Rhian E Jones discusses the Act and how well-intentioned policies for local empowerment need practical support and constitutional reform. Read the article here
Irish Tech News #FUTUREGEN Review: LESSONS FROM A SMALL COUNTRY by Simon Cocking
In #futuregen, Jane Davidson explains how, as Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing in Wales, she proposed the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015—the first piece of legislation on Earth to place regenerative and sustainable practice at the heart of government. Unparalleled in its scope and vision, the Act connects environmental and social health and looks to solve complex issues such as poverty, education and unemployment.
Davidson reveals how and why such groundbreaking legislation was forged in Wales—once reliant on its coal, iron and steel industries—and explores how the shift from economic growth to sustainable growth is creating new opportunities for communities and governments all over the world.
#futuregen is the inspiring story of a small, pioneering nation discovering prosperity through its vast natural beauty, renewable energy resources and resilient communities. It’s a living, breathing prototype for local and global leaders as proof of what is possible in the fight for a sustainable future.
#futuregen Lessons from a Small Country, reviewed
This is a positive and interesting book, who knew Wales was doing so many positive things. We are fans of CAT, the Centre for Alternative Technology, and Wales has some beautiful locations, but this book is a great guide to a conscious and intentional strategy to plan for the future and make Wales a more sustainable place.
Jane Davidson, the author, does address concerns and questions about whether Wales is too small to offer relevant insights for other countries around the world. However in many ways it is the New Zealands, Singapores, Finlands and Israels among others that are leading the way in innovative approaches to dealing with climate change and making our planet a better place to live. Davidson explains how they have identified, addressed and planned to get Wales to a better place.
In many ways during this recent lockdown period it has been a clear demonstration that local and small are actually the smartest way to identify what the issues are, and to create locally appropriate solutions. #futuregen is an inspiring case study, and a smart read for other locales, small countries, and even large ones to move forward in a positive and sustainable way.
More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.
Oakville News: #futuregen Book Review by Chris Stoate
See the article on Oakville News’s website here
Ever since reading Jane Jacobs’ wonderful little book, Systems of Survival, many years ago, I have developed a clearer and clearer view of the roles of the public and private sectors. The private sector’s commercial ethos is about meeting needs and wants, with innovation, industry, service and trade, in order to improve standards of living and quality of life. The public sector’s guardianship ethos is about protection and preservation: ensuring the sustainability of society including the activities of the private sector. It means environmental foresight and fostering social cohesion among other things, along with security.
To strike this balance is not easy. It involves using taxes and regulation to ensure sustainability without stifling present day innovation and prosperity. Of course, there are overlaps and gray areas when you get down to cases, but broadly speaking the private sector is about wealth generation, while governing should be about creating equality of opportunity and ensuring that wealth generation can continue for future generations.
So, I was delighted to discover the ground-breaking initiative of the Welsh government, which enacted The Well-Being of Future Generations Act. Jane Davidson was the prime mover of this legislation. She was Wales’ former Minister of Education and Minister of the Environment, Sustainability and Housing, and is the current Pro-Vice Chancellor Emeritus, University of Wales Trinity St. David, and associate faculty at Harvard University.
Jane Davidson has written a remarkable account beginning with her personal path to “living lightly” as she calls it, and of the development and passage of The Well-Being of Future Generations Act, and of what the Act has meant to governing in Wales. The book is called #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020.
“What Wales is doing today, the world will do tomorrow.” - Nikhil Seth, UN Assistant Secretary General
It has always seemed to me that the most profound ideas often seem beautifully simple and obvious. What struck me most about the project of the Well-Being of Future Generations Act is how clearly non-partisan it is: no one can argue that we should provide for the well-being of current and future generations.
We can argue about whether health care should be provided publicly, privately, or both; if it is good to have students pay for their own post-secondary education; and if market forces alone will preserve shrinking resources or if taxes or regulation is required…but good government means thinking long-term. All parties know this even though as a practical matter electoral considerations and imminent crises drive most decisions. It is not easy to think beyond the next time the government must face the public at the polls. The public is busy with its own immediate needs, wants and worries. Long-term considerations are often addressed in banal if high-sounding promises, rather than in the meat of legislation.
