Accidental Gods: Recent Episodes
Accidental Gods
At this time of the Great Transition, we need ideas, role models, new narratives that show us how we can step forward into a future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. What does it take for our kids to look back and say, 'It was hard, but they did it'? We talk to the people leading the way, offering interviews, conversations and radical new ideas from people who live the change we need to see in the world. We have the choice now, to transform - or to face the chaos of a failing system. Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Join the evolution at: https://accidentalgods.life
"Grasping the Nettle' is at the heart of the film. Making a dress this way is a mad act of will and artistry but also devotional, with every nettle thread representing hours of mindful craft. Over seven years Allan is transformed by the process just as the nettles are. It's a kind of alchemy: transforming nettles into cloth, grief into beauty, protection and renewal. A labour of love, in the truest sense of the phrase, The Nettle Dress is a modern-day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft."
This week is our one hundred and ninety ninth episode of the Accidental Gods podcast. It's been quite a ride, and to celebrate the end of our second century, my partner, Faith, has come to join me as host, and we have two guests, textile designer Allan Brown and Dylan Howitt who is a filmmaker with over 20 years of making documentaries and features for the BBC, Netflix, Sky, Discovery - if you've heard of them, Dylan's worked with them.
Allan was exploring how we could feed and clothe ourselves as we head towards a world of localism and increasing self reliance. A journey that began with a simple question - namely 'how can we clothes ourselves?' - led to his spending seven years of his life making a a dress from the fibres of the nettles that grew locally. He harvested them in his local wood, made the fibre, spun over fourteen thousand feet of it, hand wove it, and then made it into a truly beautiful dress for his daughter.
It was an extraordinary process of experimentation, discovery and ensoulment - a journey into possibility that would be hard to match in our current, frenetic world. And we know about this: the patience of it, the wonder, the loss, the grief, the resilience, the alchemy… the sheer magic, because Dylan made a film, 'The Nettle Dress' which also took 7 years and is also a process of emergence and ensoulment and magic and discovery.
The film is one of the most profoundly moving I've seen in a long time: it's deep time brought into being, it offers connection and profound attention and intention as it follows Al's profound intention and attention. It's so, so different from what we normally see, so grounding - and when we had the chance to talk to Al and Dylan, it made sense for Faith to join me: she's the maker in our partnership, she's been a textile maker and designer and she thinks differently than I do in many ways. So this is a joint endeavour and all the stronger for it.
Dylan Howitt Bio
Dylan Howitt is a filmmaker with many years of experience telling compelling stories from all around the world, personal and political, always from the heart. Twice BAFTA-nominated he’s produced and directed for BBC, Netflix, ITV and Channel 4 amongst many others. His latest feature documentary, The Nettle Dress, follows textile artist Allan Brown on a seven-year odyssey making a dress from the fibre of locally foraged stinging nettles.
Allan Brown Bio
Allan Brown (Hedgerow Couture) is a textile artist from Brighton, East Sussex, in the UK. Working primarily with sustainable natural fibres like nettles, flax, hemp and wool, Allan takes these raw materials and transforms them into beautiful cloth with the aim of creating functional, durable clothing that draws lightly from the land, reflecting the fibres and colours of the landscape he lives and works in.
Dylan's website www.dylanhowitt.com
Dylan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylan-howitt-babb3395/
Watching The Nettle Dress https://www.nettledress.org/watch
Nettles for Textiles on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/1648679398499874
Hedgerow Couture on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hedgerowcouture
Simon and Ann at Flaxland https://www.flaxland.co.uk/contact
Gillian Edom from sting to spin https://gillianedomsbook.blogspot.com/
We're on the edge of so many tipping points it's hard to know where to start. But paralysis isn't useful and so we need to talk to the people who are still moving forward - and who have ideas of how we can carry more and more people with us.
With that in mind, this week's guest is a many-time friend of the podcast: someone completely aligned with our aims and ideals and whose energy, activism - and capacity to write and publish books that are right on the nail - leave me awestruck.
Professor Rupert Read is an associate professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. With a first degree from Oxford and a doctorate from Rutger's, he has a polished academic pedigree and he's certainly written a lot of philosophical texts and papers. But it's as an activist, thought-leader and fearless advocate for truth that he really stands out. Rupert's books 'This Civilisation is Finished', 'Parents For a Future' and, most recently 'Do you want to know the Truth' are all hard-hitting examinations of exactly where we are and how we could move forward in ways that will at least begin to acknowledge the truths of the meta crisis.
It's not all writing, though, Rupert, was one of the core founders of Extinction Rebellion and has been arrested for his actions on behalf of our future. He went on to co-found the Moderate Flank and is now one of the key thinkers and figureheads of the Climate Majority Project. He appears almost daily on television and radio in the UK and around the world and I am really grateful that he's made the time to join us here at Accidental Gods
Rupert's website https://rupertread.net/books/
The Climate Majority Project https://climatemajorityproject.com/
In this week's episode I'm talking to someone I met on last year's Thrutopia Masterclass: someone who was there to explore and share ideas about how we might get through to that flourishing future we'd be proud to leave behind. Elisa Rathje is an artist, a filmmaker, a podcaster, a writer, an unschooling parent - and a homesteader whose life is an expression of her philosophy that we need to live closer to, and in harmony with, the land.
She and her family farm one and a half acres on Saltspring Island off the west coast of Canada between Vancouver and Vancouver island where she makes her appleturnover TV channel for Youtube, with short films showing the ways she's rediscovering, or in some cases, creating anew, ways to grow and thrive on and with the land.
We've had some pretty hardcore conversations recently on the podcast, and I thought it was time for something inspiring, less of how we fix the broken structures at national level, and more how we can each live different lives, tell ourselves different stories of who we are and how we are... get into the detail of composting toilets and community buses and how to keep chickens and geese and sort the water... all the things we're really going to need to learn, or relearn or otherwise bring into being as we shift forward into the small farm future that Chris Smaje was talking about last week.
So this is a regenerative episode, about regenerating our souls as we heal the land.
appleturnover TV https://appleturnover.tv/
The Journal of Small Work https://appleturnover.tv/farm/journal/
Miraculous Abundance https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/miraculous-abundance-one-quarter-acre-two-french-farmers-and-enough-food-to-feed-the-world-perrine-herve-gruyer/1935503?ean=9781603586429
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/feminism-and-the-mastery-of-nature-val-plumwood/825976?ean=9780415068109
Attachment Parenting https://attachmentparenting.co.uk/
Hold onto your kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hold-on-to-your-kids-why-parents-need-to-matter-more-than-peers-gabor-mate/739814?ean=9781785042195
This podcast is focussed on all the ways that we can bring all of ourselves to the project of total systemic change: our minds, bodies, spirits, hearts - and the practicality of what we do. Given this, we're delighted to welcome to the podcast Maddy Harland, the Co-founder and Editor of Permaculture Magazine .
Maddy, and her husband Tim, co-founded a publishing company, Permanent Publications, in 1990 and Permaculture Magazine in 1992 to explore traditional and new ways of living in greater harmony with the Earth. She is the author of Fertile Edges—regenerating land, culture and hope and The Biotime Log.
Maddy and Tim, have designed and planted one of the oldest forest gardens in Britain: once a bare field, it is now an edible landscape ,a haven for wildlife, and a reservoir of biodiversity. I met Maddy first back in the early days of this millennium when the whole Permaculture team was in the south east of England. More recently, they moved to Devon in the south west, where they are retrofitting a Devon longhouse to become zero carbon and restoring an old woodland to be a sanctuary for rare species like Dormice and Pied Flyctachers - and to be a place of healing and retreat for people.
Maddy has been one of the beacons of the regenerative movement for decades. She's edited one of the world's most vibrantly alive magazines for over thirty years, she's interviewed - and edited - everyone who is anyone in this field from Vandana Shiva to Satish Kumar to Patrick Whitefield hundreds, literally, of the less well known, but absolutely cutting edge, inspiring people in all corners of the world who are living the change that will take us to the future we'd be proud to leave behind.
If anyone knows where we're at, and what potential there is for change, she does. So it was a joy to be able to connect and explore ideas with someone who's given their life's energy to exploring the ways that change can happen.
COUPON: PERMACULTUREGODS - with this, you'll get a free copy of Maddy's book Fertile Edges, with your subscription. Please use the code at the Checkout. (NB: this is valid until 23:59 on 6th November 2023 - and works once a subscription and Fertile Edges have been added to the cart, and then the code added)
Website link at which to use it: https://shop.permaculture.co.uk/collections/permaculture-magazine
Permaculture Magazine Website: https://www.permaculture.co.uk/
Permaculture Books: https://www.permanentpublications.co.uk/
Free Permaculture e-books: https://shop.permaculture.co.uk/collections/free-ebooks-1
Permaculture Magazine YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PermacultureMagazine
Permaculture Magazine Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/PermacultureMag
Permaculture Magazine Instagram https://www.instagram.com/permaculturemagazine
Permaculture Magazine Twitter https://twitter.com/PermacultureMag
Plus a free Intro to Permaculture Course: https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/free-on-demand-intro-to-permaculture-open-online-resource
Setsuden in Japan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setsuden
Film: In grave danger of falling food: https://www.acmi.net.au/works/80421--in-grave-danger-of-falling-foodbarefoot-economist/
We all know that we need to reconnect to our HeartMinds and to bring our Heart Intelligence up to meet the explosion of left brain intelligence - we just don't know how to do it. This week's guest is one of my living heroes - who does have clear, grounded ideas of how to do this.
Dr Scilla Elworthy was thirteen years old when she saw the Soviet Invasion of Hungary on the television and understood the horror of what was happening. Her mother found her packing a case to go to Budapest to help and managed to persuade her to stay home by promising she'd help to train her to be what the world needed. When she was sixteen, she worked in a holiday camp for Auschwitz survivors, and sat peeling potatoes and listening to them talk of their suffering.
Since then, she has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with Oxford Research Group to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics. In 2003 Scilla founded Peace Direct, to work closely with locally-led peace building initiatives throughout the world, bringing us daily experience in how to help prevent violent conflict and build sustainable peace throughout the world.
She has written numerous books, given numerous TED and TEDx talks and now leads The Business Plan for Peaceto demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of transforming destructive conflict. She was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003 and the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2020. She is one of the clearest, most grounded thinkers I have ever met and she's working tirelessly to create the future we'd be proud to leave behind. I was more than a little star-struck, but this was a genuinely heart-felt conversation and I hope listening to it leaves you feeling as heart-connected as it did me.
The Mighty Heart https://mightyheart.co.uk/
TED Talk: Fighting with Non Violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk3K_Vrve-E
TEDx Talk: Dare to Question: Why are we so afraid of getting older https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6zenOjPC1A
TEDx Talk: How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgWyolwBGgE
TEDx Talk: The Future Belongs to those who can see it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWDl1PqGjqY
TEDx Talk: Do something - OK, but how? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYlhHkLgBWA
TEDx Talk: The Business Plan for Peace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH1WgurH5FA
Conversations in Compassion w Dr Scilla Elworthy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C5BMRDYzc8
Book: Pioneering the Possible https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/pioneering-the-possible-awakened-leadership-for-a-world-that-works-scilla-elworthy/3218709?ean=9781583948620
Books: The Mighty Heart in Action and The Business Plan for Peace https://mightyheart.co.uk/media/
How dangerous is AI? Are Large Language Models likely to subvert our children? Is Generalised AI going to wipe out all life on the planet? I don't know the answers to these. It may be that nobody knows, but this week's guest was my go-to when I needed someone with total integrity to help unravel one of the most existential crises of our time, to lay it out as simply as we can without losing the essence of complexity, to help us see the worst cases - and their likelihood - and the best cases, and then to navigate a route past the first and onto the second.
Daniel Thorson is an activist - he was active in the early days of the Occupy movement and in Extinction Rebellion. He is a lot more technologically literate than I am - he was active early in Buddhist Geeks. He is a soulful, thoughtful, heartful person, who lives at and works with the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth in Vermont. And he's host of the Emerge podcast, Making Sense of What's Next.
So in all ways, when I wanted to explore the existential risks, and maybe the potential of Artificial Intelligence, and wanted to talk with someone I could trust, and whose views I could bring to you unfiltered, Daniel was my first thought, and I'm genuinely thrilled that he agreed to come back onto the podcast to talk about what's going on right now.
My first query was triggered by the interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Bankless podcast - Eliezer talked about the dangers of Generalised AI, or Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, and the reasons why it was so hard - he would say impossible - to align the intentions of a silicon-based intelligence with our human values, even if we knew what they were and could define them clearly.
Listening to that, was what prompted me to write to Daniel. Since then, I listened many times to two of Daniels own recent podcasts: one with the educational philosopher Zak Stein on the dangers of AI Tutors and one with Jill Nephew, the founder of Inqwire, Public Benefit Company on a mission to help the world make sense. The Inqwire technology is designed to enhance and accelerate human sensemaking abilities. Jill is also host of the Natural Intelligence podcast and has clearly thought deeply about the nature of intelligence, the human experience and the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of our interactions with Large Language Models.
I've linked all three of these podcasts below and absolutely recommend that you listen to them if you want more depth than we have here. What Daniel and I tried to do today was to lay things out in very straightforward terms: it's an area fraught with jargon and belief systems and assumptions, and we wanted to strip those away where we could and acknowledge them where we couldn't, and lay out where we are, what the worst cases are, what the best case is, given that we have to move forward with technology, switching it all off seems not to be an option—and how we might move from worst to best case.
With this latter in mind, I've included a link to Daniel's new project, the Church of the Intimate Web which aims to connect people with each other. I've also - because it seems not everyone listens to the very end of the podcasts - included a link to our membership programme in Accidental Gods where we aim to help people connect to the wider web of life. I definitely see these two as interlinked and mutually compatible.
So - trigger warning - a lot of this is not yet impinging on public awareness and we're not yet aware of how close we are to some very dangerous edges. This podcast leads us up to the edge so we can look over. We do it as gently as we can, but still, you'll want to be resourced and resilient before you listen.
The Emerge Podcast https://www.whatisemerging.com/emergepodcast
Emerge with Zak Stein https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/emerge-making-sense-of-whats-next/id1057220344?i=1000610403148
Emerge with Jill Nephew https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/emerge-making-sense-of-whats-next/id1057220344?i=1000613784941
Bankless with Eliezer Yudkowsky https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bankless/id1499409058?i=1000600575387
The Church of the Intimate Web https://tome.app/the-church-of-the-intimate-web/the-church-of-the-intimate-web-a-response-to-the-global-intimacy-disorder-clhgc8h1l1b2p5k3z9ppbitfy
Accidental Gods Membership https://accidentalgods.life/join-us/
The Soul's Code by James Hillman https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-soul-s-code-james-hillman/1563087?ean=9780553506341
Peruvian shaman Oscar Miro-Quesada says that "Consciousness creates matter, Language Creates Reality, Ritual creates relationship.” This week I'm speaking with someone who bring reality into being with words and weaves relational rituals.
Abigail Morgan Prout is a poet, life coach, mother and visionary. She and I have been talking to one another for about three and a half years. We connected just before lockdown and then, as life became weirder, Abigail's daily poems were a bright flash in the whirling chaos, a doorway into a world halfway across the planet that was different in so many ways, and yet so often the same; a sense of soul connection to someone who gets it; an excoriating and sometimes intensely personal, vulnerable view into someone else's life, shared with great courage - and word-jewels of true beauty that connected me again to the wonder of the web of life, and the wonder of language. As a writer, I am always in absolute awe of the fact that we can make black marks on a white page and evoke the whole multi-dimensional, multi-sensory glory of human and More-Than-Human experience. As a prose writer, I am ever more in awe of the skill poets bring to their word-smithing, and Abigail's is beautiful, moving and inspiring at all levels. It's not just me that thinks so - Walk Deep, the collection that arose from lockdown won the 2021 Homebound Poetry Contest.
So when Homebound published Walk Deep, I really wanted to bring Abigail onto the podcast - to talk about the process of writing, which is one of my more major obsessions, but also to talk about everything she brings to this -she's a life coach and a teacher of life coaches. She's a daughter and a mother and she holds ceremony in beautiful ways. We didn't touch much on this last in the main body of the podcast - but, as happens so often, as soon as I'd stopped recording, we talked about exactly this, and it seemed so profoundly important, that I hit record again and we added another ten minutes of what, to me, is not just podcasting gold, but human gold, spiritual gold; the account of someone's experience of a lifelong dream that came to life, but more than that, of the ways the web of life is so ready to connect with us and offer help if we can only open to hear it. So that's tacked on at the end, before the final credits.
Abigail's website https://www.abigailprout.com/
Spiral Leadership Method https://www.spiral-leadership.com/
Accidental Gods Membership (the Intention Intensive is within the Membership) https://accidentalgods.life/join-us/
Abigail on FB https://www.facebook.com/abigail.m.prout
Instagram: @Insta: abigail_Morgan_prout
Our guest this week is Max Ajl, who is an associate researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for multiple journals and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society.
It was his 2021, his book, 'A People's Green New Deal', published by Pluto Press, that brought Max to my attention. If you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you'll know that one of our regular contributors, Simon Michaux, is adamant that the material flows for the various posited Green New Deals don't exist - that they are logistical impossibilities. But what Max argues strongly and with brilliant clarity in his book and elsewhere, is why these things should not happen even if they could: why they are better viewed as extensions of the Giant Vampire Squid wrapped around the face of humanity (not his phrase) - and that there's a better, much more deeply green set of ideas and ideals based in actual earth connection, the restoration of what should be fundamental human rights across the world and the widespread implementation of agro-ecological principles.
His book seems to me an eco-socialist manifesto and while its values are closely aligned with the podcast, the nature of this as a political theoretical and practical concept is not something we'd previously explored on the podcast. So now we have. In the course of our early discussion, we touched on the Cochamamba Peoples' Agreement - and then never came back to it. So very briefly, I'd like to fill you in, because this agreement is both an internationally agreed document and, in itself, a statement of core ecosocialist principles. The conference from which it arose took place in April 2010, when more than 35,000 people from 140 countries gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and developed a consensus-based document reflecting substantive solutions to the climate crisis.
Two things arise immediately. First, thirteen years on, we would call it the climate, ecological and cultural crisis. Second, and more important than the semantics - much though they matter - was the ways this agreement came into being. There were 17 working groups, and a lot of effort was put into consensus building - working out what mattered and what worked, or could be imagined to work - not the failed COP process of deleting anything that offends a member state until you have a basically meaningless document. I've attached links in the show notes and I really recommend you follow them, because it is profoundly important.
It is, in fact, the framework we need to work towards. What's distressing is that it's over 13 years old and hardly anyone in the hegemonic nations of what Max Ajl calls the core - as opposed to the periphery - has heard about it and still fewer care. So we need to change that. If you do one thing after this podcast, as Max says, it'll be to join an organisation. If you do two things, the second will be to tell people about the Cochabamba People's Agreement. And Max's book.
The sound quality was not the best. but Alan has woven his production magic and I hope your ears will accept the result as a price worth paying for the ideas we explore here.
A People's Green New Deal https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341750/a-peoples-green-new-deal/
Cochabamba People's Climate Agreement https://www.climateemergencyinstitute.com/uploads/Peoples_climate_agreement.pdf
and
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/the-environment/climate-change/49253-need-for-recognition-of-cochabamba-peoples-agreement-in-un-climate-negotiations.html
Landworkers' Alliance https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/
La Via Campesina https://viacampesina.org/en/
Colin Duncan The Centrality of Agriculture https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-centrality-of-agriculture-between-humankind-and-the-rest-of-nature-colin-a-m-duncan/3518385?ean=9780773513631
Selimah Vaiani Rethinking Unequal Exchange: the global integration of nursing labour markets https://utorontopress.com/us/rethinking-unequal-exchange-4
In this week's episode, we have a return guest to the podcast. Ruth Catlow has taken the amazing work she did in lockdown and held live festivals in the park where people get to become one of the seven core species: a dog, a Canada goose (just visiting!) a tree, grass… and, yes, a stag beetle. What they're not being, are people. So they're looking at the world through new eyes, hearing it with new ears, smelling, tasting, sensing in all ways - and the whole experience of what it is to live in this place as home, instead of just dropping in…becomes deeper, and more complex and more alive. And then each of the species can put forward ideas for the Interspecies Treaty of Finsbury Park which will make it a much better place for everyone - including the people.
And then - because Ruth's enthusiasm and expertise range widely over the ways things can be made more fair and equitable, as well as work better, she's designed the app that allows a much fairer voting system, so the people-become-MoreThanHumans can vote on the seven ideas put forward for the Treaty in ways that allows more nuance than simply ranking them.
This last became a whole other hour of conversation on voting systems and how we can create a decent democracy - so that's the bonus... well worth a listen!
The Treaty of Finsbury Park https://treaty.finsburypark.live/
CultureStake App https://culturestake.org/
Episode #163 https://accidentalgods.life/cultures-of-commoning/
Experiences of the Interspecies Festival https://www.islingtontribune.co.uk/article/now-we-know-how-trees-in-the-park-feel
Nordic LARP https://nordiclarp.org/
Quadratic Voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting
This is the part of the podcast where we talk about voting systems, specifically the quadratic voting on the blockchain that Ruth has made into an app that's in use in the Park. Then we moved into her work with Government ministries and big corporations, bringing the aliveness and liveliness, and special insight of Live Action Role Play into politics and industry to help people see things from a wider context. This is how we change the world: one new idea at a time...
What does it take to avoid global collapse? Is there still time? And if so, what are the societal, social, cultural and goal-oriented changes that we need to make to get there?
This week's guest is one of the new generation of super-thinkers who have the capacity, individually and collectively, to bring into being that better future our hearts know is possible.
Gaya Herrington received her first master’s degree in Econometrics from the Liberal University of Amsterdam and her second master’s in Sustainability from Harvard University. In between she worked for KPMG, for the Dutch Government as a regulator and then back to KPMG in the US, where she now lives. She is a member of the Transformational Economics Commission of the Club of Rome, a recurring guest lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and works at Schneider Electric as Vice-President of ESG Research.
She wrote her thesis for her second Masters on the seminal Limits To Growth work that first came out in 1972. The paper she wrote as a result of this went viral - and she expanded it into a book called Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse. She has made this freely available by download and I have put a link in the show notes - because this is absolutely essential reading for anyone on this path. The take home message though, as you'll hear, is that if we all work together, there is still time. Which should be a fairly familiar idea to those of you who have listened to other guests. But this time, we'll really unpick the data and concepts behind it in the company of someone who has worked hard at the coal face of the old system and has seen how to change it.
Gaya's book https://mdpi-res.com/bookfiles/mono/6206/Five_Insights_for_Avoiding_Global_Collapse.pdf?v1682069789
Gaya's paper at KPMG https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html
Manfred Max-Neef https://gaiafoundation.org/the-barefoot-economist-manfred-max-neef/
Club of Rome: Earth for All https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-book/
How do we make the case for a fully ecological farming system, that can feed all of us, while restoring the bio-sphere and providing affordable, nutritious food. How can we become a good keystone species - and what does that mean. This second episode with Chris Smaje, explores his new book, 'Saying No to a Farm Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and against Manufactured Foods.'
Chris was last a guest on the podcast in the spring of this year (2023), in episode 166, in which we explored his book 'A Small Farm Future' - what it meant, how he came to write it, and what a Small Farm Future might look and feel like. At the time, we veered toward the topic of the Eco-Modernist manifesto and in particular their concept that 'Precision Fermentation' is necessary to feed the world's population - and would enable us to dispense with farming, which they regard as the author of all the world's ills. Chris said then that he was writing something that would address this more directly and suggested he come back when it was ready.
And now his new book is ready, and he has come back to talk about it. The book absolutely does what it says on the tin, and does it well. Chris has a background in academia and his capacity for critical thinking shines through the text as he examines the good and the bad of the Eco-Modernist agenda, and in particular the new kid on the Eco-Modernist block, George Monbiot and his latest tract, Regenesis. He really dives deeply into the assertions that are made, takes them apart and shows the (many) places where they don't stack up.
At the end, he makes a heartfelt, grounded, and I think rather beautiful plea for us to rediscover our human place as a good keystone species, instead of feeling we have to wall ourselves up in concrete boxes eating manufactured food.
Chris's Book: Saying NO to a Farm Free Future https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future-the-case-for-an-ecological-food-system-and-against-manufactured-foods-chris-smaje/7448082?ean=9781915294166
Chris’s website smallfarmfuture.org.uk
Chris's blog https://chrissmaje.com/blog/
Chris on Twitter https://twitter.com/csmaje
Previous Accidental Gods episode https://accidentalgods.life/living-in-a-post-carbon-post-capital-post-urban-world/
Tyson Yunkaporta Sand Talk https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/sand-talk-how-indigenous-thinking-can-save-the-world-tyson-yunkaporta/3904066?ean=9781925773996
We are the Accidental Gods. We didn't plan to be the ones to hold the god-like power to destroy most of the life on this planet, but here we are, at a place where one single species - ours - has the capacity to do just this. The routes to Armageddon seem to be increasing all the time, but they all have one thing in common: they're predicated on our absolute disconnection from the web of life. It is a central tenet of this podcast that, for most of our evolutionary history, humanity has existed as an integral part of this web - and that we were aware of our connectedness. Quite how we lost this is open to question and I doubt if we'll ever find concrete answers: certainly I don't think speculation is worth a lot of emotional or intellectual bandwidth - because what really matters - what can and, I think, should, take up most of our energy in whatever time we have left - is finding ways to heal the rift, to re-connect us to the living web so that we can ask of it, 'What do you want of me?' and respond to the answers in real time. If you've listened to this podcast much, you've heard me say this once or twice before. Possibly more often. If you're a part of the wider Accidental Gods community and come along to our monthly Intention Intensives, then you've heard me say it Every. Single. Time. we meet. (!)
So, yes, finding ways to do this at scale is something of an obsession. I think it's the only way we're going to get through, and that if we can achieve it. we'll have made a significant shift in the evolution of our consciousness - our wisdom (the bit that AI will never be able to emulate). But one of the things from which I have steered quite clear is the field of psychedelics. There are a lot of reasons for this and we explore some of them in the podcast we're about to hear because I have found someone whose opinion I trust implicitly, who has direct experience of the use of psychedelics in a number of fields and whose integrity feels strong.
Dr Rosalind Watts is a clinical psychologist who was the former Clinical Lead of the 'psilocybin for depression' trial at Imperial College, London. She also gave a ground-breaking TEDx talk in 2017, in which she opened up the results of that first trial to her peers and to the world.
Since then, though, she has written a Medium post in which she points out some of the pitfalls of that trial, and opens up the concept that if we use psychedelics indiscriminately in a toxic culture, they are as likely to amplify the toxicity as they are to heal. Having realised this, and experienced some of the harm that plant medicines can do if not held within a supportive framework, Ros has gone on to found ACER Integration, a twelve month online course with monthly modules built around connections to and with trees - designed explicitly to create the supportive culture people need to integrate their experiences.
So - if you're expecting us to talk about all the multi-coloured wonders of psychedelics, then forget it, that's not what this podcast is about. It's about understanding the systemic nature of mental health, of cultural experience and of the ways plant spirits can act to change this. It's inspiring and it's a call to action, as well as a profoundly important health warning as we approach the brink of yet another tipping point.
ACER Integration: https://acerintegration.com/
Ros on Medium: https://medium.com/@DrRosalindWatts/can-magic-mushrooms-unlock-depression-what-ive-learned-in-the-5-years-since-my-tedx-talk-767c83963134
Ros on Newsnight https://headtopics.com/uk/psilocybin-calls-to-ease-restrictions-on-magic-mushroom-drug-39313183
Ros on Twitter https://twitter.com/drrosalindwatts
Ros on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalind-watts/
Ros Paper on Psychedelic link to Biophilia https://www.mdpi.com/2813-1851/2/2/12
ACER integration on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/acer-integration/
Psypan https://www.psypanglobal.org/
DoubleBlind paper https://doubleblindmag.com/colonialism-by-another-name/
Film - Psychedelic Chronicles https://psychedelicchronicles.earth/
Ros's TEDx talk https://youtu.be/8kfGaVAXeMY
The Hive w Camila Moreno https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-hive-podcast/id1387510537?i=1000612916498
This version of the summer solstice meditation has periods of silence in which you can explore your own feelings and observe the focus of your awareness. As with all meditations, please find a safe, quiet place where you can be completely undisturbed for the duration of the meditation - and a short while afterwards.
Thank you.
This version of the summer solstice meditation has birdsong overlaid so there is no silence. As with all meditations, please find a safe, quiet place where you can be completely undisturbed for the duration of the meditation - and a short while afterwards.
Thank you.
At the halfway point of the year, Manda looks back on what's been on the podcast, forward at (some of) what's to come, thoughts on where we're at as a world, and explores the books and podcasts that have stood out in the past six months.
Non fiction
A People’s Green New Deal by Max Ajl https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-people-s-green-new-deal-max-ajl/5731783?ean=9780745341750
Building Tomorrow by Paddy Le Fluffy https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Building-Tomorrow-by-Paddy-Le-Flufy/9781739345204
Spinning Out By Charlie Herzog Young https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Spinning-Out-by-Charlie-Hertzog-Young/9781804440315
Saying No to a Farm Free Future by Chris Smaje https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future-the-case-for-an-ecological-food-system-and-against-manufactured-foods-chris-smaje/7448082?ean=9781915294166
Two Lights by James Roberts https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/two-lights-james-roberts/7366651?ean=9781912836178
Post-Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in a time of collapse by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Post-Capitalist-Philanthropy-by-Alnoor-Ladha-Lynn-Murphy/9798986531007
Fiction
Black Water Sister by Zen Cho https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/black-water-sister-zen-cho/6464196?ean=9781509800018
The Grief Nurse – Angie Spoto https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-grief-nurse-angie-spoto/7230526?ean=9781914518171
Now She is Witch by Kirsty Logan https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/now-she-is-witch-a-witch-story-unlike-any-other-from-the-author-of-the-gracekeepers-kirsty-logan/7387771?ean=9781529116113
Habitat Man by DA Baden https://www.dabaden.com/habitat-man/
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-First-Fifteen-Lives-of-Harry-August-by-Claire-North/9780356502588
Frankie Boyle, Meantime https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/meantime-frankie-boyle/6521254?ean=9781399801157
Podcasts
Bankless Episode w Eliezer Yudkowsky https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bankless/id1499409058?i=1000600575387
Planet Critical – particularly the episode w Alastair Campbell https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/planet-critical/id1545009586?i=1000615243292
David Bollier’s Frontiers of Commoning, particularly the episode with Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/frontiers-of-commoning-with-david-bollier/id1501085005?i=1000615201925
Your Undivided Attention https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305
The Great Simplification https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/id1604218333
Sometimes the synchronicity of this podcast leaves me very happy. About six months ago, I was thinking that I wanted to talk to someone who really lived at the interface between science and spirituality, where I could begin to sand down some of the rough edges of my own thinking.
And that afternoon, I discovered that the 2nd edition of Professor Ursula Goodenough's book 'The Sacred Depths of Nature' was due to be published in the first half of this year. So we set up a podcast and then it turned out that my calendar management was haywire and I'd booked it for the day after teaching one of the most challenging of the shamanic dreaming courses. Normally I'd give myself several days to come back to something approaching consensus reality. You may think I don't spend a lot of time in CR as it is, and you'd be right, but there are degrees of my untethering and the day after a dreaming course is not my most tethered.
But in the end, it was magical - really good to re-read Ursula's book in the evening and then have a quiet day reflecting and exploring things that snagged my attention. And so here we are: Ursula is a Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University. She has discussed religious naturalism in essays, college classes, and as part of blogs and television and radio productions. She participated in conversations with the Dalai Lama sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute.
She is author of the book, “The Sacred Depths of Nature” which, examines cosmology, evolution, and cell biology, celebrates the mystery and wonder of being alive, and suggests that this orientation might serve as the basis for “planetary ethic” that draws from both science and religion. And on the basis of this concept, in 2014, Ursula was part of the founding of the Religious Naturalists Association. And now comes the second, updated, edition, that looks into epigenetics and pandemics and generally updates both the science and the moving reflections that each scientific section evokes.
It's beautiful, thoughtful, and inspiring. Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass said of it, “At once expansive and intimate, empirical and immanent, analytical and intuitive, material and spiritual, science and poetry get to dance joyfully together in these pages.” What better encouragement would we need to explore more deeply with the author? So People of the Podcast, please welcome Professor Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature
In 2023, Ursula was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Sacred Depths of Nature http://sacreddepthsofnature.com/
Order Ursula's book here http://sacreddepthsofnature.com/order-book/
Religious Naturalist Association https://religious-naturalist-association.org/welcome/
National Academy of Sciences https://source.wustl.edu/2023/05/goodenough-mckinnon-elected-to-national-academy-of-sciences/
Terence Deacon - The Symbolic Species https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733691.The_Symbolic_Species
Bitch by Lucy Cooke https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/bitch-a-revolutionary-guide-to-sex-evolution-and-the-female-animal-lucy-cooke/6532317?ean=9781804990919
This is the fourth of our ongoing series with Dr Simon Michaux. As ever, we ranged far and wide, but this time within the remit of 'what does the world look like in 2050 if we make good choices now?' Specifically, how do we construct and power our civilisation beyond the emergence of the new system. And yes, that's impossible to predict exactly, but it's not overly hard to make some basic observations - that we'll have phased out fossil fuels; that we'll reduce our inputs and outputs; that we'll live more simple, but higher quality lives. Specifically, we narrowed down on possible energy sources, and Simon proposed something which has been known for decades, but not put into practice, once again, with his trademark data to support his thesis. This one is genuinely hopeful - though of course we’ll have to completely rearrange our entire value system to put the living biosphere (current and future) ahead of profit - but we do know this... Enjoy!
Confessions of an Economic Hitman - Animated Short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYtb5zatgMg
Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/
This week's guest is fast becoming a friend of the Podcast. In the first part of what is now an ongoing series, Dr Simon Michaux outlined for us the nature of the materials crisis - the fact that there is simply not enough stuff, not enough copper or cobalt or lithium to continue to manufacture at the levels we have been - and there's not even enough to make the renewable (or, as Nate Hagens would call them, rebuildable) technology to replace the fossil fuel power we're going to have to stop using.
If you haven't listened to these two, please do, because lot of this conversation is predicated on that one, and on our second podcast where we looked at Michaux's hierarchy of needs and really delved into power generation in more depth.
I had planned that we'd look more at the remaining five of Simon's hierarchy of needs in this conversation, but - like most of these podcasts - the plan went out of the window when I asked how he was doing and it was clear that he'd been having some really interesting conversations. And so we went with this - because it seems to me that if the people who get it are multiplying, then it's useful for us to know this - we can support the narratives that unpick the 'business as usual' dynamics and begin to look forward to what will work. That's the core of this podcast - what can we do, how can we do it - and how can we ensure that enough people get this to create a global movement. We had to cut off faster than we'd like, so there will be (at least) a podcast four!
