Prinz Charles im Interview: "We need to make mainstream alternative"

Kämpft seit Jahren gegen die Zerstörung der Umwelt: Der britische Thronfolger Prinz Charles© Claudio Onorati/DPA

Your Royal Highness, for decades you have been warning about damage to the natural balance of our planet. Where has this conviction to protect the environment come from and do you feel vindicated that your work is now recognized on a global scale after years of lacklustre support?

I have always been someone who prefers action to words, in the hope that I can, in some small way, help to maintain this planet for future generations. I suppose more than anything my motivation is that I do not want my children and grandchildren, or anyone else’s for that matter, saying to me "Why didn’t you do something when it was possible to make a difference and when you knew what was happening?"

As a teenager in the early 1960's, I felt deeply about the wanton destruction of so much of our natural and built environment and of the imposition of an ideology that saw progress as purely linear and mechanistic and which, in the process, discarded so much accumulated wisdom and knowledge. I felt desperately the loss of balance that this entailed, and all I have been trying to do for these past decades is to right the balance. Hence I believe it is essential that from now on we rediscover how to work in harmony with Nature, rather than against her. There needs to be a balanced and integrated approach to how we live on this planet, so that we are a part of, and not apart from, Nature and her underlying patterns of which we are a microcosm.

Whether I am vindicated or not isn’t really the point. There is no pleasure in being proved right when that means that the world finds itself facing such imminent and catastrophic danger. How I wish that we had not ended up in the position that we now find ourselves. But I have to say that, to me, it feels as if we are in the process of quite literally testing the world to destruction as we accumulate increasing evidence of the collapse of natural ecosystems all around us – ecosystems on which we all crucially depend. What would give me the greatest possible reward would be if the world took the urgent action needed, as indicated by all the science of climate change and by the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, to prevent the credit crunch rapidly becoming an infinitely more dangerous climate and ecosystems crunch.

We truly are at a defining moment in history. The threat of climate change is simply too important to ignore. However, there is still reason to believe that there is a short time left to improve the situation and achieve greater global sustainability. But I fear it is a very small window of opportunity that is left open to us…

How important were visits to the Amazonian rainforest, and other parts of the world, for you to understand the climate change issue? Would you be so kind to share a memory of such a visit that made a lasting impact on you?

Clearly, it makes a big difference to have visited rainforest countries if the impact of climate change is to be fully understood, but during the course of my life I have travelled a great deal on countless official visits and have kept my eyes and ears open, thus forming my own impressions of what was happening. I have been lucky enough to meet all sorts of people from many different fields and to pick their brains. I have seen, and heard of, many different projects that are making a big difference to people's lives and to their environments, mainly through offering an alternative, more holistic approach than the conventional form of development which, quite frankly, has often been partly the cause of the environmental disintegration we are witnessing.

This is why I have supported genuinely sustainable, "organic" farming for so long; why I have battled on behalf of small farmers and grass roots communities all around the world; why I have equally struggled for a more humane approach to the built environment that recognizes local and cultural identity, rather than the imposition of a monoculture of techno-global uglification. To meet the imminent threat of catastrophic climate change, I would suggest we need to make mainstream what has up to now been dismissed as "alternative". For instance, what made a lasting impact on me was a visit to the Permaculture Institute in the Amazon. In little more than a decade, this remarkable project has integrated agroforestry, aquaculture, and multiple animal systems within a restored landscape that had been utterly destroyed by deforestation. The whole now forms a Virtuous Circle within which all the necessary animal feed is grown and biofuels for the farm vehicles and machinery are produced. What is so deeply impressive is the practical way in which the Institute demonstrates how genuine sustainability can be achieved by applying the principles it has developed.

There is nothing "alternative" in these underlying principles. Indeed, I believe they are of the greatest importance if we are to chart a new and more stable course to live in harmony with Nature, rather than trying pointlessly to gain mastery over her. Only in this way can we hope to mitigate the terrible effects of climate change.