What Wales has done is to make thinking about future generations the law. Who could argue that this should be the guiding principle of governing in every country in the world?
Getting the Act passed was a feat of determination and political skill. The book is a fascinating read for anyone wondering what is actually involved in creating legislation. Getting it passed was only the first step. The key to making the Act really mean something was to align the machinery of government, the civil service, around the Act as not simply one of many competing priorities, but as the guiding principle that must inform every government decision. The paradigm shift Wales achieved should be a model for every country on earth.
In the face of the ecological degradation which we are barely coming to terms with, The Well-Being of Future Generations Act provides for a re-ordering of government priorities and a mission-driven approach to government that could not be more-timely. Jane Davidson was behind that paradigm shift in Wales. She describes the fascinating journey to making her vision of government as guardian of sustainability into a reality in #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country.
In my own view, if government were to follow the principles enacted into law in Wales, the private sector would be liberated to maximize our well-being and quality of life.
Some of the debates we have about shareholder versus stakeholder corporate governance, which risk entrusting profit-seeking enterprises with the future of the planet and either undermine or let government off the hook, would be moot. It would allow the private sector to get on with maximizing shareholder value by innovating and meeting the needs and wants of its customers. In turn the government could focus on its role in ensuring sustainability through environmental protection and social cohesion (the Seven Generation model the first Canadians followed, and the Peace, Order and Good Government which were Canada’s founding principles), as well as help the private sector flourish with as light a touch as is consistent with the guiding principle of The Well-Being of Future Generations.
The book is an undramatized account of the unglamorous business of making real change. It should be required reading for everyone working in government. The Act is a template for governing towards a world in which future generations profit from the wisdom and foresight of their predecessors, rather than suffering from their focus on short-term self-interest. The passage and implementation of the Well-Being of Future Generations Act is a game changer. #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country is a remarkable contribution by this purpose driven political leader and thinker.
Europe Now Journal: Editor's Pick - November 2020
#futuregen. Lessons from a Small Country
By Jane Davidson
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Recommended by Elizabeth Jones
Jane Davidson’s #futuregen is an eloquent and deeply personal handbook for democratic governance in the twenty-first century. In six chapters, Davidson reflects on her twin passions for the natural environment and social justice, and how she channeled that energy into groundbreaking 2015 legislation for the Welsh nation: The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act that mandated that all government plans, whether for a new road, educational institution, airport, or housing development must be sustainable―defined as “the maximization of well-being over the long term (56).” The consideration for future generations into the practice of politics, begun in 1992, was a long uphill climb. Davidson stresses that this framework allowed campaigners to sidestep the false choice of either bolstering the economy or reviving Wales’ biodiversity and the partisan bickering and inaction bred by such dichotomies. Davidson, now a smallholder in West Wales and Pro-Vice Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, is the former Minister of Education and Minister of the Environment, Sustainability in the Welsh Government. She shares credit for the Act with mentors and collaborators, the most important which were ordinary Welsh citizens who answered the question: “what sort of country do you want to see in future?” Dubbed “the Wales we want,” the 2011-12 initiative took its cue from the United Nations’ “The World We Want” dialogues about global sustainability and how it can be achieved. Davidson’s success at nudging a range of skeptical government actors for their support is deeply indebted to the voices of young Welsh citizens, environmental scientists, and grassroots social justice advocates who offered hopeful, and specific, visions for the future. She argues that the campaign was as much a cultural as a legislative endeavor, and that thinking and acting sustainably needs to become matter-of-course rather than seen as a series of tiresome hurdles.
Davidson’s attention to moral suasion in enacting sweeping political change is at once pragmatic and idealistic. She is justifiably proud of the Welsh model for making sustainability mainstream and points to the Act’s many ripple effects, both as a template for other nations, including the UK, and in the Welsh projects undertaken since the Act passed. Among the most exciting of these is Project Skyline, the plan to transform three valleys in South Wales from environmentally ravaged and impoverished former mining communities into vibrant and sustainable ones by 2050. Launched in 2019, the initiative rests on collective ownership of the land, where residents “had no difficulty in instinctively balancing the goals of the Well-Being of Future Generations Act” (150). #futuregen is an ambitious book because Davidson expects governments and citizens alike to roll up their sleeves and follow the Welsh example, no matter where they live. She shows us how to begin our journey toward sustainability at the individual, community, regional, national, and global levels.