Simon Michaux Podcast 1 https://accidentalgods.life/transforming-industry-to-create-a-genuine-green-revolution/
Simon Michaux Podcast 2 https://accidentalgods.life/drawing-humanity-out-of-the-cave-with-dr-simon-michaux/
Gail Tverberg 'Our Infinite World: https://ourfiniteworld.com/
William Rees: https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/william-rees/
GOES REPORT http://goesfoundation.com/news/posts/2021/june/plastic-and-toxic-chemical-induced-ocean-acidification-is-causing-a-plankton-crisis-and-will-devastate-humanity-in-the-next-25-years/
Dr John Collins worked for the UK's Central Electricity Generating Board in the days when such things were nationalised industries. His PhD involved creating a real-time dosimeter for workers in nuclear plants so they didn't have to wait 2 weeks to learn the results of the film-based dosimeters that were in use. In doing so, he saved the CEGB considerable amounts of money - and, mere importantly, saved the lives and health of the men and women who worked there.
Thus began a lifetime working at the leading edge of business where innovation meets ethics and morality so that now, he is the Ethics and Responsible Innovation Advisor at Machine Intelligence Garage and on the Ethics Advisory Board at Digital Catapult. He's writing a book called 'A History of the Future in Seven Words.'
With all this, he's an ideal person to open up the worlds of business, innovation and technology. In a wide-ranging, sparky, fun conversation, we explore what might make AI safe, how a future might look with sustainable business, whether 1.5 is 'still alive' and if that's even a useful metric - and how much power does it take to post an Instagram picture compared to making a plastic bottle (spoiler alert: it's the same power and the same CO2 generated - assuming both use the same power source and if the image is stored for 100 years... which the way we're going, might not happen. But still... ).
John on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjohnlcollins/
Digital Catapult https://www.digicatapult.org.uk/
Rupert Read is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, but he is also a Green party activist, and a prolific speaker, media spokesperson and author advocating for a wholehearted, whole-culture response to the Climate and Ecological Emergency.
A long-term friend of the podcast, Rupert joins us today to talk about his new book: 'Do You Want to Know the Truth: The Surprising Rewards of Climate Honesty' and to announce the launch of a new movement, the Moderate Flank, which aims to bring together a moderate majority of people who care deeply about anthropogenic climate change, but don't want to engage in polarising actions. In this deeply honest, raw episode, Rupert makes a passionate case for an anti-polarising movement which can engage people from all walks of life and furnish them with the tools for change that will help us to adapt to the coming changes - and to ensure that politically, economically, culturally, we create a more just, equitable - and regenerative - society that we can leave to the generations that come after us.
Rupert's new book https://249897.e-junkie.com/product/1756224/Do-you-want-to-know-the-truth3F-The-surprising-rewards-of-climate-honesty
Rupert's Website https://rupertread.net/
Rupert's SubStack: https://rupertread.substack.com/
Rupert on Twitter https://twitter.com/GreenRupertRead
Moderate Flank: https://moderateflank.org
As we do each year, we've curated a list of the Accidental Gods' favourite podcast and books of 2022. Enjoy!
Podcasts
Nate Hagens The Great Simplification - fourth of four (so far) with Daniel Schmachtenberger
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/id1604218333?i=1000583952697
The Sustainable Food Trust episode with Dr Michael Antoniou
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sustainable-food-trust-podcast/id1511133906?i=1000559083233/
Global Governance Futures with Jacqueline McGlade
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-governance-futures-imperfect-utopias-or-bust/id1548522280?i=1000544342241
ITS BLOODY COMPLICATED by Compass - Episode with Byron Fay of Climate 200
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/its-bloody-complicated-a-compass-podcast/id1502390267?i=1000582130469
Catherine Weetman Circular Economy Podcast
Catherine musing on sustainabilty https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/circular-economy-podcast/id1465879853?i=1000583550758
Catherine with Simon Hombersely of Xampla https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/circular-economy-podcast/id1465879853?i=1000582020564
The rest is politics w Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart - episode w Mark Drakeford
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-rest-is-politics/id1611374685?i=1000579634739
Non-Fiction Books
The Club on the Edge of Town - Alan Lane
https://salamanderstreet.com/product/the-club-on-the-edge-of-town-paperback/
Flourish - Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
https://www.triarchypress.net/flourish.html
https://www.flourish-book.com
A People's Green New Deal - Max Ajl
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341750/a-peoples-green-new-deal/
Our Farming Life - Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer
https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/our-wild-farming-life/
(also A Dairy Story - David and Wilma Finlay of The Ethical Dairy)
https://www.theethicaldairy.co.uk/cheese-shop/dairy-story
Louis Weinstock: How the World is Making our Children Mad and What to Do about it
https://louisweinstock.com/how-the-world-is-making-our-children-mad-and-what-to-do-about-it/https://www.naominovik.com/2022/09/published-today-the-golden-enclaves/
The Barn at the End of the World by Mary Rose O'Reilley The Apprenticeship of a Quaker Buddhist Shepherd
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Barn-End-World-Apprenticeship-Buddhist/dp/1571312544
Novels
The Kingdoms - Natasha Pulley
https://natashapulley.co.uk/books/
and
https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-kingdoms/9781526623119
Tuyo - Rachel Neumeier
https://www.rachelneumeier.com/writing/tuyo/
Kingdom of Silence Jonathan Grimwood (also Jack Grimwood and Jon Courtenay Grimwood)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingdom-Silence-Jonathan-Grimwood-ebook/dp/B086R544MD/
Naomi Novik - The Golden Enclaves - Lesson 3 in the Scholomance Trilogy
https://www.naominovik.com/2022/09/published-today-the-golden-enclaves/
The Stranger Times by CK McDonnell (also The Dublin Trilogy by Caimh McDonnell) BUNNY McGARRY
https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-stranger-times-the-stranger-times-1/9780552177344
https://whitehairedirishman.com
also Kevin Hearn Ink and Sigil series
https://kevinhearne.com/books/ink-sigil/
Charlie Fisher is a co-founder and director of the Co-operative Architecture Practice, Transition by Design. He's a researcher and urban-instigator working on regenerative land use approaches and more collaborative forms of city-making driven by the belief that to unlock collective imagination for equitable societies we must remove structural barriers that are preventing people from connecting with one another.
His role over the past decade has been to build capacities within land-based organisations, primarily around urban affordable housing and mechanisms for holding land in the commons. He writes about, and runs workshops on, group dynamics, decision-making, housing finance, incorporation approaches, legal structures, stakeholder mapping, business planning, and visioning.
In 2020, he was developing the Oxygen Fund, a £5m revolving equity fund with the Oxfordshire Growth Deal, which led him to explore how regenerative land usecan be supported through Distributed Co-operative Organisations (DisCOs🕺) and web3 Regenerative Finance (ReFi) projects.
He is in the core team of regenerative blockchain-based property developer Oasa, a Swiss Association, which bought its first piece of land in 2021 at Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal. In building this ecosystem together, he is the interface between various thematic working ‘circles’ and has led the design of our sociocratic coordination system.
He is an adviser to the Center for Community Land Trust Innovation, and in 2023 he’ll be running a cohort-based course, Unearthing Common Ground, with 50 land trusts globally and 50 regenerative web3 projects to support exchange between traditional land trust projects and web3 practitioners.
In this conversation, we open up the key question of building communities: what does it take to create the connections between people that make communities work? What questions matter and how do we know which things we can leave till later? How do we move from consensus to consent so that things move forward at the speed we need as our material supply chains falter? How can we engage the best in human creativity to build communities that will have the flexibility, heart and coherence to survive? Charlie is deeply embedded in so many of these questions, and finding ways through that work in the real world. With any luck at all, we'll be moving onto a 2nd conversation when a couple more of our hundred day segments have passed - so if you have questions, let me know.
Charlie's super site https://charliefisher.super.site/
Transition by Design https://transitionbydesign.org/
Community Land Trust network https://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/
Garden City Principles https://tcpa.org.uk/garden-city-principles/
Nabeel Hamdi: Small change: Intelligent Practice and Practising intelligence https://uk.bookshop.org/books/intelligent-practice-and-practising-intelligence/9781844070053
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/garden-communities-set-to-flourish-across-england
LILAC in Leeds http://www.lilac.coop/
Oasa Earth (which incorporates the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal) https://oasa.earth/
Belina Raffy, Empress and Improvisation guide, is the director of Maffick Ltd & Applied Improvisation and Thrivability thought-leader, Thrivable World Quest co-founder and global captain.
She used to work in London and New York as an Executive for one of the largest global financial institutions, in 13 years, she saw many people struggle with burn-out. She studied improvisation to find out:
1) how these skills help individuals respond to the unexpected, and navigate ambiguity
2) how it can transform our organizations as a whole. She encourages people to explore what happens when we consciously align our work with how nature and people thrive.
She believes that our ability to improvise gives us a choice about how to respond to life’s challenges. Improvisation helps us develop our creative thinking skills in service of a happier life, and play a vital part in our response to our complex, dynamic world.
It is her passion to spread these mindsets and practices and support others discover the power of improvisation.
In this sparkling, thought-provoking episode, we explore the differences between stand-up and improv, and how the structures of either and both can allow us to reach past the tribal screaming of our time, to a more gentle, compassionate, connected way of reaching each other. Humour reaches the places that charts, data and stats never will - and Belina has years of experience in creating spaces where people can find what matters most to them, and share it in ways that make us laugh - and care.
Belina's website https://www.maffick.com/
Belina at Wisdom Together https://www.wisdomtogether.com/belina-raffy-maffick-ltd/
Belina's book https://www.maffick.com/#the-book
Belina on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi1EGkh_vzg
Upcoming courses
1-hour online ‘Compassionate Climate Comedy’ on 7 Nov
And next 7-week Sustainable Stand Up course starts 19 Jan
Details at https://www.sustainablestandup.com/#courses
Inga Foundation http://www.ingafoundation.org/
Red Cross Disaster Risk Reduction https://climatecentre.live/courses/participate/
The Frontier Development Lab https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/ and https://fdleurope.org/ .
Neal Lawson was brought up in an activist household and joined the Labour party at sixteen. After university, he worked for the Transport and General Workers' Union and then was a speech writer for Gordon Brown during the New Labour years.
He has been helping to lead the political campaign group, Compass, since its formation in 2003. He is more focused than ever on how to make big transformative change happen. He works on strategy, relationships, funding and fronting Compass.
He writes for The Guardian,[9] the New Statesman[10] and OpenDemocracy[11] about equality, democracy and the future of the left, and appears on TV and radio as a political commentator. He was the author of All Consuming (Penguin, 2009), which analysed the social cost of consumerism. Lawson's writing has been heavily influenced by the late Polish Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who described him as “one of the most insightful and inventive minds on the British political stage”.
Compass itself is a home for those who want to build and be a part of a Good Society; one where equality, sustainability and democracy are not mere aspirations, but a living reality. We are founded on the belief that no single issue, organisation or political party can make a Good Society a reality by themselves so we have to work together to make it happen. Compass is a place where people come together to create the visions, alliances and actions to be the change we wish to see in the world.
In this episode, we explore the recent history of politics in the UK and then open more deeply into the routes by which our manifestly broken political system could be transformed into something that will - in Neal's words - transform the brief flaring fireworks of hope into floodlights that can transform our nation, and the world.
Compass https://www.compassonline.org.uk/campaigns/winasone/
Compass 45 Degrees paper https://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/45o-change-transforming-society-from-below-and-above/
What is Quadratic Voting? https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-quadratic-voting-4f81805d5a06
It's Bloody Complicated podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/its-bloody-complicated-a-compass-podcast/id1502390267
Book: Four Thousand Weeks https://uk.bookshop.org/books/four-thousand-weeks-the-smash-hit-sunday-times-bestseller-that-will-change-your-life-9781784704001/9781784704001
Dr Roz Savage MBE is an Ocean Rower, Author, Speaker, Lecturer, Sustainability Advocate. Her feats have been described by Sir Richard Branson as “Heroic, epic, inspiring, historic.” Best known as the first (and so far only) woman to row solo across the world’s “Big Three” oceans - the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian - Roz inspires us to think again about what is possible, and encourages us to step up fully into the potential of our highest selves.
She combines her self-taught life skills with principles from neuroscience, psychology, personal development and leadership theory, to inspire people around the world. In 2010 she was named Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. In 2012 she was a World Fellow at Yale. In 2013 she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to fundraising and the environment. In 2017 she took up a position at Yale, lecturing on Courage in Theory and Practice.
She's author of four books, the most recent of which, The Ocean in a Drop, is published in November 2022. She's a committed and vibrant speaker whose experiences have reached audiences across the world with her example of the potential for transformation that lies within all of us. In our conversation, we delved into her experience of the oceans - what led her to throw in her job and take instead to the high seas - and then how she is using the self-knowledge she gained then, the emotional, mental and spiritual transformation that arose, to bring change to the world around us. We explore politics and economics and theories of change that bring us to the cutting edge of what is possible.
Roz's website https://www.rozsavage.com/about/
Ross book https://www.rozsavage.com/author/
Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-shock-doctrine-the-rise-of-disaster-capitalism/9780141024530
Elinor Ostrom https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=elinor+ostrom+governing+the+commons
Rebecca Solnit http://www.rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/
Three Horizons Framework for Future Thinking: https://h3uni.org/tutorial/three-horizons/
Daniel Schmachtenberger 'strange attractors' https://civilizationemerging.com/about/
Fediverse https://www.fediverse.to/
B. Lorraine Smith is a writer, speaker, corporate mischievist, and generally curious student of life. She changes minds (most often her own), casting a dubious eye on the line between work and play. She holds a vision of a future where all industry is a force for healing and any exceptions compost themselves into history.
She has been working towards this vision with global companies since 2004, bringing together activists, executives and thought-leaders. she shares what she finds as she goes along, telling as much truth as she can figure out how to spell. (Or, in the case of Matereality, how to respell.)
Originally from Toronto, Canada, she spent a decade based in New York City and recently relocated to Montreal, all the better to explore the banks of the St. Lawrence River (whom she calls Lia).
She runs ultra-long distances on urban trails, spins and knits her own original designs, and holds doggedly to the belief that our senses of connectedness and curiosity are our best assets.
She is an independent consultant whose purpose is to contribute to the shift to a regenerative economy, one where society thrives within a healthy biosphere. Her areas of expertise inform each other – as a writer, consultant, ultramarathoner, textile artisan and sojourner. She describes her approach as “spore-based,” taking a cue from nature about how to evolve and spread important ideas.
Lorraine has consulted for leading change-agents and large companies, informing strategy and stakeholder dialogue to shift us to a regenerative economy. She is also a frequent speaker at conferences on sustainability and corporate innovation.
She speaks fluent French and Portuguese, as well as conversational German and Spanish. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Lorraine has lived in Australia, Brazil, Germany, New Zealand and New York City. She currently calls Montréal home.
In this episode, following on from our conversation with Jennifer Hinton 2 episodes ago, we delve deeply into the concepts that underpin Lorraine's idea of 'Matereality' - what it is, and how her experience as a 'sustainability consultant' to some of the world's largest companies has led her to a new way of assessing the impact a business actually has on the planet and people it is, in theory, designed to serve.
What would the world be like if corporations actually decided to benefit people and planet? Actually. Not their share holders or the vulture capitalists?
With grace, humility and endless humour, Lorraine describes her journey and her conclusions of how we could re-shape the business world in time to change the trajectory towards global melt-down. This is an episode full of ideas at the corporate level, that we can nonetheless bring into our own lives. We all live in the corporate world. Even if we don't talk at C-Suite level, we are the glue that holds everything together - and we can change the ways we interact with the corporate Masters of the Universe.
Lorraine's website https://www.blorrainesmith.com/matereality
Website https://www.blorrainesmith.com
YouTube Lorraine's Channel
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/BLorraineSmith/
Twitter @BLorraineSmith
Instagram blorrainesmith
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-lorraine-smith-155a875/
Medium https://blorrainesmith.medium.com/dear-mr-hagedorn-b9e5e1c7672d
Sarah Ichioka is co-author with Michael Pawlyn of 'Flourish' a rich, inspiring book that outlines key paradigm shifts for this time of planetary emergency. Looking deeply into the web of life, Flourish proposes a bold, imaginative - and do-able - set of regenerative principles to transform how we design, make and manage our buildings and our communities.
Sarah is an urbanist, curator, writer and podcast host. Connecting cities, culture and ecology, she has been recognised as a World Cities Summit Young Leader, and one of the Global Public Interest Design 100. She is founding director of the Singapore-based strategic consultancy 'Desire Lines' and is co-author, with Michael Pawlyn, of the book 'Flourish' and co-host with Michael of the Flourish podcast.
In this expansive, incisive conversation, Sarah expands on the five paradigms she and Michael identified that are holding us back in the old 'business as usual' frame and the ways we can shift our world-view to new ways of thinking, being - and designing our lives.
Drawing on the work of foundational thinkers like Freya Matthews, Donella Meadows, Janine Benyus and Ronan Krznaric, plus existing communities such as the Los Angeles Eco Village, Sarah shows us that the ideas and actions are already in place, we just need to build them bigger, proving that, as Willam Gibson has said, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.
Flourish book: https://www.flourish-book.com
Flourish podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/flourish-systems-change/id1602779076
Donella Meadows Leverage Points: https://donellameadows.org/a-visual-approach-to-leverage-points/
Freya Matthews: http://www.freyamathews.net
Jay Griffiths 'Pip Pip': http://jaygriffiths.com/books/pip-pip/
Ronan Krznaric 'The Good Ancestor' :https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-good-ancestor-how-to-think-long-term-in-a-short-term-world/9780753554517
Deep Time Walk App: https://www.deeptimewalk.org/kit/app/
Los Angeles Eco-Village: https://laecovillage.org
Built Environment Declares: https://builtenvironmentdeclares.com
Architects Climate Action Network: https://www.architectscan.org
Dr Jennifer Hinton is a Research Fellow at the University of Stockholm, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute. She was a Marie Curie PhD Fellow in Stockholm, investigating our Relationship to Profit and how a Not for Profit model of businesses and markets might transform the world. She's a co-director of the Post Growth Institute and, with Robbie MacLurcan, co-wrote 'How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-For-Profit world.
She is a sustainability researcher, activist and practitioner with a broad range of professional and academic experience. Her work explores the relationships between core aspects of common business structures (including ownership, legal purpose, and profit-orientation) and global sustainability challenges. In doing so, she uses systems analysis methods in order to better understand how dominant business structures in the current economy are driving unsustainable dynamics at the scale of the aggregate economy, and how different business structures might lead to very different dynamics. This highlights pathways for systemic change for a more sustainable economy in the future.
Her work is part of an EU-funded program called 'AdaptEconII: Adapting to a New Economic Reality'.
Envisioning a not for profit future: Paper https://nonprofitquarterly.org/envisioning-a-not-for-profit-world-for-a-sustainable-future/
Jennifer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-hinton-758a544/
Paper: Fit for Purpose: https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/2231/
Paper: A Not for Profit Economy for a Regenerative Sustainable World: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359043036_A_Not-For-Profit_Economy_for_a_Regenerative_Sustainable_World
Paper: Five Key Dimensions of Post Growth Business: Putting the Pieces Together: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351610225_Five_Key_Dimensions_of_Post-Growth_Business_Putting_the_Pieces_Together
Paper: Relationship to Profit A Theory of Business Markets and Profit for Social Ecological Economics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348742711_Relationship-to-Profit_A_Theory_of_Business_Markets_and_Profit_for_Social_Ecological_Economics
Glas Cymru: https://corporate.dwrcymru.com/en/about-us/company-structure/glas-cymru
BRAC: http://www.brac.net
Myuma: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-myuma-group/about/
Book: How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not for Profit World: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01398
Jennifer on Twitter: @Hintojen
Tim Jackson Prosperity without Growth: https://timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/pwg/
Patagonia going Not For Profit: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/14/patagonias-billionaire-owner-gives-away-company-to-fight-climate-crisis-yvon-chouinard
Isla McLeod is a creator of ceremonies, ritual designer, transformational healer and companion at the thresholds. She has dedicated her life to bridging the gap between humanity and the soul of the earth. In her new book, 'Rituals for Life: A guide to creating meaningful rituals inspired by nature', she brings decades of experience in creating ritual and ceremony to the exploration of what ritual is and how it can enhance our lives, returning our sense of engagement, of being part of something greater, of 'turning up the dial on the beautiful'.
In this, our second conversation on the podcast, we explore the origins of the book in Isla's own childhood in Nigeria and Japan, and the sense she had of being surrounded by rituals that held real power to connect. From there, we explore her sense of devotion to the Earth as a living being as she encountered it in Dartmoor and the sense of ritual as a doorway to the sacred. We delve deeply into what ritual is and how we can each create our own rituals for the thresholds that matter: what the key ingredients are and what we can play with and make our own. And finally, we explore a ritual for each season, that touch on different aspects of our lives, different thresholds and doorways.
Isla McLeod website: https://islamacleod.com/
Isla on Accidental Gods podcast #111 https://accidentalgods.life/earth-alchemy/
Martin Prétchel Book 'Long Life, Honey in the Heart' : https://wordery.com/long-life-honey-in-the-heart-martin-prechtel-9781556435386
For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as forager-hunters, our lives intimately entwined with the lives - and then deaths - of the animals that we ate. And then we cut that link and now we eat meat in plastic packages with cute pictures on the front to remove our awareness of the death that has arisen. And yet at our deepest levels, we know that meat is murder. How do we resolve this paradox?
Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association.
The Meat Paradox is his first book and it's one of the best, deepest, and most genuinely engaging that I've read of the many that seek to address the huge cultural divide that surrounds our consumption of meat. This is a book that delves into neuroscience (denial, cognitive dissonance and the lies we tell ourselves), indigenous spiritual/shamanic practice, ancient ancestral practice as depicted in cave paintings that were created over a span of 30,000 years (that's a long time for an art form) and the actual experience of what it is to stand in an abbatoir and make eye contact with a cow as she walks into the stun cage.
Reading this book will change your life. Talking to Rob on the podcast was a joy and an inspiration and we ranged across all of these subjects and more. We didn't get to the last-line dedication to Odin, which I had thought would be the core of the podcast, but then I discovered in the pre-recording conversations that Odin is a rescue dog (which is wonderful, but not quite the backbone of a shamanic/spiritual podcast that I'd imagined).
Nonetheless, this is a deeply felt, deeply touching podcast that delves deep into the very meat of our identities in the modern world.
The Meat Paradox: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9781408713815
Web: rob-percival.com https://rob-percival.com/
Twitter: @rob_percival_ https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_
IPES report: The Politics of Protein: http://ipes-food.org/pages/politicsofprotein
Sustainable Food Trust Report: 'Feeding Britain': https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/our-work/feeding-britain/
LRB: A Million Shades of Red by Adam Mars-Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/adam-mars-jones/a-million-shades-of-red
Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist. Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of myth, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, social and environmental problems we face today.
As well as writing five books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted, her writing has appeared in several international media outlets, among them the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Scotsman. Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise.
In today's episode, we explore the writing of Sharon's latest book, HAGITUDE: what it is, how it came about, how the powerful old women of the European folk tales provide a model for what it is to live in the second half of life: we explore alchemy, the magic of the land, the Cailleach, death, dying...and Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax as the ultimate role model for older age!
HAGITUDE website: https://hagitude.org
Sharon Blackie personal website: https://sharonblackie.net
Sharon's podcasts dedicated to Hagitude: https://hagitude.org/podcast/
Accidental Gods Episode 90: https://accidentalgods.life/thresholds-of-being/
Sunday Times Review of Hagitude: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hagitude-by-sharon-blackie-review-busting-the-menopause-myth-dl0n6bbjx
Sophie Docker is a highly experienced workshop leader, facilitator and mediator working in organisations, education and community. She is Level 3 trained in restorative Justice and CNVC Certified Nonviolent Communication trainer with a number of other decision-making, dialogue communication and conflict engagement tools up her sleeve.
Sophie has a Politics and Economics Degree and a post-graduate diploma in Law and experience working with social environmental and economic justice. She is committed to exploring how we can all walk ourselves out of separation, polarisation and violence into
connection, liberation and interdependence. Passionate about working with conflict as a driver for change, she works with groups, communities and organisations facilitating dialogue and supporting individual and systemic transformation.
She has a degree in Politics and Economics and a Postgraduate diploma in Law but most of her learning came from meditation, and wide and wild experiments in living, being in community, collaborating and organising in economic, social and environmental justice campaigns and movements. Sophie's approach is underpinned by Nonviolent Communication and Restorative Practice, which she has been working with since 2012. She is a Restorative Justice practitioner registered with the Restorative Justice council and a Certified Trainer with the Centre for Nonviolent Communication and brings a systemic lens to these approaches using them personally and professionally to engage with presenting issues.
Sophie's work focuses on transforming internal and external domination systems and experiencing ourselves as essential to life, and as part of a complex adaptive living system. Her work is influenced by relational neuroscience, transactional analysis, meditation, multiple conflict engagement modalities and a deep exploration into the dynamics of personal and structural power, privilege, violence and its impacts.
In this episode, we explore the nature of our binary tribalism, our tendency to 'other' that which we don't understand and to become triggered when challenged. And then, with Sophie's guidance and experience, we talk of the ways we can move beyond that - how she has learned and is learning to step beyond our age-old tools of domination and power-over, into something where we allow our own pain but don't feel the need to project it out - and by being different, allow different outcomes.
Links:
Restorative Engagement Forum: https://restorativeengagementforum.com
Open Edge: https://www.openedge.org.uk
Sophie's page on the Nonviolent Communication Training portal: https://nvctraining.com/nvc-trainer/sophie-docker
Zineb Mouhyi is the co-founder of two charitable organizations, YouthxYouth & the Weaving Lab.
YouthxYouth is a movement to radically reimagine the future of education with the goal of accelerating the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their education.
The Weaving Lab is a global community of practice with the mission of advancing the field of weaving, understood as the practice of interconnecting ideas, people, projects, organizations, places, and ecologies to support systems change.
Zineb is also a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) where she collaboratively explores the question: How might we facilitate a planetary transition toward systems that serve all life?
In this episode, we explore the death of the old system and the birth of the new: how can the older generations become the allies the younger generations need? How can we explore together what it is to live in the wreckage of a dying system and how can we be part of the emergence of something new, generative and flourishing?
Because Zineb is deeply involved in education systems and how they might change, we explore how current education is often designed to facilitate control, to deliver workers who follow rules and orders, not lively activists who think for themselves. From here, we delve into the ways young people can reclaim their own education and mould it to serve the world that could be woven into being, not the one that is dying; how they can shift from One Truth thinking to the understanding of many truths; from linear concepts to systemic thinking, to the ways we might create toolkits to untangle ourselves from the depradations of capitalism.
We explore ways to leapfrog change, to put people, project and places at the heart of a global community of practice, to move out of the logic of separation into the logic of connection.
This is a conversation grounded in living practice of the ideals Accidental Gods endeavours to promote: finding ways to be the change, so that we might birth a new future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us... but really talking to those younger than us and finding what they need and how we can help them.
Links:
- https://www.youthxyouth.com/
- https://weavinglab.org/
- https://www.ciis.edu/
- https://curriculumforlife.com/
Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer met while working as rangers for the National Trust and soon realised that they shared a dream to live closer to the land. They bought Lynbreck Croft at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park in the Highlands of Scotland in March 2016 - 150 acres of pure Scottishness - with no experience farming but a huge passion for nature and the outdoors.
Now, they raise their own animals and sell the produce, grow their own fruit and vegetables, and are as self-sufficient as they can be, alongside producing food for their local community and hosting educational tours and running courses.
Hailed as Best Crofting Newcomers in 2018, they were given the Food and Farming Award by the RSPB in Nature of Scotland Awards in 2019 and were nominated for Nature Champions of the Decade as part of teh Nature of Scotland 10th anniversary.
They have appeared in the series This Farming Life on BBC2 and have written the book, 'Our Wild Farming Life', linked below.
Lynn and Sandra were newcomers to farming and to regenerative concepts, but in the past 6 years, as they have faced success and (some) failures and learned from both, they have seen regenerative farming becoming a far more widely held concept.
In this heart-felt episode, we begin by exploring the writing process, and how Lynn, a new writer, came to write such a fluent book.
From there, we delve deeply into the practicalities of farming in a relatively inhospitable landscape, but also explore the spiritual nature of land-connection, the ways we can give the animals with which we share our lives the fullest capacity to be all that they can be, so that we can become all that we can be: so that we can feel safe, and held in connection to the land and the tribes of the more than human world that surround us.
Lynbreck Croft: https://www.lynbreckcroft.co.uk
Lynbreck on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lynbreckcroft/
Our Wild Farming Life: book: https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/our-wild-farming-life/
Holding a Ph.D. in (Ecological) Economics and having studied international development, political science, and management, Thomas Legrand works in the field of sustainability for UN agencies, private companies, and NGOs. His focus is on forest conservation, climate change, sustainable finance, and organizational transformation.
His spiritual journey began at the age of 23 with an encounter with native spirituality in Mexico, before embracing the wisdom of a wide range of traditions and practices, including meditation, energetic healing and Tai-chi-chuan. He lives with his wife and their two young daughters near Plum Village, the monastery of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the South West of France, his country.
His spiritual search, his thought as a social scientist and his professional experience have gradually converged on the importance of spiritual wisdom in humanity’s ongoing transition. Searching for a way to mainstream this understanding in the political and sustainability conversation, he has dedicated much of the last 10 years to researching and reflecting how we can radically rethink our model of development.
The result is his book, 'The Politics of Being: Wisdom and Science for a new Development Paradigm' which synthesises so many of the foundations of Accidental Gods - the merging of a universal spirituality, grounded in connection with the web of life, and a political and social framework for a new way of organising ourselves and each other.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss how Thomas first encountered shamanic spirituality and then explore the ideas that are the backbone of his book: how do we shape our new reality and, crucially, who is already doing so?
Links
Politics of Being website: https://politicsofbeing.com
The Politics of Being: book https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Politics-of-Being-by-Legrand-Thomas/9782957758302
Video intro to the book: https://politicsofbeing.com
Politics of Being Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/politicsofbeing
Thomas on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-legrand-b8406215/
Politics of Being on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/politics-of-being/
By now it's obvious that our current system is destroying all life on the planet - and our food/farming system is key both to the current levels of destruction: industrial farming is eroding soil, poisoning the biosphere on land and sea, gobbling up fossil fuels and harming our health.
Conversely, local community agriculture projects that link together viable enterprises in a network of circular economies is one part of the key to a viable, flourishing future.
Liberty Nimmo is part of a three-person team (The Three Turnips CSA) at Lower Hampen Farm in the English Cotswolds that is working towards a viable future. Their work aims to provide an environment where nature is allowed to flourish and thereby help to support a sustainable, diverse system of agriculture. In this holistic, regenerative approach they wish to benefit all life, building soil health, contributing to cleaner air and improving water quality. They operate a low input, low output farming system and constantly strive to reduce our energy requirements and aim to become carbon negative.
Liberty herself is a Regenerative Horticultural Grower, and the Founder of Nimmo Skincare which uses Pasture Fed Tallow as a key ingredient, along with home grown oil infused herbs. Liberty has a lifelong interest in herbal medicine and using local plants on people and livestock and combines her work at the farm with part time Italian Travel Consultancy.
In this episode, we explore the practicalities of starting from scratch in the evolution of a new regenerative project: what are the aims and values that underpin it, and how can a network of enterprises grow up, each sustaining the others, so that the end result is a community supported agriculture project that feeds and nurtures the local community.
Links:
Hampen Farm
Nimmo SkinCare
FiberShed
Zero Dig
Charles Dowding No Dig Growing
Huw Richards YouTube Channel (Growing)
Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons
Outrage and Optimism w Jacqueline Novogratz: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/outrage-optimism/id1459416461?i=1000570653731
Nicole Masters: For the Love of Soil: https://www.farmingsecrets.com/mentor/nicole-masters/
James Brown is an athlete, inventor, social entrepreneur, multi-Paralympian gold medal winner - and climate activist. There was a time when James was known most for his astonishing achievements across many sports. Between 1980 and 2015, he took part in no less than five Paralympic Games (winter and summer) as well as eighteen World Championship events.
His range of disciplines was extraordinary: they included track running, cross-country skiing, triathlon, swimming, road/track cycling and guide-running. He has several Paralympic Gold medals, was holder of the 800m World Record for eight years and has three other World Firsts to his name, including being the first registered blind person to compete in a World Track Masters cycling event at the velodrome in Manchester.
In 2018, everything changed for James when his daughter - then at university - broke down in front of him in a cafe in Exeter and explained all she had been reading about the climate and ecological emergency. James wept with her, but she offered hope in the shape of the newly formed Extinction Rebellion, and the possibility that non-violent direct action might help foment change. James committed to being at her side in whatever actions she took and within weeks, they were walking arm in arm to the blocking of the five bridges that were the first London Extinction Rebellion action.
Since then, James has been arrested 13 times for his non-violent actions (once for spraying chalk paint on the road outside DEFRA in Bristol where it was raining so hard the chalk was washing off as they sprayed it one and was gone long before the arrest process was complete). Most recently, he spent two and a half months in Wandsworth prison for the action that propelled him to climate-activist super-stardom - when he climbed onto a plane at City Airport and superglued himself to the top. The Facebook Live video that he recorded at the time has gone viral and James received thousands of letters and emails while he was in prison, from people who felt desperate about the climate emergency and wanted to know how to find the same courage.
So this is what we explore in today's episode - courage and agency and activism in an age of total transformation. What can we do, and how can we find the courage to take the action we know the world needs?
James Brown Website: https://jamesbrownparalympian.co.uk
With a track record of founding startups at a young age, and executing entrepreneurial roles in global non-profits, Saurav Roy was selected as one of the youngest Global Shapers by the World Economic Forum at Bangalore in 2017. Since then, he has studied for a Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher Collage, and is now working for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based, independent financial think tank that strives to influence the nature of global finance, away from stranded fossil fuel assets. It has cemented the terms 'Carbon bubble', 'stranded assets' and 'unburnable carbon' into the financial lexicon.
Saurav's Master's thesis focused on the 'just transition' elements of the Green New Deal with the realisation that 'everything would change and everything would stay the same' in terms of the balance between the global north's endless consumption at the expense of human dignity, ecosystem annihilation and cultural balance in the global south. He examined the lack of supply chain justice in the existing concepts, evolved radical, inspiring ideas of how a global token system might fund non-debt-based climate reparations, and created the idea of a 'Carbon Truth and Reconciliation Commission' - because not all climate devastation can be healed simply by throwing money at it.
In this inspiring, thought-provoking episode, we explore these ideas in depth, evolving ideas and questions for COP27 and learn Saurav's three core concepts for healing our times.
Saurav on LinkedIn
Carbon Tracker Initiative
SDRs
Barbados PM Mia Motley: article
Jayati Ghosh
Ben is head of Horticulture and Forestry at the Soil Association. Author or co-author of eight books including Zero Waste Gargenind, The Woodchip Handbook and The AgroForestry Handbook, Ben holds specialist knowledge and experience that includes Community Supported Agriculture, woodchip, and starting up new horticultural businesses.
All told, he has been working in horticulture for more than 25 years and has been with the Soil Association since 2006.During that time he has chaired the DEFRA Edibles Horticulture Roundtable, sat on the boards of the Organic Growers Alliance and Community Supported Agriculture Network UK, and on the committee of the Farm Woodland Forum.
