When he first heard of the nuclear reactor melt-down at Chernobyl, Tim Jackson did not realise the disaster would change the direction of his life.
Back then he had just sold his first play. A Rose on the Obverse was broadcast on the BBC and he was waiting tables in London while working on his next play.
"I thought I knew what direction my career was going. But I got side-tracked soon after I started."
"Some activist streak in me took over and I realised I had skills and training that could help the cause."
It was not totally surprising. A Rose on the Obverse was a reaction to the Falklands War, which he was "bitterly opposed to".
He took a short story he had written about his grandparents, who lost their son when he was in his 20s, and adapted it, first into a stage play. It explored the way "jingoistic nationalism" has such devastating impacts on people’s lives.
The BBC then commissioned him to turn it into a radio play after it was staged at the University of St Andrews, where he had been a student, and it had become a finalist in the Sunday Times Student Drama Festival.
Greenpeace set him to work on the economics of renewable energy.
"And the rest, as they say, is history."
He has gone on to become Professor of Sustainable Development and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) and has worked with and advised the UK Government, the United Nations, non-governmental agencies, private companies and foundations to bring economic and social science research into sustainability. He is an author of Prosperity without Growth and most recently Post Growth — Life After Capitalism.
But writing, especially playwrighting, has always been his first love. He wrote short stories as a child and while at university got involved in student drama, where he got to work with a professional theatre director.
"I guess that made me aware of dramatic writing as a way of telling stories and it was also a great way to escape from my studies."
One summer he was persuaded to write the university’s entry for the Scottish Student Drama Festival — a stage adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The next summer he "tried my hand" at an original play and A Rose on the Obverse was created.
Making that piece for the BBC, Jackson realised the medium really worked for him. He puts that down to having incredibly garrulous relatives as a child.
"When I think of that time, I still hear their voices in my mind before I see their faces. And I guess somehow their chatter seeped into my subconscious memory so when I sat down to write, I found I could reproduce it faithfully, just by listening to their voices in my head.
"That’s probably also why the radio worked so well for me. It lives in the imagination, just like those voices from the ether."
He also finds radio plays to be a flexible medium allowing the writer to go "anywhere and be be anywhere".
"You can take the audience with you, just by evoking that imaginative space."
Despite his economics work, Jackson has continued to write plays, although he admits balancing the two is a work in progress.
"I’d say playwrighting is more important to me personally. Bit it sometimes seems my work in economics is more important to the world. Combining them has always been a bit tricky.
"Recently it’s been playwrighting that’s somewhat lost out to economics but I’m working on that."
One of the reasons he continued writing was his decision to include science in his plays — something that did not come naturally for him in the beginning.
"I wanted to write about love and loss and human frailty and triumph over disaster. But one of the producers I worked with was fascinated by my ‘day job’ — as it had then become."
The producer encouraged him to develop a play with an environmental theme. So he wrote a pitch for an environmental thriller set in the Norfolk Broads, an area of wetlands in the United Kingdom vulnerable to pollution. The pitch won a Public Awareness of Science Award and was then commissioned as a 30-episode series for Radio 4 called The Cry of the Bittern.
As a playwright it gives him content — "something the writer is always on the lookout for" — and as an activist it allows him to bring those causes to a wider audience and make them accessible to people.
That is important for him as an activist, he says, because of the societal importance of the issues but as a playwright it is more complicated.
"You don’t tend to think too much about the audience when you are writing. They tend to distract you from the writing process. But once the play is out there, of course you’d like as many people to listen to it as possible.
"If I were to be honest about that, I think it goes back to that shy kid, trying desperately to make his voice heard in a noisy family. But perhaps there’s also some more cultural reason. Drama enriches our lives, that’s for sure."
Putting a human twist on those stories gave him a way to reach those who might not understand the language of science.
"We can all relate to human stories."
It also gave him a freedom he does not have as an activist.
"The scientific activist is like a caged lion. Prowling around the argument but constantly obliged to remain within the confines of logic and reason. Playwrighting allows you to burst free of that cage. Suddenly you have access to emotion, to conflict, to colour. You no longer have to follow an argument. You can whoever you want, including those you fundamentally disagree with.
"Some of the best characters I have written are ones whose views I reject entirely. But hearing their voice in your head is liberating. It enriches your understanding of the issues and the dramatic intensity of the play."
To do that though he needs space. Space away from the demands of life and away from noise.