Intergenerational Foundation: Book Review - #futuregen
When Jane Davidson was Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing in Wales from 2007 to 2011 she became a leading architect of the groundbreaking Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015). In her new book, #Futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, she tells the story and relays her vision. Our reviewer, IF Research Intern Hugo Till, is impressed
#futuregen is a book of many interwoven narratives. On one level, it is an account of how Wales became the first country to enshrine the rights of future generations into law, on another it tells the story of how the Welsh Assembly found its feet and asserted Wales’ place as a pioneer for environmental and social sustainability, and on another, it recounts a deeply personal tale of Jane Davidson’s own role in these events.
She offers us a timely reminder that for intergenerational justice, as with so many issues, “the political has always been personal and the personal, political.”
Radical and robust
But the personal touches do not obscure the radical potential of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. In a world where taking “long-term action” often means nothing more than setting distant targets and letting your successors sort it out, Wales’ example of placing legal obligations on all public bodies to “carry out sustainable development, including a requirement to set and publish ‘well-being objectives’, [and] to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to meet those objectives” stands in stark contrast.
The strength of the Act, Davidson explains, is that it goes beyond mere “tinkering around the edges”, but instead demands a complete reappraisal of how we perceive our world, and what we should value.
#futuregen argues that the climate and sustainability crises are really just symptoms of a broader “crisis of perception”, whereby “large institutions subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.”
Redefining goals, global and local
To this end, the well-being goals mandate a break with the paradigm of extractive capitalism and the “unicorn of unrestricted growth”, redefining prosperity as “low carbon, delivering within environmental limits and capable of generating decent work”.
Davidson is right to argue that such measures – which go beyond encouraging government and corporations to pursue their current goals more sustainably, and instead seek to redefine these goals and change the culture of our institutions – are now necessary across the globe to secure a future.
But despite Davidson locating the Act in a broader sustainability movement for global and systemic change, she also emphasises that part of the Act’s strength is how it attends the particular character of Wales and the strength of Welsh communities.
The act is not about tying the hands of democratically elected governments and surrendering power to faceless bureaucrats tasked with enforcing the regulation. Rather, it seeks to change the culture of government and its relationship with civil society, and to empower local communities to build the futures that their grandchildren will want.
Skyline
Davidson recounts how the framework that the Act provides was instrumental to Skyline, “a community land-stewardship project to look at what would happen if the community were given back their surrounding land in perpetuity.”
It challenges the privatisation of nature whereby land “is managed by national and international corporations with little direct economic benefit to the local community” (and with very large environmental costs), and instead reasserts the stewardship of Welsh people over their surroundings, “reconnecting communities to a landscape so that it can provide income, jobs, a place of social and cultural activity and a better home for nature.”
But crucially, in each of the three valleys where Skyline was trialled, the process was steered by community leaders who emerged over the course of the projects. Thus each project began to reflect the particular “history, meaning and potential of each place”. This was the almost poetic wish list that arose from a public consultation with the people of Ynysowen in the Merthyr Valley:
The skyline is for looking at
The skyline is the Taff trail
Flowers, lakes and litter bins
Lampposts and benches
There might be fairies
There are magic mushrooms
I want round trees not pointed ones
Playgrounds, camping and fire pits
More wildlife
Flowers and gazebos
Spiders
Thus the project realises one of the central goals of the Act: to give local people the right to imagine their own futures. Whether the Act has the regulatory teeth to allow people to realise these futures remains to be seen, as Davidson admits.
Windows of opportunity
Davidson reflects on the importance of “the right time and place for whole system change”, and the advantages of using a disruptive moment, which in Wales’ case was the birth of the Welsh Assembly.
Perhaps the massive disruption caused by COVID-19 provides a similar opportunity. As Davidson explains, “We know now that governments can act – and quickly – when faced with an emergency that they must address. We must next encourage them to respond similarly to the existential threats of climate change and nature degradation to current and future generations.”
