Moving Upstream: Ben Rawlence's Episode

By Sandy Glanfield

This week, another Prime Minister steps down, and I notice the feeling before I can name it. Not shock. Not even anger. Something flatter than that. A kind of fatigue.

I think a lot of us are carrying it. We watch the news, we watch the choices being made, and somewhere underneath there is a quiet exhaustion at how often the world seems to turn away from what we know would be better for everyone.

So it felt like the right week to sit with Ben Rawlence.

Three times in his career, Ben found himself inside government or policy, working on the things that matter most. Trying to help stop a war. Trying to secure water and food. Trying to bring democracy, and choice, and better lives to people who had been denied them. And three times, he describes hitting a brick wall.

When he looks back at the themes of his life, he could be forgiven for calling it exactly that, his head against a wall, again and again. But that is not how he tells it. What he found each time was something steadier underneath. A growing trust in himself to do the right thing, whether or not it worked.

The frustration is hard to overstate. Again and again, the public were on side. The people who held the power knew what the right thing was. And then they chose not to do it. Someone recently described his career to him as a graveyard of good intentions.

I will be honest about how I listened to him. At first I was amazed. Impressed, surprised, a little shocked at the rooms he had been in and the things he had tried to do. But listening back, the feeling changed. I felt heartbroken. Heartbroken for Ben, and heartbroken for a world that was handed these chances and let them slip. Watching the last few years, the choices that have pulled us towards fear and scarcity and decline, that heartbreak is hard to shake.

It brings me back to the thing Reboot the Future was created for. Reminding people to treat others and the planet as you’d wish to be treated. We all want better lives. Whether or not we are thinking about anyone else, we want to thrive. We want this planet to thrive. So why is it so hard to live by the simple idea at the heart of everything we do, that if you put the good out, the good comes back?

That is the real guide for reciprocity. Not a world that survives on a few good people, but all of us putting something in. Effort offered freely, in the trust that when you put the good out, the good comes back, for all of us and for the planet.

Here is what gives me hope, though. At each of those cruxes, the point where he had given everything and could not go on, Ben did not stop. He looked for another way. From government to human rights, chronicling what he saw, standing up, doing the right thing in a different form. And eventually he made a sharp turn, away from clearing up the damage downstream and towards the source. He started looking upstream, asking what good he could keep putting in.

That turn became Black Mountains College, in and around the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park in Wales. A college built to take on the challenge of our times: how to build a fair and just society within safe planetary boundaries. A future where nature and people thrive together.

The question that carried him through is one he offers to all of us.  What's the right thing for me to do right now? It is a question worth stepping back for, more than once, especially when the fatigue sets in.

So if you are feeling it too, the heartbreak and the frustration and the tiredness of watching, maybe that is the question to hold. What is the right thing I can do right now? And I would add one line to Ben's. For the good of us all, and for the good of our planet.