’ve got to get out because giant sharks come in to hunt turtles. There are over 100,000 giant tortoises, great plants, a lot of mangroves and the sharpest coral. It is astonishing.”
Aldabra is too sensitive for millions of tourists, who will instead visit a special centre in the Seychelles’ capital and watch live feeds of reef footage. “The digital world can link up with these wild places and get people to understand how marvellous they are,” says Smit. “One of the issues with the Attenboroughisation of the world is that humans are never shown in it, really, and I think that it is important to show humans.”
Blue Planet II has trigged huge public concern – and political action – over plastics. Smit has witnessed tonnes of plastic washed up on Aldabra. “This isn’t my phrase but it’s a very good one: when people say they are throwing something away, please tell me, where is away?” he says. “It’s not that we’re
“I SAID, IT’S HORSE-FEATHERS. IT’S TERRIBLE, JUST BORING – ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, EVOLUTION, THE WORLD GOING TO HELL IN A HANDCART,” RECALLS SMIT.
intrinsically malicious. Most people I know would love to live without plastics, but no-one is actually demonstrating how it is possible.”
A sculpture at the Eden Project was called WEEEman, a giant built from the waste electronic and electrical equipment an average adult discards in their lifetime. “The lazy interpretation is, look how disgusting we are but that’s the wrong message. We’re not wasteful. We’re taking the blame for a regulatory system that isn’t insisting on things being repairable. How is it cheaper to buy a new DVD-player than repair the old one?”
While the globalisation of the Eden Project makes it look like any other great capitalist success story, Smit is critical of capitalism for its lack of innovation and its destructive pursuit of economic growth. “Everybody thinks that capitalism is good because it leads to advances. Capitalism actually doesn’t – it leads to competition to be one grade better than what was there before,” he says. “Why is capitalism failing us so badly? It’s because the courage of investment is incredibly small.” Right now, he says, investors should be pumping money into devising “closed loops in everything so nothing is wasted”.
But Smit is equally critical of green campaigners. “For too many years the environment movement has been forced to give a dystopian vision, an Old Testament admonishment to our culture of consumption and it’s had to paint big business as a baddie,” he says. “It’s a bit like blaming the dustbin man for our landfill. What we’re not getting is a narrative about how exciting it is to be alive today, what we could do, and what the world we envision is.” His environmentalist friend George Marshall asked an evangelical preacher about the secrets of his success and was told: “It’s like this George, you’re preaching damnation, I’m selling redemption.”
Smit’s message of redemption is that we’re entering a new era that is both local and global. “I don’t want to set myself up as any kind of guru, but there is a dawning realisation all over the world that we are none of us islands,” he says. He believes people want to live again in intimate local communities, but without parochialism.
“Localism does not mean ‘hair-shirt’ and going without and survivalism,” Smit adds. “It means having the technology that will enable you to live a very sophisticated life with a gentle foot on the world. We will all see ourselves as local but inextricably linked, in terms of our behaviours having impacts on each other, which will lead to different behaviours and different international regulation. We’re about to enter the most exciting times since humans came off the prairies.”