Colin Tudge is an optimist. He is founder of the Campaign For Real Farming, which believes we can grow tasty, nutritious food for all the world’s growing population, for years to come, without wrecking the planet.

His latest book — the culmination of a life’s work — sets out his views on life, the universe and everything. The title, Why Genes Are Not Selfish And People Are Nice, was dreamt up by the publishers — he prefers the subtitle: A Challenge to The Dangerous Ideas That Dominate Our Lives.

He says in the preface: “I have been writing this book in my head for more than 60 years. I decided it was time to pull things together before the grim reaper came knocking”.

He was 70 in April, but his cheery, round, whiskered face is familiar to the Occupy generation.

He has been hugely influential on the thinking of many young people, who are now putting his ideas into practice. In Oxfordshire, the market gardening venture Cultivate counts him as a friend, as well as the People’s Supermarket in Cowley Road and Hogacre Common in South Oxford.

A Londoner by birth, he fell in love with biology at six, which meant that after the age of 13 he studied nothing but science, eventually taking a zoology degree at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

But he had also fallen in love with agriculture (on a visit to a farm in Lancashire on his tenth birthday) — and with writing, which took him into a career as a journalist. He worked for Farmer’s Weekly, was features editor of New Scientist, then a science broadcaster for BBC Radio 3, but for the last 20 years has been freelance, working from his home in Wolvercote.

One of his biggest successes has been the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which has grown rapidly since he set it up four years ago to challenge what he felt was the blinkered thinking of the mainstream Oxford Farming Conference, which happens at the same time.

“It has really taken off. It is run like the Edinburgh Fringe, with people doing their own things,” he said.

He believes a “people’s takeover” of farming is needed to ensure agriculture is used to grow food rather than with the aim of making money for a small group. But he is comfortable with capitalism, as long as it has “socially desirable ends” and he is relaxed about details, saying farming should be “as organic as possible”.

In the decades while he has been thinking and writing about agriculture, he has seen the BSE and foot-and-mouth crises replaced by “horseburgers” and food shortages caused by extreme weather such as flooding and drought.

He said: “If you want to put agriculture right, you have to think from first principles. You have to dig deep and say ‘why are we doing this?’ You have to look at the underlying philosophy.

“You have to recognise that if you want agriculture that really is sustainable and resilient to climate change you have to have good science, geared to proper ends and not geared to the private ends of Monsanto or Tesco.”

Hence the “selfish gene” of his book’s title. He is not the first to wrestle with the metaphors used by Oxford don Richard Dawkins, who coined the phrase, nor to point out that the idea is rooted in the neo-Liberal philosophy of the free market.

“It seems to be saying that evolution depends on competition. It is seen to be natural, and part of what we need to do. But it is a huge philosophical mistake to say that what is natural must be right, and that the whole world is driven by competition.”

He added: “I am a huge fan of Darwin, but the idea that life is driven solely by competition is wrong. Competition is a fact of life, but when you look closely, you find that co-operation is the essence, and is what makes life possible.”

From the first primordial sludge, atoms and molecules have come together in co-operative systems, and the most wonderful of all are living cells and living organisms, he says.

“Some of the creatures that live in and around any one tree are indeed competing with that tree — they are there to eat it — but many others are vital to its own survival.”

And Darwin’s theory that we are all descended from a common ancestor should make us treat other species with respect, rather than using them simply as a resource.

Above all, Mr Tudge wants us to approach the natural world with humility.

“When I read science at university in the early 1960s it was assumed that we, humanity, were on the point of complete understanding; and what we could understand, we could and should control, for our own benefit,” he said.

“President Kennedy wanted Americans to get to the moon, and they succeeded — thus reinforcing the idea that we really can do anything we set our minds to. This idea was encapsulated in one grand slogan: the conquest of nature.

“But you do not need to bash the world into your will, nor do you have the ability. We need a sense of reverence, that the world is ultimately mysterious, and that there could be an intelligence behind it. These ideas lie at the heart of all traditional religions.

“Science is wonderful and it is necessary, but it has not brought us omniscience and it never can. In fact, its greatest lesson has been that nature is beyond our ken. To approach nature with humility and to treat it with respect and reverence isn’t just a matter of piety. It is the only sensible survival strategy,” he added.

Having finished the book, he is now setting up a Fund for Enlightened Agriculture to support sustainable farms, smallholdings and shops. There will also be a College for Enlightened Agriculture.

“The curriculum must be broad. It must include the feeding of pigs and the raising of wheat but also the state of the world and the nature of the economy — and the underlying metaphysics.”

* Why Genes Are Not Selfish And People Are Nice is published by Floris at £16.99