Satish Kumar

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:So this way environmental movement has grown in many dimensions. And, and a kind of, not only inner environment, not only outer environment but also inner environment. That’s a kind of spiritual dimension which Schumacher founded, that it should not be just the kind of look after nature, look after outside economics and so on. Also you have to have a love for nature, compassion for animals, compassion for humanity. And that’s inner transformation, love and kindness and compassion. And then living a simple life comes not out of necessity and out of stress that oh we haven’t got enough, and that well we have to simply, no, simple life should be elegant. So elegant simplicity became a kind of part of my contribution to the movement. And so I have been in a way kind of you can say since 1973 as an editor of Resurgence, and a kind of, a kind of activist in the environmental movement, had been there, witnessing all the time.British Library catalogue number: C2037/86 Project clip number: 26