Podd: Accidental Gods

The Phoenix Always Rises: Evolving into the Future Human with Prof Chris Bache, Author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe

8 januari 2025 | 85 min

This podcast is predicated on the belief that if we all work together, we can still lay the foundations for a future we'd be proud to leave as our legacy. And it's becoming increasingly obvious that this is now urgent; that we need to let go of the assumptions we'd made about career paths or future constructs and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the process of making it through. Five years ago when we began, it was possible to imagine that the world might stabilise with a vestige of the old system as a scaffold for the new. That assumption is growing increasingly ragged. At the same time, it's becoming increasingly obvious, at least to me, that the shifts we need to be in the world are primarily inner; that the truly urgent work is in healing both our own and the global human psyches, that we need urgently to remember how to connect with the web of life so that we can ask it 'What do you want of me?' and respond to the answers in real time. That we need, in short. to evolve.

But we need mentors and guides along the way. It is possible that we could perhaps each carve out our own route, but part of being human is sharing best practice, is having elders and mentors who open the doors of possibility for those who strive to walk the ways of healing. And this week's guest is one of those elders and mentors; he's a trailblazer of the most incandescent kind.

Professor Christopher Bache is professor emeritus in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and on the Advisory Council of Grof Legacy Training. He grew up in a Catholic household in the southern US and spent 4 years at a seminary training to be a priest before deciding this wasn't the path for him. Moving into academia, he took degrees in the US and at Cambridge and finally a PhD by the end of which he had concluded that, 'using language derived from finite existence to describe an infinite God was like shining flashlights at the stars.' He duly finished graduate school as 'a deeply convinced agnostic with a strong atheistic bent' and went on to teach the philosophy of religion as an academic study.

So far, so academically straight. He took a post teaching at Youngstown University in Ohio - and then he read Ian Stevenson on reincarnation and Stanislav Grof's work on LSD. And 45 years later, I read his book, 'Diamonds from Heaven: LSD and the Mind of the Universe' and realised that here was someone who had walked with the Heart Mind of the Universe. Here is someone who has taken himself to the edge of being, in order to understand the process. As you'll hear, over the course of 20 years, he took 73 truly heroic doses of LSD in very carefully controlled conditions and then, over the past 20 years, he has reflected deeply on the results. I'll let him tell his story: it's truly remarkable. And what he brings to us is visions of how humanity could be: it's not guaranteed - but it's the opening to a door of possibility where every one of us can play a part, where, as he says, if we can align ourselves with the needs of the living planet, find out what's ours to do and devote ourselves to doing it, we have no idea what might arise.

For many of us, this feels like a true dark night of the soul. So I offer this conversation as a ray of potential, that out of this immense pressure, might arise the conscious evolution of humanity: if we can all find ways to be the change.

Chris Bache website https://chrisbache.com/ABOUT
Chris Books https://chrisbache.com/BOOKS-1
New Extended Edition of The Living Classroom https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Living-Classroom-Second-Edition
Stanislav Grof (a website devoted to him and his works) https://www.stangrof.com/
Bill Barnard Liquid Light Book https://liquidlightbook.com/
Soul Centered Healing https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/soul-centered-healing-a-psychologist-s-extraordinary-journey-into-the-realms-of-sub-personalities-spirits-and-past-lives-ed-d-thomas-zinser/310221?ean=9780983429401

Democracy Rising: Making 2025 the year we recover from Peak Polarisation with Audrey Tang, Ambassador at Large for a safer, kinder world

1 januari 2025 | 103 min

Is it possible that 2024 might have been the year of 'Peak polarisation' around the world and that from hereon in humanity might grow less divided, not more; that we might use technology and social media wisely to bring the best of ourselves to the table, becoming the best we can be in service to life? Audrey Tang certainly thinks so in this wide-deep, mind-expanding conversation, we explore everything from the dual nature of AGI to the potential for liberational education that gives young people a sense of agency, interaction and the common good, to ways to rescue democracy to recipes for sound sleep.

Until recently, Audrey Tang was Digital Minister of Taiwan: the country's first transgender, post-gender, and youngest ever Minister of state. In this role, Tang helped bring the .g0v movement into the mainstream and brought with it the concept that democracy could be a social technology with a focus for good. In 2014, at the time of the Sunflower Revolution in which Tang took part, confidence in the government was measured at 9%. Six years later, it was up to 73%. In that time, there had been shifts in everything from the concept of education, to healthcare, to the provision of broadband, to the online submission of taxes. Then the pandemic hit and, by any measure, Taiwan's response was one of the most flexible, emotionally and politically literate in the world. With no need for lockdown, they kept public confidence high and the death rate low. More recently, the Government began 'pre-bunking' the possibility of foreign interference in the General Election of 2024 and the end result saw all three parties agree that it had been a free and fair election, with a population who felt heard and engaged. How different is this to the western experience of maximal polarisation.