Lord Bird’s Future Generations Bill, currently awaiting its second reading in the House of Lords, builds upon the momentum of the Welsh Act to “embed long-termism, prevention and the interests of future generations at the heart of UK policy making”. This UK-wide Bill has to opportunity to be even more ambitious than the Welsh Act, since it can take advantage of powers that are not devolved to regional government. In particular, it promises to hold not only government departments but large corporations to account for unsustainable practices.
In #futuregen, Jane Davidson tells a delicately personal story but with global ramifications. In a world where control over the future seems to be increasingly slipping from our grasp, it provides a bold vision for a better tomorrow as well as a strategic map for getting there.
Resurgence Magazine: Lessons for the Future
In this issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, we look at ways people around the world are nurturing life – and hope – in the extreme. In the Ecologist section, Matt Kendall celebrates post-pandemic pedal power in Paris, and Rhiane Fatinikun speaks to Resurgence & Ecologist about Black Girls Hike and tackling racism in the British countryside.
In Keynotes, Russell Warfield interviews Jane Davidson about the pioneering Future Generations Act, which sets a precedent for leaders across the globe. In Arts, Michael Benson explores how images can be a powerful tool for communicating hope amid the horror of human-made crises.
Our September/October issue also explores the role of education at a time of coronavirus and the vital lessons we can learn.
Intergenerational Foundation: Education post-COVID – a life or death decision?
COVID-19 has placed education at high risk around the world. In Wales, the way forward is guided by Well-being of Future Generations Act of 2015. Jane Davidson, Pro Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at University of Wales Trinity Saint David, was a leading architect of that groundbreaking legislation when, from 2007 to 2011, she was Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing in Wales. Her book #futuregen: lessons from a small country was published last month.
On 4 June 2020, I published my first book, #futuregen: lessons from a small country, which tells the story of why Wales was the first country in the world to enshrine the Sustainable Development Goals and the Brundtland definition of sustainable development into law with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act in 2015.
The book was due to be published at the internationally renowned Hay Festival, a feast of literary talks and events which attract annual audiences of over 250,000 people to the tiny Welsh market town nestled on the banks of the River Wye. And all those plans changed with COVID. The peace and tranquillity of our small country was shattered by an invisible killer, stalking our lives – and our way of life.
Community spirit
Living where I do, close to the coast in rural Wales, our experience of COVID in the early weeks was linked to shortages – flour, toilet paper, food staples – that somehow never got beyond the cities to those of us living on the edge.
But almost instantly, the kindness of strangers and the strength of the local community stepped in: when I was sick, it was young local volunteers who picked up my medicine, and wonderful fresh food was delivered by local growers and producers. Our local miller rose to the flour challenge and now supplies all the local shops.
A community Facebook group was set up to brief people on issues relating to the virus and Welsh Government rules – different and more cautious than England – and a companion group was set up focused on highlighting positivity in these turbulent times.
Across Wales and the UK, we entered the sudden realisation that it was the NHS and other care workers, the food producers, the volunteers, the bin collectors, the van deliverers who kept us safe in the face of the threat.
Ever the optimist, I wrote in a preface to my book, “In the interests of future generations, when this threat is over, there will be an opportunity to capitalise on our rediscovered kindness and sense of society, to celebrate the importance of nature, to build on our increased virtual engagement to act on that other silent killer – climate change – for the benefit of current and future generations.”
Danger ahead
Last week, I read the UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education’s report, Education in a post-COVID World: Nine ideas for Public Action, and I realised that my optimistic vision needed some real underpinning action to stop the opposite happening.
Many of us have used the lockdown as a time for reflection and networking, garnering a green collective vision on how responsible governments could respond to the COVID global crisis and #buildbackbetter, #resettheneedle, introduce a #greennewdeal – anything that might stop a return to the fossil fuel economies we need to extinguish.
But the reality for those not in our privileged position is that all governments will now be turbo-charged in the interest of getting people back to work at all costs – and off the government payroll. Businesses will go under, millions of jobs as well as lives will be lost which potentially could create a savage rip through access to opportunity for the poorest and most unequal societies in the world, driving down wages, increasing exploitative labour practices and plunging millions more into poverty while the disease still has us all in its sights.
The risks to education
It is looking increasingly likely that one of the biggest losses might be the withdrawal of educational opportunities to the next generation.
