Mrs K, aka Professor Karen Johnson, has appeared as a talking head in a Guardian video about soil health (see above). She’s super excited getting soil health some publicity and wanted my help with sharing it on social media. But she got a bit of a shock that the video attracted a small number of ‘dislikes’ and a couple of negative comments underneath, my favourite being:

Sorry but since I don’t like weeds I’m going to be paving over my garden. If soil fetishists want more of the stuff they can just go to their local garden centre and buy some.

Soil fetishists. Love that.

I explained to Mrs K that there is a small but significant number of idiots who like sharing their idiotic opinions on social media. My favourite type is those who bother going on blogs about TV series like Game of Thrones every episode to inform the rest of us that they never watch it – well, thank you for that searing insight. This is why there’s an adage ‘never read BTL’ – the ‘below the line’ comments section.

Likewise, we should never get hung up about people who are anti-Sustainability – whether the merely cynical “it all comes down to money at the end of the day” to the full on denial crew “how come the Romans grew grapes in York 2000 years ago?” And we certainly shouldn’t go head-to-head with them in a public forum – it’s far to easy to be right but lose the argument.

My approach is pure Green Jujitsu – instead of telling people that they should take Sustainability seriously, I like to ask them why they should. Instead of telling them what they should do, I like to ask them what they could do. That simple change in stance tends to silence the cynics and make them reconsider their position.

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