Since the end of May 2024, Audrey Tang has been Taiwan's Ambassador at Large in charge of Cyberspace Governance, instrumental in bringing ideas of a post-polarised world to those who dance amongst the levers of power - and doing so with charm, grace and a fierce, sharp intellect that makes the balance between polarities feel like the only possible way forward.

Audrey is probably not entirely alone in swimming both deep in the world of code and stretching wide across the understanding of what it takes to bring humanity to a place of agency, connection and sufficiency, but I don't know of anyone else who has this as a life's goal. This was the most mind-expanding, heart-firing conversation imaginable, and it was an astonishing joy and an honour. I hope it inspires you to be part of a growing, evolving, re-connected world.

Audrey has been the subject of a documentary: 'Good Enough Ancestor' - at the time of this podcast, the trailer is available, but the full video will be released in early January 2025

Plurality.net https://www.plurality.net
Download and donate here https://www.plurality.net/chapters/
Good Enough Ancestor Trailer https://youtu.be/L_AAhYk6I3M
Good Enough Ancestor https://vimeo.com/1010351047/07c278e0d0
TimeShifter App https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/timeshifter/id1380684374
Vivid App https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vivid-double-your-brightness/id6443470555?mt=12
Tenet movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6723592/

Heart of Oak: Talking Druidry, Spirituality and the nature of Magic in the MetaCrisis with Philip Carr-Gomm

25 december 2024 | 92 min

Seven Generations Perspective Meditation for December 2024

18 december 2024 | 26 min

Solstice Cheer: Three Friends uphold a Podcasting Tradition with Della Duncan, Nathalie Nahai and Manda Scott

18 december 2024 | 89 min

Must Read, Must Listen, Must View: Manda's favourite books, podcasts and videos this Winter Season

14 december 2024 | 29 min

The Power of (good) Food with Nick Weir of the Open Food Network

11 december 2024 | 79 min

Clearly we're at an inflection point in the history of humanity. Our experiment with a notional democracy is failing and either we find something that actually works, or we sink into autocracy. And given that the current global flavour of autocracy is in deep denial of the climate and ecological catastrophe that's currently underway, then that's a pretty fast road to extinction: you can't deny your way out of biophysical reality.

So what can we do, we who care deeply about passing an inhabitable - thriving - world to the generations not yet born? We need to go back to basics. We all need clean water, clean air, safe shelter and good nutritious food - and we are rapidly heading for a space where just accessing these will become more of a priority than our recent experiment with unleashing ancient sunlight has led us to believe. But more than this, the community that grows around these, particularly the growing and sharing of food - is the glue that keeps us together. We are a prosocial species. We are astonishingly creative when we put our minds to it. So what happens when we put our minds to creative ways of growing and sharing food that are founded in solid values of cohesion and connectivity? One of the things that happens is the Open Food Network which is a global community of farmers, growers, community food enterprises and software geeks with a common belief that world food systems are broken - and that better, more connected, open, resilient systems can arise in their place. They are building alternative food systems from the bottom up: this is their theory of change and this is a recent podcast about a new OFN project called the Power of Food.

So this week, I've been talking to Nick Weir who helped to set up the Open Food Network UK. Nick has a background in IT account management, but, as you'll hear, he is also a long-term grower who co-founded the Stroudco Food Hub and Stroud Community Agriculture and is deeply passionate about the role of innovative food systems in creating a kinder, more interconnected society, and the ways in which the Network can model a new way of working which empowers people to bring more of themselves to their work. If you're feeling crushed by the global political chaos, I hope this conversation cheers you as it did me, with living examples of change happening on the ground, and the ripple effects it can have.

Open Food Network Global https://openfoodnetwork.org/
Open Food Network uk https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/
Power of Food podcast https://www.wearecarbon.earth/power-of-food-collaboration/
Open Food Network resources https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/resources/
Landworkers' Alliance https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/our_vision/
Sustain https://www.sustainweb.org/about/
Social Farms and Gardens https://www.farmgarden.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do

The Power of Food theory of change https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oSn8g-b-GlVku9g9TOKoVO0GvxSRSuCy/
Living Justice https://livingjustice.earth/projects/

Avoiding Burn Out, Fall Out, Drop Out (and Freak Out): Practical Routes to a whole, healed future with Dan McTiernan of Earthbound

4 december 2024 | 77 min

How do we become the change we need to see in the world? What are the actual, practical steps to grounding, connecting and resonating with the world?

We're on the brink of cataclysmic change. Knowing this, we have choices: we can either fold into despair, terror, rage…whatever rises up in us as we watch the whole biosphere hurtle towards irrevocable tipping points. Or we can become the change we need to see in the world: each of us. This is a cliché by now, but that doesn't stop it being true. Here are others: we are the people we have been waiting for and if not us, now then who and when? We've been saying these for a long time and if you're listening to this podcast, then you're already on board, at least intellectually. You know there is no going back, that ideology cannot win out over biophysical reality and avoiding ecosystem collapse doesn't just mean moving to regenerative farming or buying second hand clothes or even changing all the narratives of all the world's media systems - good though each of these things would be.