In the introduction to the Commission’s work, the Chair – Her Excellency Sahle-Work Zewde, President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia – makes a very powerful point: “There is a serious risk that COVID-19 will wipe out several decades of progress – most notably the progress that has been made in addressing poverty and gender equality…This is not something we should accept; we must do everything in our power to prevent it. COVID-19 has the potential to radically reshape our world, but we must not passively sit back and observe what plays out. Now is the time for public deliberation and democratic accountability. Now is the time for intelligent collective action.”
So what does intelligent collective action look like? I’m writing this on the day that Wales’s schoolchildren started going back to school for the first time since the lockdown started on 23 March 2020. Currently, Wales is the only part of the UK where all children are re-commencing their schooling in an organised fashion, but not as they know it. The nature of our weather and the age of our school buildings means that some schools will only be able to have 20% of their pupils in at any one time to avoid spreading the disease further.
Although the intention is that all children will have been assessed by teachers before the end of the summer term in mid-July, we are seeing huge variations between those whose parents are actively educating them at home, those who are children of key workers and therefore are still in school, and those who have had no educational input from family or state and are at increasing risk of being left behind.
We don’t know what public examinations will look like. We don’t know what university entrance will look like. We don’t know if young people will want to go to university this year without the physical experience; we don’t know if they will be able to go to college – and we don’t know who has been lost in the wake of this unequal disease.
But we do know that this has to be the time for action, for public deliberation and democratic accountability to ensure that those hard-won educational gains across the globe in taking people out of poverty, of improving girls’ educational chances, of moving towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not lost – because it literally could be the difference between life and death.
Meeting the crisis
It’s extraordinary how quickly systems we take for granted can break down if they are not fit for purpose. It is equally extraordinary how adaptable and imaginative we can be in response.
If I had launched my book at the physical Hay Festival, I would perhaps have had an audience of 200 people; by participating in two digital events at Hay and three others in the launch week, my global audience was nearer 10,000.
I have spent most of my adult life trying to increase chances for future generations – as a teacher, youth worker, anti-poverty campaigner, mum, education minister, environment minister, university practitioner – each time, I hope, contributing in a small way to the solution rather than the problem.
But for it to break down as it has, so quickly and in so many countries? How can it be that a system of such profound importance to the life chances of the young of the world can be so flimsy? Is it because the “education” itself that young people are receiving is itself not fit for purpose? Neither in content nor process?
I hope that the messages from the Commission on the necessity of the provision of access to and funding for public education are heard. There is one recommendation in particular that speaks to my soul, and in my view would cut through the core of the problem, and that is about trust and good practice. “The Commission calls on everyone with educational responsibilities, from government officials to teachers to parents, to prioritize the participation of students and young people broadly in order to co-construct with them the change they wish to see.” As goes the adage, “nothing about us without us”.
Legislating for the Well-being of Future Generations
In Wales, the only country in the world with a Well-being of Future Generations Act, the law requires the Welsh Government and all its public services to deliver on seven goals aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals, and to prioritise five ways of working: to think preventatively, long term, collaboratively, in an integrated way and to involve those affected in the decisions.
All schools have pupil councils and most are eco-schools. There is an active youth parliament, a Children’s Commissioner and a Future Generations’ Commissioner who has set up a young leaders’ academy.
The new curriculum which will be in place by 2022 is predicated on building resilience, on areas of learning rather than subjects. Its development has been influenced by young people and it is designed to adapt as necessary.
It takes 15 years to change a curriculum in the UK from nursery entry at the age of three to a university entrant at the age of 18. We still operate to a 19th-century agrarian calendar in deciding when we take holidays. Yet there are no absolute laws that govern these processes, only conventions – and COVID has cut through those.
Without a Well-being of Future Generations Act it would be harder to focus on the needs of future generations when the pressure from current ones will be so great. But if countries do respond to the challenge set by UNESCO that “Now is the time for public deliberation and democratic accountability. Now is the time for intelligent collective action” , let’s make that collective action a global push to protect young people’s rights to education on a healthy planet – and help them educate us of the importance of delivering such an outcome.