His own experience includes running a walled garden in Sussex supplying a Michelin starred restaurant, working for Garden Organic at their gardens in Kent and running the 10-acre horticultural production at Daylesford Organic Farm, before moving to the Welsh College of Horticulture as commercial manager.
More recently he is project managing an agroforestry planting at Helen Browning’s farm in Wiltshire and has acted as Horticultural Advisor and Board Member for the Community Farm near Bristol.
This conversation follows on from the one on Regenerative Farming with Caroline Grindod, as part of our ongoing exploration of how we can transform our food and farming systems, heading for the complete paradigm shift that we need to an entirely new system and a new way of being in the world, while allowing farmers, growers and ordinary people to continue to flourish in the existing system.
Ben is at the heart of an agro-forestry revolution in the UK and abroad, experimenting and gathering data and experience in the planting of trees as we move deeper into a changing climate. We talk about the practical implications of working with trees that, by their nature, require long term thinking and planning. We learn of the mistakes that have been made, and the accidental discoveries of things that work. We explore the changing face of farming, and how agro-forestry, sylvo-pasture and other ways of farming with trees can transform modern agriculture from being part of the problem, to being part of the solution.
Ben's Website
Ben at the Soil Association
Ben at the Sustainable Food Trust
Ben at LinkedIn
Ben's Books
The Woodchip Handbook
Plant a Tree and Save the World
Zero Waste Gardening
Books mentioned by Ben
The Reindeer Chronicles
Barn Club
Events and Organisations:
The Farm Woodland Forum
Caroline Grindrod is a consultant and coach in regenerative systems and leadership. Along with background in environmental conservation and upland land management, holistic management and experience in designing sustainable and regenerative food businesses, Caroline has a lifelong passion for personal development, wild spaces and a growing interest in regenerative leadership.
She draws upon that diverse range of skills and experience to offer an ever-evolving and truly unique approach to working with ‘keystone’ people in food and farming.
Our climate is changing month on month, year on year. Growing food has always been precarious, but never more so than now. Our global food system lacks resilience and people are starving in greater numbers than ever. If we believe the answer is not in yet more chemical inputs, or in growing food in vats that distance people ever more from the heart of the land, how can we foster resilient systems that enable people to heal our damaged landscapes while still growing good, nutritious, health-full food.
First of two episodes exploring regenerative farming in practice. The second is with Ben Raskin in 2 weeks' time.
Roots of Nature
Wilder Culture
Primal Meats
Caroline at LinkedIn
We Are Carbon (Caroline has featured on this podcast, and recommends it)
He is the creator of the Cynefin Framework, and originated the design of SenseMaker®, the world’s first distributed ethnography tool. He is the lead author of Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision makers, a shared effort between the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, and the Cynefin Centre.
He divides his time between two roles: founder Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Company and the founder and Director of the Cynefin Centre. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organisational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. By using natural science as a constraint on the understanding of social systems this avoids many of the issues associated with inductive or case-based approaches to research.
This episode ranges widely across the path of his life and his ideas, aiming always at the core question of our time: how do we create the best conditions for a generative future we'd be proud to leave to future generations? Dave is engaged in large-scale projects with, for instance, the NHS, and world governments to work out how to gather real information from people in ways that work and that can lead to generative outcomes. We explore ways to change the substrate of our culture, not by jamming new technology into the toxic niches of Facebook and Twitter, but by evolving new ways of engaging with each other that allow us to find the 'adjacent possible' - the next best thing that we can do in any situation.
If you want to connect more with the work that the Cynefin Company does, or to listen to aspects of Dave's work in more detail, please follow the links below.
Dave's TED talk
Dave Snowden blog
The Cynefin Company
Professor David J. Helfand, a faculty member at Columbia University for forty-five years, served nearly half of that time as Chair of the Department of Astronomy, a position he has again resumed. He also recently completed a four-year term as President of the American Astronomical Society, the professional society for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary scientists and solar physicists in North America. He is the author of nearly 200 scientific publications and has mentored 22 PhD students, but most of his pedagogical efforts have been aimed at teaching science to non-science majors. He instituted the first change in Columbia's Core Curriculum in 50 years by introducing science to all first-year students.
In 2005, he became involved with an effort to create Canada's first independent, non-profit, secular university, Quest University Canada. He served as a Visiting Tutor in the University's inaugural semester in the Fall of 2007 and was appointed President & Vice-Chancellor the following year to lead this innovative experiment in higher education. For six years in a row, Quest has been ranked #1 in North America in the National Survey of Student Engagement.
He completed his term as President of Quest in the fall of 2015 and returned to Columbia where he now heads the Committee on Innovative Teaching and Learning. His first book, "A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age" appeared in February 2016 and came out in paperback Aug 10, 2017.
In this episode, we explore the nature of higher education in a changing world and the models that could work as we move into a time when what matters is emotional literacy and resilience and the ability to garner ideas and synthesise them broadly rather than learning 'more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing.'
Prof Helfand TED Talk 'Designing an Education for the 21st Century'
Quest University in British Columbia
A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age by David J Helfand
Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal
Louis Weinstock is a psychotherapist who works with children adn the child within us all. He helps people find light in the darkness - in the things the are unseen, unheard and unspoken. For over 20 years, he has expertly guided children and adults through some of the toughest challenges life can throw at us - loss, trauma, divorce, burnout and breakdowns.
And now he has a new book: How our World is Making our Children Mad - and what to do about it.
He's taking 'mad' in both senses of the world - the one that means 'not fitting in with consensus reality' and the one that means 'massively angry - enough to go on strike and take to the streets'. With absolute compassion, deep wisdom and years of insight, he opens up seven roots of our trauma and the fruits of healing that each offers if we heal it.
In the podcast, we explore the origins of the book, and move beyond it to the ways we can heal ourselves and the divided culture in which we live. We touch on some of the moving case studies in the book, and the ways we can extend the learning they bring to ourselves, our inner children, and the children in our lives, always striving for healing of self and planet. I am always struck by Louis' deep authenticity, his emotional intelligence and his capacity to hold balance and find wisdom in the chaos of our world. As a starter for healing, this feels huge.
Louis' Website and Book: https://louisweinstock.com
The Visionaries: Rites of Passage: https://thevisionaries.org.uk/our-impact/
Donnachadh McCarthy is a professional eco-auditor, author and environmental campaigner. He is a former deputy chair of the Liberal Democrats and served on the board of the party for seven years. He is now not a member of any political party and enjoys working with people in all parties or none to address our common environmental crises. He is a former columnist with The Independent and has had articles printed in the Guardian, Times, Ecologist, Resurgence etc.
He is the author of Saving the Planet Without Costing the Earth, Easy Eco-auditing, and The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy has Been Bought. He is the co-founder of the successful cycling campaign group Stop Killing Cyclists. His environmental consultancy 3 Acorns Eco-audits helps deliver the Corporation of London’s City Bridge Trust eco-auditing programme for London charities. His Victorian home in Camberwell, was London’s first carbon negative home. It has solar electric and solar hot-water, a Clean Air Act compliant wood-burner, solid-wall insulation, rain-harvester and composting toilet.
In this rawly honest conversation, he lays out the reasons why he believes that if we are to survive the Great Derangement, the media must become the fourth pillar of the environment movement. Along the way, we discuss his visit to the Yanomami and how it changed his life, his political experience at the rotten core of Britain's corrupt political system, and his swan-dive into a new future on the stage at Covent Garden. Join us to reframe the setting of your intent.
Climate Media Coalition http://climatemediacoalition.org/
Donnachadh on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/donnachadh
Book: The Prostitute State: http://www.theprostitutestate.co.uk/buy.html
Pioneering the Possible by Scilla Elworthy
Professor. Janis Birkeland is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in the University of Melbourne. Janis has dedicated her personal, professional and academic life to figuring out what is genuine sustainability - how to plan for a built environment that is not just 'less bad' than the alternatives, but actually returns more to the land and the people who live in and around it thn whatever went before.
Throughout her professional career, she has been drawn to figuring out how cities and buildings, despite their huge impacts, can transform society and save the planet. First, she became an architect and urban designer, transferring into city planning. Later, she became a lawyer to better understand the barriers to systems change. Now she is an academic, author of many dozens of papers and a number of books, of which the most recent is ‘Net- Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development’. She is a clear and consistent advocate for the design of human settlements that are socially and ecologically ‘net positive’ and has just published "Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development" (Routledge) which provides methods, models and metrics to enable practitioners and students to create eco-positive environments. It also includes a free computer app to facilitate net-positive design
In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the myriad ways we could choose to design our buildings differently - and the many practical ways we could upgrade what exists as well as creating new models for what might arise.
Janis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janis-birkeland-84135120/
Net Positive Design Website
Algae-Tecture: https://carloratti.com/project/algaetecture/
Mycelial Bricks: https://wasterush.info/mycelium-construction/
https://whitneyfungifun.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/sustainability-of-mycelium-bricks/
https://happho.com/an-emerging-sustainable-construction-material-mycelium-bricks/
https://www.certifiedenergy.com.au/emerging-materials/emerging-materials-mycelium-brick
Phoebe Tickell is an imagination activist, renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur. Originally trained as a biologist (she has a first class degree in Biological Natural Sciences from Cambridge University), she now works across multiple societal contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and has worked in organisational design, advised government, the education sector and the food and farming sector. Until 2021 she was working in philanthropy at The National Lottery Community Fund to implement systems-thinking approaches to funding and and leading insight and learning in the £12.5 million Digital Fund.
On the way through, she has co-founded a series of organisations dedicated to systems change via innovative approaches, including 225 Academy, which delivered 5-day transformative experiences for young people aged 11-18 globally;Future Farm Lab, which created systemic interventions to the food system and the Our Field Project — an experiment in a group of citizens co-owning and co-governing a field of grain in Hertfordshire.
More recently, she is founder of Moral Imaginations and RenaissanceU, a member of Enspiral, part of the Don't Go Back to Normal Project, on the board of Renaissance U, and an advisor to the Consilience Project. She's a certified Warm Data Lab host and an advisor to the International Bateson Institute. She recently led 1,000 people in a Collective Imagination journey in Berlin and then 4,000 in Sweden.
In all of this, she took time out to talk to Accidental Gods about the nature of the present moment, how we can find the learning tools that will bridge to the future we want to envision, and how we translate those visions of the future into values. In a wide ranging, inspiring, edge-walking conversation, she explored the balance of inner and outer worlds, tangible and intangible and how we might connect them; she talks of falling in love with Solar Punk again (her Twitter handle is @solarpunk_girl, so that feels quite huge), having read that 'Solar Punk without the end of capitalism, is just greenwasher CyberPunk'. So we explore what cyber punk is, too, and Protopian writing, and how it relates to Thrutopian writing, before we move onto the nature of existing Solar Punk communities and how they frame their underlying values.
This was a genuinely sparky conversation: it felt as if we really dug deep into the nuts and bolts of change and how it could happen - come along for the ride!
SolarPunk links:
SOLARPUNK: Life in the future beyond the rusted chrome of yestermorrow
How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now (ft. @Andrewism)
How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future (ft. @Our Changing Climate)
Joe Brewer has separate bachelors degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a masters in atmospheric sciences. He is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and serial social entrepreneur who brings a wealth of expertise to the adoption of sustainable solutions at the cultural scale.
Among his notable achievements are the creation of an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society at the University of Illinois and design of new collaboration protocols for strategic communications among European NGO’s with WWF-UK and Oxfam, in the UK.
He was an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research from 2001 to 2005, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. He was a research fellow at the Rockridge Institute in 2007-08 analyzing political discourse in the United States. He contracted with the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva in 2010-11 to help build a globally-focused high performance computing facility dedicated to holistic simulations of the dynamic Earth.
His experiences as a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar weave together a combination of skills dedicated to open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action for catalyzing change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world.
More recently, he has moved to Colombia and is engaged in regenerating an area of dry desert with the aim of returning it to flourishing biodiversity. He has written The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and established Earth Regenerators, a community, a study group and a place to share ideas that will bring us closer to a prosocial world, focussed on bioregions where the human and More-Than-Human worlds integrate, where we organise with direct local democracy, create a steady state economy, based on shared values and not on growth, and where we predicate our actions on trusting the good intentions of others.
In this deep, penetrating conversation, full of radical honesty, we discuss the end of the holocene and its implications, explore the age of the anthropocene and what may come of it, and how all of us can become earth regenerators - what it means, and how it might work. Joe outlines the processes of his 8 week course and his new GoFundMe project to birth a bioregion.
Joe's Book: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-regenerating-earth/
Rieki Cordon of SEEDS says, 'We need a Renaissance over revolution because a revolution is technically just revolving. It’s having the same power structures, but with new people in power. What’s interesting about a Renaissance is it’s a fundamental shift of the paradigm. So it’s not something that’s “us vs them”; like a revolution where the mission is often, “let’s take down the 1%.”
It’s more about rethinking how our systems are designed, and how we show up in society. We have fundamentally new technologies. We have a fundamentally different environment that humanity is operating in and we’ve never before had a global civilization."
SEEDS is not just about money and value exchange, it's about finding ways we can be in the world that are genuinely regenerative: Reiki is also a part of HYDRA, which is evolving the rules and baselines for regenerative villages.
In this second of two parts, we explore how a genuine regenerative renaissance might spread, how it might look and feel - how we can make it work.
SEEDS: https://joinseeds.earth
SEEDS conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqfAy1mKQGM
Rieki Cordon, one of the facilitators of SEEDS regenerative currency, describes the necessary regenerative renaissance as follows: "We need it (the renaissance) to be regenerative; if not, humanity is not going to be able to continue this experiment called civilization because our planetary ecosystem services will fail. That’s one side. The other side is we can build the most beautiful world and civilization the world has ever known. And why not? Why not make all of our rivers drinkable again? Why not live in forests full of food?"
And why not create a currency that grows out of, through and alongside community so that never again do we enter into the bizarre transactional nightmare of debt and compound interest where, beyond a certain threshold, money is a self-replicating extractor, sucking value and life from people and planet.
SEEDS currency is built on the blockchain, but it's not Bitcoin: the principles that govern its creation and exchange are built on the values of a genuinely regenerative renaissance.
In this first part of two podcasts, Reiki describes how SEEDS arose and what it can do.
SEEDS: https://joinseeds.earth
Thrutopia Masterclass: https://thrutopia.life
For over a decade, Charles Eisenstein has been a pillar of the movement to a regenerative future. His book is essential reading, his blogs and podcasts are always thoughtful interventions that offer insight at crucial junctures of our progress towards a more conscious evolution. He dares to go where others either fear to tread or just don't have the insight, and he leads by example: his life is based on compassion and the gift economy. He's one of the few people who lives as far as possible outside predatory capitalism.
His son, Jimi, is a transformative animator whose clear, clever art explains complex regenerative principles in ways that everyone can understand. He, too, explores the edges of our being and lives them into reality.
Here, these two remarkable people speak with Della Duncan of the Upstream podcast, celebrating the tenth anniversary edition of Charles's book, but also exploring the delicate and transformative moment in which we live, shining lights on ways we can live the change we need to see.
As we head into Thrutopia, we are delighted to be able to bring you this as an introduction to thinking - and being - the transition.
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/sacred-economics-money-gift-and-society-in-the-age-of-transition/9781623175764
Jimi's You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6IIFtrrKH_J3555XGJkl1A
Musical Chairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BZ-WGnZMXM
Regenerative Agriculture: https://youtu.be/fSEtiixgRJI
Charles Eisenstein's website: https://charleseisenstein.org
Charles Eisenstein's Substack: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com
Thrutopia Masterclass: https://thrutopia.life
Indra Adnan is a psychosocial therapist, founder of The Alternative Global and author of The Politics of Waking up: Power and possibility in the fractal age. She has been a journalist, a director of a political think tank and a community organiser. She is always an activist.
Her passion is the creation of methods of connection that allow everyone to be fully themselves, to find the place from which meaning and purpose arise and to act from there. She gave up her job at the think tank on the day the British MP Jo Cox was murdered in the run up to the 2016 Brexit Referendum, and has spent the time since then considering and creating ways to bring about the change we need to see if we're going to address the climate, ecological and cultural chaos of our time.
In this conversation, we delve deep into the ways we might do things differently - how does a different kind of politics and governance work? How does it feel? What are the logistics and how might we bring it about? On the way, we consider the creation of an alternative media system - one that brings people together instead of splitting them apart - and the ways that local citizens action networks (CANs) can join together to create a movement of movements with unstoppable momentum.
Indra's Book: https://systems-souls-society.com/insight/perspectiva-press/the-politics-of-waking-up-power-and-possibility-in-the-fractal-age/
The Alternative Global: https://www.thealternative.org.uk
Simon Anholt: The Good Country: https://www.goodcountry.org/simon-anholt
David Wood: London Futurists: https://londonfuturists.com/
Trust The People: https://www.trustthepeople.earth
Marge Piercy: The Low Road: https://thechangeagency.org/testimonials/marge-piercy/
Thrutopia: https://thrutopia.life
Will Llewellyn has worked in the renewables industry for decades. Now a co-director of Red Kite Management, he advises individuals and firms on the use of food waste, animal slurry and human effluent as feedstocks for biodigesters which can both reduce the leakage of fugitive methane into the atmosphere where it acts as a greenhouse gas and provide a power source for vehicles, a heating source for buildings and a potential baseline load filler in power generation.
Will on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-llewellyn-31aa0420/
Waga Energy www.waga-energy.com
CNG Fuels: https://cngfuels.com
Geneco Biomethane: https://www.geneco.uk.com/our-services/biomethane
Nobody can doubt now that we're in the midst of the climate and ecological emergency: doom scrolling is now a national sport. But if we think about doom, that's what we'll get and most of us would prefer that we had a way through to a future we'd be proud to leave behind. It's up to us to make this happen and Professor Rupert Read, with his long history of climate action through the Green Party, Extinction Rebellion and his writing, is well placed to make this happen.
He's also the originator of the name, 'Thrutopia' - laying out the need for a Thrutopian genre in the Huffington Post back in 2017. As we head towards the Thrutopia Masterclass and endeavour to make this happen, Rupert and Manda discuss the need for this genre and how it might look and feel.
Thrutopia Masterclass: https://thrutopia.life
Rupert's Website: https://rupertread.net
Rupert's Paper: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupert-read/thrutopia-why-neither-dys_b_18372090.html/
IPCC report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
Ursula le Guin: The Dispossessed: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-dispossessed/9781473228412
Lawyers for net zero https://www.lawyersfornetzero.com
Climate Emergency Centres network https://climateemergencycentre.co.uk
Mothership https://mothership.sg/2021/09/climate-crisis-halimah/
Guardian article on fish: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/17/trawling-for-fish-releases-as-much-carbon-as-air-travel-report-finds-climate-crisis
Jamie Quince-Starkey has worked with planes, trains and automobiles, but he found himself most at at home in himself, and at peace with the world when he had his hands in the soil, growing thing to eat.
Many of us might resonate with this, but Jamie took it a step further and set up Down to Earth Derby, a life-changing project that, as he says, "is an idea born out of conflict; the conflict of living life in the modern-day and the realisation of the negative impact we have on this planet.
The challenge is making a difference whilst also being realistic and having an understanding of how life is for the average person; I know we can’t just jump ship and move to an off-grid community (imagine if the problem was that simple)!"
It's not simple, and he was working full time and had recently become a dad, but even so, he set up the project and threw himself into its mission:
- to work for our communities empowering everyone to be part of making Derby a world leader in nature-based urban regeneration.
- to make living with nature a part of our everyday lives.
- to create a movement with the people of Derby through a series of nature-based engagement projects and promoting the new city social.
- to promote and contribute to a thriving sustainable-regenerative economy for everyone, making Derby a blueprint for world-class nature-based urban regeneration.
Jamie was mentored by Tim Smit of the Eden Project, who introduced him to another Derby resident, Ross Nicholson. Ross is co-founder of Neo, an international network of 15,000+ individuals and companies across over 100 countries across the sustainable futures space which 'makes vital human connections to get stuff done.'
And getting stuff done is what Down to Earth Derby is all about - this is about creating real change in a real city for real people, working on real regenerative principles. It's an idea that's evolving in real time and is replicable anywhere in the world. Making change from the ground up and the inside out. "DTE Derby is about growing people, connecting with nature and the importance of creating community."
If you enjoy this, check them out - and see what you can do in your local community.
Down to Earth Derby
https://www.dtederby.org
Eden Project
https://www.edenproject.com
Ross Nicholson's website
https://neojourneys.io
Tim Gill Book
https://uk.bookshop.org/books/urban-playground-how-child-friendly-planning-and-design-can-save-cities/9781859469293
Professor Steve Keen, Honorary Research Associate with the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security at the University College London, was one of the handful of economists to realize that a serious economic crisis was imminent, and to publicly warn of it from as early as December 2005 (http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892/). This, and his pioneering work on modelling debt-deflation, resulted in his winning the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review (http://rwer.wordpress.com/) for being the economist whose work is most likely to prevent a future financial crisis.
He is author of Debunking Economics, which explains in detail why the orthodox economic theory is not only wrong, but more of a threat to the survival of humanity and the more recent: New Economics: A Manifesto, which gives ideas of how we can shift to a new system of exchanging value.
He is co-creator of the Minsky App and of the Ecocore Universal Carbon Credits.
In this episode, we explore some of the wilder falsehoods of the currently orthodox model of economics, and dive into the ways we could structure a model that could work differently.
Debunking Economics Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/debunking-economics-the-podcast/id1484374606?i=1000552938203
Patreon Site: https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen
Universal Carbon Credits: https://ecocore.org/proposal/
Garry Turner has spent most of his professional life as an international product manager looking after £20m of business within a £3bn business within the chemical industry. Until 2018, he was locked into the life of job/mortgage/car/KPIs and all that goes with external validation. And then he woke up - and realised that any sense of meaning and purpose was missing. His journey since then is one of opening and awakening taken in the most grounded way, so that he can express fully what it means to be human at this time of total transformation. He still works in the same job in the same industry, but now he runs a podcast dedicated to human transformation, and describes himself as a 'strategic advisor and thinking partner', offering coaching to others on the same path. He spends his days working towards a generative future we'd be proud to leave behind.
In this profoundly moving conversation, we delve deeply into his journey, from his surgery for testicular cancer, through a growing awareness of the change he can make in the world, to a place now where he is actively engaging in many different ways with people and ideas that can bring about the transformation we need to see.
Garry's Website:
https://www.garryturner.life/who-is-garry-turner/
Garry's podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/activating-consciousness-from-hexo-change/id1551686556?i=1000553135392
Garry's LinkedIn profile
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garryturnerstrategicadvisor/
Thrutopia https://thrutopia.life
At the age of three years old, Sarah Corbett occupied social housing to keep it standing (it's still up), and from then on, was a committed activist at the local, national and international level, first with her parents, and then later, as part of wider activist movements. But as an introvert, and a deep strategic thinker, she wanted to make change in ways that were gentle, but powerful, harnessing the power of connection, rather than outrage and confrontation.
Founder the Craftivist Collective, she has spend the past fifteen years empowering crafts-people around the world to harness the power of their creativity, their clear intent, and their capacity to connect with lawmakers at all levels from the C-Suite of major retailers to MPs and civil servants - finding their humanity, and becoming a critical friend rather than another source of outraged triggers.
Sarah’s work has helped change government laws, business policies as well as hearts and minds through her unique ‘Gentle Protest’ methodology. She works across the arts sector, charity sector and academia, as well as with unusual allies to reach people nervous of activism in an attractive and empowering way. Corbett regularly gives talks, events and happenings around the world. Her book “How To Be A Craftivist: the art of gentle protest” is now available in paperback. Her talk ‘Activism Needs Introverts’ was chosen as a TED Talk of the Day and has over a million views.
In this episode, she talks us through from the beginnings of the Craftivist Collective with a letter to an MP embroidered on a handkerchief, to the summer-long campaign of the Canary Craftivists, focusing on the goals and ideals that bring people together from grandmothers to grand daughters, to seasoned WI campaigners, to first time activists finding a voice for their climate concern that doesn't involve banners, chants and confrontation with the security forces.
Craftivist Collective Website
https://craftivist-collective.com
Become a Patron
https://craftivist-collective.com/adopt-a-craftivist
Sarah's Manual
https://unbound.com/books/craftivist/
Pre-Order Sarah's new book
https://unbound.com/books/craftivist-collective-handbook/
Yannick Beaudoin is Director-General for Ontario and Northern Canada with the David Suzuki Foundation and Director for Innovation and forOntario with the Wellbeing Economies Alliance for Canada and the Sovereign Indigenous Nations. He brings a ‘new economics for transition’ lens to the organisation to enable the transformation of Canada towards social and ecological sustainability. He has a background in marine geology, was former Chief Scientist with GRID-Arendal, a United Nations Environment Programme collaborating centre - and has a Masters from Schumacher college in Economics for Transition.
We talk with him this week in his role in the Wellbeing Economies Alliance for Canada - and as part of the greater Alliance, which incorporates nations as far apart as Scotland and New Zealand, and organisations across the globe. David brings his sense of scope and place and humanity to the huge questions of today: What's our economy for? And if it's not fit for purpose, how can we shift the system to something which would bring people and planet into balance and harmony.
David Suzuki Foundation:
https://davidsuzuki.org
Wellbeing Economies Alliance
https://weall.org/
Weall Canada
https://weallcanada.org/
Theory U
https://www.toolshero.com/leadership/theory-u-scharmer/
Three Horizons Model
https://resources.h3uni.org/tutorial/three-horizons/
Thrutopia
https://thrutopia.life
The Thrutopia Masterclass is designed to help us all generate the ideas, the frames and the stories we'll need to take us through to a future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that follow us. If you've ever wanted to tell stories, it's for you. It's an ideas generator, a narrative incubator and a dissemination guide. What is isn't, is a basic writing course.
This isn't a basic writing course, either - but it's a selection of things that I feel really matter if you're going to write, the basics for creating your own writing apprenticeship.
If it's useful, let me know. If you want more depth in any particular area, let me know. If you want another one, ranging more widely, let me know...
Thrutopia Masterclass: https://thrutopia.life
Maggie Ostara, PhD left her job as the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University when she realised she’s not meant to work for anyone else.
Twenty five years later at the height of of the pandemic, she created the Eight Pillars of Feminine Sovereignty and the six Feminine Sovereign Archetypes and then organised and hosted the online Women Evolving Our World Conference (and upcoming podcast).
She is committed to helping people from all walks of life to connect deeply with the flow of life, to listen to the inner wisdom of their own bodies, and to find their own empowerment, authority, agency and resilience.
Maggie says: “Now is the time for those of us who’ve been clearing our out-dated belief systems and building our skills and wisdom in the energetic and emotional realms to step forward and take our place among the leaders of today. For too many years, those who claim leadership in our world have valued profit and personal gain over the well-being of the majority of the human world, not to mention all the other beings with whom we share this planet. We are transforming and upgrading what it means to be a leader in alignment with the More Life principle: more life to all and less to none. I invite you to take the next step forward -- whether that’s simply in your own life, or in your family, community, neighbourhood or in your work in the world – shining out your values, your radiance, your compassion and your vision of the world you want to live in. Together we truly can make a difference!”
Maggie has a thriving YouTube channel, teaches online courses, works with clients individually and in groups, provides business consulting, and particularly loves guiding Change Agents expand their body of work and its influence globally. She lives in occupied Pomo territory in Northern California with her non-binary 20 year old and her black feline familiar.
In this episode, we explore what it takes to let go of the restrictions of the conventional world, and listen to the quiet urgings of the inner voice that pushes us to be other than our conditioning or society's expectations. With clarity and courage, she charts a course to a sense of self-compassion, self-awareness and connection to the flow of life that brings clarity to her life's purpose - and then shares the core of what she does in a way that makes it universally accessible. At the end, she offers a gift to Accidental Gods listeners, so that you, too, can share what the learning she offers.
Gift package from Maggie
https://womenevolvingourworld.com/accidentalgods/
SovereigntybyDesign.com
OstaraExperience.com
Dave Johnson began his career as a trial lawyer in the courtrooms of Miami. After a decade, he came to Stanford to study design, tech and environmental law. He has worked for several Silicon Valley companies, with an increasing focus on teaching, first at Stanford Law School and then the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford (a/k/a the d.school). His most recent articles are Design for Legal Systems, to be published by the Singapore Academy of Law, Mar/Apr 2021, and Designing Online Mediation: Does “Just Add Tech” Undermine Mediation’s Ownmost Aim?, published in 2019 by FGV Direito, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dave is currently working on a book entitled: Climate Activism by Design, bringing design principles to bear on citizen activists responding to corporate and governmental inaction on this immediate, existential crisis facing all of humanity.
In this episode, we discuss the foundations of his book - how a trial lawyer shifted to design principles and thence to the design concepts behind climate activism: what it is and how to frame it such that we can find the best possible modes of action as the emergency becomes ever greater.
Dave's website and blog
https://climate-activist.com/designing-a-greenprint-elements-for-a-personal-eco-philosophy/
Battle for Seattle - wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
Freya Mathews books
http://www.freyamathews.net/books
Patrick Holden is the Founding Director and Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust.
After studying biodynamic agriculture at Emerson College, he established a mixed community farm in Wales in 1973, producing at various times: wheat for flour production sold locally, carrots and milk from an 85 cow Ayrshire dairy herd, now made into a single farm cheddar style cheese.
He was the founding chairman of British Organic Farmers in 1982, before joining the Soil Association, where he worked for nearly 20 years and during which time the organisation led the development of organic standards and the market for organic foods.
His advocacy for a major global transition to more sustainable food systems now entails international travel and regular broadcasts and talks at public events.
He is Patron of the UK Biodynamic Association and was awarded the CBE for services to organic farming in 2005.
Patrick is passionate about the application of Nature’s principles of Harmony to food and farming, which is explored in the SFT’s latest initiative, The Harmony Project.
In this episode, Patrick talks about the work of the Sustainable Food Trust in building a commons-based trust network which can co-create a global farm metric to assess farms around the world for their environmental impact in all ways. With this, farms can really begin to assess their own impact, and political institutions across the world can begin to rewards farms and farmers for restoring our land to the extraordinary fertility and abundance that we used to take for granted.
Links
Sustainable Food Trust https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/
Patrick's Farm: https://holdenfarmdairy.co.uk/
Patrick's Farm on social media:
https://www.instagram.com/hafodcheese/
https://www.facebook.com/Holden-Farm-Dairy-100227754976198/
https://twitter.com/hafodcheese
Since dropping banners against Heathrow Airport's third runway from the roof of the Houses of Parliament, Tamsin has consistently shifted public conversation on the climate and ecological emergency.
They have organised a number of high profile protests, co-founded a Suffragette inspired environmental campaign - Climate Rush, coordinated (the successful) Save England's Forests coalition, founded a CIC - The Momentum Project - that mobilises the community surrounding London City Airport, led global corporate campaigns as Head of Global Campaigns at Lush Cosmetics and been a founding member of Extinction Rebellion.
In 2021 Tamsin stood for co-leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales. They are also active in queer uprising; a theatre maker and the author of two books - RUSH! The Making of a Climate Activist and Do Earth: Healing Strategies for Humankind.
In this episode, we explore the nature of activism and how it is evolving; how to create community from the ground up, based on Tamsin's experiences in East London, amongst others, and how we can shape a world where the transactional, zero-sum nature of our current system is no longer the driving force.
Links:
Tamsin's Website: https://www.tamsinomond.com/
Tamsin's TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/how_we_re_going_to_solve_climate_change_tamsin_omond
The Artist's Way: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Artists-Way-by-Julia-Cameron-author/9781788164290
SEEDS: https://joinseeds.earth/
One of the things that sets us apart from other species (as far as we know) is that we are forever building futures in our heads. Whenever we embark on something new: a relationship, a job, a project, a house move…it's fired and inspired by the stories we tell ourselves of how we'll feel, how others will engage with us, how our lives will be different - and often better. The futures might not pan out as we think, but we got ourselves where we need to be by our ability to shape ideas of a different reality.
And yet when we're confronted by the greatest, deepest emergency our species has ever known and while we have plenty of dystopic stories of how bad it could be (think HandMaid's tale, or The Road, or even Don't Look Up), and a few utopias set in other worlds or other times or other realities, what we don't have is a big - vast - body of work showing how we could get to somewhere we'd all want to go: somewhere that future generations would look back and say of us, 'Yes, it was hard, but they did everything they could, they all pulled together, they created a vision of a flourishing world and we're building on the foundations they left us.'
We need urgently to craft these stories: heroic journeys (or possibly post-heroic journeys) of how the world could be in the near term if we get it right, whatever that means. We need accurate, believable road maps of how to get from here to there. 'Here be Dragons' and big scary lines on the map doesn't cut it any more: we have to imagine things better.
And it's hard. We need a whole lot of research of the things that are happening now in a whole range of fields from politics and economics to food and farming through business, work, the future of cities, education, technology, social media... and we need to explore how to stitch the ideas together into workable narratives that will draw people with them, even if they're bombarded by the 'business as usual' stories of our media. We need to give our media new stories to tell, that they will believe and want to share.
And finally, we need the insights from industry professionals in publishing, film, TV, theatre… to help us get our new stories in front of the most possible people.
So this is Thrutopia Masterclass. It's an Ideas Generator, a Narrative Incubator and a Dissemination Guide. It's a Think Tank and a community, a writing masterclass like nothing you've ever seen before. Come and join us! https://thrutopia.life.
Or just share the link to this mini bonus podcast…
https://thrutopia.life
Nathalie Nahai is host of The Hive podcast, author of two books, international speaker and consultant with businesses big and small. Her clients have included Unilever, Google, Accenture and Harvard Business Review, among many others.
Her most recent book, 'Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience', opens up worlds of business where profit is not the only motive, where psychological safety, meaning and solidarity are core business values and businesses are learning to walk their talk. In a world where government is failing so completely to address the many crises of our time, we spent an hour discussing whether business can fill that gap, and if so, how? When it is such a huge part of our lives, when the entire neoliberal model seems to be predicated on a cycle of wage-slavery followed by meaningless consumption, can work bring us back to balance with ourselves, each other and the ecosystems of which we are an integral part?
Links:
Nathalie's website: https://www.nathalienahai.com/
Business Unusual: https://wordery.com/business-unusual-nathalie-nahai-9781398602212/
Values Map: https://thevaluesmap.com/
B Corps UK: https://bcorporation.uk/
B Corps EU: https://bcorporation.eu/
B Corps Global (US) : https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us
Isla McLeod is a celebrant, ritualist, walker-between-the-worlds and deep connector to spirit. She says of herself: "I am a creator of ceremonies, ritual designer, transformational healer and companion at the thresholds. Inspired by nature, forged by my longing, devoted to remembering. Lover of moss, mushrooms, trees, wild swimming and moonlight.
It is my deepest wish to inspire and support a remembrance of what is sacred in our lives and guide people back home to the natural world. To create and hold space for others to journey within and recognise their innate creativity, wisdom and the unique medicine they bring to life. Through offering a container for transformation, held with the deepest love and respect, I hope to help others access those forgotten treasures that are their gifts to share with the world."