But there's been a gap between what we know and how we behave, between where our better selves might push us and the behaviours that are locked into the core of our being, our firmware, if you like. But now - this minute now - we're hitting the buffers where the old paradigm is so obviously not fit for purpose that we need something new. The core questions are what? And how?

And this is where we're going with the podcast just now - After Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network reminded us of our purpose on the earth, and Andrea Hiott of Waymaking helped us embrace paradox - now we're talking to someone who can help guide us into the embodied reality of a different way of being.

Dan McTiernan is a certified Transpersonal Psychology Coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor. With is wife Johanna, he's the co-founder of embodied coaching organisation, Earthbound. He hosts the Being Earthbound podcast which is absolutely on my must-listen list, as is the Substack blog from which it arises. He's a facilitator on Alef Trust’s Nurturing the Fields of Change programme and is the project leader for the Embodied Permaculture Project - an international 2-year action research project exploring the impacts of holistic wellbeing on outer ecological change work. The first 9 weeks of this programme are about to be released as a self-study course - and by the time this podcast ends, you will want to join up with that - I'll put a link in the show notes as soon as I have one - hopefully before this goes live.

He is currently working with Alef Trust and the A Team Foundation to deliver an innovative project supporting farmers and growers in the UK with a programme of embodied wellbeing known as Calmer Farmer which will be launched in January 2025.

As you'll hear, Dan is working at the leading edge of the change we need to embody. He has straightforward practices that any of us can do to help us with grounding, attunement, opening and integration so that we can be the nodes in the web of life. This is key people: we need to stop trying to think our way out of this with our head minds. It doesn't work. It's not going to work. We need to come into our physical bodies, find that truly calming place of peace - and then find connections we can trust with the wider web. This is what we're here for. And Dan has routes to get there.

For more information about this coaching approach, to book a 1-1 appointment or to find out more about Earthbound’s courses and practice group: www.earthbound.fi

For more information about Calmer Farmer: www.calmerfarmer.org

To read more about Dan’s work and to listen to the Being Earthbound podcast: www.beingearthbound.substack.com
The Embodied Permaculture Course is here https://earthbound.fi/embodied-permaculture-course

Adaptation is Here: Launching the TrAd (Transformative Adaptation) Book with Rupert Read and Morgan Philips

27 november 2024 | 66 min

We're teetering on the brink of ecosystem and cultural collapse. How do we adapt and transform to the changing realities?

This week sees the launch of a new book: Transformative Adaptation: Another world is still just possible. The main editors and contributors are friend of the podcast, author, activist and co-founder of the Climate Majority Project, Rupert Read and - new to the podcast - Morgan Philips who is an educator, currently working for Global Action Plan, an environmental charity that mobilises people and organisations to take action on the systems that harm us and our planet. Full disclosure, I'm also a contributor - the book is published by Permanent Publications, the book-publishing arm of the Permaculture Magazine, and Maddy Harland, who edits the magazine and has published the book, brought together the five articles I wrote on Thrutopia: what it is, why we need it and how we get there, and fitted them into the mix.

The book launch has been timed to coincide with the end of COP29. At the time of recording, we have no idea how that will go, but if it's like all the previous 28 COPs it will be a triumph of obstructionism and irrelevancy masquerading as action. We might be surprised. We hope we are. But even if the nations who truly understand the magnitude of the meta-crisis somehow manage a worldwide diplomatic miracle and succeed in making it clear that we need total systemic change - we still need guidelines that help us see how this can happen: ideas of what to do at local and national levels, examples of the kinds of deliberate democracies that we'll need to bring everyone on board; templates of how the world can be if we actually bring all our creativity to bear on the single most important issue of our time.

This is exactly what this podcast is for - the whole of it - and this particular episode lays out the detail, from the concept of a 6th Mission for the UK government (and any other national government that wants to take it up) to examples of how we might shift our educational focus, to why building flood defences is really not enough, never going to be enough and how we could shift our communities to stop reacting and start…adapting.

None of this is easy. We do know this. But we can at least start the important conversations. This is what we're doing here - and we hope you find it inspiring enough to buy the book and read it, give it to your friends, family and colleagues - do whatever it takes to help your local community to find creative, flourishing, inspiring ways to meet the chaos of our world.

TrAd book https://www.permanentpublications.co.uk/port/transformative-adaptation/
TrAd Collective https://transformative-adaptation.com/
Climate Majority Project http://www.climatemajorityproject.com/
Climate Majority Complimentary Approach https://climatemajorityproject.com/safer/
The Rojava Project https://thekurdishproject.org/history-and-culture/kurdish-democracy/rojava-democracy/
Solar farms can be havens of biodiversity https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/solar-farms-biodiversity-pv/
Kikaru Komatsu https://sites.google.com/site/kmthkr/home/publications

Holding the Paradox: Navigating a changing world with Andrea Hiott of Making Ways

20 november 2024 | 68 min

We are not going back. But how do we go forward now in a world where the old norms are under assault by people who move fast and break everything? How do we find a place of balance and compassion - for ourselves, each other and the More than Human world - so that we can move forward in a way that isn’t just a replaying of the old binaries?