There is no better adage than “do unto future generations what you would have had past generations do unto you” (John Rawls). There is no better time than now to demonstrate that education is the most effective tool to deliver.
The Guardian: Britain beyond lockdown: can we make more space for nature?
In Wales – as elsewhere in the UK – the pandemic exposed the risks of excessively specialising in sheep and cattle for export. This was already a concern due to Brexit, which will end subsidies and reduce markets, and a broader consumer trend to eat less meat. Lockdown brought a sudden dearth of vegetables and a glut of lamb. Shocked consumers are calling for a more reliable local supply. Welsh hill farmers are looking for new revenue streams either by planting crops or charging for ecosystem services, such as flood control, wildlife habitat and peatlands that absorb carbon dioxide.
“This pandemic gives us the permission to think differently,” says former Welsh environment minister Jane Davidson. “The UK government, particularly in a post-Brexit scenario, has the biggest opportunity since 1974 to redefine the role of food in the economy and to create the stewards of the land to ensure the country is resilient.”
Ox Magazine: Love, Labour and Lessons - Jane Davidson by Sam Bennett
Usually at this time of year, the area in which Jane Davidson lives – on the margins of Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire – is brimming with visitors. But it is of course quieter right now, granting residents less-disturbed contact with “all the fantastic countryside and nature”. On her website, her husband Guy documents the produce they grow. I point out they’ve acres to do it with, not meaning to sound bitter towards the former minister for environment, sustainability and housing in Wales. “We have,” she says, “although we leave most of it alone.” This year, with the land they do use, they’re growing roughly 100 different kinds of fruit and veg. She’s always maintained you don’t need a profusion of plot to grow your own, an acre more than enough to feed those under her (solar panelled) roof.
With announcements about the easing of lockdown measures in England due later that day, she’s “delighted” the Welsh government are acting more cautiously. “Wales has kept a different public health model to England,” she resumes, a daughter of doctors, saying whereas the latter have public health doctors sitting in local government, the former appoints them directors of its health boards – “a really important distinction in the context of being able to successfully manage the outcomes [of epidemics and pandemics].”
We also speak the day after many people gathered on Oxford High Street, beneath Oriel College’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes, calling for the monument’s removal. Her book, #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country covers her upbringing in Rhodesia – named after Rhodes – about which she writes:
Three incidents over a period of years penetrated my idyll enough to start me seeing the worm in my Eden, the racism underpinning the right-wing Rhodesian Front government after the United Declaration of Independence from the U.K. in 1965.
Statues denote a moment in time, says the pro vice-chancellor emeritus at University of Wales Trinity Saint David, “and that moment in time is normally where the rich and powerful have decided to erect a standard-bearer for their values. So erecting a standard-bearer for the values of racism has to be totally unacceptable now, the time for removing symbols of racism and imperialism is now.”
Southern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe, to which she’s yet to return. “I want to,” she says. “I’ve always promised my children we would go back on a significant birthday.” She doesn’t like to fly due to the emissions, “but I don’t want to outlaw love miles. So I will take my family and relive my childhood with them, because none of them have seen where I was brought up, where my values were created, where I fell in love with nature. We will plant the requisite amount of trees,” she adds, by way of addressing the journey’s emissions – the importance of understanding how our actions impact the planet one of the “simple messages” in #futuregen, which also explains how the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 came to be.
Interview with iNews: From an old barn to a state-of-the-art eco house, how family is enjoying a greener lifestyle by Madeleine Cuff
Read the article on iNews’ website here
“Jane Davidson and her family used to live in an ordinary house in Cardiff. Sure, her husband Guy may have kept a few chickens in the back garden, but life was still pretty normal. The gas boiler whirred to life on cold mornings, the fridge was stocked with supermarket produce and power was piped from the national grid.
When she was appointed minister for environment, sustainability and housing in the Welsh Assembly Government in 2007, the germs of a radical, life-changing move were sown. Davidson wanted to “be a minister who was not only advocating for people to do things, but doing it myself”, she tells i.
The family decided to do one good thing for the planet each year. They started by agreeing to no more air travel; their final trip was an adventure to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania for Jane’s 50th birthday. They also signed up to a vegetable box scheme and switched to a renewable power provider…”