In this episode, we explore her journey through depression and addiction, to deep, grounded earth-connection - to a place where she holds rituals for others, ushering in new love and new life, or helping people to die with meaning and connection. She unfolds the peaks and troughs of a journey that has seen her spent a year in a Buddhist retreat, two years in a yurt connecting with the cycles of the seasons and the lunar months, and now, working with and on the land, to help usher in the new emergent reality.
This is a deeply connected, connecting episode. If you're exploring the ways you can connect with the Web of Life in a way that feels meaningful, Isla's journey is rich with experience and insight.
Isla's Website: https://islamacleod.com/
Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, scholar, ritualist, poet, midrashist, and dreamworker. She is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic seminary, and cofounder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, a program in earth-based, embodied, feminist Jewish spiritual leadership.
Her own experience of dreams as a source of deep teaching, wisdom and connection to the All That Is (however we define it) led her to a lifetime of exploring dreams and how they can guide us in ways that bypass our conscious minds. Dreams led her to rabbinical school and then from there into the many areas of her teaching and learning life. The depth of this book makes it one of our generation's most useful dreaming handbooks - it won't tell you how to interpret your dreams: It will help you to find their depth and mine them for all they can teach you.
North American listeners can PreOrder Jill's book here: https://ayinpress.org/undertorah/
UK and Europe: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Undertorah-An-Earth-Based-Kabbalah-of-Dreams-by-Jill-Hammer/9781532362002
Rabbi Jill Episode 12: https://accidentalgods.life/episode-12/
Alice Holloway has a degree in jewellery making from Central St Martin's and a Masters in Design for the Cultural Commons from the London Metropolitan University. She is founder of the Little Black Pants Club, co-founder of London Urban Textiles Commons and is committed to helping people find joy and beauty in the creation of all that we need: to building a future of community and connectivity where we no longer depend on mass production or on real people being devolved into numbers. Her projects include a mobile Sweat Shop which brings a bicycle into a community so that people can power the creation of their own sweat shirts - and see the whole process, from the effort it takes to power the machine, to the machine itself, and the crafting of a garment that fits.
In this inspiring, sparky conversation, we explore the ways we can bring morality, ethics, decency together with joy, beauty and the wonder of self-expression to create a world that leaves exploitation and the accumulation of capital behind.
Links
London Urban Textiles Commons
Elinor Ostrom: Evonomics Introduction: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/
Elinor Ostrom: 8 Principles: http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons
Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-01/governing-the-commons-by-elinor-ostrom-review/
David Bollier Podcast: Frontiers of Commoning https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/frontiers-of-commoning-with-david-bollier/id1501085005
Eva Bishop is mother of two young children, as well as being a long-term a climate activist and current communications director for the Beaver Trust. She is dedicated to finding ways that we can all create emotional and practical resilience in the face of the climate emergency - but in particular, how parents and care-givers can help young people develop the skills they will need to navigate a world that is undergoing total transformation - while at the same time, helping to be part of the change we need to see.
In this broad-ranging, deep, challenging conversation, we explore the ways we can all be part of the solution, touching on: emotional resilience strategies; growing food and exploring the whole food system; education: what it is for, how it functions, and what it needs to become. Eva shares her 'Collective Human' strategies and 'MyActionMatters'. If anyone feels moved to help with these, there is room for a team, to bring funding together to expand them.
We are all part of the solution. We just need to find what we're best at. Go for it.
Links
Episode 88 - Eva talking about the work of the Beaver Trust
The Beaver Trust
Jo McAndrews You Tube: Eco-Anxiety: A Call to Action
Restoring Shropshire Verges Project: https://middlemarchescommunitylandtrust.org.uk/guest-blogs/restoring-shropshires-verges-project-rsvp/
Guardian article on city allotments
In this, our ninth season (and third year), we are aiming to look more deeply into the ways we might create a flourishing future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that follow us.
With that in mind, our first guest of this new season is Richard Heinberg, author of the magesterial, 'Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival' which came out in September 2021.
Richard is Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute, and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He is the author of fourteen books in all, including some of the seminal works on society’s current energy and environmental sustainability crisis:
His books include:
- Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (September 2021) power.postcarbon.org
- Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, co-authored with David Fridley (Island Press, 2016) ourrenewablefuture.org
Also mentioned in the podcast:
Fermi Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Peter Turchin: https://peterturchin.com/
The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Prum: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Evolution-of-Beauty-by-Richard-O-Prum/9780385537216
This is now official solstice tradition - we three explore the questions we've asked others through the year, look at what moved us in our podcast interviews and what they are pulling us towards for next year.
And we offer a solstice meditation at the end, to bring you, too, to the quiet point of looks-within
Nathalie Nahai is an international speaker, consultant and author of two books: the recently published Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, and business best-seller, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. Her work explores the intersection between persuasive technology, ethics, and the psychology of online behaviour, and clients include Google, Accenture, Unilever and Harvard Business Review, among others.
Through keynotes, workshops and consultancy, she teaches people how to understand the psychological dynamics behind evolving consumer behaviours, and how to ethically apply behavioural science principles to enhance their website, content marketing, product design and customer experience.
In 2021 Nathalie launched TheValuesMap.com, a free tool developed in collaboration with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, to help people within organisations understand, communicate and practically express the values they stand for. A member of the BIMA Human Insights Council, Nathalie also hosts The Hive Podcast, and contributes to national publications, television and radio on the impact of technology in our lives.
Della Duncan is a Renegade Economist who hosts the Upstream Podcast inviting you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. She is also a Right Livelihood Coach, a Senior Fellow of Social and Economic Equity at the International Inequalities Institute in the London School of Economics, the Course Development Manager of Fritjof Capra’s Capra Course on the Systems View of Life, a Senior Lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Gaia Ed., Co-Founder of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and an Alternative Economics Consultant.
Della holds a Master of Arts in Economics for Transition with Distinction from Schumacher College, a graduate certificate in Authentic Leadership from Naropa University, has completed Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects Intensive Program, and is a Gross National Happiness Trainer through the Gross National Happiness Center in Bhutan.
The Hive: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-hive-podcast/id1387510537
Upstream: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/upstream/id1082594532
Here we go, people of the podcast - the books and their links. I've linked through Blackwells, because I used to love Heffers (part of the same chain) when I was in Cambridge. Do obviously feel free to support your local bookshop.
KSR: The Ministry for the Future
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Ministry-for-the-Future-by-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/9780356508863/
Cory Doctorow - Walkaway
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Walkaway-by-Cory-Doctorow/978178669307/
Victoria Goddard The Hands of the Emperor
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Hands-of-the-Emperor-by-Goddard-Victoria/9781988908144
Mick Herron SLOUGH HOUSE - 7th Jackson Lamb thriller
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Slough-House-by-Mick-Herron/9781529378665/
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iron-Widow-by-Xiran-Jay-Zhao/9780861542093
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Fates-and-Furies-by-Lauren-Groff/9780099592532
NON-FICTION
Davids Graeber and Wengrow - THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING : a new history of Humanity
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Dawn-of-Everything-by-David-Graeber-D-Wengrow/9780241402429/
TAMSIN OMOND: Do/Earth: Healing strategies for humankind
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Do-Earth-by-Tamsin-Omond/9781914168000/
All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K Wilkinson
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/All-We-Can-Save-by-Ayana-Elizabeth-Johnson-editor-Katharine-K-Wilkinson-editor/9780593237083
Finding the Mother Tree https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Finding-the-Mother-Tree-by-S-Simard/9780241389348/
Tomorrow is too late - Grace Maddrell https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Tomorrow-Is-Too-Late-by-Grace-Maddrell/9781911648321/
The Future Earth - Eric Holthaus
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Future-Earth-by-Eric-Holthaus/9780062883162/
Recapture the Rapture - Jamie Wheal
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Recapture-the-Rapture-by-Jamie-Wheal/9780062905468/
Mariana Mazzucato Mission Economy
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Mission-Economy-by-Mariana-Mazzucato/9780241419731
PODCASTS
The Hive: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-hive-podcast/id1387510537/
Upstream: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/upstream/id1082594532/
Emerge: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/emerge-making-sense-of-whats-next/id1057220344/
Frontiers of Commoning: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/frontiers-of-commoning-with-david-bollier/id1501085005/
Outrage and Optimism: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/outrage-optimism/id1459416461/
What Could Possibly Go Right: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-could-possibly-go-right/id1520465627/
Your Undivided Attention: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305/
EcoCiv : https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ecociv-podcast/id1511996189/
Farmerama: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/farmerama/id1031542491/
Farm Gate: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/farm-gate/id1490590788/
The Lodge Cast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-lodge-cast/id1530950902/
Reasons to be Cheerful: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reasons-to-be-cheerful-with-ed-miliband-and-geoff-lloyd/id1287081706/
Tom and Thelma Look Left: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/thelma-and-tom-look-left/id1553737688/
'If I could get policymakers and citizens everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future' Ezra Klein, Vox
'A novel that presents a rousing vision of how we might unite to overcome the greatest challenge of our time' TED.com
'A breathtaking look at the challenges that face our planet in all their sprawling magnitude and also in their intimate, individual moments of humanity' Booklist (starred review)
'Gutsy, humane . . . a must-read for anyone worried about the future of the planet' Publishers Weekly (starred review)
'A sweeping epic about climate change and humanity's efforts to try and turn the tide before it's too late' Polygon (Best of the Year)
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of our foremost visionary writers. Author of 19 novels, numerous short stories, blogs and essays, his Ministry for the Future' was one of Barack Obama's 'must-read' books of 2020. This is one of the few genuine 'Thrutopian' novels which aims to take us from squarely where we are, through a clearly defined route (with all its pitfalls, prat-falls and fights back by the Status Quo) to a place where we have a decent chance of survival.
In today's podcast, we explore the book, the author's experience of being invited to COP26 in Glasgow, and where we might go next.
Buy the book: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Ministry-for-the-Future-by-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/9780356508863
KSR Website: http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/
A view of KSR as one of the few contemporary novelists dealing with 'big ideas' of how we could be: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/kim-stanley-robinson-socialist-novelist
KSR TED Talk - 'Letter from the year 2071' https://www.ted.com/talks/kim_stanley_robinson_remembering_climate_change_a_message_from_the_year_2071#t-594961
Network for Greening the Financial System: https://www.ngfs.net/en
Dr James Meadway is an economist whose work has focused on developing viable alternatives to neoliberalism, and has published widely on democratic ownership, environmental economics, and automation and the digital economy.
He was previously economic advisor to John McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor, and was chief economist at the New Economics Foundation. He is currently writing a book on the British economy after the 2008 crisis, and appears regularly on broadcast media as a commentator on UK politics.
James holds a PhD in economics from the University of London, masters degrees in economics and economic history, and a BSc in economics and economic history from LSE. He has taught at SOAS, City, Cambridge and Sussex Universities.
In this episode, we explore the repercussions of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow and how the world might respond - in particular, how we might respond as individuals, and as communities.
Links
James in the New Statesman: Why a green state is not enough to compensate for bad capitalists: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2021/11/is-a-green-state-the-answer-to-the-climate-crisis
James just after the 2019 election: https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/17/labours-economic-plans-what-went-wrong/
Aditya Chakrobortty in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/green-new-deal-bad-idea-policy-left-joe-biden-john-mcdonnell
Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future.
Born in London, England, he received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, explores the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day.
His new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, offers a coherent and intellectually solid foundation for a worldview based on connectedness that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future.
He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth. He lives with his partner in Berkeley, California.
He writes topical articles exploring the deeper patterns of political and cultural developments at his website Patterns of Meaning.
In this week's podcast, we explore his most recent paper 'The End of Capitalism' and how our entire economic structure needs to change if we're to address the demands of the moment. From there, we move to the pillars of systemic change and how a shift in the world economy to one of reciprocity over extraction/abuse must be an integral part of the transition to a flourishing, interconnected future. Drawing from indigenous wisdom, and the 'Four R's' described by LaDonna Harris as the foundations of indigenous cultures across the globe, to the concept of fractal flourishing, citizens's assemblies and the crisis in sense-making, we move ever towards a model of how our world could be if we got it right.
Jeremy's Website: https://www.jeremylent.com/
Web of Meaning - book: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Web-of-Meaning-by-Jeremy-Lent/9781788165648
End of Capitalism Paper: https://patternsofmeaning.com/2021/10/11/solving-the-climate-crisis-requires-the-end-of-capitalism/
Growth mitigation paper (referenced, not by Jeremy) https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/endf2_kuhnhenn_growth_in_mitigation_scenarios.pdf
What Does an EcoCivilisation Look Like? https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/ecological-civilization/2021/02/16/what-does-ecological-civilization-look-like
Podcast 38 with Accidental Gods: https://accidentalgods.life/fractal-flourishing/
Dr John Whitelegg, BA PhD LLB, is visiting professor, School of the Built Environment, Liverpool John Moores University and was formerly professor of geography and head of department at Lancaster University and a staff member of the global science policy organisation, the Stockholm Environment Institute.
He has worked with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy and the Environment (Germany) and is an associate of the Kassel Centre for Mobility Culture (Germany) and a board member of the Californian organisation “Transportation Choices for Sustainable Communities”.
John has edited the journal “World Transport Policy and Practice for 25 years and has written 10 books. In the most recent book Mobility, he presents an evidence-based case for a transformation of the totality of transport and mobility policy to achieve three zeroes (zero carbon, zero deaths and injuries and zero air pollution).
He has worked extensively on practical measures to achieve 100% decarbonisation of land transport.
In this episode, we talk at length about what needs to happen in our transport systems to bring about the three zeroes of death, emissions and carbon. John has travelled widely and worked in Germany, Sweden, and the outer Hebrides as well as many locations in the UK. He has a coherent set of ideas of what needs to be done - and we considered some of the ways ordinary people can begin to make these happen.
Foundation for Integrated Transport: https://integratedtransport.co.uk/
Center for Research into Energy Demand Solutions: https://www.creds.ac.uk/
West Oxfordshire Community Transport: https://www.woct.org.uk/
South Shropshire Climate Action Group: https://southshropshireclimateaction.org/
Trust the People: https://www.trustthepeople.earth/the-course
Article on Car free cities UK - 1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/26/city-entres-end-of-road-for-cars-brighton-bristol-york
Article on Car free cities UK - 2: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/31/york-to-ban-private-cars-from-city-centre-within-three-years
We are the stories we tell ourselves - about who we are and where we're going. In our small day to day decisions, we think how our stories of ourselves will be enhanced by the things we do. So when all our stories have been about scarcity, separation and powerlessness, and how we can fight to gain more than those with whom we are in competition - how can we build healing, whole, healthy stories that will bring us forward to a flourishing future?
Alina Siegfried is a performance poet, storyteller, and advocate for systems change. She has worked at Enspiral, in the New Zealand Government, and for the Edmund Hillary Foundation. Her book, 'A Future Untold' brings our stories to the heart of our systemic change.
Alina's website: https://www.alinasiegfried.com/
Aina's TEDx Talk: https://youtu.be/PM_xnvTVyEs
Introduction to Johan Rockstrom: https://youtu.be/yBjB-w5HD_M?list=PLxTt2Nm5dTv3awnK1ren4BtHNctW_v7zY
Common Cause Foundation: https://commoncausefoundation.org/about/
The Long Now Foundation: https://longnow.org/
Don't Think of an Elephant: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-All-New-Dont-Think-of-an-Elephant-by-George-Lakoff/9781603585941
Anthea Lawson is a campaigner who’s interested in the connections between our inner lives and the world we create together.
Over two decades, she has campaigned to shut down tax havens and stop banks fuelling corruption and ecological destruction. She launched an award-winning campaign for transparency over who owns companies, which was taken up by many other organisations and has resulted in changes to the law in dozens of countries.
She worked on the successful campaigns for an Arms Trade Treaty, and for the international ban on cluster bombs. She has worked for Global Witness, Amnesty International, and many other campaign groups. She's dug up Parliament Square in guerilla gardening efforts, and was arrested with Extinction Rebellion.
In her writing she explores what we can learn from how we do campaigning: how our inner lives are entangled in our work to change the world. I’ve been exploring this as an associate at Perspectiva, and in her book The Entangled Activist: Learning to recognise the master's tools, to be published in spring 2021.
She is interested, too, in the limits of campaigning in a time of breakdown, which I’ve been exploring through editing at the Dark Mountain Project.
Her book is a deep exploration of personal process that then expands so that it becomes relevant to us all - if we're activists (and frankly, if you're listening to this podcast, I imagine you're an activist at some point in your life even if you don't identify as such), then we are also an integral part of the system that is the problem - disentangling ourselves from this is not going to happen. So the question arises of how we can be the change we need to see in the world. Anthea has explored this in depth and it was such a pleasure to engage with her on this question.
Anthea's website: https://www.anthealawson.uk/
Perspectiva Press: https://systems-souls-society.com/insight/perspectiva-press/
Dark Mountain Press: https://dark-mountain.net/
Dr Rupert Read is a long term climate activist. On the day after this podcast goes out, he'll be in court on charges of Criminal Damage for pouring water soluble paint on the steps of a hard-core climate denying think tank. No stranger to action as well as thought, he is one of he nation's foremost climate philosophers and in today's episode, we explore together the nature of our current crisis, the hope (or otherwise) for international agreement at COP26 and action at an appropriate scale afterwards - and then look at how we as individuals can help foment a worldwide move towards a coherent, adaptive future, including ideas such as employee strikes mirroring the 'Fridays for Future' school strikes, the employers who are actively supporting climate action, and the ways we can begin to become more resilient and less dependent on 'business as usual'. We end by discussing the Thrutopia Masterclass, starting May 1st on which Rupert will be the inaugural speaker.
Rupert Read web site: https://rupertread.net/
Rupert's Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/GreenRupertRead
10 Tests for COP: https://greenworld.org.uk/article/10-tests-cop26
Ocean Tipping Point Paper: https://tinyurl.com/2e25nm8s
Perspective Article on Moderate Flank:
https://systems-souls-society.com/what-next-on-climate-the-need-for-a-moderate-flank/
New Statesman Article on employers allowing climate action: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/09/can-your-employer-stop-you-joining-climate-strike
Similar article on Employers from Ian McGregor: https://theconversation.com/everyones-business-why-companies-should-let-their-workers-join-the-climate-strike-122976
Tech workers global climate strike: https://www.wired.com/story/tech-workers-global-climate-change-strike/
Companies who are participating in the climate strike: https://www.fastcompany.com/90403903/these-are-all-the-companies-participating-in-the-climate-strike
The systems around us have grown up in a world that assumed them impervious to change. But - as Greta has said - change is coming. So how do we navigate it, and shape it to a flourishing future? How can we be part of the bigger change the world needs to see?
Dr Anna Birney is Director of the School for System Change at the Forum for the Future. She is author of Cultivating System Change: A Practitioner's companion, and she is 'passionate about designing and facilitating systems change programmes that support people, communities and organisations to transform their practice'.
Anna started facilitating multi-stakeholder processes around the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. At WWF-UK she ran a six-year education programme on system change which included setting up 56 communities of practice to knit together innovative practices. This experience supported her to develop practical system change frameworks for WWF-UK and Forum for the Future as well as organisations including Unilever, Nike, Shell Foundation, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Innovate UK and the NHS, through the System Innovation Lab - experimenting and learning how to develop different practices.
This led onto setting up the School of System Change where as well as overseeing the learning and curriculum, Anna now coaches on a wide number of projects and initiatives including the Marine CoLab, the #Oneless project and Oxfam’s System Innovation in Woman’s Economic Empowerment. She is the author of Cultivating System Change: A practitioner’s companion which is based on her PhD.
“Having cultivated the School since 2016 it gives me great pleasure to continue to engage and learn from participants, contributors and partners to evolve what we offer. I am most excited about how we can grow the number and diversity of facilitators and the diversity of learning, exploring what systems change practice might look like in different contexts and geographies.”
Links:
Forum for the Future: https://www.forumforthefuture.org/ School for System Change: https://www.forumforthefuture.org/school-of-system-change YouTube Video for the BaseCamp Course: https://youtu.be/B-oqDQkQ54U Anna's Medium page: https://annasquestions.medium.com/ Anna's Book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/cultivating-system-change/anna-birney/9781910174098 Cultivating the Future: Medium blog: https://medium.com/school-of-system-change/cultivating-system-change-a-practitioners-companion-e05e541c1726 The Presencing Institute: https://www.presencing.org/
We live in an era of empty food, vast food miles and a burgeoning ecosystem emergency that is largely pushed by a chemical-based agriculture system that is poisoning waterways, oceans, and soil, destroying the biodiversity of our land and waters and harming the health of humanity.
A regenerative farming system that works, in Ffinlo's words 'with nature rather than in spite of nature' can do so much to improve our health, bring us back into relationship with the living earth, restore our devastated ecosystems, restore the water cycle - and draw down CO2 into the earth so that as we build soil, we heal our climate.
With so much to go right, why are we not doing this everywhere? That's one of the questions I ask Ffinlo Costain, host of the FarmGate podcast and Founder and CEO of Farmwel, a company dedicated to helping generate momentum towards sustainable mainstream agriculture and aquaculture, focussing on the environment, people's livelihoods, and farm animal health and welfare.
Ffinlo is in the almost-unique position of understanding the problems, having solutions and having the ear of people in power. So if anyone's going to help us change, it's him. Join us for a fascinating, detailed, inspiring pair of podcasts.
Farmwel: https://www.farmwel.org.uk/
FarmGate podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/farm-gate/id1490590788
UNFCCC NDC calculations: https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cma2021_08_adv_1.pdf
Soil Health Report will be released Oct 20th 2021 - available here: www.foodandsecurity.net
We live in an era of empty food, vast food miles and a burgeoning ecosystem emergency that is largely pushed by a chemical-based agriculture system that is poisoning waterways, oceans, and soil, destroying the biodiversity of our land and waters and harming the health of humanity.
A regenerative farming system that works, in Ffinlo's words 'with nature rather than in spite of nature' can do so much to improve our health, bring us back into relationship with the living earth, restore our devastated ecosystems, restore the water cycle - and draw down CO2 into the earth so that as we build soil, we heal our climate.
With so much to go right, why are we not doing this everywhere? That's one of the questions I ask Ffinlo Costain, host of the FarmGate podcast and Founder and CEO of Farmwel, a company dedicated to helping generate momentum towards sustainable mainstream agriculture and aquaculture, focussing on the environment, people's livelihoods, and farm animal health and welfare.
Ffinlo is in the almost-unique position of understanding the problems, having solutions and having the ear of people in power. So if anyone's going to help us change, it's him. Join us for a fascinating, detailed, inspiring pair of podcasts.
Farmwel: https://www.farmwel.org.uk/
FarmGate podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/farm-gate/id1490590788
UNFCCC NDC calculations: https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cma2021_08_adv_1.pdf
Soil Health Report will be released Oct 20th 2021 - available here: www.foodandsecurity.net
This is one of our most nakedly political conversations - because politics is the language of power and those who rule over us do so with at least the vestige of a democratic mandate. To understand how to affect change, we need to understand how to shift the levers of power on a worldwide scale. But change always begins at home, so in this week's episode, we're talking about political activism in the UK and where it might go in the near term.
Our guest is someone really well placed to discuss this:
Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London. His most recent publications include Twenty-First-Century Socialism(Polity 2020) the translation of Maurizio Lazzarato's Experimental Politics and the book Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism.
His next book, Hegemony Now : How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World , co-authored with Alex Williams, will be published in 2022.
He writes regularly for the British press (including the Guardian, the New Statesman, open Democracy and Red Pepper) and for think tanks such as IPPR and Compass, is routinely engaged in debates and discussion on Labour Party policy and strategy, and has appeared on national television as a spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.
He has been involved with both mainstream party politics and extra-parliamentary activism throughout his adult life, having been an active participant in the social forum movement of the early 2000s, a member of the founding national committee of Momentum (the controversial organisation established to support Corbyn's leadership of Labour), and being a former elected member management committee of Compass, a pluralist left-wing think tank and lobby group.
Jeremy is an an advisor to and participant in a range of ongoing projects such as The World Transformed and the New Economy Organisers Network. He has also participated in many cultural projects, particularly connected with music and sonic culture, and is a founder member of Lucky Cloud Sound System and Beauty and the Beat, two successful and respected collectives that have been organising regular dance parties in East London since the early 2000s, at many of which he still regularly DJs.
Jeremy also maintains a lifelong commitment to public education outside the academy, currently hosting Culture, Power, Politics, a regular series of free open seminars and lectures.
Links:
Jeremy's website: https://www.jeremygilbert.org
Jeremy's blog: https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/2020-analysis/
Jeremy's papers on Open Democracy: https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/2020-analysis/
Guardian review of Jeremy's book 'Twenty First Century Socialism': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/06/twenty-first-century-socialism-by-jeremy-gilbert-review
Jeremy at Novara Media: https://novaramedia.com/tag/jeremy-gilbert/
Compass: https://www.compassonline.org.uk/
The World Transformed: https://www.theworldtransformed.org/
Momentum: https://www.theworldtransformed.org/
From her experience at three years old when she saw the spirit of her grandmother at the foot of her crib, Deena Metzger's life has been devoted to the exploration of the worlds of spirit and of humanity, combined, in search of an answer to the question: What is your Calling? Working as a poet, novelist, therapist, healer and visionary, she has brought together Nineteen Ways to a Viable Future - a route by which all of humanity can become the best of ourselves and thus be what the web of life needs of us.
In this conversation, we explore some of those Ways and the routes by which Deena reached them, together with her thoughts of the present and future as we move into the time of crisis.
In her own works, Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over fifty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.
Deena has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing. As a writer, she asks: Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times?
She conducts training groups on the spiritual, creative, political and ethical aspects of healing and peacemaking, individual, community and global, drawing deeply on alliance with spirit, indigenous teachings and the many wisdom traditions. One focus is on uniting Western medical ways with indigenous medicine traditions.
Deena's website: https://deenametzger.net/
Louis Weinstock is a remarkable man - a deeply committed therapist who does his best to make his skills available to as many children and young people as need them - and so many do. He focuses on grief and loss, initially around death and diagnoses of fatal illness, but increasingly the existential grief of our dying ecosystem and the despair, rage and frustration at a world that is not acting as it could or should.
In this profoundly moving podcast, we talk in depth about how all of us can exist with our grief and despair, how we can hold them tenderly, and how, from these places of resilience and strength, we can hold the conversations that need to happen in our widening circles.
About Louis:
Louis works with children, and the child inside us all, the one that wants to be loved, the one that wants to cry, the one that knows what it wants, the one that really does dance like no-one’s watching, the one that spends timeless hours looking at bugs under a piece of bark, the one that keeps getting back up no matter how many times they fall down.
He helps people find a light in the darkness, especially in grief, in the shadow, in the things that are unseen, unheard, unspoken. Her sees death as our greatest teacher, and avoidance of it our biggest mistake. He made an audio course all about death and life here: it will help you become more fully alive in your everyday existence.
He runs Magic Power of Grief circles at festivals, and in other spaces and places.
He believes the body is deeply intelligent, and our ‘symptoms’ are just fragments of our soul seeking wholeness. Rumi once said “What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe”.
He loves using design, collaboration and creativity to solve big, meaningful problems. One way he does this is by helping to run a charity – Apart of Me – that helps kids transform their grief into compassion. This project also has two side projects which are focused on helping younger children grow into emotionally empowered leaders: Earthlings and Bounce Works.
Making a home for experience in words is his favourite spiritual craft. You can check out some of his writing here. He's currently writing a book about How The World Is Making Our Children Mad And What To Do About It - available next year and we'll invite Louis back on the podcast to talk about it when it comes out.
Louis Weinstock: https://louisweinstock.com/
A Part of Me https://www.apartofme.app/
Wider Horizons Summer Festival: https://widerhorizons.events/
Caro C has been described as a Soul Enchantress (BBC Radio 3) and a 'One Woman Electronic Avalanche' (BBC Introducing), she's a composer and musician, a sound engineer and a solo performance artist. She's a rock climber and a dreamer, a creator of magic with all things sound.
She created the music that is our signature at the head and foot of the podcast and she's been our engineer and producer for nearly two years, weaving miracles with technology and weaving our conversations in ways that bring them to coherence while always being a balm to the ears. As she launches her new album, Electric Mountain, we talk about her journey into sound, her experience of earth-connection and conscious evolution and how she weaves all of these into into a deeply connected, dream-woven life.
Links:
Caro's Page: https://carosnatch.com/
Caro on Bandcamp: https://carosnatch.bandcamp.com/
Ece Temelkuran is an international columnist, political analyst, novelist and sharp, brilliant, astute - and great hearted - writer. Her books 'HOW TO LOSE A COUNTRY' and 'TOGETHER' have been met with great international acclaim. (she shared a stage at the Edinburgh Festival with Ed Milliband, of the outstandingly successful 'Reasons to be Cheerful' podcast. He was also something political at one point in the UK, when such things mattered...)
She was our guest in podcast 74 -and on the first Sunday of September, she returned with a one hour Zoom-based Bookclub to delve deeper into the compassionate wisdom of her books.
Rokiah Yaman is the Project Director for LEAP Micro Anaerobic Digestion. A part of the project from the start, she coordinates the LEAP demonstration sites, oversees fundraising and planning activities, and manages infrastructure and operational logistics, helping to bring micro AD technology and the closed-loop ethos into public spaces where people can see who it works in their own communities.
In this episode, Rokia talks us through the technologies involved in Micro Anaerobic Digestion, and introduces us to the projects in London, the Scottish Highlands and Islands, Nigeria and Malaysia. We find out how it works, and how we can make it work in urban and rural settings, as part of the power spectrum of the future, where circularity is embedded in the way we live and we generate our own energy closer to home, giving us autonomy and agency and cutting the mega-corporations out of the loop.
As ever, our signature music comes from Caro C, but this week, we have additional music at the head and foot from Billy Surgeoner's album 'Hey Mountain Hey' - the track is The Pollen Path
Leap: https://www.madleap.co.uk/
Hey Mountain Hey: BillySurgeoner.BandCamp.com/track/the-pollen-path/
Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer and internationally recognised teacher whose work sits at the interface of psychology, mythology and ecology.
Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of our native myths, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, social and environmental problems we face today.
As well as writing four books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted, her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Scotsman and more, and she has been interviewed by the BBC and other major broadcasters on her areas of expertise.
Sharon is one of those rare people who walks her talk in every part of her life. Through the past decades, she has lived in each one of the Celtic lands: Scotland, then Ireland, then Wales, always in remote areas with few people and a wild, powerful landscape. Her deep roots to our mythology and to the spirits of place have left her uniquely placed to speak to and of the old ways of our ancestors - and the ways we can avail ourselves of the ancient wisdom of lineage and place to weave new ways of being that will help to guide us through the change that is coming. This week's podcast is a deep, deep dive into our shamanic past and our future. Join us and step beyond the veils.
Sharon Blackie Website: https://sharonblackie.net
Books: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/sharonblackie
Howard Johns was a climate activist on the front lines until he realised that he needed ways to say 'yes', instead of 'no'.
Accordingly, he set about building solutions, eventually founding Southern Solar a national solar energy company, and Ovesco a locally owned renewable energy cooperative. At the same time he chaired the trade body representing the UK solar industry, finding himself once again a campaigner around energy policy in the process.
A believer in solutions, Howard is convinced we have all the technology and money we need to implement the climate and energy solutions we need. It is now time for lots of people to get involved with making it happen.
Howard TED talk: https://youtu.be/pkGAMb5sYvg
Howard's website: https://www.howardjohns.net
The Beaver Trust is a small group of committed individuals who understand the deep interconnectedness of life. By bringing beavers back to the UK where once they flourished, they are seeing whole ecosystems grow back to life. In their work with farmers and landowners, they are able to open gateways to radical restoration of our landscapes and biodiversity, reversing the catastrophic species loss of the past five decades.
Eva Bishop is their Communications Director. In this week's episode, we explore the work of the Trust and it's place in the wider systemic change we need if we're going to make it through the current bottleneck.
The Beaver Trust https://beavertrust.org
The Lodge Cast podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-lodge-cast/id1530950902
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BeaverTrust/
All We Can Save: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/All-We-Can-Save-by-Ayana-Elizabeth-Johnson-editor-Katharine-K-Wilkinson-editor/9780593237083
"Love is that which enables choice. Love is always stronger than Fear. Always choose on the basis of Love." – Forrest Landry
You might know him as the founder and CEO of Magic Flight, a company among the first to introduce the portable vaporizer to the world, but Forrest Landry is really a philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher who has been studying and practicing the varied High Arts since the mid 70’s.
Before creating Magic Flight, Forrest was a third generation master woodworker who found that he had a unique set of skills in large scale software systems design. This led to work in the production of several federal classified and unclassified systems, including various FBI investigative projects, TSC, IDW, DARPA, the Library of Congress Congressional Records System, and many others.
This work was a fun diversion, but Forrest’s heart has always been most focused on metaphysics – the study of what is, what is the nature of being, what is the nature of knowing, and why are we all here. And, so, the most challenging system design that Forrest has tacked is his work “The Immanent Metaphysics” a decades long effort to restore legitimacy to the practice of metaphysics and construct a rigorous, coherent and precise statement of, well, everything.
He talks to us this week of his experience in connecting with the world unmasked - about the considerations of life that it led to: what matters most and how we, too can connect with it.
Forrest Landry TED Talk: https://youtu.be/iAmLRLc4ffk
SolarPunk questions answered: https://mflb.com/civ_dev_1/solarpunk_questions_out.pdf
Overall orientation to What is needed to meet the coming transformation: https://mflb.com/civ_dev_1/overall_recommendations_out.pdf
Forrest Landry's technical investigations into the meaning of life: https://mflb.com/geek_index_1.html
COP26 takes place in Glasgow, Scotland in November of this year. This is our best - possibly our last - chance to persuade those who govern the world that the climate and ecological emergency needs swift and radical action. So how can we get the message through to those who are driving our collective bus that they need to turn the wheel before we all hurtle over a cliff? How can we persuade them that 'business as usual' is no longer an option, or that alternatives do exist if we only had the creativity, imagination, courage and empathy to make them work?
This week, we speak to two people involved in two separate Pilgrimages to Glasgow to find out what they're planning and why.
Benjamin Christie is driven by the deeply held belief in the possibility of a more equitable, sustainable and harmonious world. He works to support NGOs and ethical businesses develop and achieve their goals. With a career spanning events, media and business development, Benjamin has been fortunate enough to gain experience of many different countries, environments and partnerships at first hand. He's speaking on behalf of the SPINE OF ALBION Pilgrimage which is walking from the southernmost tip of England to the northernmost tip of Scotland - through Glasgow at the time of COP26.
Links to his work and activities include:
http://www.listeningtotheland.com/
https://medicinefestival.com/
https://www.wisdomkeepers.earth/
Bamber Hawes says of himself that he is 'a Thing Maker'. He trained as an Industrial Designer in Sussex, then moved to London and had various companies making furniture, building sets and film props, art directing and modelmaking.
In 2005, after 22 years living in Hackney just off the Murder Mile he 'ran away from his annoying media clients' to Bishop's Castle in South Shropshire, where he now is a picture framer, furniture maker, artist and Art Co ordinator for an Art Trail and is a Town Councillor.