Our world changed irrevocably with the results of the US election on the 5th of November. On this podcast, we talk a lot about total systemic change and now that change is happening in front of our eyes. Clearly, there is no going back from here. So how do we who care deeply about a flourishing future - who wish there to be a survival of complex life in all its amazing creativity - navigate this new landscape? How do we embrace the polarities and dichotomies of an unpredictable
world so that we can embrace the infinite complexity - and unknowability - of the future?

This week's guest is someone who has devoted her life to exploring the paradox at the heart of our existence. I first met Andrea Hiott through her 'Love and Philosophy' podcast which has become part of my essential listening list. From the outset, Andrea struck me as someone whose way of viewing life is, if not unique, then definitely exceptional and well worth exploring. As you'll hear, she is someone who throws herself into learning: she can talk with authority on everything from philosophy and phenomenology to neuroscience and ecology and as we speak, she's completing her doctorate, which is called Ecological Orientation. She's an author of various books, including Thinking Small, The long, strange trip of the Volkswagen Beetle, and has long worked on issues of motoring and mobility as a consultant, writer, and ghostwriter. She has appeared in films and TV shows, such as The Bug and Cars that Changed the World. She's been on a whole variety of other podcasts, and has worked extensively for museums, artists, collectors, and agencies.

She is also developing the philosophical framework of Waymaking and the practice of Navigability and I have never in my life spoken with someone who has evolved their own philosophy to the extent that they can talk about it in depth and in detail and make so much sense. There's a YouTube where Andrea does exactly this - I've put a link in the show notes.
On top of all this, she is founder of the private educational consulting platform, Making Ways and pours her energy into collaborating with other thinkers and creators at the intersection of multiple different philosophical, cognitive and ecological landscapes, so that she can create a deeper, more emergent understanding of the world we live in.

We booked this conversation over six months ago and we were not particularly hinging it around the US election. But we recorded this one week to the day after the vote that has so completely changed our world so it would have been impossible not to reflect on this. Andrea is a US citizen, currently living in Europe, so she has a particular set of perspectives - and a capacity to see beyond the polarities that feels particularly useful now. I felt a lot calmer after this conversation than I did going into it and that wasn't all about the pony with colic that put our recording back by a day. So in the hope that this helps you, too, to deepen into this moment of absolute change,

https://www.andreahiott.net/

https://making-ways.ck.page/profile

https://www.youtube.com/@waymaking23

https://www.youtube.com/@DesirableUnknown

https://www.facebook.com/TheBugMovie

Thinking Small Book

Being the Best Ancestors we can - with Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network

13 november 2024 | 81 min

How do we all respond to the seismic events of the US election? Specifically, how do those of us over 50 respond? (and how would the younger generations like us to respond)?

This is the question of now. It would be hard to discuss anything else, but my guest this week is uniquely placed to address these questions. As you'll hear, John Izzo was once an ordained Minister in a Presbyterian Church. Now, he's a bestselling author, speaker, and thought leader focused on social responsibility. He's a Board Member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action group and one of the co-hosts of a podcast called The Way Forward Regenerative Podcast which is expressly aimed at people over 50 who want to explore what it means to be an elder.

I met John on that podcast back in the summer and was so impressed with his approach to things. John is a deeply thoughtful, deeply spiritual person who takes his time to look at things from all angles. He's dedicated his entire career to helping individuals and organisations discover purpose and foster meaningful change. He is absolutely committed to exploring the role of elders in creating a regenerative future. And we need this now, more than ever.

Originally we had scheduled this week's guest for a recording on the 4th of November. Clearly this wasn't going to be as constructive as a conversation held in the wake of the election, whatever the outcome. And so we rescheduled and spoke together on Thursday 7th, which gave us time to process the results and speak more directly to a future that is unknowable, but not entirely unpredictable. How do we feel? What world do we want to create? How best can we bring alive a flame of hope from the ashes of the old system? These are our questions - a starting point, not an end point and no doubt this conversation will continue for the rest of our lives. This is our truth for now.

John's website https://drjohnizzo.com
John's books https://drjohnizzo.com/books/
Elders Action Network https://eldersaction.org/
Elders Action Network on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/EldersActionNetwork/
Elders Action Network on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCMAJFT3jmRlQHnM4p6Rrh7g&ved=2ahUKEwjF-Iq3ubuJAxXRVkEAHZtzH98QFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3JK2afgUEPwxIJz-tO0ZRM
Elders Climate Action https://actionnetwork.org/groups/elders-climate-action
The Way Forward Regenerative Conversations podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-way-forward-regenerative-conversations/id1651941803

Bonus: The System is Dead. Long Live the (new) System! Thoughts on the US election and the self-terminating algorithm

8 november 2024 | 12 min

It occurs to me that we are now at an inflection point in the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and - notionally - Democratic) culture that has been so successful in destroying the ecosphere.

