Dr. David Fleming (2 January 1940 – 29 November 2010) was an independent thinker and writer on environmental issues, based in London, England. He was one of the whistle blowers on the possibility of peak oil's approach and the inventor of the influential TEQs scheme, designed to address this and climate change. He was also a significant figure in the development of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement and the New Economics Foundation, as well as a Chairman of the Soil Association.
Alongside these roles, his wide-ranging independent analysis culminated in two critically acclaimed books, Lean Logic and Surviving the Future (published posthumously in 2016). A film about his perspective and legacy - The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? - was released in 2019, directed by Peter William Armstrong.
Quotes
- Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.
- It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it.
- Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction.
- 'The harder I work, the luckier I get'. It was Thomas Jefferson who started the stream of variations on that theme. He should have added, 'The harder I work on one thing, the unluckier I get on all the other commitments I haven’t had time for'.
- Holism [is] the art — in contrast with reductionism — of seeing a complex system as a whole. Holism knows the limits to its understanding; it acknowledges that the system has its wildness, its privacy, its own reasons, its defences against invasive explanation ... It does not pretend to understand the whole school just on the evidence of dissecting the geography teacher.
- While democracy has advanced, the part we ordinary citizens have played in the making and sustaining of the places and communities we live in has diminished. Never has so much been decided for so many by so few.
- Crime is valuable feedback about what childhood in a society means, about its education, economics and culture—about whether this is a society that works or not.
- Wisdom is intelligence drenched in culture.
- A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the grammar, the story, humour and good faith that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of social capital. And the social capital of a community is its social life – the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith and reciprocal obligations the civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.
On Aesop's fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf:
- There are two morals to the story. The first is: avoid giving false alarms. The second is: in the end, the wolf came, so do not be misled by previous false alarms into thinking that the latest alarm is false, too. Of these two morals, the second one is more significant. Believing false alarms wastes time, but can lead to some helpful advice for apprentice shepherds; disbelieving all alarms can lead to a local lad being eaten, for starters.
- If an argument is a good one, dissonant deeds do nothing to contradict it. In fact, the hypocrite may have something to be said for him; it would be worrying if his ideals were not better than the way he lives.
- Do nothing that matters without consulting a conversation.
- At present, we have a policy-response shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives.
- Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.
- Life-saving information tends to come in local dialects.
- Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so.
- The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it’s based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it’s got a lot to be said in its favour.
- The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging.
On society's fixation on economic growth:
- The study of economic lift-off is well developed; touch-down has not been considered. There is an asymmetry here which would invite comment if applied to aviation.
- The reduction of a society and culture to dependence on mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well on the way to destroying it. Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion.
- Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.
External links
- The Fleming Policy Centre homepage
- Prospect articles by David Fleming (1999-present)
- 2001 - The Third Annual FEASTA lecture - "The Lean Economy: A Vision of Civility for a World in Trouble"
- 2003 - Before The Wells Run Dry - "Building a Lean Economy for a fuel-poor future"
- 2006 - Full footage of Fleming's Schumacher College Earth Talk: “Lean Energy: A Practical Guide to the Energy Descent”
- 2007 - Transition Culture interview - "The Transition to Sustainable Resilience"
- 2007 - Cultivate's Sustainable Community Conference - "The Community Lecture"
- 2009 - Transition Towns Conference - "Wild Economics, Wolves, Resilience and Spirit - a study in interdependence"
- 2009 - Video interview on the subject of peak oil, in Fleming's flat in Hampstead
- 2010 - Video interview with Fleming on TEQs, after Swedish Parliament presentation (from SVT)
- 2010 - David Fleming's last interview (audio), in which he discusses his forthcoming book Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It
- Online tributes paid upon his death
- 2011 - All Party Parliamentary report into TEQs
- 2015 - Academic paper in the Carbon Management journal advocating for Fleming's TEQs system
- 2016 - Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It - Fleming's book, published posthumously by Chelsea Green Publishing (+ footage from the 2016/17 book tour)
- 2016 - Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy - the paperback drawn from Fleming's Lean Logic, published by Chelsea Green Publishing
- 2017 - "Community, Place and Play: A Post-Market Economics" - Schumacher College's course on Fleming's work and legacy
- 2019 - The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? - film about Fleming's foresight and enduring influence