Now, he has created CLARION, a 10 foot Polar Bear made to be portable. He and Clarion will be walking from his home in Bishop's Castle to Glasgow in time for COP.
Instagram: @clarion_the_bear
Facebook: Clarion_the_Bear
Twitter: @BearClarion
His call to those who might want to join him is this:
Calling anyone who would like to be part of a commitment to our living, breathing Earth and the future of all life.
I am organising a Climate Crisis Pilgrimage from South Shropshire to the COP26 climate talks that starts on 1st November in Glasgow.
Would you be interested in joining me for a day of walking as I progress northward?I will be doing the whole 306 mile walk which will take 22 days.
Each day I will be joined by local people from the area that I have reached.
The unusual thing is that I will be accompanied by a ten foot high sculpture of a polar bear, that I have made. The bear, called Clarion, is made from thin bamboo poles, willow withies and many layers of heavy duty tissue paper bonded together with waterproof PVA. He is carried on a palanquin. He ain't heavy!
I am looking for people to join me for a day walking along footpaths, bridle paths, canal towpaths and B roads.
The intention for this pilgrimage is to come together to walk, to talk, to connect with each other, to connect with the landscape by moving through it slowly, admiring its beauty and grandeur.
To be positive and kind, and to build active hope. To smile and laugh while being serious.
Walking to the climate talks will not change the world ~ but I can think of nothing better to do to show the earnestness of my belief that we must learn to talk together and build community, only in Oneness will we make a better more just world.
Clarion and I will be coming through your area on these dates:
DAY ONE 10th October Bishop's Castle to Longden
DAY TWO 11th October Longden to Platt Lane
DAY THREE 12th October Platt Lane to Bulkeley
DAY FOUR 13th October Bulkeley to Kingsley
DAY FIVE 14th October Kingsley to Rainhill
DAY SIX 15th October Rainhill to Appleby Bridge
DAY SEVEN 16th October Appleby Bridge to Middleforth
DAY EIGHT 17th October Middleforth to Garstang
DAY NINE 18th October Garstang to Lancaster
DAY TEN 19th October Lancaster to Hincaster
DAY ELEVEN 20th October Hincaster to Sadgill
DAY TWELVE 21st October Sadgill to Askham
DAY THIRTEEN 22nd October Askham to Calthwaite
DAY FOURTEEN 23rd October Calthwaite to Cargo
DAY FIFTEEN 24th October Carge to Stapleton Grange
DAY SIXTEEN 25th October Stapleton Grange to Lockerbie
DAY SEVENTEEN 26th October Lockerbie to Mosslands
DAY EIGHTEEN 27th October Mosslands to Elvanfoot
DAY NINETEEN 28th October Elvanfoot to Douglas
DAY TWENTY 29th October Douglas to Strathaven
DAY TWENTY ONE 30th October Strathaven to Busby
DAY TWENTY TWO 31st October Day off
DAY TWENTY THREE 1st November Busby to COP26
The complete itinerary will be on Facebook soon : Clarion the Bear
So, please consider coming along as a treasured, intrepid pilgrim.
I assure you this will not be a shouty, banner waving demonstrating rabble.
This pilgrimage will be in the media, and I am sure it will be praised and vilified.
If you are not a walker perhaps you would like to still be part of this by being a driver, delivering walkers at the start of the day and/or collecting them at the end.
Contact me on Social media or on 07957 667 847
No small children, no dogs, no alcohol.
Thank you Bamber the Human and Clarion the Bear
Matthew Taylor, CBE FAcSS, is the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, but before that, he was Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Arts (or more properly, for the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) - and before that, he was head of the Number 10 Policy Unit for Tony Blair's Labour Government. He is a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze, presents 'Agree to Differ' and occasionally, Analysis on the same channel.
He's also deeply interested in the intersection between neurophysiology, psychology and human behaviour - and how we can bring these to bear on the current transformative moment in our history. In this episode, we explore his ideas around 'co-ordination theory' and how we can use them to create new politics and new ways of organising our society to give more people a better, more equitable say in how we make things happen.
Matthew Taylor blog: https://www.thersa.org/blog/matthew-taylor
Minimate: Co-ordination theory: https://youtu.be/-54DxHlOMnc
The Podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger and Tristan Harris: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305?i=1000526825665
With a background in medicine and psychology, Chris Johnstone's work over the last thirty years has focused on exploring what helps us face disturbing situations (whether in our own lives or the world) and respond in ways that nourish resilience and well-being. His books include Active Hope (co-authored with Joanna Macy and translated into more than eleven languages) and Seven Ways to Build Resilience. His online resilience courses have attracted students from more than sixty countries.He lives in the north of Scotland where he teaches online at CollegeOfWellbeing.com, ResilienceTraining.net and ActiveHope.Training
Madeleine Young is a permaculturist, homeopath and XR activist. She's a trained facilitator in The Work that Reconnects and has helped to co-create the Active Hope online training.
Find their free video-based online course in Active Hope at https://activehope.training
Online resilience courses at https://resiliencetraining.net
https://www.activehope.info
http://collegeofwellbeing.com
https://chrisjohnstone.info
Sacred Design Lab is a soul-centred research and development lab that explores and interprets the changing landscape of spiritual and community life. The Lab collaborates with divinely restless, intellectually curious and entrepreneurially practical leaders to help design and prototype the spiritual communities and infrastructure of the future, interpreting ancient best practice in the service of transformation.
Sue Philips, one of the co-founders of the Lab says of herself that, 'I am relentlessly curious about liberating ancient wisdom to solve complex problems. I’m passionate about inspiring spiritual flourishing, designing for meaning making, and witnessing the transformation that happens when people roam around in what matters most.
My wife and I share our 30-minute “family chapel” every morning, to remember who we want to be and what we care about, and to cultivate imagination for “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”1
I’m part business strategist, part design geek, and part monastic. On any given day I might read liberation theology, human-centered design briefs, or business school case studies. Ideally all of them side by side. I graduated from Colgate University and the Episcopal Divinity School, and taught at Harvard Divinity School, where I am a Ministry Innovation Fellow. My wife and I live in Tacoma, WA with whichever of our five children is passing through.'
As we hover on the edge of the Great Turning, increasingly, we seek a spiritual foundation that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. In this week's podcast, we discuss how that might come about, how we might recognise broad spiritual foundations that are universal and useful to support our connection with a numinous world.
Links:
Sacred Design Lab: https://sacred.design
Sophie Miller trained at Central St Martins before moving on to a decade-long career in television design. Now, she gives her time and energy to Extinction Rebellion as a Red Rebel - and to Ocean Rebellion, of which she is a co-founder. She lives in Cornwall, and so when she discovered that the first post-Covid G7 summit was taking place in her country and her county, she had to ask.
In this week's second inspiring podcast, she describes what it actually takes to mount a successful action in the current political climate. She talks of the growing support from all aspects of the Fourth Estate and - movingly - of the practical - and spiritual - path that has brought her to this place and this time.
She speaks as an activist who understands the damage done to the Oceans, knowing that there is still time to change what we're doing.
We discuss the nature of policing, of totalitarianism - and the ways we can all work to transcend the crushing forces of authority to bring something deeper and more profound to our world.
https://oceanrebellion.earth
https://rebellion.global
https://extinctionrebellion.uk
Sophie Miller trained at Central St Martins before moving on to a decade-long career in television design. Now, she gives her time and energy to Extinction Rebellion as a Red Rebel - and to Ocean Rebellion, of which she is a co-founder. She lives in Cornwall, and so when she discovered that the first post-Covid G7 summit was taking place in her country and her county, she had to ask.
In this week's inspiring podcast, she describes the practical - and spiritual - path that has brought her to this place and this time - as an activist who understands the damage done to the Oceans -and that there is still time to change what we're doing. We discuss the nature of policing, of totalitarianism - and the ways we can transcend the crushing forces of authority to bring something deeper and more profound to our world. This is the first of two parts. Next week, we'll be back to find out how the activism transpired and where we all go from here.
https://oceanrebellion.earth
https://rebellion.global
https://extinctionrebellion.uk
How do we unpick the damage of Neoliberalism? How can we break the connections between work and income and unsustainable consumerism? Amidst the ideas of how our climate is changing, Professor Mark Maslin, FRGS, FRSA, offers answers to the social and economic ills of our time.
Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London. He is a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, Executive Director of Rezatec Ltd and Director of The London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership. He is a member of Cheltenham Science Festival Advisory Committee and sits on the Corporate Social Responsibility Board of the Sopria-Steria Group and Sheep Included Ltd.
Mark is a leading scientist with particular expertise in past global and regional climatic change. He has published over 175 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and The Lancet. His areas of scientific expertise include causes of past and future global climate change and its effects on the global carbon cycle, biodiversity, rainforests and human evolution.
He also works on monitoring land carbon sinks using remote sensing and ecological models and international and national climate change policies, and has presented over 50 public talks over the last five years including Google UK, Twitter EU, New Scientist Live, UK Space conference, Oxford, Cambridge, RGS, Tate Modern, Royal Society of Medicine, Fink Club, Frontline Club, British Museum, Natural History Museum, Goldman Sachs, the Norwegian Government, UNFCCC COP and the WTO.
He has also written 8 popular books, over 60 popular articles. His “Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction” by Oxford University Press is now in its fourth edition and has sold over 50,000 copies.
In this podcast, we talk about his most recent book, 'How to Save our Planet: the Facts' which does exactly what it says on the tin. A crips, cleanly written, utterly absorbing book, this is one of the clearest books ever written on the nature of the problems that assail us, the fact that it's not too late to change - and what we need to do at every level of society to change things. It's small enough to leave in the smallest room of the house - or by the kettle in the kitchen - so that everyone who comes by can pick it up and learn something useful. This is how we change the world, one aphorism at a time.
Links from the podcast
How to Save Our Planet: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320/320155/how-to-save-our-planet/9780241472521.html
Mark Maslin's home page: https://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/people/academic-staff/mark-maslin
Review of Bill Gates's book: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-021-00581-z
The Conversation: How bad could things be if we do nothing?: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-how-bad-could-the-future-be-if-we-do-nothing-159665
Alexandra Kurland is a horse clicker trainer, behaviourist, classical rider - and convenor of the annual (now bi-annual) Science Camp that explores the art and science of positive reinforcement. She is host of the Horses for Future podcast, co-host of the Equiosity podcast, and author of The Click that Teaches and a whole host of other books and online courses about horse training.
In today's podcast - the second of two - Alex and Manda continue to dive deeply into the fundamental question of our time - how do we bring people of widely disparate political views to a point where we all pull together to create a flourishing, generative future for people and planet?
We have the answers. We just need to see the possibilities and be emotionally and psychologically prepared to apply them. So this is a behavioural problem now, not a technological one. Which means it needs the brightest behavioural minds on the planet to begin to think about it.
And we can start now...
The Clicker Center: https://www.theclickercenter.com
Equiosity: https://www.equiosity.com
Horses for Future: https://kurlanda.wixsite.com/sequestercarbon
Mary Hunter: PORTL shaping: https://behaviorexplorer.com/author/mary/
An Introduction to PORTL shaping: https://www.artandscienceofanimaltraining.org/tools/portl-shaping-game/
The New Climate War by Michael Mann: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-New-Climate-War-by-Michael-E-Mann-author/9781913348687
Alexandra Kurland is a horse clicker trainer, behaviourist, classical rider - and convenor of the annual (now bi-annual) Science Camp that explores the art and science of positive reinforcement. She is host of the Horses for Future podcast, co-host of the Equiosity podcast, and author of The Click that Teaches and a whole host of other books and online courses about horse training.
In today's podcast - the first of two - Alex and Manda explore one of the fundamental questions of our time - how do we bring people of widely disparate political views to a point where we all pull together to create a flourishing, generative future for people and planet? We have the answers. We just need to see the possibilities and be emotionally and psychologically prepared to apply them. So this is a behavioural problem now, not a technological one. Which means it needs the brightest behavioural minds on the planet to begin to think about it. And we can start now...
The Clicker Center: https://www.theclickercenter.com
Equiosity: https://www.equiosity.com
Horses for Future: https://kurlanda.wixsite.com/sequestercarbon
Mary Hunter: PORTL shaping: https://behaviorexplorer.com/author/mary/
An Introduction to PORTL shaping: https://www.artandscienceofanimaltraining.org/tools/portl-shaping-game/
The New Climate War by Michael Mann: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-New-Climate-War-by-Michael-E-Mann-author/9781913348687
Mothiur Rahman is founder of New Economy Law and a pioneer member of XR. In his first podcast with us, we explored the work he has done, helping to create a law that works for ordinary people. This week, we look at the ways the current system is breaking the law and how we can help to re-weave it into something that helps people and planet to flourish.
New Economy Law
Article: Stir for Action - Land and Power
Article: Resurgence & Ecologist - Extinction Rebellion, A Civil Rights Movement
Presentation: UKELA Wildlaw Conference hosted at Sussex University (2019)
Presentation: Vaults Festival 2019 - Decoloniality & Rewilding Psyche
Braver Angels - originally Better Angels - came into being after the divisive nightmare of the 2016 Presidential Election in the US. It began with a group of people in a barn in South Lebanon Ohio and has since spread to 20,000 people around the US, with chapters in other nations around the world. Their skill - their superpower - is to bring the social and humane technologies originally created to help bring together couples on the brink of the most acrimonious divorces. With skills in listening and a good dose of empathy, they help us to see the humanity in each other and so find the best of ourselves to bring to the table.
John Wood Jr is an Ambassador for Braver Angels and has been working in the depths of the partisan divide. In this podcast episode, he shares the experience and wisdom of his journey, and that of the Braver Angels project.
Details here: https://braverangels.org
"When do you feel most alive? When are you most open and connected with a deeper sense of being? When do you fall in love with life and want to turn towards the world with hope and care?
Perhaps, like us, your sacred ground is the earth under your feet… your sacred spaces are cathedrals of trees with branches filled with wind and rain, sunlight or stars… your baptismal pools are filled with deep brown river water or the wild and salty sea. Perhaps, like us, you yearn to share this… for spiritual community, for authentic meeting and deep silence with people and with all beings. So, welcome to wild church!"
In this podcast, we explore Sam's journey to the founding of the Wild Church and Wild Monastics - how these fulfil the need for deep connection, and where her spiritual activism has taken her since the pandemic began.
Wild Church (including Wild Monastics): https://www.riverdartwildchurch.com
Wild Wisdom School: https://wildwisdomschool.com
Wild Spirit Community: https://wildspiritcommunity.com/founder/
Blog Post: Returning to the Monastery of the Heart
Ece Temelkuran is one of the Turkey’s best known novelist and political commentators. She has contributed to the Guardian, Newstatesman, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Spiegel, The New York Times and Berliner Zeitung.
Her books of investigative journalism broach subjects that are highly controversial in Turkey, such as the Kurdish and Armenian issues and freedom of expression.
Her novel Women Who Blow on Knots won a PEN Translates award, sold over 120.000 copies in Turkey, and has been published in translation in Germany, Croatia, Poland, Bosnia and France with editions also forthcoming in China, Italy and the USA.
Her non-fiction work: HOW TO LOSE A COUNTRY is a searing indictment of the rise of the neo-fascist right around the world, rooted firmly in her own experience in Turkey.
TOGETHER breaks new ground - a series of ten essays, each exploring life - hers and the world's - and ways the human spirit rises above the exigencies and horrors that we can create - to manifest the bright points of human existence that signal hope for the world.
The writing is lyrical, sharply insightful and deeply moving. In this podcast, we explore the woman beneath the words - and the ways we can take what she offers to bring us all closer together.
Ece Temelkuran's Website https://www.ecetemelkuran.com
Together: the book - https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Together-by-Ece-Temelkuran-author/9780008393809
Eva and Justin were guests of podcast 44 [https://accidentalgods.life/re-democratising-democracy/] - in which we explored the links between personal and collective trauma -and they outlined the work they were doing in Scotland to build towards a constitutional convention that would help to weave new democratic structures for an independent Scotland.
Now they are weaving a new Gathering into being - an online week, bringing together people from all over the world to find new ways to be human in the 21st century - ways that will take us forward into a world that is regenerative for the human and more than human worlds.
In their own words:
"Reworlding is asking: how can we develop new decision making processes - and integrate with enduring ones - in order to collectively create a decolonised, just, empathic and regenerating world at every level?
This is not a call to get involved in politics. This is a call to help create a new politics.
Reworlding will bring together people who have:
- experience of working with their own and others’ trauma, and/ or
- experience of decision making systems that seek to enable a mutual world, and/ or
- experience of resisting domination to protect and enable a just and regenerative world
This week is an exploration, a scouting out of what is already happening, and a searching ahead: imagining and working towards assembling a politics of wholeness, including through deepening our awareness of what colonises within and between us - and what liberates us."
Links: More on the Gathering here: https://heartpolitics.squarespace.com
We first spoke with Navona Gallegos in podcast #55 (here) when she had newly moved onto the land she was starting to farm in New Mexico. In this podcast, she returns to talk about how her work is progressing there - and to talk more deeply about the actual mechanisms we can use to draw carbon down into our soils.
She says this: "Where I am called is to bring more focus on the fungi, as that really is the 'how' of soil regeneration, be it agricultural, forest, greening deserts, whatever, and I don't hear people talking about that enough. We know fungi and their glomalin are what sequester carbon (mitigate climate change, reverse ocean acidification, etc.) and cycle macro and micro nutrients thereby increasing abundance and nutrient content in foods thereby increasing the capacities of those who eat those foods. Last time I spoke about fungi in relation to the soil food web, but I'd like to really make clear how and why fungi are the keystone to soil health and therefore human health, land health, etc. and how we support them and get out of their way. Fungi are the neural network of the Earth, communicating the state of the environment to plants and giving them the tools to respond. By facilitating plant growth, fungi are also changing climate patterns; there are many examples of how revegetating an arid area brings more rainfall. And so, I have a vision I'd like to speak on (that is SO possible) of vast stretches of land, even whole continents, once again connected in mycelial webs. I think that is a goal we should set for our species for the next seven generations because if we have that, we have connected ecosystems and watersheds that are clean, abundant, biodiverse, adaptable, and full of so much food, fiber, and fuel for humans and more than humans. Just like disease is broadly described as a breakdown of communication within the body, the destruction of those mycelial networks through tillage and other harmful practices marked the start of the wetiko culture.
The 'how' is simple: plant a wide diversity of plants, mostly annuals; bring more wood into systems via mulch and hugel culture and leaving woody debris (and I can go into how that lignin is decomposed by fungi into humic substances, which are the storehouses of the soil for carbon and other nutrients and even DNA information of other types of life forms that is stable for thousands of years as well as cleans contaminated soil by binding contaminants, AND how fungi are the gatekeepers to those stores and information, choosing when to draw on them); use fungal composts (not bacterial dominated); stop disturbing the soil (there are ample resources now for no-till and I can elaborate); rotational grazing with animals to increase plants vigor and diversity; do not pull weeds, rather create a more fungal soil and watch the 'weeds' back off on their own (ie, create what we want rather than resist what we don't want).
As far as the 'how' socially/politically, it's all about changing our thinking and viewing the world as alive. Rather than paving over an empty lot or growing mono-crop grass lawns, let's create ordinances that promote more ground cover and diversity. This advocacy doesn't just have to be about making more human food. We need rooftop gardens everywhere possible to mitigate the heat island effect and create positive feedback loops of rainfall and temp. that allow more growth. Mulch your leaves instead of bagging and throwing them away. Everyone can find a way to promote this either in stopping destructive gardening and growing practices or by advocating for community growing spaces or by guerilla hugeling, planting, seed-saving, foraging, and buying locally. Long-lived indigenous cultures all have practices that support fungal networks. One of the main issues I see when I consult on soil building is a psychological clinging to control when the system really needs to just be left alone and supported in simple ways. The more we rewild our minds and our communities, the more we will get away from the perceived need to micro-manage, the more we can hear the voices of the land so our actions are efficient and effective, AND simultaneously build the equivalent of human mycelial networks where we can trade tools and information in an open-source way.
I don't have a lot of concrete ideas myself around how to build political will. Rather, where I'm at is simply the acknowledgement that we need to change our thinking fundamentally and let go of scarcity/wetiko culture by reconnecting. Fungi are literally the (re)connectors of terrestrial life. My personal path toward reconnection is by changing how we grow food in our gardens and farms so that fungi thrive and imbue us with better nutrition as well as inoculate our guts us with, well, themselves and their voices (heard through our microbiome, cravings, hormonal regulation, etc.). Personally, the more I do this, the more I am connected to my (new-to-me) land through dreams of when it will rain, when a certain plant will drop seeds, etc. Or I am visited by a honey bee who spends twenty minutes walking on my hand and I am left with the knowledge that they are there, that they need me to plant flowers to them to pollinate. The more time I spend inoculating myself with the flora around me (eating the wild plants, grasses, bark), the more I am able to safely drink the water on this land without filtration, which I couldn't do when I arrived in Dec. When I do actions like mulching, I am walking the talk of my earth-based spirituality and the land spirits take notice and support."
Jonathan Dawson, co-creator of the Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher college, is a sustainability educator and a former President of the Global Ecovillage Network. He has around 20 years experience as a researcher, author, consultant and project manager in the field of small enterprise development in Africa and South Asia and before joining the College he was a long-term resident at the Findhorn ecovillage.
Jonathan is the principal author of the Gaia Education sustainable economy curriculum www.gaiaeducation.org, drawn from best practice within ecovillages worldwide, that has been endorsed by UNITAR and adopted by UNESCO as a valuable contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. He teaches this curriculum at universities, ecovillages and community centres in Brazil, Spain and Scotland. He has also adopted the curriculum to virtual format and teaches it through the Open University of Catalunya in Barcelona.
In this week's wide-ranging discussion, we explore the differences between the hard, mechanistic view of economics and the wider, more regenerative view that is based in moral philosophy. From there, we look at the ways we can change the stories we tell ourselves about value and worth and the ways we are moving forward in an ever-changing world.
Links:
Articles:
DAWSON J. Teaching Economics for the 21st Century, Resilience.org. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-10-06/teaching-economics-for-the-21st-century
DAWSON J. Changing Stories: Using narrative to shift societal values, Resurgence (March, 2015) http://newstoryhub.com/2014/08/changing-stories-using-narrative-to-shift-societal-values/
DAWSON J. A wave of disruption is sweeping in to challenge neoliberalism, Guardian, March 12, 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/12/disruption-challenge-neoliberalism-commons-political-system
Books:
Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Doughnut-Economics-by-Kate-Raworth-author/9781847941398
Mariana Mazzucato: The Mission Economy: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Mission-Economy-by-Mariana-Mazzucato-author/9780241419731
Tim Jackson: Post Growth: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Post-Growth-by-Tim-Jackson-author/9781509542529
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry for the Future (fiction): https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Ministry-for-the-Future-by-Kim-Stanley-Robinson-author/9780356508832
Bill Gates: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/How-to-Avoid-a-Climate-Disaster-by-Bill-Gates-author/9780241448304
TED TALK
Rupert Sheldrake (banned by TED) https://youtu.be/JKHUaNAxsTg
Katrina Blair began studying wild plants in her teens when she camped out alone for a summer with the intention of eating primarily wild foods. She gained an MA from John F Kennedy University in Orinda, CA in Holistic Health Education and - as she tells us in the podcast - went on to found Turtle Lake Refuge in 1998, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to celebrate the connection between personal health and wild lands. She teaches sustainable living practices, permaculture and wild edible and medicinal plant classes locally and internationally. She is the author of two books, one a raw food cook book's 'Recipes for Living Deep' and The Wild Wisdom of Seeds (linked below).
The Mission Statement of Turtle Lake Refuge says that it exists to celebrate the connection between personal health and wild lands.
We are inspired to promote and practice sustainable ways of living, honouring wild nature and the evolution of community. Examples of our work include growing, harvesting and preparing local, wild and living food for the community, educating about the great values of the wild edible and medicinal abundance available in our area, providing local micro greens for the public schools, restaurants and stores and educating about organic land stewardship practices through our project Bee Happy Lands.
Links:
Turtle Lake Refuge: http://www.turtlelakerefuge.org
Recipes for Living Deep: http://www.turtlelakerefuge.org/rawfoodcookbook
The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: http://www.turtlelakerefuge.org/wild-wisdom
When David SmartKnight heard that the G7 summit was coming to Cornwall in June 2021, he went to the land and asked of it ‘What can I do?’ That night, he had a dream… and as is the way of things, when we align ourselves with life, the world joins our actions. Pretty soon he and his co-producer, Klaudia van Gool had a team of people, who came together to make a beautiful, moving 3 minute video and a project of awe-inspiring scope, to bring the words of the world’s children to the world’s leaders in ways they cannot ignore.
As for David himself: Following a thriving career as an IT consultant, for 25 years David has asked: “What does it mean to live sustainably?”. This has resulted in studying & applying Permaculture, shamanism, Non-Violent Communication, storytelling, teaching, social enterprise, running a smallholding, planting and managing coppice, making greenwood furniture, keeping livestock and holding ceremonies. All woven into a second career as an environmental educator, devising and delivering a European-wide teacher training program, creating and piloting a sustainability curriculum for secondary, establishing two award-winning Environmental Education Centres and running eco-build projects as community empowerment exercises.
“Sustainability”, he believes “is a completely inadequate ambition: what we actually need is regeneration, which, by necessity, requires both personal fulfilment and social justice.”
Between his deep-nature connection business, the complexities (and joys) of single-parenting two teenagers and devoting much of his time to supporting the Regenerative Cultures strand underpinning Extinction Rebellion, David currently is spearheading “The Children’s Fire Project” – an ambition to bring the 7th Generation Principle to the heart of global economic thinking.
And this is Klaudia: I grew up on the edge of a village in the south of the Netherlands, considering the fields out the back my play ground. I had an urge to garden and made small gardens around the house. I signed myself up as a youth member of a national nature conservation charity.
It wasn’t until I decided on an Environmental Science degree after moving to the UK and having children, that things came together for me and I realised i couldn’t think of anything better to do than work in the field I loved, which I have continued to do ever since.
I worked as an Environmental Business Services Adviser for the Groundwork Trust for eleven years, after personal experience of various small businesses ranging from construction to food processing.
In addition to the degree in Environmental Science, I attended many trainings in the fields of business, permaculture, education & teaching, facilitation, management, sustainability skills and personal development.
I have gathered many skills through training and practical experience: gardening, preserving, foraging, basketry, living willow structures, strawbale and cob building, bushcraft, herbal medicine and more.
Once I started on the permaculture path, I got hooked, started teaching permaculture in 2007 and have taught 31 PDCs to date. This path had led to a social permaculture interest, see more here.
In recent years I have been involved with Extinction Rebellion, mostly focussing on regenerative cultures and deepening my curiosity for ceremony and herbal knowledge and skills.
The Children’s Fire Website: https://childrensfire.earth
Video Link to 'Honouring the Children's Fire': https://youtu.be/4SO6dS1Qa9I
Klaudia van Gool: http://klaudia.co.uk
Mothiur Rahman, pioneer member of Muslims for Extinction Rebellion and of New Economy Law speaks with raw courage and a unique combination of vulnerability and strength as he describes his own journey to spiritual connection and how it informs his life, from supporting anti-fracking campaigners to working with XR visioning.
From helping defeat the first major fracking application in the UK, to taking part in XR actions to highlight government inaction, Mothiur walks his talk with clear integrity, a sharp, engaged mind and a commitment to bringing about a regenerative future.
New Economy Law
Muslims for Extinction Rebellion FB page
Article in Resurgence Magazine: "A Civil Rights Movement"
Mothiur’s statement to be read at his trial (for XR Action - the case was dismissed before this could be read out)
Mothiur's article in Stir for Action Land & Power:Community Charters
Mothius's talk at Vaults Festival 2019 Decolonise/Decarbonise: Decoloniality & Rewilding the Psyche
In this second of two parts with Alan Watson Featherstone we explore more deeply the creation of Trees for Life - how it arose and what it entailed... In itself, this is impressive, but what makes it inspiring for those of us who might not be able to set up a world-changing forest reWilding project, is the extent to which, having made a commitment to change the world, the world itself supports us in our endeavour.
This is what is so inspiring about Alan's story, what gives us hope in a world hurtling towards so many tipping points: that if we listen to our innermost yearnings, if we follow our hearts and let our intuition lead us - then when we step onto the path of our calling the world supports us in our endeavour.
Alan's website: https://alanwatsonfeatherstone.com
Trees for Life: https://treesforlife.org.uk/alan-watson-featherstone-founder-of-trees-for-life/
Findhorn community https://www.findhorn.org
Auroville community https://auroville.org
Restore the Earth http://www.restoretheearth.co.uk
Global Ecovillage Network https://ecovillage.org
Alan Watson Featherstone is an ecologist, nature photographer, international speaker - and founder of Trees for Life, the charity that grew from a promise made at a Gathering, into a multi-million pound organisation owning - and ReWilding - thousands of acres of the Scottish Highlands. Along the way, he organised the planting of trees by the million, the fencing of thousands of acres to protect saplings - and helped lay the roots for the re-introduction of beavers to Scotland.
His journey from electronics undergraduate to one of the world's foremost advocates for Wild Land and our connection with nature is an inspiration for anyone and everyone who seeks to connect with a sense of purpose in life.
Alan's website: https://alanwatsonfeatherstone.com
Trees for Life: https://treesforlife.org.uk/alan-watson-featherstone-founder-of-trees-for-life/
Findhorn community https://www.findhorn.org
Auroville community https://auroville.org
Restore the Earth http://www.restoretheearth.co.uk
Global Ecovillage Network https://ecovillage.org
'Dreaming Your Soul's Path' Gathering at Accidental Gods https://accidentalgods.life/dreaming-your-souls-path/
Professor Rupert Read works in the philosophy department at UEA in Norwich. He's author of numerous books and a hands-on, sit-in-the-streets climate activist. His latest book, Parents for a Future is a passionate, beautifully argued clarion call for all of us to do whatever it takes to move us onto a trajectory that will shape the future we need and want for future generations: a future we're proud to leave behind.
This year in particular is a crucial turning point. As we emerge from COVID and move towards COP26 in Glasgow, the decisions we make now will shape this decade, which will shape this century, which will shape this millennium - and the future of the human and more-than-human worlds.
You can connect at @parents4afuture and #ParentsforFuture, so head for both of those and see what you can do to make this year the one where we changed.
Parents for a Future Book: https://www.parentsforafuture.org/shop
Rupert's website https://parentsforafuture.org
ThruTopia paper: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupert-read/thrutopia-why-neither-dys_b_18372090.html
Narrative Ark Television for the future website https://narrativeark.net
Donnieis a facilitator, authorand social entrepreneur,passionate about all things not-for-profit. Originally from Australia, he moved to the U.S. in 2013, from where he coordinates the Post GrowthInstitute. As a consultant, he has worked in Egypt, Kenya, Fiji, Thailand and South Korea, helping 500+ not-for-profit projects start, scale and sustain theirwork, while his own initiatives include developing: Free Money Day, the Post Growth Alliance, the (En)Rich List, the Offers and Needs Market process, The Not for Profit Waytraining, Silent Skype team meetings, Project Australia, and the globally-used #postgrowth hashtag. An Affiliate Professor of Economics at Southern Oregon University and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Donnie holds a Ph.D. in social science.
He is passionate about the concept that we already have the answers to the current world, social, cultural, climatic, ecological and economic crises - and that if we can understand this fact, it will help us to work towards answers that will work.
In the podcast, he explores the ways in which we can spread this understanding, and build on it to create a generative future. He focuses on the things that are already working - and ways we can shift the focus of our economy away from the massive hoarding of wealth by big multinationals and the global hyper-rich.
How on Earth: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/How-on-Earth-by-Donald-Maclurcan-author-Jen-Hinton-author/9780990369004
We all know the economy is broken - that the experiment of free market capitalism has driven us to the edge of extinction. The problem is working out what to replace it with that will help us to find new ways of being without creating such havoc that lives are destroyed in the process.
In this first of a two-part series, Richard Murphy explores ways we can change the current system to create a different world.
Richard Murphy is a political economist, author of the book 'The Joy of Tax', and is a visiting professor at Sheffield, Anglia Ruskin and City universities. He's an adviser at the Fair Tax Mark and was deeply involved in creating the first iteration of the Green New Deal in the UK. He writes the Tax Research Blog, which shines bright lights on the economic illiteracy of free-market governments.
In our conversation, we explore how money is made in the current system, the mythology of austerity and how the world could be if we all understood the nature of the lies. When we all see the Emperor has no clothes, we can re-create a new way of doing and being.
Tax Research Blog: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
Fair Tax Mark: https://fairtaxmark.net
The Joy of Tax: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Joy-of-Tax-by-Richard-Murphy-author/9780552171618
Tax Justice Network: https://www.taxjustice.net
The Green New Deal: https://greennewdealgroup.org
Pam Barrett worked at the heart of the Westminster government's civil service. Then she moved to picturesque Buckfastleigh, a mill town on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, and began to see how badly the town was served by the town and regional councils. She started a group to preserve the town's only swimming pool. That grew, and the pool was saved, and she moved on, in time, to stand as an independent for the town council. A group of others stood with her, and they gained 9 seats on a 12 seat council. Which meant they could do things, make things happen... discover the freedom that local democracy gives if it truly serves the local people.
With the newly independent group on the local council, the concept of 'of the people, by the people, for the people' took on new meaning. They moved the council to a bigger room and made the proceedings far more transparent. They asked local people what they wanted to do - and then worked out how much it would cost.. .23p per household per week to really keep the swimming pool open, other bits for other things, amounting to an extra 97p per household per week. And then they let local people decide if they wanted that...
and, like almost all participatory budgeting, when people have a chance to really see what their money goes towards - they did want it, and they were happy to pay. So that four years later, when the council came up for re-election, 10 independent councillors stood and 10 were elected.
Pam's story is one of agency, and local empowerment and it can play out pretty much anywhere in the world where democracy is still alive. Listen in and be inspired - then go out and see what you can do in your local area.
FlatPack Democracy: https://www.flatpackdemocracy.co.uk
Trust the People online Training: https://actionnetwork.org/events/trust-the-people-online-course-spring-2021
Be Buckfastleigh: https://bebuckfastleigh.co.uk
Positive News on Pam Barrett and Buckfastleigh: https://www.positive.news/uk/the-devonshire-town-that-transformed-local-democracy/
Handforth Parish Council Zoom call (full) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsalmnyed7k
Handforth Parish Council Zoom (highlights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgGmYeAm0jk
Chris Taylor, author of 'The Tao of Revolution' is a Tai Chi teacher, regenerative farmer, musician, performance poet, facilitator-of-change and author - who describes himself as a revolutionary mystic. Or mystical revolutionary. His book is described as 'A field guide for Global Transformation, - a book on climate and societal change that isn't about the coming chaos, but about how we learn to live with the future. The system will not be over-thrown, it will be overgrown - here's how.'
In this heart-warming, thought-provoking podcast we move through Immanuelle Wallerstein, Quaker philosophy and Mellissa Etheridge to the Green New Deal, QAnon and Taoism, to how we can live deeply connected to the land that feeds us.
Ultimately, we explore the opportunities and gifts of our times and the ways that we can each find the margins of ourselves, find the things that make our hearts sing and find the ways to do them - so that together, we are building a world based on connection, coherence and empowerment.