A significant number of us now see what has been obvious to a minority for some time: that the system is not broken - it is doing what it was always designed to do: which is to maintain power in the hands of a few white men.

What we know now, is that the system is not fit for purpose - IF that purpose is the survival of complex life on this planet, if it is the flourishing of the human and More-than-Human worlds in an indivisible web of life.

We need a new system - and this realisation has landed not with the people who solve their problems with violent insurrection (see Jan 6th 2021) but with people whose primary driving aim is to find ways to connect and consiliate, to create coherence with compassion, to find courage and confidence and creative curiosity.

And so this is our goal now - there is no point waiting for the side we favour to win in a broken system.

- We need a whole new system predicated on new and better values.

- We need to find our connectedness.

- At a bone-deep level, in the core of our tissues and the vast expanses of our individual and collective awareness, we need to remember our place in the Web of Life and work only from this.

- We need to start building something entirely different that does not rely on the structures of the broken system, even as it crumbles (or is dismantled) around us.

This is our challenge. Facing it will require everything we've got, but the old system is a self-terminating algorithm and we can all see the route to chaos and extinction now.

If we're going to pull through and find that flourishing world we can bequeath with pride to future generations, nothing else matters now.

Nothing.

Find what's yours to do and do with all your heart. Build imaginal islands with friends, colleagues and co-evolutionaries of the human and More than Human world. Build narratives based on the heart-focused values that are our birth-right.

Above all else, do whatever you can to connect to the More than Human world - to the Web of Life in all its awe-inspiring wonder, its majesty and beauty - and ask 'What do you want of me?'

Listen to the answer, however it comes.

And then do it.

Turning waste into wellbeing, wildlife, food and forests: Bringing permaculture to schools with Elliot Riley

6 november 2024 | 65 min

Having your C.A.K.E. (Compassion, Awareness, Knowledge, Empathy) and sharing what you learn - with Andrew Hale of Dog Centered Care

30 oktober 2024 | 92 min

How does an understanding of what makes dogs tick, help us to understand ourselves and our place in the world? What does it take to feel safe - as a human, or as a dog (or cat, or horse, or... anything)? And how can we help ourselves and each other find regulation in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous)?

Andrew Hale is a Certified Animal Behaviourist who specialises in working complex behaviour cases, especially those involving 'Reactivity and Aggression.' Look around you at the world. Look at the news. What two words best describe the nature of our local, national and geo-political processes?

Andrew is one of those remarkable people committed to a Dog Centred Care approach, working with empathy and compassion to understand why any being is behaving in this way. His focus is on dogs, but what we're learning - and the reason I have invited Andrew onto the podcast - is that all the theories of secure or ruptured attachment, of the need for autonomy, agency, confidence and safety, apply in dogs as much as they do in people -or indeed, any sentient being.

This conversation dives deep into trauma (or at least, trauma responses), our capacity for secure attachment in the modern world, our parenting skills, our skills as people who choose to share our lives with other animals - and ultimately, our skills in helping ourselves cope with a culture that's increasingly going off the rails. It's not about to get any better, either. So the more we can find our own stability, the more we can help others. Which is what this episode is all about. Relax, get yourself a cup of tea and let's explore what really makes us tick.

Dog Centered Care https://dogcc.org/
Dog Centered Care TV on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DogCentredCare/videos
Dog Centered Care Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/dogcc

Candace Pert Molecules of Emotion https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/molecules-of-emotion-why-you-feel-the-way-you-feel-candace-pert/355476
Attachment and Bonding in dogs and people https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4348122/

Rethink, Repair, Rebuild – with Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

23 oktober 2024 | 65 min

How can we achieve total systemic change? And are there politicians anywhere who are ready to make it happen (in a way that supports the continuation of complex life on this planet, not the scorched-earth destruction of the right)?

The short answer is that yes, there are people deeply embedded in politics who know how dire things are and that we need urgent change. One of these is Natale Bennett, former Green Party leader and now Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle, one of two Green Party members of the UK’s House of Lords.

She is also the author of the book Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society, which was published by UnBound in 2024.

Her thesis is that what has been called political common sense over recent decades—that greed is good, inequality doesn’t matter and we can keep treating the planet as a mine and a dumping ground—has been a recipe for disaster. The ideology of neoliberalism has delivered poverty and destruction, with a few benefiting while the rest of us pay. We need urgent change - and we have the routes to do it. Many ideas and arguments in this book have been inspired by the people she has met around the UK. Every idea in it has been road-tested, honed by interaction. We can only get through this dangerous stage by relying on the collective ingenuity, talents and creativity of millions of people, all empowered to “do politics”. This book aims to synthesise the voices Natalie has heard and read –and encourage them to step forward. They collectively represent true common sense.

