They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you.

I'm sure Philip Larkin must be turning in his grave at the thought that those have become by far the best-known lines from his entire oeuvre. But they do resonate with a lot of people.

Not with me. My parents did exactly the opposite of fucking me up. Though many of the life choices I made were completely mystifying to them, they just took a deep breath and assured me they'd still be there for me if/when it all went badly wrong. Happily, it didn't. For the most part.

Mind you, packing me off to boarding school at the age of eight could well have ended badly. It has for many, over many decades. But I just got on with it, and being something of a rule-breaker, was popular with my contemporaries, if not with my teachers. I got the taste for independent thinking from a very early age and took full advantage of all the privileges that this kind of weird private education in the UK gives one. An early School Report (when I was 11) commented that I seemed “to have acquired a lot of self-confidence”.

That has served me well at every single point in my life: dealing with classrooms full of extraordinarily badly-behaved school children in my first year as a teacher; getting stuck into the leadership role in the Green Party ( then the Ecology Party) just a few years after first joining it in 1974; seizing hold of the opportunity to build support for the UK environment movement throughout the 1980s at Friends Of The Earth; setting up a number of organisations, usually with others, usually successfully; speaking truth to power, whenever and wherever required.

Looking back on it now, at the grand old age of 74, I know how blessed I was to have had all those advantages from such an early age. That has embedded a deep sense of gratitude in all I’ve done.

So, I’m still hard at it – campaigning for the Green Party, supporting young climate activists here in the UK, (particularly through an organisation called Just Stop Oil, with its inspiring commitment to Non-Violent Direct Action), campaigning against the twin insanities of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, as well as for electoral reform, democratic renewal, family planning and other causes less favoured by today's environment movement.

But I'd be lying if I didn't own up to a gathering sense of dread. It's true that things are shifting. Renewable energy and storage technologies are well on the way to seeing off the incumbent fossil fuel industries. Most politicians now acknowledge the need to think very differently about the natural world and our continuing suicidal abuse of it - but still cannot free themselves of their subservience to the Great God of Economic Growth, which is the root cause of that abuse. And that goes on even as it becomes clearer and clearer that the costs of that growth significantly outweigh the benefits – and that those benefits flow disproportionately to the richest 1% of all citizens on Planet Earth.

The truth of it is that we've left it so late. This is something I feel very personally having tried so hard - and so unsuccessfully - to persuade politicians (as Chair of UK’s Sustainable Development Commission from 2000 to 2009), business leaders (as Co-Founder of both Forum The Future and The Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme), and the media (through books, films, TV series etc) that going early in transitioning to a genuinely sustainable economy would be so much less painful than going late.

Going too late will of course be the worst outcome of all. I don't think we're there yet, in terms of accepting the inevitability of the existential collapse of human civilization. But I do know that it’s already far too late to avoid increasingly disruptive, traumatic impacts on the lives of billions of people.

As a growing number of campaigners now acknowledge, it's hard living with that burden. It certainly wasn't part of the deal when I joined the Green Party 50 years ago – it seemed then that we still had plenty of time to get things sorted! These days, it's impossible to put down that burden unless one can reconcile oneself to massive cognitive dissonance, at best, and to self-serving dishonesty at worst.

I can't put it down – not least because I've seen for myself what that burden means for young people today. And I ask myself, on a daily basis, what the notion of intergenerational justice means any longer, as originally captured in the definition of sustainable development in the Brundtland Report (“Our Common Future”) back in 1987:

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

I burn with anger that these wise words (and all the amazing breakthroughs achieved at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992) were set aside by world leaders as so much empty, well-meaning rhetoric.

We're already paying a very heavy price for that devastating failure of political leadership over 30+ years. It will get worse. A lot worse.

But anger without the promise of redemption is a dangerous thing. I'm still learning as I go in terms of getting that balance right. And will be using my posts on Meer to keep improving in that regard!