Chris Taylor's book: The Tao of Revolution: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Tao-of-Revolution-by-Chris-Taylor-author/9781939269973
Oasis Human Relations: https://www.oasishumanrelations.org.uk
Grace Blakeley: Green Capitalism is not enough: https://democracycollaborative.org/learn/publication/green-capitalism-not-enough
Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation paper: https://jembendell.com/2019/05/15/deep-adaptation-versions/
Immanuelle Wallerstein: World Systems Analysis: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/World-Systems-Analysis-by-Immanuel-Maurice-Wallerstein/9780822334422
Dr Rachel Lilley combines extensive academic research with many years practical experience working with teams and senior leaders to offer unique and practical insights into attention, emotions, consciousness and decision making. She has particular expertise in behaviour change related to sustainability, climate change and community engagement as well as extensive academic and personal experience of using mindfulness to develop self and other awareness and gain insight.
In today's podcast, we discuss the basis behind her PhD thesis, which explored the practical results of teaching mindfulness to civil servants in the Welsh Government and how this impacted on the ability to deliver results particularly related to climate change actions. The core of this: that people learned how their own minds worked - and so began to understand how others' minds work, that not all minds are the same, and not all thought processes follow the same lines - is transformative in our lives, our workplaces and our ability to respond to the current planetary crisis. Rachel explains the basis of her work and its results so far- as well as the potential for extending it further.
Rachel Lilley Predicting Mind website - https://predictingmind.com
Lisa Feldman Barret: How Emotions are Made - https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/How-Emotions-Are-Made-by-Lisa-Feldman-Barrett-author/9781509837526
George Lakoff Metaphors we Live By: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Metaphors-We-Live-By-by-George-Lakoff-author-Mark-Johnson-author/9780226468013
Podcast: Sam Harris talking to Anil Seth: https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/113-consciousness-and-the-self/
Everybody Now
Climate Emergency and Sacred Duty
We’ve caused a turning point in the Earth’s natural history. Everybody Now is a podcast about what it means to be human on the threshold of a global climate emergency, in a time of systemic injustice and runaway pandemics. Scientists, activists, farmers, poets, and theologians talk bravely and frankly about how our biosphere is changing, about grief and hope in an age of social collapse and mass extinction, and about taking action against all the odds.
On 19th October 2020, Everybody Now is being released by podcasters all over the world as a collective call for awareness, grief and loving action.
With contributions from:
Dr. Gail Bradbrook - scientist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion
Prof. Kevin Anderson - Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester
Dámaris Albuquerque - works with agricultural communities in Nicaragua
Dr. Rowan Williams - theologian and poet, and a former Archbishop of Canterbury
Pádraig Ó Tuama - poet, theologian and conflict mediator
Rachel Mander - environmental activist with Hope for the Future
John Swales - priest and activist, and part of a community for marginalised people
Zena Kazeme - Persian-Iraqi poet who draws on her experiences as a former refugee to create poetry that explores themes of exile, home, war and heritage
Flo Brady - singer and theatre maker
Hannah Malcolm - Anglican ordinand, climate writer and organiser
Alastair McIntosh- writer, academic and land rights activist
David Benjamin Blower - musician, poet and podcaster
Funding and Production:
This podcast was crowdfunded by a handful of good souls, and produced by Tim Nash and David Benjamin Blower
Permissions:
The song Happily by Flo Brady is used with permission.
The song The Soil, from We Really Existed and We Really Did This by David Benjamin Blower, used with permission.
The Poem The Tree of Knowledge by Pádraig Ó Tuama used with permission.
The Poem Atlas by Zena Kazeme used with permission.
The Poem What is Man? by Rowan Williams from the book The Other Mountain, used with permission from Carcanet Press.
David Benjamin Blower is a radical Christian theologian, a musician, a writer, and a podcaster. He is co-host of NOMAD podcast which describes itself as 'Stumbling through the post-Christendom wilderness looking for signs of hope". His first book Kingdom vs Empire is 'an explosive manifesto for politicised faith in 21st Century Britain.'
In this deep dive into the nature of faith, we explore spirituality, belief, tribalism - and the narratives we spin ourselves of where we are and where we could be.
David's Website davidbenjaminblower.com
David's Music benjaminblower.bandcamp.com/music
Nomad podcast - Elizabeth Oldfield episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nomad-podcast/id301419170?i=1000493995562
Nomad podcast - Elaine Heath episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nomad-podcast/id301419170?i=1000422414384
Climate PodBoom - https://pdst.fm/e/media.transistor.fm/1f96c344/de91b51d.mp3
Glenn Edney is a Deep Ecologist, an Ocean explorer, diver, sailor, an activist for the living Ocean - and a deeply thoughtful visionary, following in the footsteps of his hero, Jacques Cousteau.
He's the author of three books, the most recent, published in 2016, is 'The Ocean is Alive'. He wrote this as his way to help those of us more land bound to understand that, like Gaia, the Ocean is a living entity with its own hyper-complex physiology - that everything from the chemical composition of the water, through the lives of the plankton and microbiomes to the majesty - and super consciousness - of the great whales, is part of a single Being. The detail of how the Ocean lives and breathes is fascinating and glorious, but it's the stories of connection, heart-to-heart, with the living elements of the Ocean that stay with us long after we've put the book down.
In the podcast, Glenn shares his complete connection with the Ocean - and the ways we can - and must - open to this magnificent part of our planet.
“Mena kei te hauora te moana ka pera ano te hauora o te iwi”If the ocean is healthy so too will the people be healthy - Maori saying
The Ocean is Alive: book link: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Ocean-Is-Alive-by-Glenn-Edney-author/9780473352608
High and Deep Sea Photos by Glenn: https://www.synchronicityearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Synchronicity-Earth-High-Deep-Seas-Insight.pdf
Trust The People is a movement of community builders open to everyone sharing deliberative democratic tools to support local communities dealing with global crises. In this episode, Mags Mulowska, an activist with TTP, explores how our current system is broken, and the ways we can change it so that everyone has choice and a voice, so that everyone's voice is heard and communities build around a sense of place and of purpose. She describes the courses run by TTP and some of the ways they have led to flourishing outcomes in diverse local communities. And we discuss the May local elections in the UK and how people can join a movement of independent candidates dedicated to bringing radical inclusivity, deep listening and trust to the local process.
Trust the People: https://www.trustthepeople.earth
Isabel Hardman "Why we Get the Wrong Politicians"
Alnoor Ladha's work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules (TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in anarchist organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play and make trouble together.
Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and explores/writes about the intersection between politics and spirituality in troubled times. He is also a co-founder of Tierra Valiente, a post- capitalist community in northern Costa Rica.
In this week's podcast, we discuss his ideas of Capitalism, memes and mind viruses - notably the idea of the Wetiko - and what the antidotes might be. We explore the nature of subjective reality and the narratives that promote capitalism. We explore the need for mystical anarchism, the means by which we might transcend subject/object duality, cultivating relationality and cultivating a sense of connection to the web of life.
The Rules: https://therules.org/author/alnoor/
Tierra Valiente: https://www.braveearth.com
Seeing Wetiko: on capitalism, mind viruses and antidotes: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/
What could possibly go right: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-10-20/what-could-possibly-go-right-episode-19-alnoor-ladha/
Navona Gallegos is an ecologist and farmer working to transition desert back into grassland in the arid Southwest of Turtle Island. She works and educates on the intersection of clean water, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and nutrition: soil. Navona's passion is decolonization and she sees building soil as the keystone that allows us to step into right relation with our surrounding ecologies, access more of our innate capacities, and create a culture that truly meets our needs. Her insight into the spiritual connection with the land is a breath of fresh air, giving us ways to connect that are healing for us as well as the earth.
Links:
Dr Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web: https://www.soilfoodweb.com
We have to stop consuming stuff... but we never stop imbibing ideas. So here are some to choose from - all links to Blackwells. For obvious reasons.
Non-Fiction
'From what is to what if' by Rob Hopkins
The Trembling Warrior and others by Gill Coombs
'The Best of Times, the Worst of Times' by Paul Behrens
'How to Be More Pirate' by Alex Barker
'Doughnut Economics' by Kate Raworth (also Doughnut Economics Action Lab)
'Less is More' by Jason Hickel
'The Ocean is Alive' by Glenn Edney
'The Tao of Revolution' by Chris Taylor
Fiction:
'This is How You Lose The Time War' by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
'The Border Keeper' by Kerstin Hall
'Slough House' by Mick Herron
'Agent Running in the Field' by John le Carré
'Attack Surface' by Cory Doctorow
'Call Down the Hawk' by Maggie Stiefvater
'The Timekeeper' by Tara Sim
'In Other Lands' by Sarah Rees Brennan
'The Ten Thousand Doors of January' by Alix E Harrow
'The Left Handed Booksellers of London' by Garth Nix.
'A Deadly Education' by Naomi Novak
'Fallible Justice' by Laura Laakso
'Poison in Paris' by Robert Wilton
'The Last Protector' by Andrew Taylor
'The Angel of the Crows' by Katherine Addison
Podcasts:
Upstream hosted by Della Duncan
The Hive hosted by Nathalie Nahai
The Sustainable Futures Report by Anthony Day
A New and Ancient Story by Charles Eisenstein
'Your Undivided Attention' by Tristan Harris
'Regenerative Agriculture Podcast' by John Kempf
Farm Gate hosted by Ffinlo Costain
'Equiosity' by Alex Kurland
'Horses For Future' by Alex Kurland
Drinking from the Toilet by Hannah Brannigan
Link to Dreaming the Year Awake
So, it's our Birthday - and it's that time of year when every pundit endeavours to look back at the year just gone and ahead to the one that is coming. And we thought we'd like to establish a parallel tradition, where we bring together our favourite podcasting-friends and explore the ways we think. So we set up a structure that will be repeatable in future years... where we give each other gifts of a book, podcast or something else that has brought us real insight, and then we explore each other's existential questions. And we have fun. So that you can have fun too.
Della Duncan is a Renegade Economist who hosts the UPSTREAM podcast challenging traditional economic thinking and uplifting stories of sustainable, just, and equitable economic systems-change around the world. Della is also a Right Livelihood Coach, a Senior Fellow of Social and Economic Equity at the International Inequalities Institute in the London School of Economics, the Course Development Manager of Fritjof Capra’s Capra Course on the Systems View of Life, and an Alternative Economics Consultant.
Nathalie Nahai is host of THE HIVE podcast. Nathalie is an international speaker and author of the best-selling book, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion, which has been translated into seven languages.
Her work explores the intersection between persuasive technology, ethics and the psychology of online behaviour, and clients include Google, Accenture, Unilever and Harvard Business Review, among others.
Nathalie gives keynotes, workshops and webinars on the psychological dynamics behind evolving consumer behaviours, teaching people how to ethically apply behavioural science principles to enhance their website, content marketing, product design and customer experience.
A member of the BIMA Human Insights Council, she also hosts The Hive Podcast, Seeking The Self and several Guardian podcasts, and contributes to national publications, television (BBC, Sky, CNN), and radio (BBC Radio 4) on the impact of technology in our lives.
From Nathalie:
Books
-
- Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Women Who Run with the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estés
- Foxfire Wolfskin - Sharon Blackie
- The Abundant Earth - Eileen Crist
- Podcast: Eco Civ Podcast
From Della:
Books
-
- The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype - Clarissa Pinkola Estés
- Building Bridges, Not Walking on Backs: A Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19 - Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women
- The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself - Richard Wolff
Podcast: Upstream Conversations that I mentioned
From Manda:
Books
-
- English Pastoral - James Rebanks
- Less is More - Jason Hickel
- Slow Horses - Mick Herron
Suppose we all learned three things at school: empathy, critical thinking and systems thinking... imagine how different the world would be. Suppose we learned how to think clearly, how to communicate, how to understand our own feelings and express them without feeling the need to trash other people just because we were hurt, or angry.
Rachel Musson, founder and educational director of ThoughtBox, a radical, new co-learning programme speaks of her journey to create the system, and how it's working - in over a thousand schools and fifty four nations across the world. Rachel believes in co-learning: no more lesson plans, but a classroom of peers who take the core of a topic and build on it together. The result is a flexible learning environment where everyone thrives, where each individual is given space and encouragement to grow to be the best of themselves.
Imagine a world where this is possible. Where it is happening. Where it is growing...
About Rachel
Rachel Musson is a teacher, trainer, writer and thought-leader on
sustainable education and wellbeing in schools.
Working for 13 years as a Secondary English teacher, Rachel has taught
students and trained teachers in schools across the world including the UK,
Ireland, Australia, Nepal and Tanzania. She is the Founding Director of
ThoughtBox Education – a social enterprise fostering triple wellbeing by
helping young people deepen relationships with themselves, society and the
natural world. She is the pioneer behind Changing Climates: a free climate
change curriculum currently being used in 1500+ schools across 56 countries.
Rachel is currently working with industry leaders on education reform policy
and standing as an international thought-leader on climate-change education
and triple-wellbeing in schools.
ThoughtBox: https://www.thoughtboxeducation.com
ThoughtBox Community Network: www.thoughtboxeducation.com/community
New free membership for global educators: https://www.thoughtboxeducation.com/teaching-for-a-better-world
Freedom to Think: Blog on the new anti-capitalist ban in UK schools: https://www.thoughtboxeducation.com/blog/freedom-to-think
We live on the edge of change - the facts can be terrifying, but the creative potential of our times is inspiring and just as jaw-dropping as the horrors of the reality we inhabit. Paul Behrens is Assistant Professor of Energy and Environmental Change at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has advised governments and his work on climate change has appeared in leading scientific journals, as well as on the BBC, in the New York Times and Scientific American. He's got a clear, un-sensational view of the way things are - and how we can bring ourselves back from the brink.
In our conversation, we explore the realities and the possibilities - and where we might go from here.
Pauls Book: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Best-of-Times-The-Worst-of-Times-by-Paul-Behrens-author/9781911648093
The concept of radical, renegade, revolutionary insurgency based on the model created in the Golden Age of Pirates was given wings by Sam Conniff's best selling book, BE MORE PIRATE.
In the wake of its success, Sam needed to find ways to help the many people the book inspired. And for that he needed help. Enter Alex Barker, Primary Pirate, visionary, breaker of rules and maker of gatherings on and offline. Alex and Sam between them have steered Pirate groups from industries as far apart as car manufacturing (Mercedes), Social Media Mega-Giants (Google) and nationally owned health care providers (the UK's NHS).
But we can go deeper than simply breaking the old, fossilised structures of industries... we can change the entire system. Because, as Sam says, 'problems will not be fixed by fixing the problems... what's really needed is an overhaul of the engine that's causing the problems. In other words, the business model.'
And, as Alex says, 'I want to see many more new crews forming outside of formal structures, so that while the old models fall, new ones are already emerging.'
Accidental Gods seeks to be part of that emerging eco-system of new ways of being. And to get there, we need new ways of thinking - and ways we can each break out of the moulds that have cast us. Alex Barker offers a map to the treasure of change. Follow us!
The book: https://www.bemorepirate.com/the-book
The Workshops: https://www.bemorepirate.com/the-workshop
Rethink Humanity Paper: https://www.rethinkx.com/humanity
As we said at the end of the podcast, Mike Raven and Ross Thornley of AQAI have kindly agreed to let Accidental Gods subscribers and members access their Adaptability Quotient test.
The link is here:
DISCOUNT CODE FOR AQAI: https://app.aqai.io/signup/aqme?discount_code=ACCGODS
Red is the colour of our life blood. It joins us to the land and all the web of life. It was chosen as the original colour of the silent life-dancers of Extinction Rebellion as an explicit symbol of this life blood - and although other colours have been used, notably black for oil and blue for the sea - the feature of a red line of silent individuals threading between police and activists has become a key component of XR Actions across the world.
For those not involved in the Red Rebel Brigades, their presence can feel transformative. To understand better the deep, shamanic connection with the land and the sensing-into-spirit that is an integral part of Red Rebel actions, we interviewed Sophie Miller, founder of the Cornish Red Rebels in the UK and key activist in many other actions over the past eighteen months.
Anyone who is interested in becoming part of the world wide movement of Red Rebels can find out more on their web page: http://redrebelbrigade.com
Great Thunberg says that ‘We cannot save the planet by playing by the rules, so the rules have to be changed’. This is self-evidently true, but that leaves us with the question of what rules could we create that we could all live by. Polly Higgins has the Earth Protector law, but Shelley Ostroff has gone one step further with her Codes for a Healthy Earth and the World Water law. Together, these rules spell out our connection with the More than Human world, and leave us with agency, initiative, and a sense of genuine flourishing.
Shelley Ostroff (PhD) is a planetary activist, leadership consultant, social architect, mystic and writer. She is the founder of www.togetherincreation.org, www.7days-of-rest.org, www.codes.earth and other initiatives dedicated to the healing and replenishment of the planet and all its inhabitants. Concerned by the suffering and devastation humans cause each other, other species and the planet, she dedicated herself to exploring whole-system systems dynamics and integrative healing wisdom from diverse disciplines and traditions. She has worked with people from all walks of life, from different sectors of society and across continents as a therapist, consultant, mentor, and creative partner in cultivating individual, collective and whole-system wellness. Through ongoing research and practice, she has developed a unique holistic approach to human and whole-system healing and transformation that includes evolving blueprints for a new form of holistic health-oriented global Eco-Governance.
Links:
Codes for a Healthy Earth https://www.codes.earth
Together in Creation: www.togetherincreation.org
Seven Days of Rest https://www.7days-of-rest.org/
Accidental Gods: https://accidentalgods.life/
Mike Raven is a Radical collaborator, rapid researcher, speaker, facilitator and entrepreneur.
He's a holistic business graduate and practitioner. He's a qualified Naturopath, who has studied at Schumacher College and been a UN Global Goals Ambassador. He's co-Founder of LEAPS - which accelerates Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals using design-style sprints.
And most recently, he's co-Founder of AQai, whose mission is to improve humanity's adaptability at speed and scale, to help ensure no one gets left behind, in the fastest period of change we, or any human, has ever experienced in this, and the next decade.
Above all, he is a Husband, Son, Brother, Friend, former digital nomad and passionate Futurist.
Links:
Decoding AQ: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/decoding-aq-adaptability-confidence-with-ross-thornley/id1517421415
AQAI.io: https://www.aqai.io
The Squiggly Career: https://www.thesquigglycareer.com
Global Goals. www.globalgoals.org
Holocracy" www.holocracy.org
Remote Year: www.remoteyear.com
Biology of Belief: https://www.brucelipton.com/books/biology-of-belief
Mark Lakeman is the founder of the City Repair Project, as well as the founder and Design Director at communitecture, architecture & planning. Both organizations are Portland, Oregon-based world-changing initiatives that transform social, political, and physical infrastructure in order to embed permanent transformative effects. He has also been lead instructor for the Planet Repair Institute’s Urban Permaculture Design Course for a decade. Mark’s work has been published by El Mundo, Dwell, Architecture Magazine, New Village Journal, Sotokoto, The Utne Reader, Permaculture Activist and many more. With City Repair, in 2003 Mark was awarded the National Lewis Mumford Award, and his collaborative work has been featured at the Global Venice Biennale Exhibition. Additionally, in 2017, Mark’s work in City Repair was awarded “Social Design Circle” global recognition by the Curry Stone Design Prize.
Here, he talks to Accidental Gods podcast about his life's extraordinary journey from city architect to city repair - and how the world might look in 2030 if we got it all right.
Links:
City Repair Project: https://cityrepair.org
Building Convergence: https://www.buildingconvergence.com/about/
Creative Mornings: https://creativemornings.com/talks/mark-lakeman
Communitecture.net: www.communitecture.net
Village Building Convergence: www.villagebuildingconvergence.com
Mark Lakeman: www.marklakeman.net
Planet Repair: www.planetrepair.org
Gill Coombs is a writer, coach, and facilitator. Her approach is rooted in her own long, colourful journey towards fulfilling work. In 2010, Gill left a corporate Learning and Development career to travel around the country on foot and public transport, leading workshops for communities on living in harmony with self, people and planet.
She is now an elder visionary with Extinction Rebellion and her own experiences of street-level non violent direct action led to the writing of her newly updated, and newly re-published book, 'The Trembling Warrior: A Guide for Reluctant Activists" - building on interviews and conversations with activists of all kinds, she has created a resource for anyone involved in action of any sort - direct or indirect. With her help, we find the levels of activism that feel safe for us, learn how to build tribe and -crucially -learn how to resource ourselves, to avoid burnout and breakdown so common in the progressive activist movement.
In this podcast, we explore, deepen and expand on the themes of the book, to create our own resource for Trembling Warriors.
Gill's Website book page: https://www.gillcoombs.co.uk/thetremblingwarrior
Earth Protector Communities https://earthprotectorcommunities.net/
Embercombe - Dreaming the Wildfire: https://embercombe.org/dreaming-the-wildfire/
Byline Times: https://bylinetimes.com
Double Down News: https://www.doubledown.news
Novara Media: https://novaramedia.com
Thomas Moore: Dark Nights of the Soul: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291596/dark-nights-of-the-soul-by-thomas-moore/
George Monbiot Article on Government Corruption: https://www.monbiot.com/2020/10/23/without-trace/
The Alternative: https://www.thealternative.org.uk
Compass Think Tank: https://www.compassonline.org.uk
More in Common: https://www.moreincommon.com
Led By Donkeys: https://www.ledbydonkeys.org
At the start of Lockdown, Eva and Justin set out to interview 100 people in Scotland - deep, wide, broad interviews across the widest range of opinions. Now, they are bringing those together, creating the foundations for a consultative democracy that really listens to people’s cares and concerns. If it can happen in Scotland, it can happen all around the world. We need new structures. This podcast, and the Medium article that led to it, aim to be the absolute foundation resources for those wanting to create whole, healing institutions based on the best of human Being.
About Eva and Justin:
Eva Schonveld is a climate activist, process designer and facilitator, supporting sociocratic system development, decision-making and facilitation in a range of contexts including XR Scotland. After many years working in the arts, she went on to co-found Scotland’s first Transition town and city, networked to inspire the Transition movement across Scotland, and was commissioned by the Scottish Government to establish and manage Transition Scotland Support. More recently she has co-founded Starter Culture, which is developing a range of projects to tackle the marginalisation of the inner dimension at different levels of scale including working on supporting more relational ways of doing politics in Scotland. She is also co-founder of Heartpolitics which exists to address the interconnected social and environmental threats that arise from dividing humans from the wider ecology, and from dividing our minds from our hearts, which is currently working on a fractal Grassroots to Global process which aims to connect open-hearted listening and creative culture re-design processes with a global citizens assembly.
Justin Kenrick is an anthropologist and Senior Policy Advisor at Forest Peoples Programme where he works for community land rights in Kenya and Congo. He is a director of Life Mosaic, and also works on land reform in Scotland. He lives in Portobello, Edinburgh, where he chairs Action Porty which undertook the first successful urban community right to buy in Scotland. He writes in many contexts is active in the XR UK and XR Scotland Political Strategy circles, and is on the Stewarding Group of the Scottish Government’s Climate Citizens Assembly which XR Scotland campaigned for. He has a PhD in anthropology from Edinburgh University, draws on a four year Buddhist psychotherapy training, co-founded Heartpolitics, is a Quaker, and has been imprisoned several times for peaceful direct action. His work focuses on enabling people to safely risk taking the steps needed to restore trust in themselves, their community, society and the world.
Links
The original Medium article: Politics, Trauma and Empathy: breakthrough to a politics of the heart? https://medium.com/@evaschonveld/politics-trauma-and-empathy-breakthrough-to-a-politics-of-the-heart-8591d8dce628
Sue Gerhardt 'Why Love Matters' https://www.academia.edu/4198318/Why_love_matters_By_Sue_Gerhardt_Abingdon_Oxfordshire_Brunner_Routledge_2004_Pp_256_9_99_ISBN_1583918175
Sociocracy: https://sociocracy.co.uk
Grassroots to Global: https://www.grassroots2global.org
The Alternative: https://alternativet.dk/en
'Climate Change is a failure of the imagination'. If this is so, and this is a time when we need to be at our most imaginative, how can we change the trajectory of our falling imaginations?
Rob Hopkins, author of 'From What Is to What If?', offers an answer. In this podcast, we explore the ways that all of us could combine to create a new future - ways to recharge and restart and give space to our imaginations. Rob offers a vision of a future and actual examples of change happening now from the Civic Imagination Office in Bologna, with its pacts of actually doing things, that has inspired other towns in the UK to do the same, to the Doughnut Economics model and the ways people engage to make a difference.
Here, we have a wealth of radically transformative ideas that we can engage with on a daily basis to transform ourselves, our communities and our planet.
Links
Rob Hopkins site https://www.robhopkins.net/
Buy the book from Rob's site: https://www.robhopkins.net/the-book/
Rob's podcast Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext
Radio 4 Food Program 'Sitopia' https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000m49j
Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics model https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
AG_S3_P8_RobHopkins_12oct20.mp3
Manda: So Rob Hopkins on our second try at the other end of a lockdown- the other end of first lockdown - welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How is life down in Devon?
Rob: Life is kind of I don't know. I almost feel like I'm emerging from lockdown as a different person than I went in. It feels very strange kind of a process. And next week I'm going away to France to go and do some talks and stuff, which was supposed to happen in April or May and was cancelled. But actually, I'm sort of feeling that in the last six months, the furthest I've been is Totnes. I went to Exeter once and it was completely sensorially overwhelming. So quite how going on Eurostar and all that's going to be, I have no idea.
Manda: This is how our ancestors lived there, wasn't it? There were people in our village who for whom going to Glasgow was a once in a decade event when I was a kid growing up. And the rest of the time they were within walking distance or maybe took a bus to the little town and that was it.
Rob: I used to live in Italy when I was about in my early 20s and I lived in this village and we had this friend called Guido, who was about 80, lovely, lovely man, still running his farm on his own. He had a cow and a horse. And I remember he had one time an English backpacking young woman had come to stay in his house for a while and helped on the farm called Lynetta. We still talked about Lynetta all the time. And I don't think he'd ever been maybe he'd been to Pisa once, you know, he'd hardly ever been away.
And I remember he said, I know you're going to London. If you go to London, just ask for Lynetta. Everyone will know.It's like this mental picture of London as it was the same size village..
Manda: So since we last spoke, you have started your own podcast and the whole of your book, 'From what is to What If' seems to me to have taken off as an Internet phenomenon. The concept of creative thinking as a way to move us forward has become central. So there may well be people listening to the podcast. Actually, I hope there are people listening to the podcast who haven't read your book yet, because that means that they will go out and buy it by the end of the podcast and we will enlarge the general audience of the concept of creative imagination and what it can do to begin to shape the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible that Charles Eisenstein speaks of. So before we move into the work that you've been doing recently, can we talk a little bit about the book from what is to what is how it arose and the wonder that is contained within it?
Rob: Well, it was kind of a two year project, really, that I did where I interviewed more than 100 people. I went to visit loads of really interesting places, projects.
And it came about because I kept reading people who I really admire and respect, like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and George Monbiot and people. And they all seem to be using this term where they would say climate change is a failure of the imagination. It would kind of pop up and then disappear again. I'd be going, oh, ah, I was interesting. What do you mean by that? Why why would we be having a failure of the imagination in 2020 at a time when we need to be at our most imaginative?
And then I came across some research done in 2011 by a woman callled Kyum Hee Kim, a researcher who had looked at a whole load of data from something called the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, which is the sort of gold standard creativity test which had been done in the US on big samples of people going back to the 1960s. And the conclusion was that imagination and IQ had risen together until the mid 90s and then IQ kept rising and imagination kind of just like sort of divergent thinking had started to decline.
And I thought, well, when this was published, it made the front page of Newsweek. It was a really big deal. And it was like people it was a whole lot of soul searching in the US about what does this mean for economic growth? What does this mean for Hollywood? And to which I was I don't really care about those, but I do really care about what that means for the fact that we're trying to imagine an alternative to business as usual, because business as usual is a suicide pact. And if we're stuck with our imagination, that's really, really serious.
And actually, we were talking about lock down before for me, one of the one of the moments for me during lockdown that just nailed this thing of climate change is a failure of the imagination was the most surreal. I mean, the last four years have given us lots of surreal Donald Trump moments.
But the one where he was talking about how he was trying to dismiss the idea of making buildings more energy efficient, because everybody knows that the only way to make buildings more energy efficient is to fill in all their windows. So they have no windows.
I'm thinking you're the you're the president of this country and actually really on social media and things, I encounter so many people who get into that thing of, well, a low carbon future is basically living in a cave and eating potatoes, isn't it? And of course it's not. Of course it's not. And so in the book, what I wanted to do, it kind of help me really realise that a lot of what I've been doing for the last 10, 12 years and the transition movement and the writing and the talking I do is about longing and cultivating longing.
The only way we're going to achieve a zero carbon world is by creating such deep longing in people that it becomes inevitable that we create it in a way. We say when when Neil Armstrong went to the moon, it wasn't his idea, it wasn't JFK idea. We had culturally been creating that longing to go there. Frank Sinatra sang us to the moon. Tintin went to the moon. Everybody went to the moon, to the point where there was such a profound collective longing to go to the moon that it kind of became inevitable. And we did it within eight years from scratch. We got someone onto the moon, you know, and and it seems like we often focus on the how do we build the rocket bit and not on the how do we create the longing bit, which is about imagination. So the book is an exploration of what's the state of health, of our collective imagination.
Rob: How can we tell if the imagination is not doing that well, what could we do about that? What would it look like if we set out to intentionally rebuild the imagination, if we elected people who said our priority is to make this the most imaginative country in the world, what would you do? How would you do that? You would have to completely overhaul education and health service and politics and democracy and economics. And I find examples of all of those things and of people who are putting imagination now at the heart of how they see their political future, how they want to reimagine things.
And one of my favourite stories in there that I only heard about two weeks before I had to submit the final manuscript. So I had a frenzied couple of weeks trying to find out more. Was the Civic Imagination office in Bologna, where the government in Bologna had created a not a civic engagement office or a civic participation office, but a civic imagination office, and said 'Our intention is to boost the imaginative capacity of this city'. And it's so replicable and so beautiful. So fundamentally, the book is an extended love poem to those two words' What if?' And their the profound power and our need to reconnect to them at this particular time in our history.
Manda: Because it does seem to me that the whole thing, the analogy of going to the moon, we could all imagine what we thought going to the moon was going to be like. And then what happened was we saw where we could do it or - we believed the scientists who told us there was a way we could do it - and that what is lacking in the conversations that I hold out in the world, not with Accidental Gods people or people within our collective bubbles, but the general people who still read the Mail and the Telegraph and believe the BBC - is that they genuinely have no idea of what the alternative might look like. Which is exactly what you're saying, this total failure. It's easier to imagine the complete extinction of everything that lives on Earth than it is to imagine an alternative to business as usual. Which is a collective failure of the imaginatin. It is terrifying. So lots of questions arising. But the first one is actually I want to know what is happening with the Civic Imagination office in Bologna, because you must have it must be at least 18 months, possibly two years since you submitted your manuscript?
Rob: I haven't checked back in with them. I don't know what a civic imagination is in lockdown looks like. But the idea of it, I think, came about the fact that they always trace projects, always have their kind of founding story, and their founding story is all about a bench that somebody who lived on the street wanted to paint the bench a different colour. And they approached the municipality and realised that in order to just get permission to paint, one bench was going to take the nine months and they had to get the permission of six different government departments. And they realised that this was just ridiculous. And it was the same time as they were noting that there was a real decline in participation in elections. There was a real decline in civic engagement generally. So they that they started this idea of a Civic Imagination office by creating six laboratories around the city. And the people who run them are completely immersed in that place. They said everybody has our phone numbers and they run visioning exercises and all kinds of different imagining work.
But the bit that made for me that stood out as the genius bit was this idea of Pacts. We all get so used in our daily life to being invited to be imaginative. At works someone might put up a flip chart and say, 'Hey, ideas, people, ideas!' Or we go along to a consultation about a housing development. And we know that everything we write on a piece of paper, they're just going to chuck it in the bin and build it as it was. So our imagination has become bruised and used to disrespect and used to just being sidelined, marginalised and ignored.
And what they do in Bologna is they run these processes and the ideas that emerge that are particularly strong.The municipality will say 'That's a great idea, OK, let's make a pact. We can offer this, this and this. And you as a community or as a community organisation, you can offer that and that. Good. OK, let's do it. Let's make a pact.' And in the last five years in Bologna, they've made 500 pacts, which range from 'We're going to support you to make a garden on your street and make it much easier for you to do so,' through to, 'Oh, OK, you want to start a school to train and support young people to become classical musicians? Well, you can have this empty office block and we'll support you to get in there and to turn into that.' And it comes because of the pact.
And this idea of pacts feels so respectful to me.How do we create a place where people are invited to be imaginative with the chance that actually those are those ideas might become a reality? So for me, that was my key take away from Bologna was pacts. The imagination needs Pacts.
Manda: And the chance that the ideas might become a reality. That feels like a really, really important key step before we ever start the process.
Exactly as you said, if you sit in the room when he created the ideas and you know that the people running the process have no intention of following what you're saying, then it's already dampening, if not completely annihilating, the ability of your imagination to stretch out to its furthest limit. If you know that your ideas might take off, then it becomes exciting and real and juicy and fun and inspiring.
Rob: It's a completely different it's a completely different experience.
Manda: I'm due to talk quite soon to Mark Lawrence, who set up the City Repair Project in Portland. Have you heard of that?
Rob: Yes, of course. Absolutely.
Manda: That feels like one of those extraordinary experiences of the imagination of, OK, this we need more collective space. So we're just going to paint this intersection and turn it into a park and see what happens. And what happens is that there are now 700 of those in Portland, which is just mind blowing. Or there were before Portland turned into a war zone.
Rob: There might be more because of that. Yes, you never know.
Manda: So that's happening in Bologna. And it seemed to me that when you were writing the book you were talking particularly to the more progressive parties in the U.K., and I'm wondering since then and particularly since lockdown - because lockdown seemed to me that a lot of us who want social and cultural and climate justice saw the potential of lockdown for change. What Molly Scott Cato caused the Boeing 747 of the business as usual fossil fuel economy was landing and that potentially when it took off, again, it could be something different. And we're not necessarily seeing that played out yet. But I am hoping that there is some pretty strong roots growing underneath of ways that it might play out. So I'm wondering, in your connexions with politicians in the U.K., are you seeing more imagination being exercised there?
Rob: There is an exercise that I do whenever I do talks where I invite people to close their eyes and to imagine that we are helped by the time machine I built during down from plans I found online, we're travelling forwards 10 years in the future to a future where we had done everything we could possibly do. And it's not a utopia, but it is a world that has been profoundly transformed by us doing everything we could possibly do.
And I've done this with 15 people in the room and fifteen hundred people in the hall in Belgium and the things that always come out strongest when I do it, when we then kind of get people's feedback afterwards is the birdsong was louder, the air smelled clearer. There were less cars or no cars sometimes. There was a stronger sense of shared collective purpose and there was food growing all over the place. And we would do that exercise.