That’s why she chose to publish it with Unbound using crowdfunding. You can order it through them, or it should be in your local bookstore.
YouTube Introduction to Natalie's book https://youtu.be/US7EaCHR0Zs

The Lama, the Oath and the Web of Treasure Vases - with Cynthia Jurs, author of 'Summoned by the Earth'

16 oktober 2024 | 77 min

We know we need to shift from our Trauma Culture to a resilient, connected Initiation Culture where we can open our heart-minds to the Web of Life, ask 'What do you Want of Me?' and respond to the answers in realtime, with flexibility, authenticity and a grounded awareness of our place in the huge complex system of the More than Human World.

Knowing this, and being able to do it are two different things. But it's possible, and our guest this week is someone who walks this path with enormous grace and huge integrity.

Cynthia Jurs met her root teacher, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the early 1980s, and in 1994 received his transmission of Dharmacharya, becoming a teacher in his tradition, the Order of Interbeing. In 1990 she traveled to a remote cave, 13,000 feet up in the mountains of Nepal to meet the 106-year-old Lama Kushok Mangden Rinpoche, from whom she received an assignment - she was to engage with an ancient tradition of Earth Treasure Vases - that's our English transliteration. The actual translation is 'vessels giving life-essence to the earth'. And so she did. She received these small pottery vessels and has spent the past 34 years making pilgrimages around the world to engage in sacred practice with local communities, gathering prayers and whatever is sacred to the people of the land she is in, as an offering to be interred with these vessels in the earth. There have been three generations of vases, and there may be a fourth so that in the end, there are 108 of them. The practice is still on-going and engages people all around the world. In 2018 she was given the honorary title of Lama at Tolu Tharling Gompa in Nepal by Ngawang Tsultrim Zangpo Rinpoche.

She has written of her experiences in a book, 'Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing our World,' and if you're interested at all in how we can connect with the web of life, I absolutely encourage you to read it.

These days, inspired by her years of service and connection with others who care, Cynthia is forging a new path of dharma in service to Gaia—a path deeply rooted in the feminine, honouring indigenous cultures, and devoted to collective awakening. If you want to join her, Cynthia leads meditations, retreats, courses, and pilgrimages to support the emergence of a global community of engaged and embodied sacred activists.

You can find her offerings and join the global healing community at: www.GaiaMandala.net

and

there is more about her book at https://www.summonedbytheearth.org/

Her book is here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/summoned-by-the-earth-becoming-a-holy-vessel-for-healing-our-world-cynthia-jurs/7556979?ean=9781632261328

Living Well in a Tiny House with Rachel Butler and Maddy Longhurst of Bristol Tiny House Community

9 oktober 2024 | 71 min

Our two guests this week are deeply embedded in the creation of Tiny Homes as a way for us meet the needs of all within the bounds of the living planet. Both are living absolutely at that sharp, bright edge of inter-becoming from which our more flourishing future will emerge.

Rachel Butler is the founder of Tiny House Community Bristol, Chair of Bristol Community Land Trust and is a member of Bristol’s One City Homes & Communities board. Her root mission is within systems change/paradigm shift: to re-common as much land as practicable, enabling as many people as possible to move back onto and reconnect with this land, by co-creating and co-residing in Tiny House Regenerative Settlements. She believes that, at this critical time of human-created poly crisis, as the current system collapses and composts, it’s also time for the human species to rejoin the web of life, in sacred reciprocity; healing our relationships to self, each other and community; not only human, but of all beings and kinds.

Maddy Longhurst is a director of Tiny House Community Bristol alongside Rachel and, for the last 4-5 years has been helping to create their Tiny House development in Sea Mills, Bristol, as well as another small tiny house community off the radar. Since having to leave her rented home this August, she and her daughter have decided to exit the mainstream housing system so as to no longer be subject to its unethical, exploitative ways, but to live, for now, in the fertile margins until their tinies are created.

She's UK coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Consortium, weaving relationships between people working in the urban and peri-urban agroecological transition. She is also Studio Coordinator for Constructivist, a regenerative design school for built environment professionals, and part of the Strategy circle for Bristol Commons. Some of her current areas of work are on Reimagining the Greenbelt as a place for regenerative settlements, prototyping Landed Community Kitchens and developing a model for Tiny Homes for land regenerators in the city.

As you can imagine, our conversation ranged from how grinding bureaucracy so often gets in the way of genuinely restorative, regenerative practice, to the philosophy and practices that are the foundations of the change we need to see in the world. We explored the actual social technologies that moved things forward and learned of two workshops that sound totally transformative. Since recording, it's become apparent that the one in Bristol with El Juego is not really open to other participants, which is sad, but I have no doubt they'll be back - and that Maddy and Rachel will be able to engage with the teaching and bring it into life here and elsewhere. I've put links in the show notes to the Fearless Cities event in Sheffield on the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of November. If I go, I swear I'll be at a microphone in time for the Ask Me Anything Gathering in the Accidental Gods membership that day. This is also a good time to remind you that Dreaming your Death Awake is on the last Sunday of October, 27th from 4-8pm UK time. It's on Zoom and anyone can come.

