Everything Matters, Nothing Happens.

I recently listened to the Anglofuturism podcast and felt a rare sense of relief. Not because it offered solutions, but because it finally put a name to something I’ve been running into for years at St Clere: Everythingism.

At its heart, Everythingism is the insistence that every cause must advance at once and nothing can ever be set aside to make way for a worthy outcome. Because all goals are equally important and nothing can be left for another time, nobody is prepared to decide what matters more now. You get constant moral urgency paired with total inertia.

At St Clere, we achieve everything technically/legally/humanly possible that does not require us to ask anyone’s permission. It’s the projects that need sign-off; the ambitious, slightly daring ones, where Everythingism bites. Ironically it’s the projects that could bring most benefit that Everythingism bites hardest.

One example came during discussions with Kent Highways about a potential housing development near Kemsing Station, an under-used station, awkwardly far from the village it nominally serves, yet only forty minutes into London, exactly the sort of place to build to contribute to solving our housing crisis.  The first question we were asked by Highways was how would our proposal support the goal of increasing public transport use?

Our answer was fairly simple: we would fund upgrades to the station, add a ticket office, and build a car park so local residents could use Kemsing rather than joining the daily logjam into Sevenoaks. This was immediately challenged. A car park, after all, involves people driving.  True. In the countryside, people almost always have to drive to stations because there is so little infrastructure linking villages to public transport. So alongside the car park, we proposed new cycle paths and footpaths connecting nearby villages directly to the upgraded station.

Another objection from Highways: these routes might not be used as much after dark in winter.  So we suggested low-level lighting, designed purely to make the paths usable and safe.

But what about the dark skies policy?

The conversation more or less ended there. We parted ways with me asking, only half-jokingly, whether they really wanted me to solve the problem of seasonal light variance before allowing us to contribute to the housing shortage.

A second example was even clearer.

In response to local government priorities; boosting the visitor economy, improving mental and physical health, and diversifying the rural economy, we proposed an educational woodland adventure play park with a highly successful national operator. The expectation was over 100,000 visitors a year out of London, with additional benefits of children off screens taking exercise, families in nature, affordable access for local residents.

For the operator and for us at St Clere the health of the woodland was central. Its character and condition were integral to the attraction’s success. No trees would be felled.  Raised walkways throughout would protect the woodland floor. Even the necessary toilet block would be elevated to preserve the ground beneath. Parking would be on a neighbouring field using grass-reinforced surfaces. The operator’s two existing parks have, over time, demonstrably increased biodiversity, with no meaningful traffic, noise, or light pollution.

The planning officer was concerned because of relatively new legislation that says the woodland must not be damaged in any way because of the designation of the woodland in question as a PAWS (Plantation on Ancient Woodland Site).

Of course we agreed the woodland must be preserved. That was never in dispute. Every aspect of the proposal started from the premise of no damage to the woodland, only improvements. We reiterated not a single tree would be felled, hardly a single foot would step onto the existing woodland floor.

The concern then narrowed to the posts supporting the raised walkways. These posts would enter the woodland floor.  Across a 60-acre site, the posts supporting the raised walkways would affect under 200 m² of woodland floor. To more than offset that, we proposed planting 20 acres of new woodland, roughly 400 times the area affected by the posts.

It was still a no.

Tourism, mental health, physical activity, children’s wellbeing, rural jobs, environmental education, biodiversity net gain; all official priorities. Yet the smallest and most abstract potential harm, however minimal or hypothetical, even when offset, was enough to override every tangible benefit.

This is Everythingism in practice.

I’m not saying that we care too much about public transport use, dark skies or woodland floors. It’s that we’ve lost the ability to weigh them against other benefits. We no longer ask what delivers the greatest overall good, or what trade-offs are reasonable in the real world. Instead, any compromise is treated as a failure.

A functioning future requires choices. It requires saying, “this matters more than that, here and now.” Not forever. Not everywhere. But if everything ALWAYS matters equally, nothing can happen.  All our beautifully written strategies that we all wildly agree on; health, transport, children, and nature, remain exactly that: strategies, not outcomes.

Sometimes the right thing to do is build houses next to a station; accepting the small cost of low level lighting to deliver housing and keep the school and pub open, and the station in use. Other times, it’s the right thing to build a woodland play park; accepting a few posts in the forest floor to get children out of London and into the countryside where they can learn to love the countryside and all the benefits it brings.

Everythingism feels virtuous but it is not.  It keeps every principle in tact, but every problem unsolved.