And then the people would leave and go out into the normal world and think 'well, that was that was nice. But that's never going to happen.' And actually, that's what we've had for at least a couple of months, we could go outside and all of a sudden that was so much more kind of tangible. And what I've observed during lockdown has been a lot of organisation, a lot of Extinction Rebellion groups and other environmental groups who are really keen to explore that kind of what academics would call 'prefigurative' - that sort of really feeling into and becoming better at articulating, 'What do we want to come next? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we communicate that to people that we're going out into the world with a big, bold, beautiful 'yes!' that accompanies the big, bold, beautiful 'No!' that is also so, so important in the fight that we have at the moment.
So I've seen a huge amount of that and a huge number of organisations who have been picking up bits of the book and wanting to do stuff with them.
And I've heard lovely things of people sending me little video clips or bits where they've started a conference or started the meeting by reading the first bit of the book, which is my imaginary walk through a future where we made it. It has been really fascinating to see where that pops up.
So I my intention always with the book was to to put it out and just see where it went. And so I know a few places now that are that are very moving along very strongly now: Hastings and Stroud and a few other places in creating Civic Imagination offices. And there's a project I've been asked to be part of in Northern Ireland as a coming together of unexpected organisations.
And they're using 'What If?' Through all of this really interesting. So I'm just I'm just sort of sitting with all of that. It's really important. I think that we always bear in mind with all of this that there is an element of imagination, which is a function of privilege, and that the imagination needs certain conditions to be in place, and that when we are living a world where we are overwhelmed with stress and anxiety and trauma are the part of our brain that fires, the imagination shrinks. And one of the things that I was doing overlooked, I was reading Adrienne Maree Brown, who's fantastic black, permaculture activist in the US who talks beautifully about how colonisation and systemic racism impacts the imagination. She has this lovely line about 'Wwe are living in someone else's imagination and imagination that doesn't make space for us or particularly wants us even to be there.' So when you were saying about politics, we have to bear in mind that if we want to see a massive increase in imaginative capacity across society, it's not a level playing field.
That if your basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs are being met, it's very hard to have an imaginative life and capacity, which is one of the reasons why on the podcast, we keep coming back to Universal Basic Income all the same as such a vital piece of creating space for people to rediscover an imaginative life.
Manda: I had a conversation recently with someone who's quite tapped into the Tory party because I have been listening to other more economic podcasts with people who are greatly in support of UBI. And one individual had said that it was his opinion that we were now 50/50 the chances of UBI. I said this to my friend who laughed and said the Tories will never allow it because they need the fear to be prevalent to maintain what they want. And what you're saying is at a core level, whether they know what they're doing or not, they don't want us to be able to stretch our imaginations in the directions that they might go. They like the fact that everybody is terrified.
Rob: There's a guy who I interviewed for the book called Henry Giroux, who was an activist educator in the US, who I read an article by him where he used this term 'The Trump dis-imagination machine.' It Leapt out at me, this phrase of The Trump Dis-imagination Machine.
I feel like there is a perfect storm of factors that we're living in at the moment that are corrosive and toxic to the imagination. We have no time. We have no space. And when we do have space, we fill it up with scrolling and scrolling and trying to get to the bottom of our Facebook feeds. And our attention span is being demolished and co-opted by people who value it financially, literally, far more than we value it. We have an education system that marginalises it, sidelines it.
There are so many factors I set out in the book. And I do think there is a thing when you rewrite people's history for them; when you deny people's experience; when people's attempts to change things get routinely squashed; when you have politicians who are utterly shameless and you lose that sense of a familiar ground in which if you do something, if you break the law, you're out of your job, which applies to the rest of us.
We're kind of in this strange land. And I think we always underestimate the power that our time online has in terms of shaping our imagination and the degree to which now - as we saw during Brexit - a handful of very smart people can shape people's imagination and sense of what's possible because they know so much about them through their data. I think it's a profoundly dangerous time and our imagination is in deep danger. And actually, I found during the research, there were people going back to the 1960s, who were warning about what happens in a culture if our imagination gets depleted? What happens if we don't protect the imaginative capacity of a society and of a people?
And I think that's what we're seeing now is that, if Kyum Hee Kim was right and what we saw in the mid 90s was that was the point when we tipped and the imagination started to decline again, which she said was due to the decline of play in our culture and its disappearance from our children's lives was due to our spending, more and more time on screens and less and less time outside and daydreaming and with an education system around that time that put testing at the heart of absolutely everything.
We started to create the conditions then. And we know that if we don't feed a society a good diet, if we aren't sufficiently nourished, then you see a rise in preventable illnesses. We know that if a population isn't educated well, then it's unable to reach its full potential. But we seem to just be allowing this curling up at the edges, this depletion of or contraction of our imagination just goes off just slightly out of our field of vision and we don't notice it. And the point of the book, which for me was to say, 'Hang on. If we lose our collective imagination, we are screwed. Particularly now. We would be at any time, but particularly with the climate emergency, which demands that we reimagine and rebuild everything. We have to focus back on this and say this really is important. Something really precious here is not being paid attention to, and that really matters.'
Manda: So have you had feedback since the book was published from people who might hold the levers of the power to change our imagination. So I'm thinking obviously not Cambridge Analytica, but the people who run any of the social media companies and or the BBC or Sky or Channel Four or are any of the big media companies whose job it is one way or another to curate what reaches are a marginal pool?
Rob: The quick answer to that is no. I'm sure that the longer answer is, 'But I have been contacted by quite a few people who are script writers, who are looking to write, who are fed up of writing endless dystopian stories and who want to do stuff which is looking to tell the other stories.'
I've been contacted by a lot of people working within the education system who want to change it. And and and it's been really fascinating.
And, you know, it's one of those things where you never quite know. But there have been quite a few things I've been listening to. And I'm thinking 'They read the book. They read my book.' They were on the food programme on Radio Four. A couple of weeks ago. That was just a phenomenal thing where the idea was that we were living now in 2030 and it was a utopia was based around food and it was so totally that first opening day of the book. But I didn't get credit. That's OK.
But that the power of ideas. And the only thing that I thought was slightly disappointing was, was how posh everybody was. There were not very many regional accents, responsible for running the future or even a young accent, very often suggestions of people who were not white. There was definitely not very many of those here. I thought that was beautiful how they did that and just those little kind of observations of stuff.
And I also know that Anne Hidalgo, who is the mayor of Paris, who has been very enthusiastic about Transition for a long time - she wrote an endorsement for the book - and when she began her campaign to run to be re-elected as the mayor of Paris, early in lockdown, she gave this phenomenal speech where she talked about Paris is a 15 minute city where everything you need is within 15 minutes of your house. And she painted a picture of what it would be like. It was beautiful. It was 'A day in the life' living in a 15 minute city. And you wake up and you get your bread from here and everything you need is within 15 minute walk. You don't need a car because you can get to everything. And and that's the bit that I see more and more of.
And I see more and more people using what if in all kinds of different places. I'm not saying that's all happening because of the book. I think there's something which is kind of of the moment that maybe the book captured rather than somehow it all being due back to that.
Manda: Yeah, but I think you put the idea out there and it's beginning to run. So I'd like to look a bit about Amsterdam specifically because it is heading to be a Doughnut city. And I saw that you had looked at that on your podcast so we could talk a little bit about your podcast. And then I'd like to discuss Amsterdam and then we'll see where we go from there. So tell us about your podcast and particularly about the Amsterdam concept.
Rob: So the podcast has been my lockdown project. I was sitting there thinking it would be nice to emerge from lockdown with something different from how I went into lockdown.
Manda: You've been to a lot of Lino Cuts as well. Like but as I say in a very lovely thank you.
Rob: That's been a bit of a discovery. But I wanted to do something that was beginning the process of thinking about what the next book might be. So it's called 'From What If to What Next' The first book was called 'From What is the What If'. And this is called 'From what if to what next?'
The concept was that the listeners and subscribers would send me in there. 'What if' questions - which are the questions that are sitting with them in terms of the kind of future they long for, the kind of future they dream of? Which 'What if?' questions does that raise for them? And then I would find the two best people I could to help explore how we might move from what if to what next, how we might explore how that could become a living, breathing reality.
And it's been such fun. It's been brilliant and we start every episode with that exercise I mentioned before of saying, 'OK, we're travelling forward is 2030'. So for example, the first episode was 'What if birdsong drowned out the traffic?' So we had Sam Lee and Maya Rose Craig, who's also known as Bird Girl, who is a young ornithologist. And we started out with a travel forward, 'We're 10 years is 2013. We're now living in a world where birdsong drowns out the traffic. Take us on a walk around, describe it to us, explain it to us.' And it's just so beautiful, because it allows you into the imagination of those people, which is what gets them out of bed every morning to create that.
And we don't do that often enough. I remember one of the guys I interviewed for the book called Stuart Candy, who's a futurist, who said to me that one of his thoughts was, every time there's an election, we should say that the people who are running for office should make a two or three minute film about what the world would be like 10 years in the future if all of their policies have been implemented. Let us inside that of your imagination. We want to I want to know what that feels like and looks like. And so that part of it is just magic.
And then we also do a bonus thing for people who subscribe to the Ministry of Imagination, where there is now a Ministry of Imagination which has proved hugely catalytic in terms of making the country and its politics more imaginative. And the guests are then anointed as Ministers of the Imagination and are invited to come up with three policies that will hugely accelerate our move towards whatever it is we're talking about, and not to think there are any constraints or budget limits or whatever, just some really big, bold, clever ideas.
And as those have gone along, the Ministry itself has become a whole character who actually the building itself is so imaginative that some days you turn up to go there and it's run away to join the circus turned himself into a hill. And the whole interview is conducted lying on our backs, looking at a meteor shower
Manda: And does it in this building that you've been talking about UBI a lot, or is that come up in other slightly more sober conversations?
Rob: It comes up in both, actually, but it's often one of people's three policies. You know, 'How do how are we going to do this?' 'Well we need to start with a UBI, obviously, because that's how we free up people's space.
Manda: So have you thought in-depth about Universal Basic Income? Because it was one of the things that we talked quite a lot about when I went to Schumacher and I haven't had a chance on this podcast to have a proper conversation. Is it something that you've considered as other than a concept? Because I'd be really interested to unpick that a little bit.
Rob: Well, I'm always sort of more attracted to the idea of a Universal Basic Assets, actually, you know, the idea that people should have access to all of the assets and services that are needed because income is just one little part of it. But we did have we did do a podcast that was what if a universal basic income unlocked or sparked a revival of the imagination.
And there was a guy on that called Phil Tier who wrote a book called The Coming Age of Imagination, all about how UBI gives people space to be more imaginative. We were doing this quite early on in lockdown and he was saying, 'Well, just look at what people are doing.' You know, that's just a little bit of space the lockdown has given people. For all of its downsides and stuff, it forced people to stop and to pause. And you saw people starting drawing again or starting lino cutting again in my case or, you know, making daft videos of their family, doing complex dance routines or posing as famous portraits.
I wonder how many people, you know, wrote the novel they always dreamt of writing or so many people started gardening in a way they'd always dreamt of and talked about and never done. So it's something that would also give the artistic people in the world some kind of stability. It's such a terrifying life. A lot of people being art, being artists, you're so hand-to-mouth and precarious. The other guest who was on that episode talked about how it would give artists a security that they don't have, which would be hugely beneficial for the for the wider society to see that kind of explosion of creativity. But also that in that situation, the rest of us would then have a huge amount to learn from those people. That artists would then be able to teach us how better to use our time and andhow to be creative.
Manda: So, yes, because creativity and imagination are are two sides of the same coin. And if we had the space and the I think something you said earlier about we need to feel safe in order to be able to be imaginative. And one of the strange paradoxes of lockdown, it seemed to me, was people's incomes crashed, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn't as if you had to rush around going out, trying to find another job because that wasn't possible. And so the odd paradox of being less fearful than we might otherwise have been in a circumstance where there really was for some people, almost no income at all struck me as very liberating, as well as showing up a huge holes in the structure that we have at the moment.
So anyway, that's probably a whole different concept. I would really like to have to run a podcast on the difference between Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services and how we could actually make them work. But that's a separate conversation. So Amsterdam is looking forwards and wants to be the first doughnut city. It's one of the C40 cities of which I gather there are now, in fact, 76 at the time of recording.
These are activist green mayors who want their cities to be, as you saig with Paris, to be 15 minute cities, to be living cities, to be regenerative cities where the ecosystems thrive more than they did on the land on which the city was built before the city ever got there. And that these things are possible and that all we need is, is, as you said, the Bologna pacts. You need the people at the top to say, 'If you can imagine it, we will help you make it happen. What matters to you?' And that Amsterdam is really kicking off with this. So have you been to Amsterdam or have you been zooming with people in Amsterdam or otherwise exploring it as a model?
Rob: Well, I love Amsterdam and also as a massive van Gogh nerd, it's a regular pilgrimage site for me. No, I didn't go there. It was it was during lockdown. So we did an episode speaking to Kate Raworth and Marika Van Doneck, who was the deputy mayor there. I think the thing that I love and Kate and I have talked about quite a lot that is so exciting to me about Doughnut Economics and where it crosses over so beautifully with imagination. And Rob Shorter, who was at Schumacher, who I worked with to create the imagination sundial. And he now works on Doughnut Economics Action Lab.
And one of the things that came to me halfway through researching the book was the degree to which the imagination needs limits. And so if I said Manda, Tell me a story,' you'd be stuck. But I said, 'Tell me a story about the mouse that lives under the piano in the pub around the corner from you always wears a blue hat.' It would be easier because there would be some limits, a framework around the imagination.
This why Dr. Seuss wrote a book with 50 words. It's why we like haikus and limericks and Hip-Hop and art forms that give us some kind of a limit.
And it's why everywhere I go around Europe, where people are working on climate change solutions who fundamentally understand the scale and the gravity of the issue, what they're coming up with is brilliant, imaginative, and we could do that and we could do that.
And people like Donald Trump, who still can't get his head around the fact that a well insulated building could actually have windows...When you put those limits around, then the imagination thrives. And what the doughnut economics model does so beautifully is it defines that Doughnut. So you can't go further out that way and you can't go further in this way. So this is the sweet spot.
And what it does and what you see it doing in Amsterdam is then it fires all that imagination where we understand that we need to be working within this space.
And that's what I love about it. It's an imagination work out for economists. I've been to workshops that Kate has run with a real mix of people, very hard headed business people, kind of artistic people, engineers, planners, and they all get it. And they'll go, 'Oh, OK, that's the space. Right? So what are we going to do?'.
And everybody has something to bring differently to what it would look like in that space. And when we did the podcast about it, they both did their kind of walk through the city of the future. And Kate was so great at picking out all the places where 'Look over there, there's someone who's got a cargo bike and they're actually running a business out of the bike. And this is how you see this flourishing of micro enterprises and creativity and how it all ties in with a sort of a circular and a micro circular economy within that city.
It's a really powerful tool for shifting us into the headspace of designing within the framework we need to design with but having a defined the space. where we can say, 'You know this place better than us. We're not coming in to tell you what to do. We're just defining the space. And you can't push further that way and you can't push further that way.'It's magical. And you see in the workshops they run and how they do them, the way they bring in making and art.
Kate was on the very first people who read the final manuscript of the book because she wrote an endorsement. I sent her the draught. And she was going to New Zealand to do some work for the New Zealand government. And she read it the whole way. And she arrived and sent me this message from New Zealand airport saying 'I just finished it. I love it. It's great!'.
One of the one of the stories in the book is about an exercise that Transition Network developed, developed along with Encounters Art called 'Transition Town Anywhere' In it, you get 100 to 400 people together and you imagine you're stepping into the future where we had done everything we could possibly do. And then you think about, 'Well, what's my role in this future? What am I doing?' You meet other people who share your interest and together you design a project you're going to do and then you literally build it out of cardboard and bamboo and string and sticky tape and pens and then you inhabits it and you trade in it and you celebrate it and you grieve in it and you dance in it.
And to be amongst three hundred adults totally lost in a play world that they've created is just amazing. And Kate's first thought was we should do that as a circular highstreet, so you could do it as a high street and then afterwards then you could pan up and you could look down and you could say, 'Look, it's a Doughnut!', We haven't we haven't done it yet because it didn't quite feel like it worked that time.
But maybe sometime in the future now. Somehow just that thought captured for me, that sense of the way that Doughnut Economics defines the space and then you need to facilitate the imagination within that space. So I love it.
Amsterdam is the first, but there are many other cities working on it now. It's a brilliant tool because everybody understands doughnuts and Kate can explain it in about two minutes and it makes complete sense.
Manda: I will put a link in the show notes. But for people who haven't got access to the show notes because you're listening to this on the move, the doughnut is a model of economics where the floor, the minimum that is allowable is provided for all of the basic human needs of food, water, shelter, but also political representation, gender equity, pay gaps between the largest pay and the smallest pay being as narrow as we can get them. And then there's an upper ceiling of the planetary limits. And the point is to find an economic, political, social, environmental solution that provides for the needs of all of the people and communities within the defined space, within the means of the living planet. And it's beautiful and elegant and it works. And it basically overturns every economic model that has been since the start of economics as a science. If Kate doesn't get the economics Nobel PRIZE equivalent, it'll be because they're all too jealous that she did this and they didn't.
I'll find a link to Kate describing that and I'll put it in the show notes. Because if you're not aware of this and that's the other book that you'll want to read as a result of this podcast after you finished Rob's book. You need them both on your bookshelf.
So as we're heading towards the end of our time, I know that you wrote at the beginning of your book a manifesto for the future of how you saw it then. But since writing, you have listened to so many other people clearly designing their future of where we got to 2030 and this is what it looks like if we got everything right. Have you got an internal model that you could set for us just now of how your life is going to be in 2030 if from the moment of this podcast forward, we got everything right?
Rob: Well, hopefully I'm still here.So assuming that I am, for me, it's a world that is that is much more localised and much more resilient.
So I see it as a as a future where I'm living in a place with very little in the way of cars and the air quality is so much better as a result. And streets have been taken back and tarmac has come up. And we now live in cities where what used to be really, really busy roads are now small forests, emerging forests and food gardens and places for play and an economy which is much more about micro enterprises than big enterprises. I always like to dream when I go into a supermarket about what this place could be and how this space could be used more effectively and what else could be going on in here.
So maybe there's a sawmill in there and a flour mill and maybe there's all kinds of people making different things that are going on in there. It feels like a future that's much more practical. People are able to turn their hand to most things. Schools are maybe more like how I imagine a kibbutz would have been in the 60s and 70s, with food being grown and people learning through doing this and using the town, the city around them as a place where people go to learn.
It's a future where no more people of colour are killed by the police.And that hasn't happened for seven or eight years. It's a place where money that would be invested into criminal justice and brutalising particular communities now goes into enabling those communities to live lives of well-being and with good housing and good food and good opportunities. And we've seen a massive increase in well-being and drops in crime. As a result, we see addiction being treated as an illness, not as a crime. We see people being able to live lives in which they are able to be imaginative and creative and and that there is space in people's lives. People don't work anywhere near the kind of hours that people work today. So families are able to spend more time together.
We see a lot of the strategies that we needed to do for climate change back in 2020. We looked at climate change and public health and mental health and economic regeneration as entirely separate fields. And by 2030, we recognise that they are entirely the same thing. We joined them up. We are thinking more in terms of bio regions and connecting people to those.
The food's fantastic. The beer is just exquisite. We we are back in a time where we go to places because there are things that you can only taste there. There are particular beers that you have to come to Totnes to sample because you won't get them in any supermarkets anywhere but they are created in Rob's brewery.
The birdsong would be so much louder and insect life would be so much more visible. But the thing that I noticed during lockdown in 2020 was that whether the birdsong was louder or whether I just had more time and space to listen to it, I felt like it was a spring of birdsong, louder than I ever heard in my life. It was the most beautiful spring of my whole life, I think during lockdown. And I feel like as we slow down going into that future, will we all be able to say that of a lot more years, 'That was the most beautiful winter of my life, because I actually had the time and space to stop and appreciate it.'
You know, I could go on for hours with this.
Manda: Plese feel free. Because this is what we need. This is the visioning that we need because we can't get to the moon unless we know what the moon looks like and feels like.
Rob: So these bits in the podcast where people talk about the future, they're so beautiful and so heartfelt and poignant and kind of dreamy and and I'm just I'm just doing a project at the moment where I've been editing little bits of them together. I'm working with an animator to bring them to life.
I'm sure there are always people who will say that by 2030, we'll all be underwater and it'll all be just horrendous and awful. And yes, I'm not saying somehow magically, because we decide to think differently, that the the impacts of climate change that we have already put into train will somehow magically disappear. But the point is that the worst scenarios that we read and the terrifying scenarios, scientists usually say this is the scenario if we don't do anything.
But there is this one over here which is admittedly is looking pretty unlikely, but there is this scenario over here, which is the one where we pulled our finger out and did something phenomenally amazing in a short period of time because we decided that we could and we did. We created something so phenomenally extraordinary that the generations who came after us still tell great tales and sing great songs about those phenomenal people who did that work. And that's the bit that I'm still holding out for. And that's the bit that will only happen if we can help people to imagine it and to dream it.
And so anything that we can do, anything that I can do, to give people those tastes of it just feels so precious and important to me.
Manda: Yes. Thank you. That is absolutely perfect. So people will be able to find this animation at some point on your website.
Rob: So I'm on Twitter as @RobInTransition and and also I imagine that it'll probably be shared first with people who are subscribers to the podcast, which is patreon.com/From What If To What Next.
Manda: I will link to all of those in the show notes. So as we wind to a close, if people listening wanted to do one thing other than reading your book,that would substantially or significantly or even just a tiny bit make a difference to their world what would you encourage them to do?
Rob: To their to their world or to their imagination?
Manda: Either? Both. I imagine that if you contained your imagination and content, you want to get content, you really can change your imagination.
That's a good idea that. Someone should write a book about it. My favourite practise is when I'm walking to look up at the trees and to eat or even just lie on my back and look up at the canopy of trees. And there is something about the canopy of trees, particularly when they're when the sun's coming through them and it is different at different times of year that is just a huge perspective shift. And the patterns and the compositions and the colours are just one of the most beautiful things.
It always just takes me out of where I am at that moment. And it just grounds me in something and it reconnects me to just how exquisitely beautiful this world is that we are blessed to live in. And it just gives me a bit of space. And I find that then when I go back afterwards, somehow I'm more… maybe what it is is is one of the things that I wrote about in the book about awe. It's about little everyday tastes of awe. And the science about how it awe makes us more compassionate and more generous and more prosocial is really fascinating.
And I think for me, maybe there's something biological that explains why we like going into cathedrals. And when we look up maybe that when we even tilt our head back, I don't know, some hormone kicks in or something. For me, there is something about looking up at the canopy of beautiful trees, even if I'm in the middle of a city that just gives me a little dose of awe and just sends me off back into my life with my imagination, just somehow a bit perked up.
Manda: Brilliant. That is a truly fantastic place to end. So, Rob Hopkins, thank you very much indeed for our second try on the podcast.
In 1997, Fiona Shaw was initiated as a Medicine woman in the Red Path tradition. Since then, she has created communities of ceremony in the UK, Germany, Portugal and Israel. As the years have progressed, she has seen the acceleration towards the crisis of these times, and seen the changes in the nature of the circles. This podcast was recorded at the Autumn Equinox of 2020, when Fiona had just come out of ceremony. The grounding of that, informs all that she says of who we are, who we have been, who we could be - and the pathways of ceremony and human connection that can bring us to a profound healing of all that we are.
Links:
Fiona's Website: http://birthingthesoul.co.uk/
Sacred Birthing Website: https://www.sacred-birthing.co.uk/
The imagination needs mental and emotional space to enable us to create a vision of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Rob Shorter wrote his dissertation at Schumacher on how we cultivate our imagination and change the cultural narrative towards the thinking that Doughnut Economics embodies.
In this podcast, we dive deep into the nature of imagination and how we can let it grow. We explore Doughnut Economics and how the model can transform our world. And we look at the work of the lab and how we might all be involved. Most of all, we explore how each of us as individuals can be part of the change we need to see in the world.
and Rob shares a song. Listen just for that...
Links:
Doughnut Economics Action Lab: https://doughnuteconomics.org/
Doughnut Economics (Book): https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Doughnut-Economics-by-Kate-Raworth-author/9781847941398
Circle Economy: https://www.circle-economy.com
Ellen Macarthur Foundation for the Circular Economy: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org
C40 Cities: https://www.c40.org
Leeds Good Life: https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk
City Repair Project: https://cityrepair.org
Biomimicry video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4oW8OtaPY
Gill Coombs is a facilitator, coach, peripatetic counsellor and an elder of Extinction Rebellion. Of her three books to date, The Game is the second. In it, she outlines the powers of the Dark Four: The Dark Media, Dark State, Dark Finance, Dark Corporations - and the ways they battle the generative forces of light.
And in her game, we can each choose to play one of seven avatars. We might choose a different one in each moment. We might play them so close together as to be indivisible. But it is the thesis of this podcast that meta-awareness is one of the core requirements of humanity and that if we understand what's possible, we can gain agency. With Agency, we can choose to be different. If we choose to be different enough, we become different.
So let's play in the seven avatars and see what we'd like to become.
Links
Gill's website: https://www.gillcoombs.co.uk
The Game: https://www.gillcoombs.co.uk/thegame
Tom Mills' Book - BBC: Myth of a Public Service:
Tristan Harris' podcast - Your Undivided Attention
Blog post on the Wetiko: 'Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses and Antidotes for a World in Transition.'
Jozette Khimba has been a lifelong activist, but it was her connection with activist Barrister, Polly Higgins that took her to Stroud and the Stop Ecocide campaign. With Polly's death in 2019, Jozette became part of the Earth Protector Communities movement, striving (in her case) to bring the concept of Earth Protection as a moral and legal construct into schools, colleges and universities across the world.
As increasing numbers of young people are joining the movement for change, Jozette explains what each of us can do to bring action to our local communities.
Links:
Stop Ecocide: https://www.stopecocide.earth
Earth Protector Communities https://earthprotectorcommunities.net
EPC Facebook (which has details of events): https://www.facebook.com/groups/EarthProtectorsCommunity
Jeremy Lent is an author whose writings investigate the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current existential crisis. His recent book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, explores the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth. His upcoming book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, will be published in Spring 2021 by New Society Publishers (North America) and Profile Books (UK & Commonwealth).
In this podcast, we explore the thinking behind the idea of an Ecological Civilisation - and how we might get there.
Links:
Jeremy's site: https://www.jeremylent.com/about.html
Jeremy's blog: https://patternsofmeaning.com/2018/10/10/we-need-an-ecological-civilization-before-its-too-late/
Liology Institute: http://www.liology.org
Jeremy at XR in October 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBYiEI5pl5A
Gill Coombs is a writer, facilitator, coach and activist. In 2011/12 Gill studied Holistic Science at Schumacher College, and then wrote her first book Hearing our Calling. In 2015 she stood as a Parliamentary Candidate for the Green Party, and the following year published The Game: Life vs the Dark Powers. Gill was arrested twice during 2019 with Extinction Rebellion, and as a member of the Visioning Circle, helped to establish XR’s Eldership Circle. She has written three life changing books - today we are exploring ‘Hearing your Calling’ - and how we can bring that into the world.
Gill’s link and book: https://www.gillcoombs.co.uk/books
Schumacher Collage PostGraduate Courses: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/postgraduate-courses-2020
Reciprocoach: https://reciprocoach.com
Mary Reynolds set her intent to win a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower show with her first (and only) exhibit. To do it, she created a wild garden that left visitors in tears for the lost memories of their youths... and she won her gold medal. Her life since has been a long unfolding of dreams connecting her to the wild land of her Irish ancestors, deepening her experience and coming ever closer to the land.
With a raw humility and deep passion, she speaks here of her journey and of how we can join her mission to make of every garden an ARK.
Links:
We are the Ark: http://wearetheark.org
Mary's personal site: http://marymary.ie/
Dark Sky Ireland: https://www.darksky.ie
Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/804968449865497/
We know that our healing depends on our re-connection with the web of life, with what we call ‘The Natural World’ until we stop seeing it as something other and start seeing it as an integral part of ourselves. But knowing is different to doing. Declarative learning is not performative learning - both are necessary, but each occupies different bits of our nervous systems and it’s only when we actually begin to embody change that we understand it - and it’s from this embodiment that transformation arises.
In a series of Answers to listeners’ questions, Manda outlines the steps to transformation - and reviews some of the wisdom of guests over the past 6 months.
Links
Accidental Gods: https://accidentalgods.life
Richard J Davidson TED talk: https://youtu.be/7CBfCW67xT8
Sam Harris on AI: https://youtu.be/8nt3edWLgIg
Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.sheldrake.org
Tristan Harris Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305
Tristan Harris website: https://www.tristanharris.com
Robert H Lustig: https://robertlustig.com
"When a human embryo is in the mother’s womb, creation whispers into their being ‘I am placing a piece of my genius inside you’. Our task then is to find it, discover it, and share it.
If that gift becomes the center of our work - we will shine and be seen and i's unearthing will bring a deep happiness and a sense of fulfilment and purpose."
Mac Macartney is a writer, visionary, teacher, thought leader, TED talker, founder of Embercombe and leader of The Journey. A role model for the best of masculinity, guided by his visions for a healed earth and healed humanity, Mac talks with deep, abiding compassion and authenticity of the ways we can find our way back into context with the earth.
Links:
Mac's site - https://macmacartney.com
Mac's books - https://macmacartney.com/writer/
The Journey - https://embercombe.org/the-journey/
Embercombe - https://embercombe.org/
A book about Rolling Thunder (not the original) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Voice-Rolling-Thunder-Medicine-Walking/dp/1591431336/ref=sr_1_1
Mac TED talk: https://youtu.be/PhPwxx7nZh0
Mac TED talk2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1gdeiPri_U
Adam Hamdy is a novelist, screenwriter, advisor-to-ministers (not that they necessarily listen, but that's their loss) and soon-to-be author of a book on the neuroscience of empowerment - how we can do it and why it's essential. Our conversation ranged from Phytoncides (yes, but trust me, it's fascinating), to the neuroscience of love, and - as ever, what we can actually do, to make a difference in the world around us.
Links
Adam's site: http://www.adamhamdy.com
Ligandal site: https://www.ligandal.com
Crime Time list of best novels - featuring Adam's Black 13 https://www.crimetime.co.uk/the-best-novels-and-novelists-on-the-great-crime-fiction-debate/
The paper on CoronaVirus - https://freemarketconservatives.org/were-at-war-with-an-invisible-enemy-heres-how-we-fight-it/
Humanity Rising: https://humanityrising.solutions
Health Benefits of Phytoncies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793341/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18336737/
https://europepmc.org/article/med/20074458
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/time-spent-green-places-linked-longer-life-women-2017030911152
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/plants-death-rates-women/
https://biofit.io/news/phytoncides-forest-vitamins
As we awaken to an emergent planetary coherence, we rely on stories about our Cosmovisión or Ultimate Purpose to place ourselves within our bodies, our communities, our planet, and our universe. Benjamin Ross, Media and Alliance Building Lead for the new governance group, One Nation, is an evolutionary myth-maker, meta-coherence steward, nurturer of emergence, and lover of all beings. Through the expression of non-dual archetypes, all-win ontology, and visionary holistic thriving in media, governance, and culture, Benjamin is co-creating narrative and experiential frameworks necessary to midwife the birth of a New Earth.
In this wide-ranging, far-reaching and beautifully shared vision, Benjamin explores the purpose and drive behind One Nation, behind Azure Village and the thousand fractal shards of the Burning Man revolution in this post-pandemic world.
"I identify with life. There's a part of me that identifies as Life. I am Life, Benjamin-ing. I am a verb. I'm not a noun. And that verb is an emanation of a complex system that I'm part of. I wouldn't be me if you didn't exist. The ways in which you've changed the world just by your being here is completely connected to who I am and and how I think of myself. And so when my identity frame begins to shift to actually see you as actually a part of me and me as a part of this greater whole, then then these these labels just become tools that we can use to sort through the complexity of information."
One Nation Party: https://www.onenation.party/
Benjamin's Medium post: https://medium.com/@benjaminross_/a-thousand-fractal-shards-one-burning-man-revolution-bbf4ee5f20ee
Civilisation ReDesign: https://www.civilizationredesign.one
Christopher Life, One Nation candidacy: https://www.onenation.party/presidential-candidate-christopher
Unity 2020: Articles: https://medium.com/@ArticlesOfUnity/the-articles-of-unity-f544f930d336
As we awaken to an emergent planetary coherence, we rely on stories about our Cosmovisión or Ultimate Purpose to place ourselves within our bodies, our communities, our planet, and our universe. Benjamin Ross, Media and Alliance Building Lead for the new governance group, One Nation, is an evolutionary myth-maker, meta-coherence steward, nurturer of emergence, and lover of all beings. Through the expression of non-dual archetypes, all-win ontology, and visionary holistic thriving in media, governance, and culture, Benjamin is co-creating narrative and experiential frameworks necessary to midwife the birth of a New Earth.
In this wide-ranging, far-reaching and beautifully shared vision, Benjamin explores the purpose and drive behind One Nation, behind Azure Village and the thousand fractal shards of the Burning Man revolution in this post-pandemic world.
"The intention of Azure Village is to be a temple to our collective potential. And what that means to us is there's both a personal and a collective aspect to that. There's a way in which I feel this land in particular calls me into my own greatness. When I first set foot here, deeply listening to the way that nature speaks here, different ecosystems have such different ways of communicating and the energy that I felt here was so precise. It was so stripped away of any excess, and yet it was thriving, and I had associated thriving with this kind of lush, excessive kind of just dripping with water and life. And out here, things are only doing that which they must do and in that they are thriving. And so, I feel that kind of precision here within myself that anything that is excessive or not enough is coming into like this razor's edge of balance with itself. And that itself is my evolutionary edge that I continue to walk here. And so, I feel both challenged and supported in becoming that version of myself here."
One Nation Party: https://www.onenation.party/
Benjamin's Medium post: https://medium.com/@benjaminross_/a-thousand-fractal-shards-one-burning-man-revolution-bbf4ee5f20ee
Civilisation ReDesign: https://www.civilizationredesign.one
Christopher Life, One Nation candidacy: https://www.onenation.party/presidential-candidate-christopher
Unity 2020: Articles: https://medium.com/@ArticlesOfUnity/the-articles-of-unity-f544f930d336
United Citizens Coalition https://medium.com/@benjaminross_/united-peoples-coalition-d8cd25faf014
Phoebe Tickell is embedded in, and embodies the new sense-making and change-making of the world. Founder of Moral Imagination and facilitator of Radical Collaborations, Phoebe works in fields as diverse as philanthropic funding at the National Lottery Community Fund, innovative governance models, holistic science curricula and the convening of courses on deep systems thinking.
Here, she explores the nature of reality, how 'Warm Data' and a systems approach can help us to perceive the world as it is, as a necessary prerequisite to embodying the change we need to be. She discusses patterning and the development of flies, language and how to grow it into what we need and the psycho-technologies we need to make the best decisions possible in a world currently in systems melt.
