Blog articles from the Mindset section of The Big Idea

Mindset

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Agriculture is by far the most important thing that human beings do – the thing we absolutely have to get right. So why won’t the powers-that-be take it seriously? By Colin Tudge

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Small farms and farmers are disappearing at an alarming rate – and yet they are vital. Colin Tudge suggests that a prime task for humanity (among a host of others) is to re-establish agriculture as the focus of all our endeavours and to raise the status of farmers   The only people who are truly treasured … Read more

The battle for Darwin’s soul

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Darwin was much influenced first by the gloomy T R Malthus and then championed by the pugnacious T H Huxley. Colin Tudge suggests that if only Darwin had known the Russian naturalist and activist Peter Kropotkin the world might now be a very different place Two of the most influential books published in the 19th … Read more

A new bottom line

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— and a glimmer of hope. By Colin Tudge Keir Starmer promises change – but the change he is promising is of a very limited kind. Whatever form it takes it will be within the present “neoliberal” economic paradigm: an all-against-all competition with the world at large to increase material wealth, known as “growth”. Within … Read more

Life is a master class in cooperativeness

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Competition, beyond doubt, is a fact of life. But, says Colin Tudge, the essence of life is cooperation  It almost goes without saying that individuals gain from living in societies, and that all creatures depend to a greater or lesser extent on others of their own kind. Children need their parents. Vultures scavenge more effectively … Read more

The biology of compassion: work in progress

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Colin Tudge introduces a new series of blogs on whether and to what extent the insights of modern biology can throw light on matters of morality, and hence on politics and economics  In a nutshell, I want to argue that humanity has been led astray these past few thousand years, and particularly over the last … Read more

GUEST EDITORIAL by Professor Tim Gorringe: The Christian attitude to nature

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Christian theologian Tim Gorringe argues that “To trash or seek to dominate this Creation is not simply unethical but is ‘the most horrid blasphemy’” In his recent blog “Fellow Creatures” Colin Tudge suggests that the traditional Christian attitude to the natural world is inadequate, not to say flawed. Christians, he says, take their lead from … Read more

Morality, reality, and policy

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Economic strategies worldwide take precious little account of the world’s real problems, says Colin Tudge  Even at this late hour, we (humanity) might still realistically hope to prevent the world’s final descent from catastrophe into meltdown – provided we took the real problems seriously enough and really were prepared to do, in Rishi Sunak’s bulldog … Read more

No new thing under the sun

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This article is intended to show how the world’s great literature has tackled the problems of food and farming these past 3000 years. AlThough agriculture and the world in general have changed beyond recognition, the most fundamental problems – of politics, the economy, and above all of mindset — are the same as ever. Every … Read more

Is it time to break the law?

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The most serious divide in the present world says Colin Tudge is not between political parties or rival religions or between religion and science but between those who realise the gravity of the world’s present plight and want to do something about it and those who seek primarily to exercize their power and maintain the … Read more

The Science of Ice Cream

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Is cookery an Art or a Science? Ice cream making is very much at the Science end of the spectrum as a new generation of gelato makers attest.