"Space where it is quiet enough to hear the characters you are trying to write. I do whatever it takes to create that space."
So it was fitting that Jackson was asked by drama producer Peter Wild, who he had worked with on The Cry of the Bittern, and documentary producer Rosie Boulton, to write an episode for a new type of drama-doco they were working on, as the first season, called Making Space, was about how creative artists find the space to create.
The difference in this series is instead of it being a dramatic representation of factual events used to break up the "talking heads", it is a dramatic story inspired by those events into which the documentary content was woven.
Jackson wrote a piece called The Language of Flowers, about the writings of two religious poems by renaissance poet Christopher Smart while he was incarcerated in a prison cell — the "space" in this example.
"I think I struggled with the form at first. I know my mum did. She wanted to know why these people, the documentary voices, kept speaking in the middle of my plays."
But by the time he got to the last episode he had written, a play called Variations about the composition of one particular movement in the middle of a Beethoven sonata, he felt like he had worked it out. That play won the Grand Prix Marulic in 2007. "My mum liked it too."
His genre of his plays range from love stories to thrillers.
"Even economists fall in love. I was particularly inspired by a story about the scientist Ludwig Boltzmann, who is most famous for his entropy law. It’s a tricky piece of physics, but you sum it up by saying that the most likely state of the world is chaos or as Paul Simon once said ‘everything put together sooner or later falls apart’."
"I was fascinated by that. I couldn’t find a transcript of the original speech. So I had to reconstruct what I thought he might be saying. It was something about the unlikely — and yet undeniable — nature of love in a chaotic, entropic world. Shortly after that speech Boltzmann committed suicide."
Boltzmann’s daughter Elsa, the narrator in Jackson’s play, fell in love with and married one of her father’s PhD students.
"When you start looking, you find love in the most unlikely places."
Jackson is also the author of a number of economics books and finds that process quite different from writing plays.
"[It’s] driven more by the left brain than the right brain — although occasionally you can bring them together if you are lucky. As for enjoyment, I’m not sure. To be honest all writing is agony. But when you’re immersed in it, you can sometimes find yourself in a state of flow. You’re lost in the task. You don’t even exist. You’re a conduit for ideas coming through you. In that sense both kinds of writing can be deeply fulfilling."
It is his latest book Post Growth that he is most proud of, although he is pleased some of his plays have stood the test of time, with two of them broadcast again on BBC Sounds, two decades after he first wrote them.
"Mainly because for the first time in my life, I allowed the economist and the playwright out of their separate cages and let them work together," he says.
"Economic wisdom wrapped up in poetry", is one of Jackson’s favourite reviews of the book.
To be coming to New Zealand, brought out by the British Council, and having the opportunity in Dunedin to talk about both, is something he is looking forward to.
Jackson is no stranger to New Zealand as he has worked with Air New Zealand for five years on its journey to become the "least unsustainable airline" in the world, as the chair of the advisory panel calls it.
He was also "absolutely delighted" to be nominated as a Hillary Laureate in 2016 by the Hillary Institute as he has always been intrigued by the first ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary.
"And the award itself — in the shape of the Hillary step — looks perfect alongside the very eclectic collection of books on my shelf."
Jackson believes New Zealand has an "enormous opportunity" to offer leadership in sustainability.
"You have such a unique history here and the country is so rich in terms of resources — both physical and culture."
While being at the end of the world makes things tricky, that could provide the space needed for the "creative task of imagining a better future".
"That’s something an artist sometimes knows better than a scientist how to do."
It is important not to see the arts "too instrumentally" in the same way that you cannot lecture people in a radio play as it destroys the intrinsic value of art.
"But we can use art to explore different visions for the world we want. We can use the power of the story to work our way through difficult issues — and occasionally come to some form of resolution, be that only temporary or partial.
"And we can draw on the consolatory power of art to ensure that whatever happens — loss or love, triumph or tragedy — we stay connected to our own humanity."
This visit will provide an unforeseen dilemma for Jackson, who has developed a ritual for when he arrives in New Zealand after a 26-hour flight.
"However tired and exhausted I am ... I head to the beach somewhere and throw myself in the sea. I guess, in the middle of winter, it’s going to be a bit more of a challenge."
To see:
Playwrighting panel with Tim Jackson, Saturday 2pm, University of Otago Allen Hall Theatre; "Post Growth — Life After Capitalism: An evening with Tim Jackson", Saturday, 5.30pm, Petridish, Dunedin.