Phoebe’s website - http://www.phoebetickell.com
Moral Imaginations - https://moralimaginations.com
Fritjof Capra’s website: Capracourse.net
Theory U- https://www.ottoscharmer.com/theoryu
Liberating Structures - http://www.liberatingstructures.com
Nora Bateson - https://batesoninstitute.org/nora-bateson/
Unbound Philanthropy - https://www.unboundphilanthropy.org/grants-and-co-funding
Miki Kashtan, co-founder of the Bay Area NVC and adept nonviolent communication practitioner, lays out the pathways she believes could take us towards a future where everyone flourishes. If we explore the flows of life - of need and resource, of how we interact, then we can begin to heal the patriarchal wounds of separation, scarcity and powerlessness and move into a world where mutual care and trust lead us to a state of community, empowerment and provision.
Links:
Miki Kashtan website: https://mikikashtan.org
Miki Kashtan blog: https://thefearlessheart.org
Tom Atlee: http://www.tomatleeblog.com
Miki's concepts of how to structure Global governance: https://thefearlessheart.org/resources/local-to-global-collaboration/
Genevieve Vaughan - the maternal gift economy: http://gift-economy.com
James Gilligan - Conference ‘the Making of Destructive Leaders’ - https://www.confer.uk.com/event/leaders.html
Nonviolent Global Liberation Community - https://nglcommunity.org
Collaborative Lawmaking Study: http://efficientcollaboration.org/wp-content/uploads/MinnesotaCaseStudy.pdf
Books:
James Gilligan: Violence: Reflections on a National Pandemic: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/60198/violence-by-james-gilligan-m-d/
Alice Miller: ‘For your own Good’ https://www.alice-miller.com/en/for-your-own-good/
Walter Wink ‘Powers that Be’ https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Powers-That-Be-by-Walter-Wink-author/9780385487528
Rebecca Solnit ‘Paradise Made in Hell’ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/
Life after Covid-19 - Miki has a chapter in this - - available for pre-order here: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/life-after-covid-19
Marija Gimbutas ‘The Balts’ https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.40925
Article on the disempowerment of our ancestors: https://thefearlessheart.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/From-Obedience-and-Shame-to-Freedom-and-Belonging.pdf
Practical visionary Miki Kashtan has devoted her life to the exploration and practice of non violent communication: to finding ways in which choice can become a central part of human existence: the capacity to set aside the patriarchal wounds of separation, scarcity and powerlessness and to choose instead, connection, flow and the ability to meet the needs of the whole of the web of life. In this two-part podcast, she lays out the baselines of choice, of the ways we can think and feel and be beyond the confines of our patriarchal system, ahead of part 2, where we explore the futures we could reach if we all committed to choice and change.
Miki Kashtan website: https://mikikashtan.org
Miki Kashtan blog: https://thefearlessheart.org
Tom Atlee: http://www.tomatleeblog.com
Genevieve Vaughan - the maternal gift economy: http://gift-economy.com
James Gilligan - Conference ‘the Making of Destructive Leaders’ - https://www.confer.uk.com/event/leaders.html
Nonviolent Global Liberation Community - https://nglcommunity.org
Books:
James Gilligan: Violence: Reflections on a National Pandemic: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/60198/violence-by-james-gilligan-m-d/
Alice Miller: ‘For your own Good’ https://www.alice-miller.com/en/for-your-own-good/
Walter Wink ‘Powers that Be’ https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Powers-That-Be-by-Walter-Wink-author/9780385487528
Rebecca Solnit ‘Paradise Made in Hell’ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/
Life after Covid-19 - Miki has a chapter in this - available for pre-order here: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/life-after-covid-19
Collaborative Lawmaking Study: http://efficientcollaboration.org/wp-content/uploads/MinnesotaCaseStudy.pdf
Marija Gimbutas ‘The Balts’ https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.40925
Article on the disempowerment of our ancestors: https://thefearlessheart.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/From-Obedience-and-Shame-to-Freedom-and-Belonging.pdf
(relevant detail here: In Goettner-Abendroth’s account, on the other hand, it’s specific events that change the experience and result in different choices leading to different actions. In other words, it’s stress and trauma on a large scale that interfere with the spontaneous unfolding of trusting relationships and love. The scale has to be large enough to overwhelm the capacity of a group or culture to metabolize stressful events within its finite resources and resilience. In the case of the “Kurgan” culture that Gimbutas identified, the possible causes could be the flooding of the black sea[1] and/or the desertification of large swaths of land on which many groups depended for their survival. Both of these events pushed large numbers and groups of people outside the bounds of their previous modes of subsistence, thereby creating both trauma and a clash between survival and their manner of living.[2]
It is almost impossible, I believe, for our modern minds to grasp the calamity of what these waves of invasions from the Kurgans westward signified, because we no longer have the lived sensibility of what it’s like to live in a peaceful, life-loving, egalitarian culture in unity with nature and each other. I continue to contemplate this description of it and to extrapolate to the present to be able to grasp the loss and begin to mourn it, on behalf of all of humanity:
“when [the Kurgans’] barrow-type graves appeared in Europe for the first time (primarily containing males with weapons), nearly 700 major habitation sites, representing a rich fabric of cultural and technological developments, disintegrated after flourishing undisturbed for many hundreds of years.” (Marler 179)
[1] See Ryan et al, “An Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf”, Marine Geology, 138 (1997) 119-126, where evidence is provided of a major, cataclysmic flooding of the Black Sea, which is now believed to be the source of mythological accounts such as that of Noah’s ark in the bible (not the only one in the region). [2] See The Rule of Mars for several overlapping accounts of these events.)
Carolyn Hillyer lives on a 1,000 year old farm in the heart of Dartmoor. Her fierce, deeply spiritual guardianship of this place involves a heart-commitment to sharing the space with those who have been and those yet to come. As we near the end of (the first) Covid lockdown, she talks - and sings - of her spiritual connection to the ancestors of this land, of the ceremonial spaces she has built, of the Sami women and the bear skull that they brought in honouring - and of the remains of a Bronze Age ancestor-woman found on the hill overlooking the land, and the bear skin she was wrapped in. Carolyn's deep, heartfelt connection to the land shines through her words, her art and her songs: a shining beacon of how life can be lived for those who choose to follow.
Carolyn’s website, Seventh Wave Music: https://www.seventhwavemusic.co.uk
Renegade Economist and Right Livelihood coach, Della Duncan, has spent most of her professional life exploring the ideas that might transform our culture into the more beautiful, flourishing - fun, joyful, - safe - world our hearts know is possible. In this deep-dive interview, we explore the furthest edges of what our world might look and feel like if we were able to reconfigure our economy so that every transaction was predicated on the flourishing of the human and more-than-human worlds. From Manfred Max-Neef to the Post Growth Foundation, we explore the ideas at the cutting edge of human potential.
Links:
Della’s website: https://www.dellazduncan.com
UPSTREAM podcast - radio documentary series (including UBI) https://www.upstreampodcast.org/documentaries
Helena Norberg-Hodge World Localisation Day: https://worldlocalizationday.org
No Impact Man: https://colinbeavan.com/search-no-impact/
How on Earth? - how to flourish in a post-growth world: https://www.howonearth.us
How on Earth? YouTube: https://youtu.be/x07vWvdChAM
Anand Giridharadras ‘Winners Take All’, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/0141990910/
Christian Felber - ‘Change Everything’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Change-Everything-Creating-Economy-Common/dp/1783604727
Movement Generation: https://movementgeneration.org
Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation: http://longnow.org/
Manfred Max-Neef: Human Scale Development: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Human-Scale-Development-Application-Reflections/dp/094525735X
Manfred Max-Neef: Economics Unmasked: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Economics-Unmasked-Berlin-Technologie-pack/dp/1900322706
7 Fundamental Human Needs: based on Max-Neef’s work: https://www.kennethmd.com/the-7-fundamental-human-needs/
Professor Rupert Read, Green Party activist, XR speaker, and deep adaptation philosopher, speaks openly, deeply - and with a raw, almost unique honesty - about the dangers of the current time, and the need to turn away from ‘business as usual’
There are times when we need to shock ourselves out of our complacency, when we need to realise how close to the edge of extinction., we are, when we need to step away from the fantasies of ‘business as usual’ and re-appraise the very nature of what it is to be human. And then to work out how to go forward in ways that are regenerative, compassionate, and that turn towards life.
Rupert Read website: http://www.rupertread.net/
Rupert - 24 theses on Corona https://medium.com/@rupertjread/24-theses-on-corona-748689919859
Rupert’s ‘Pro-energy-descent’ review of Planet of the Humans by Michael Moore - https://medium.com/@rupertjread/review-michael-moores-planet-of-the-humans-by-rupert-read-and-deepak-rughani-723f4deadb10
Rupert at Compass Online: https://www.compassonline.org.uk/the-coronavirus-gives-humanity-one-last-chance-but-for-what-exactly/
Jem Bendell interviewing Joanna Macy- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1wUY6945kY
RR and Helena Norberg-Hodge on relocalisation: - http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/uploads/4/8/3/2/48324387/post-growth-localisation_pamphlet.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1us740Lkhrk-5DYzrX8SK0wKYbawvWSyJU6bgpoPsxNmPwFZoLeEVxANw
On Being podcast with Resmaa Menakem https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000476829446
Abel Pearson is a poet, peasant farmer, permaculture educator & activist, tending soil in West Wales and listening for the stories we need to build community and culture, restore health and breathe new life into our connection to land, food and seed. He is the founder of Glasbren, a non-profit social enterprise working to reimagine our food systems, rewild the way we eat, live and grow food and regenerate our communites, the people that live in them and the land we depend on. Glasbren is a Community Supported Agriculture scheme, offering it's members a weekly 'Share in the Harvest' veg box & a transparent relationship with where their food comes from, volunteer opportunities, courses and workshops. They also raise money for tree planting and support the local food bank through their Solidarity Fund. Abel is passionate about growing food, together, as a means to facilitate a collective shift to a radically ecological way of being and as a vehicle for social, ecological and cultural rebirth. He is a grower at Glasbren, but also teaches immersive experiences in permaculture, food growing and regenerative living, works with activists & Earth stewards to build a rooted connection to the Earth and is searching for authentic ritual spaces, passageways and the knowing to explore a truly indigenous connection to place.
Glasbren: https://www.facebook.com/GlasbrenCSA/
Eco Dharma: http://www.ecodharma.com/
Zac Bush talking about the importance of biome (soil/gut) to health: https://youtu.be/EniVCQL3Nzc
Community Supported Agrictulture: https://communitysupportedagriculture.org.uk/
Help-X HELPEX - https://www.helpx.net/
"What's the equivalent, by 2030, of putting humanity on the moon? What do we need to do that is bigger than life, worthy of human nobility, such that if it put into action around the world, we would be credited as that generation of human beings that when the chips were down really made a difference? That's what we want to do. That's the aspiration for Humanity Rising to work together with like-minded, similarly inspired people from all over the world. Over the next 10 years to make the critical difference necessary to ensure human survival."
Radical activists, educators, academics and entrepreneurs, Jim Garrison and Matt Robinson of Ubiquity University have launched the world's most ambitious summit - using the cutting edge of modern technology and bringing together hundreds of organisations and hundreds of thousands of committed activists - Humanity Rising sees the beginning of the wave that could change the world. If we commit to it.
Jim and Matt talk to Accidental Gods about the project, how it arose, and their visions for the future.
Ubiquity University: https://www.ubiquityuniversity.org/
Here are the access links for Humanity Rising:
Registration: http://humanityrising.solutions/
The Humanity Rising schedule can be found here: https://humanityrising.solutions/agenda/
If the maximum amount of Zoom webinar participants is reached you can watch the live stream here:
https://www.facebook.com/UbiquityUniversityOnline
https://www.youtube.com/c/UbiquityUniversity
https://www.awaketvnetwork.live/humanity-rising-channel
If you missed a session the recording can be found here:
https://ubiverse.org/groups/humanity-rising-global-solutions-summit/documents
Matt's Poem: Humanity Rising - A New Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u1aPyx_8fU
Life is changing and we need to find ways to keep ourselves emotionally resilient. Sarah Schlote, therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, has spent her professional life exploring the pathways by which we find safety - in our own bodies, in our closest relationships, and out in the world. In today’s podcast, we explore the ways we can find the connection that science (and experience) tells us we need to feel safe in the presence of others. We explore ways that we can work towards safety in Zoom (or other video) calls in both one to one situations and in larger groups. We look at strategies we can all use all the time to help us navigate the novel circumstance of a global threat.
Links:
Sarah’s personal site: https://sarahschlote.com
Sarah’s Healing Refuge: https://healingrefuge.com/our-team/sarah-schlote/
Equusoma: https://equusoma.com/
Sarah’s “Freesources” page - has brilliant diagrams: https://equusoma.com/freesources/
Steven Porges: https://www.stephenporges.com
Peter Levine’s ‘Trauma therapist project’ https://www.thetraumatherapistproject.com/podcast/peter-levine-phd/
Book Spiritual Bypassing: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spiritual-Bypassing-Spirituality-Disconnects-Matters/dp/1556439059/
Dr Gail Bradbrook has a PhD in molecular biophysics. She was founder of a program called ‘StreetSchool Economics’. She’s a visionary, social and spiritual activist - and, of course, she’s best known as one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion. She has a deeply held spiritual path that underpins the values of all her work - being in service to the earth in the best way she can guides everything she does.
In this podcast, she talks about those values, about the moments when she prayed for help - and was answered - and about the vision that drives the latest dreams of how we move away from the corruption of the current system to the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Links to people or ideas mentioned in the podcast:
Extinction Rebellion - https://rebellion.earth
This is not a Drill (Book): https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Not-Drill-Extinction-Rebellion-ebook/dp/B07R57LTG5
XR Podcast Episode 11 featuring Jason Hickel: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/xr-podcast/episodes/2020-05-17T19_00_00-07_00
XR YouTube featuring Ian Haney Lopez and Adam Elliott-Cooper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U7PYZCObtk
Street School Economics: https://streetschooleconomics.wordpress.com
Gail Bradbrook ‘Adventures in New Economics’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rUk-r0G1eQ
Charles Eisenstein: https://charleseisenstein.org
Frederic Laloux Reinventing Organisations: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com
Tax Cast: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=620020246
Recent advances in neuroscience have shed light on those things that are most precious to us - a sense of equanimity and inner safety, of balance, and of the capacity to relate in ways that leave us feeling nourished. All of these stem from early patterning and recognising the times we're off balance can help us to find how best to resource ourselves. In this deep dive into the neurophysiology of poly-vagal theory, Sarah Schlote, director of the Healing Refuge in Canada, and of Equusoma, the centre for Horse-Human recovery, relays in lyrical, human terms, the ways to healing that arise from an understanding of how we recognise safety, danger and life-threat. This is part 1 of a 2 part series. In the second part, we'll explore the routes to rebalancing and the implications to our sense of wellbeing that arise out of lockdown.
The Healing Refuge is here: https://healingrefuge.com
Equusoma is here: https://equusoma.com
Stephen Porges' Polyvagal theory here: https://www.stephenporges.com
Dr Judith Wester is a thanatologist: an academic who specialises in the study of death, dying and the cultural rituals of many nations. Her life is given to teaching others of all ages and in all walks of life how to broach this subject with themselves and so with other people. In this deep dive into death, Judith explains the difference between death, dying and dead, between grief, mourning and bereavement - and looks into the ways we could explore beyond the inevitable mortality of each of us, to the mortality of our culture - and how something new might be reborn from the ashes in this time of Corona Lockdown.
Judith's website is here: https://cedareducation.org.uk/
Angharad Wynne is a visionary, land-walker and storyteller. She works to reconnect people from around the world with the wild lands and ancient lore of Britain.
Her own encounter with death has transformed an already-deep connection to the land, and the lore of the islands of Britain. She draws inspiration from her storytelling - and the ways it is led by the deeper needs of the ancestors to have their voices heard - and from her spiritual practice, leading pilgrimages deep into the edge-spaces of Wales. She is a profoundly spiritual individual with a deep, grounded, authentic understanding of the potential of this moment - and the world's most beautiful voice.
Her website is here: https://www.angharadwynne.com
Cae Mabon is here: https://www.caemabon.co.uk
and the book she mentions is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancestral-Medicine-Rituals-Personal-Healing/dp/1591432693/ref=sr_1_1
Nathalie Nahai is host of the outstanding podcast, The Hive. Her humanity, her deep, broad grasp of psychology, particularly the psychology of online influences and the ethics around them, informs all of her work. In this conversation, we explore together what lockdown means, and how we might grasp this moment in ways that will leave all of us better when it's over, but that won't leave us guilt-tripped or (even more) exhausted.
We explore what it means to be human. How to transcend the moment and the psychology of pleasure versus happiness. Join us, and enjoy…
Nathalie's podcast is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-hive-podcast/id1387510537
I'll put up a meditation as a podcast after this, but if you want more, deeper, try here: https://accidentalgods.life/what-if-imagining-the-new-future-our-hearts-know-is-possible/
If we can really begin to feel the emotional reality as a physical thing, a felt-sense in our bodies, so that it suffuses all of us - then we can aim for this.
If you want longer variations - or if you live in the Southern hemisphere and would prefer to go north, than south - you'll find more here: https://accidentalgods.life/what-if-imagining-the-new-future-our-hearts-know-is-possible/
I haven't often had the pleasure of speaking with someone else whose life revolves around the concept of conscious evolution: what it is, why its time is now (with increasing urgency) and how we might move the great, hypercomplex, super-connected web of humanity towards it. Rob has both a materialist and a spiritual perspective on the ways we might reach conscious evolution so this was a particularly interesting deep dive into what it will take to reach our critical mass.
Rob's website is https://www.consciousevolution.co.uk
He refers to John Stewart's Evolutionary Manifesto, which is here: http://www.evolutionarymanifesto.com/man.pdf
He recommends Charles Eisenstein's 'New and Ancient Story' podcast which is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-new-and-ancient-story-the-podcast/id1047290956
He refers to ‘This View of Life’ by David Sloan Wilson - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246844/this-view-of-life-by-david-sloan-wilson/
I mentioned 'The Listening Society' by Hanzi Freinacht, which is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Listening-Society-Metamodern-Politics-Guides-ebook/dp/B074MKQ4LR/ref=sr_1_2
...and he recommended that I talk to John Stewart, and Daniel Schmachtenberger... both of which have been invited to feature on the podcast.
This was recorded on the third day of lockdown in the UK. Our world is changing and we're feeling things we've never felt. Or feeling them more deeply. Or strangely. If ever there was a time to re-connect with our heritage, to re-discover the ancient teachings of the indigenous shamanic peoples of every continent, that time is now. In this podcast, Chris Luttichau shares the teachings of the Inner and Outer Minds, of the Four Attentions, and offers a meditation to help us to become grounded in our own Heart Minds.
If we're going to step into a new way of being, if we're going to connect with the More than Human world, to make the step into conscious evolution, these are the skills we will need.
Chris Luttichau's website is here: Northern Drum
His books are 'Animal Spirits' and 'Calling us Home'
And the YouTube version of the HeartMind girl dancing, is here.
Ya'acov Darling Khan is an international teacher of Movement Medicine and a shamanic practitioner. His new book: 'Shaman: Invoking Power, Presence and Purpose in the Core of who YOU Are' is out on 30th of March - a clarion call for the new era where we know our globalised links and have found that we can co-operate in ways that leave the dinosaurs of our governments far behind the curve.
In this insightful, raw conversation, Ya'acov and Manda Scott explore the nuances of the present moment, their own personal responses to it, and the sense of opening and transformation that we could lift from now... along with the rage, grief, desperation and horror at all that is happening. In the words of Greta Thunberg: 'It is no longer enough to be the best of ourselves. We need to be better.' Here, we explore some of the ways that could happen.
Joanna Macy calls this the Great Unravelling - a time when everything changes. And we are human, so most of us live somewhere on the spectrum between finding change unsettling, to finding it genuinely terrifying. Where we are on that scale is often dictated by our inner resilience: our ability to return to inner stability after a destabilising shock. So just now, when the shocks are coming daily, our ability to find resilience is critical. In this podcast, we explore some of the ways we can return to a place of inner wholeness, of balance, from which we can generate the courage, clarity, connection and compassion we'll need to flourish in a world of uncertainty.
The Emerge podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in exploring human potential as we surge into the anthropocene. Its host, Daniel Thorson is fearless in exploring the ways we can evolve, interviewing thought-leaders in the fields of psychology, philosophy, spirituality - all individuals engaged in finding ways we can become the best of ourselves - and better.
A former activist/organiser at Occupy Wall Street, Daniel has spent tens of thousands of hours in meditation, and almost as many thinking deeply about the ways we can move forward in the heart of the Anthropocene. In this conversation, we have the opportunity to join his enquiry, to find out where his work has taken him, to dive deeply into what it means to be alive now, and the ways we can move forwards as individuals and as a collective.
His suggested must-read book is The OverStory by Richard Powers
His suggested listening, is/are Rob Burbea's Dharma Talks
And the Emerge podcast website is here
Happy listening!
As ever, if you want to connect with us, we're at Accidental Gods.
Rabbi Jill Hammer is an author, midrashist, mystic, poet, essayist and Hebrew Priestess. Director of spiritual education at the academy of Jewish Religion in New York and co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is committed to an earth based and a wildly mythic view of the world in which nature, ritual and story connect us to the body of the cosmos and to ourselves - she has been called 'a Jewish Bard'.
In this episode, we explore some of her extraordinary life, and how her Jewish roots have led her to explore the gendered nature of Divinity, the Kabbalah, and how to interpret dreams in a way that is at once thoroughly modern and absolutely ancient.
Links:
Rabbi Jill Harmer
The Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute
The Academy of Jewish Religion
Rupert Read is convinced that societal collapse is inevitable - and near. And that this is White Swan effect - it's not remotely surprising or coming out of left field. So this being the case, we need to act - we have a choice between crashing into extinction OR moving forward to a transformation of our culture and society so profound that what transpires bears no resemblance to the current society.
Given that this is the case, what can we do? In this lively, dynamic conversation with Rupert Rea, we delve into the topic of Deep Adaptation, Transformative Adaptation and the various routes to a different future. We explore the routes Extinction Rebellion could take to avoid 'rushing the rebellion' and look forward at ways we could craft the world we need to see.
Biography: Prof. Rupert Read is one of the definitive spokespersons on ‘The Collapse’. He is the co-author of This Civilisation is Finished. The book describes how Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. The reckless combustion of fossil fuels means that Earth’s climate is changing disastrously in ways that cannot be resolved by piecemeal reform or technological innovation…. Unless humanity does something beautiful and unprecedented, the ending of industrial civilisation will take the form of collapse, which could mean a harrowing die-off of billions of people’. He has been a frequent spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. This has involved meetings with senior politicians from across the political spectrum. He represents Extinction Rebellion on national radio and television, including Radio 4’s Today programme and the BBC’s Question Time and Politics Live. He teaches philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and created and (until recently) led the ‘philosophy of presence’ group in Norwich. He was taught by Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat-Hanh, Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell.
This Civilisation is Finished, by Rupert Read
An Eco-Spiritual Basis for Rebellion Against Extinction - Schumacher College
Podcaster, economist, and spiritual activist, Della Duncan is deeply integrated in the movement for human and planetary change.
In this deep-diving conversation, we explore what it is to 'InterBe' such that we can take our place fully in the web of consciousness. Drawing deeply on her own experience, Della explores the ceremonies that we can undertake to help us shift our consciousness to reach a place where we can open our eyes and see ourselves in the mirror of the world.
As someone who has trained directly and intensively with Joanna Macy, Della teaches widely the Work that Reconnects and seeks to apply the sense of turning towards the world in every moment of life.
We discuss the ways that reframing the economy can be a bridge between those seeking systemic social change and those engaged in spiritual activism, look at the 'Upstream' metaphor and how finding the source of malaise is as important as rescuing those who are being damaged by our current system.
Within the framework of the Three Pillars of the Great Turning: Holding Actions; Systemic Change; and Shifting Consciousness, through the dynamics of systemic change and the leverage points of change, Della lays out the ways we can move towards equity, sustainability and a life well lived.
Della's website: https://www.dellazduncan.com
The Upstream podcast website: https://www.upstreampodcast.org
A view into Joanna Macy's Three Pillars of the Great Turning http://beamsandstruts.com/bits-a-pieces/item/980-joanna-macy-and-the-three-pillars-of-the-great-turning
Mari Kondo's website https://konmari.com
Marianne Williamson website: https://marianne.com
Ken Wilbur's quadrants: https://integrallife.com/four-quadrants/
Changing how we feel is the goal of most Self Help courses, a great deal of therapy and most of the routes that lead to alcohol and drug abuse.
Suppose we could do it intelligently, with a generosity-of-spirit that allows us to fall in love with the act of living. So that life becomes a wonder, however it is lived?
In this final podcast of series 1, we take a look at this ultimate sticking point in our society. For many of us, feeling just isn’t safe and feeling good is either self-indulgence or self delusion. Or at least, that’s what we’ve programmed ourselves to believe.
But imagine a world where everyone was in love with living every moment of the day. Where we knew as a felt sense, that life was inspiring, and there to be explored. Where the magic of the days touched every interaction with ourselves, other people and the world around us.
None of this is impossible. Childhood trauma notwithstanding, we do have the ability to choose how we feel, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. I can open to the things that make my heart grow - or I can recycle the things that make it shrink.
(With the coda that for some of us, our history of trauma is too great and we are hijacked by the impact of that on our bodies - therapy is a key resource and one to be used if at all possible.)
For most of us, though, we let our default feelings define the tenor and thread and weave of our lives. And we don’t have to. In fact, we need not to do this for any longer than we can help.
In this podcast, we explore the ways we can shift out of our defaults to something that lets us flourish. Because the world needs nothing less from us now.
Jonathan Haidt - the Righteous Mind https://www.amazon.co.uk/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0141039167/ref=sr_1_1
Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IICN1F8/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
Peter Levine: In an Unspoken Voice: how the body releases trauma and restores goodness https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009BVWRLO/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
Stephen Porges: Polyvagal theory: https://www.stephenporges.com
Jonathan Franzen - What if we stopped pretending? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
Rupert Read: This Civilisation is Finished: https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Civilisation-Finished-Conversations-Empire/dp/0994282834/ref=sr_1_1
Complexity is all around us - in fact if we're looking for a distinction between complicatED things as opposed to comPLEX things, then it's that people make things complicated (but linear, and readily described) while the whole of the rest of the web of life makes things that are complex... from a cell to an organ to a human (or animal, or plant) body, to an ecosystem, to our climate, to the entire planetary biosphere...
(which is why modern medicine doesn't get so far when it tries to treat us all as if we were basically clockwork and all they have to do is fix the flywheel...)
Anyway - if we're going to understand how we tick, if we're going to understand why the non-linear tipping points of complex systems trend towards infinity quite so fast (think methane hydrates boiling off in the arctic causing runaway global heating) - and particularly if we're going to get to grips with why and how we might reach a stage where conscious evolution is the next emergent property of the hyper-complex system of human society... We need to understand the basics of complexity.
And when we've got our heads around this, it's useful to have a look at the Levers of Change by which any complex system may be nudged - because the non-linear nature of complex systems means that the ways we might, say, change the trajectory of a jetliner are not the same ways we might influence a complex system. So we look at that, too, with honour given to Donella Meadows for coming up with the twelve point list.
If you want to look more at her work, it's here
If you want to look at the twelve points specifically, try here
As is clear by now, if large numbers of us are going to find a way to move towards conscious evolution, then we have to solve the problem of how ordinary, time-poor, stressed out people in a world hurtling towards chaos and calamity, can find the time, space and bandwidth actually to become the change we need to see in the world.
To this end, we explored the neuroscience of habits in the last podcast and now, here, we want to look at how habits shape who we are as people. Because really quite large amounts of our lives are habits of feeling which lead to habits of thought which lead to habits of action. And if we’re going to reach a place where conscious evolution is the next iterative step, we need to learn how to feel, think and act differently in world in which our default is usually to pick a behaviour from our tool kit and implement it.
'Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny' - Lao Tsu mapped the progress from habits of thought (and we would add habits of feeing) towards the truth of what we become.
In this episode, we map the core science of what makes our habits move from simply things we do once, to things that we do without thinking them... that then have a core impact on who we are and how we design our energy through the days, both as individuals and as a culture.
We look at the absolute basics of reinforcement (positive and negative) and how habits become enduring - by becoming easy, obvious, attainable and definable and having four distinct parts: a trigger/cue that tells us this behaviour needs to happen now; a desire; the behaviour; and the reinforcement or reward.
Taking a particular behaviour of listening to a 5 minute visualisation we look at how to anchor this as a habit within our existing behavioural sequence, with a deeper dive into the nature of intrinsic reinforcement. We look four of the main internal reinforcers: Dopamine, Serotonin Oxytocin and Endorphins.
We explore clean loops, backchaining and real world applications of habit-building.
The entire aim of Accidental Gods is facilitating the routes toward conscious evolution. The early podcasts opened the concept of ReAwakening into Connection with the Other-than-Human world. The previous podcast opened the door to Growing into Coherence - the ways in which we can use the fact that 'what fires together wires together' to develop a practice of close and open focus meditations.
This podcast explores the routes towards Heart Coherence - which develops outwardly as regularities in heart rate variability. There is more on this at the Heart Math Center: and at the Mind Life Institute.
The ability to build coherent heart-based sensations - of joy, or compassion, or love, or gratitude, or wonder, or awe… or whatever it is most open to us and most available in the moment as a default sensation that we can revert to in moments when we don't need to be thinking about something else. Because what fires together wires together, if we can begin to develop these
The second part of the podcast explores intent focused meditations - the ability to hone our attention into a clear, clean intention in a way that manifests in a changing reality in the world - focused on the creation of conscious evolution.
Leading from these, we come to the last two parts of the four step route towards conscious evolution: Asking for Help, and Letting Go.
In the Asking for Help - we need to take our place in the web of life, and ask 'what are we here for' in ways that yields answers that are clear, coherent and constructive. So we have to be able to ask in ways that are free of ego, judgement, projection and fear. We need also have built a set of authentic, grounded relationships with the Other-than-Human world so that we can ask for help and hear answers that make sense to us. This requires that we hone our faculties of attention so that we can interpret the responses as they come to us - this is part of the practice that will take us forward. Each of us needs to understand our own internal landscapes so that we can make our own interpretations cleanly. This is a hugely personal practice that takes time - and a degree of trust - to develop. Trust grows over time and we need to build it.
and then - when we can stand in balance; when we can become fully coherent so that we are able to stand in our own power, cleanly and clearly; when we have practiced asking questions in ways that yield clean, clear, coherent answers...
Then we can balance on the knife edge of the moment so that we are pure awareness, knowing that all we have to do is ask for help in that space of unknowing where all that we have to do is ask for help and wait for the answers in a place where we can hear cleanly. And this is not going to be a one-hit event. It's a thing we build to and then we practice it over and over - and if enough of us are practicing this, then this practice will yield a sense of the future iterations that take us to conscious evolution.
This isn't hard. It's not rocket science. It's just going to take quite a lot of us, working together. IF this sounds good to you, there's more detail - and meditations/visualisation at https://accidentalgods.life
There are four obvious types of meditation, mindfulness, contemplation… whatever you want to call it, there are four types that form the foundation of this work. All of them help us to build our focused attention into intention and then the rest of the practice changes the nature of the focus.
As we've said already, the key to successful practice - to building enduring habits - is to evoke a background affective texture (that is, a feeling) that is intimately woven with the act of our practice. The feeling of Joyful Curiosity - the child-like wonder of something truly magical happening - is the key to this. If each breath, or each moment of watching a candle flame, or a leaf or whatever we choose, is utterly magical, then it's far more likely to be engaging and we're far more likely to want to bring our mind back again to the single point of focus.
And then we move to Open Focus meditation, which is the same kind of life skill, but spread out into everything we experience in the moment: everything we see, hear, smell, taste, feel - all of it, as it happens, in the moment. This is an eyes open meditation and a really good grounding for becoming fully present through the days.
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Of the four steps to conscious evolution and the paradigm shift that we need, this is the one that most people have explored at some point. This is the place where we shift our brain patterns from beta pattens to theta, delta or - rarely so far, but I think it'll become more frequent - gamma. This is where we make the most of the fact that what fires together wires together so that we can begin to have more control over what we think and what we feel, so that in the end, we can reshape both. This is where we learn to focus our attention, to build a clear and concise intention; where we remember what it is to balance on the knife edge of the moment and free ourselves up from the endless iterations of our fears of the future or despair at the past. This, effectively, is where we find what it is to be the best of ourselves. And the good news is, this is the easiest bit to work on - it just takes time. So we'll explore the beginnings of this - of what we can do and why, and what the implications might be for our integration and our end goal of conscious evolution. And then in the next episode, we'll look explicitly at how we can do it.
Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life
Re-Awakening into Connection is the core of what Accidental Gods is about - the return of our heritage, our birthright, our ability to live in context with the web of life.
It's not long in evolutionary terms, since we were a part of the living world, able to ask questions, and answer the questions that were asked of us. Now, as we stand on the cusp either of catastrophe or extraordinary change, we need to regain that capacity: we need to re-awaken our innate abilities so that we can take our part in the web of life, in full confidence that we are the right people in the right place at the right time to do whatever is asked of us to affect the change the world needs.
So - how do we do this? How do we bring ourselves to a point where we can walk out into the natural world and open ourselves to a conversation that is going on every moment of every day and every night – without us? How can we ask questions and hear answers in a way that feels as if we are part of a genuine, authentic, reciprocal relationship? How can we become clear enough that our listening is not tainted by our egos, our judgements of self or other, our projections and our sheer terror of getting things wrong? (or right).
In this podcast, we talk about this, and propose some answers. None of this happens overnight. We can't undo the domestication of a lifetime in a few minutes - but it can be done. We are born able to connect. We just need to remember how. And then we need to take our place in the web of consciousness with a sense of integrity and confidence that we're the right people in the right place at the right time, doing what is needed of us - without ego, projection or fear. It's fun. Trust me.
Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life
It's time for Conscious Evolution - for a radical shift in what it means to be human: co-creation; an awakening and a reconnection.
We are the accidental gods - all of us - we are the generational era that stands on the brink of species level extinction. For the first time in the history of evolution on this planet, one member of one species could conceivably wipe us all out. We didn't plan this, but it's where we are. What can we do?
No problem is solved from the mindset that created it. So we need to think beyond our current expectations of ourselves. We believe that we are ready to make the next evolutionary step. Not a tweak to our DNA, but a change in consciousness - a choice consciously made, to step into all that we can be.
So this is what we're here for at accidental gods - to chart one way, to inspire, to bring together all the best of what we can be.
This introductory episode puts forward our proposition that conscious evolution is not only timely, it's essential if we're going to survive to the next decade and begins to open the doors to how, collectively, we might get there.
This is a paradigm shift, the emergence from a hypercomplex system - and as such, the end point is, by necessity, impossible to imagine from here. But what we can do is shift our mindset so that we are making steady iterative steps towards a different future. As a starting point, we list the four steps we believe are integral to our progress: (Re)Awakening into Connection: Growing into Coherence, Asking for Help (of the other than human world) and Letting go of all that we believe to be true.
If you haven't read the Deep Adaptation paper, it's sobering, but useful: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life