Tiny House Community on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/tiny-house-community-bristol-ltd/
https://www.tinyhousecommunitybristol.org - this is the Tiny House Community Bristol website - please have a look at the Sea Mills page where you can see and support their planning application
The THCB Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/364360747248042/
THCB Instagram @tinyhousecommunitybristol

https://www.regenerativesettlement.com

https://www.agroecologicalurbanism.org/building-blocks

https://www.urbanagriculture.org.uk/ongoing-projects/fringe-farming/

for those interested in policy around community led housing (CLH): Bristol's CLH policy page https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council/policies-plans-and-strategies/housing/community-led-housing-policies

Also maybe this for great examples of tiny homes around the world: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoNTMWgGuXtGPLv9UeJZwBw

Also another progressive 'compact homes' policy https://www.teignbridge.gov.uk/planning/custom-and-self-build/compact-homes/defining-compact-homes/

Accidental Gods Online Gathering:
Dreaming Your Death Awake online Gathering 27th October 4pm - 8pm UK time https://accidentalgods.life/dreaming-your-death-awake/

Of Reindeer, Donkeys and the verb that is Water. Stories of climate-healing with Judith Schwartz, author of The Reindeer Chronicles

2 oktober 2024 | 73 min

How do we move beyond our myopic focus on carbon/CO2 as the index of our harms to the world? What can we do to heal the whole biosphere? And what role is played by water-as-verb, forest-as-verb, ocean-as-verb?

This week's guest is an environmental journalist and author who has answers to all of these questions - and more. Judith Schwartz is an author who tells stories to explore and illuminate scientific concepts and cultural nuance. She takes a clear-eyed look at global environmental, economic, and social challenges, and finds insights and solutions in natural systems. She writes for numerous publications, including The Guardian and Scientific American and her first two books are music to our regenerative ears. The first is called 'Cows Save the Planet' and the next is 'Water in Plan Sight'. Her latest, “The Reindeer Chronicles”, was long listed for the Wainwright Prize and is an astonishingly uplifting exploration of what committed people are achieving as they dedicate themselves to earth repair, water repair and human repair.

Judith was recently at the 'Embracing Nature's Complexity' conference, organised by the Biotic Pump Greening Group which offers revolutionary new insights into eco-hydro-climatological landscape restoration. She's a contributor to the new book, 'What if we Get it Right?' edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who was one of the editors of All We can Save.

Judith has been described as 'one of ecology's most indispensable writers' and when you read her work, you'll understand the magnificent depth and breadth of her insight into who we are and how we can help the world to heal.

Judith's website https://www.judithdschwartz.com/
Do The Impossible website https://www.dotheimpossible.earth/
Embracing Nature's Complexity Conference https://www.thebioticpump.com/tum-ias-conference-2024
Judith's paper at the conference https://bioticregulation.ru/conf2024/Judith-Schwartz.pdf
Book - What if we get it right? https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-If-We-Get-Right-ebook/dp/B0BPX5GWP8

Building an Economics of Happiness: How - and why - our Future must be Local with Helena Norberg Hodge of Local Futures

25 september 2024 | 86 min

How do we build the local futures we all know we need? What does it actually take to become a good enough ancestor? Or even the best ancestor we can be? Our guest this week, Helena Norberg-Hodge, has given her life to exploring the answers, and helping birth them into being.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is one of the Elders of our culture. She's a linguist, author and filmmaker, and the founder and director of the international non-profit group Local Futures, in which role, she has initiated localization movements on every continent, and has launched both the International Alliance for Localization (IAL) and World Localization Day (WLD).

She's a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.” She is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, and Local is Our Future (2019), and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness.

Almost fifty years since her journey began in Ladakh, Helena is still collaborating with thought-leaders, activists and community groups across the globe which gives her a uniquely rounded insight into howour local futures could look and feel - and the routes to getting there.

I've known Helena since I was at Schumacher college - I rented a room in her house for a while, so we know each other well and I was able to press her in ways I wouldn't normally feel able to do with a podcast guest, so we could drill down into the details of her ideas for a different way of being. At heart, we need to get rid of global trade and move back to a localist economy based in sufficiency. The devil is in the detail, obviously, but if we have an idea of where we're going, we stand more chance of getting there.

So I hope this inspires you to action. Please do follow up some of the links - and definitely watch this new film: Closer to Home - the vision it offers of a generative, working local future is beautiful.

