42 I SEED WORLD EUROPE I SEEDWORLD.COM/EUROPE | MAY 2026 That is the core lesson I have taken into my work across film, books, and the stage. Sustainability has to be experienced as something warm, human, and desirable. People need to feel that they belong to a vision of the future. Organizations like Greenpeace have always understood this well. They offer a sense of community, a moral identity, a group you want to be part of. If we want a modern, high-yield, technology-positive sustainability model to succeed, it needs that same emotional grounding. People need to feel that a modern world can be a good world. A world with more nature, more freedom, more opportunity, and better lives. In the end, that feeling matters far more than any collection of facts or figures. SWE: LOOKING DECADES AHEAD — SAY 10 TO 50 YEARS — WHAT WOULD SUCCESS LOOK LIKE TO YOU? HOW WOULD THE PUBLIC CONVERSATION ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY, ABUNDANCE, BIOTECHNOLOGY, AND THE HIGH- YIELD/SEED SECTOR IDEALLY HAVE TRANSFORMED BECAUSE OF YOUR WORK? HB: If you look at history, it is clear that changing a dominant societal narrative takes time. Organizations like Greenpeace and Milieudefensie needed almost 50 years to fully embed their worldview into public consciousness and, eventually, into policy. What began in the 1970s has now materi alized in things like the European Green Deal. That tells us something important: new stories do not win overnight. So, when you ask about the horizon of 10, 20, 30, or even 50 years, my hope is very clear. I hope that by then this abun dance-oriented, high-yield sustainability narrative is fully established and widely accepted. At the moment, my work operates on two levels. On the one hand, I am focused on public persuasion. Projects like The First Sustainable Generation aim to reach broad audiences and shift how people intu itively think about sustainability. On the other hand, through initiatives like Blue Planet and collaborations within The First Sustainable Generation, we actively bring companies together, especially from green house horticulture and the seed sector. What I already see happening there is encouraging. These sectors are beginning to realize that they cannot keep trying to fit themselves into a narrative that was never designed for them. They need to articulate and own their own story. One that shows they have a legitimate, credible, and attrac tive role in a sustainable future fifty years from now. That realization alone is a major step forward. My hope is that this pluralism becomes normal. That society and politics recognize there is more than one pathway to sustain ability. That high-yield, technology-driven approaches are no longer treated as a com promise, but as a core solution. And that this perspective is increasingly reflected in policy choices. If I allow myself to dream, and focus for a moment on Europe, the vision becomes very concrete. Already in the 1990s, studies showed that if agriculture were truly optimized and concentrated on the most suitable land, Europe could meet its food needs using roughly thirty percent of the current agricultural area. That opens up an extraordinary possibility. I imagine a Europe that is modern, innovative, prosperous, and confident. A Europe with dramatically more space for nature than today. A continent where large areas are rewilded, restored, and accessible, and where people can genuinely enjoy that recovered nature. It is a vision of abundance in every sense: material abundance, moral confidence, and ecological richness. That is what success would look like to me. Hidde Boersma and Karsten de Vreugd in South America for their documentary series ‘The Origin of Food’. Source: Hidde Boersma Read part 1 here.
View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.