Helena's website https://www.helenanorberghodge.com/
Local Futures https://localfutures.org
World Localisation Day https://worldlocalisationday.org

Film: Closer to Home: Voices of Hope in a Time of Crisis (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJBWvUEZ-50
Helena's book Ancient Futures https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/ancient-futures-learning-from-ladakh-helena-norberg-hodge-hodge/2771495?ean=9780712606561
Book Local is our Future: Stepping into an Economics of Happiness https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/local-is-our-future-steps-to-an-economics-of-happiness-helena-norberg-hodge/7409197?ean=9781732980402

Autumn Equinox meditation 2024

20 september 2024 | 17 min

Thoughts at the Autumn Equinox 2024 - how, what, when, where and why

20 september 2024 | 22 min

Forking the Future: building routes to viable change with Tim Frenneaux of Pivot

18 september 2024 | 69 min

Stop killing the planet! Shaping International law so it's on the side of Life – with JoJo Mehta of Stop Ecocide International

11 september 2024 | 83 min

Can our national and international legal systems be harnessed in service of life, to put the brakes on the worst excesses of capitalism and slow the annihilation of our eco-sphere? Stop Ecocide International exists explicitly to make this happen and this week, we talk to Jojo Mehta, co-founder and Executive Director of the movement.

If we're going to stop capitalism's harms to the planet, we have to build road blocks into the current system that will be recognised by those who make the harms happen and one of the key ways to do this is to criminalise activities that are wiping out the future in real time - if we're using Joanna Macy's concept of the Three Pillars of the Great Turning, this is one of the most effective Holding Actions imaginable (the other two pillars are 'Systems Change' and 'Shifting in Consciousness', which we explore in many other episodes.

Today, though, we're exploring this ultimate Holding Action and our guest is right at the forefront of this. Jojo Mehta is co-founder and Executive Director of Stop Ecocide International (SEI) which she and the late pioneering barrister Polly Higgins (1968-2019) set up in 2017. SEI is the driving force at the heart of the growing global movement to make ecocide an international crime. Their core work is supporting diplomatic progress and fostering global cross-sector support for this. To this end, they collaborate with diplomats, politicians, lawyers, corporate leaders, NGOs, indigenous and faith groups, influencers, academic experts, grassroots campaigns and individuals, positioning themselves with great clarity at the meeting point of legal evolution, political traction and public narrative. As a result, they are uniquely placed to track, support and amplify the global conversation.

This conversation took us in many directions, exploring the legal implications of the law, but beyond it to the potential it has to counter the iniquities of the States Investor Dispute Settlements and how it could bolster Indigenous groups seeking protections for their ancestral lands. We looked at the ways the law is being framed and where it and laws like it have already been enacted, how it's progressing in the International Criminal Court and what the ultimate aims are in using it as a deterrent, but also as a cover for those in the extractive, destructive industries - which, let's face it, is pretty much every industry - who want to act, but are constrained by their requirement to push always for profit regardless of the impact on people and planet. Those who drive them may not care about the little people - you and me - but they care about themselves and if they face actual gaol terms, then their incentive structures become quite different. As Daniel Schmachtenberger so often says, 'Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome' - Stop Ecocide International exists radically to shift the incentive structure and it's making real headway. If you despair about the ways we can change the trajectory of the system, if you think our chances of veering the bus away from the cliff's edge are small, then this is the spark of light you need in the gloom - it's genuinely encouraging.

Stop Ecocide International Ltd https://www.stopecocide.earth/stop-ecocide-international-ltd
Stop Ecocide Foundation https://www.stopecocide.earth/sef
Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide https://bell-harmonica-g83z.squarespace.com/legal-definition
SEI on Twitter https://x.com/EcocideLaw
JJo on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jojo-mehta/
Stop Ecocide Film on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw0HWM9n8I

Guardian Article showing real progress - yay! https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/sep/09/pacific-islands-ecocide-crime-icc-proposal

The Manic Fire Monkeys Do It Again (and Again): Exploring the wonder of human evolution with Dr Shane Simonsen

4 september 2024 | 103 min

The climate emergency is impacting our entire eco-sphere. Plants are at the core of every food chain but we have no idea how fast they can adapt to changes that are taking place in decades where once they took Millenia. Which is where human ingenuity and intervention could be game-changing. If we put our minds to it, could we help plants to evolve in ways that serve the entire web of life?

In this regard, Dr Shane Simonsen is someone who has oriented his entire life to making sure that we have the right seeds to grow the food we'll need as industrial agriculture grinds to a halt.

In this regard, Dr Shane Simonsen is someone who has oriented his entire life to making sure that we have the right seeds to grow the food we'll need as industrial agriculture grinds to a halt.
Shane has a prodigious output. When he's not writing his substack on Zero Input Agriculture - this means no water, fertiliser or pesticides, and the former of these is seriously impressive when you know he lives in subtropical Australia - or recording his Going to Seed podcast with Joseph Lofthouse, or writing Taming the Apocalypse as a non-fiction view of how the world could be if we got it right, or converting this into fiction in Our Vitreous Womb… when he's not doing all of this, Shane is farming in the aforesaid sub-tropical zone of Australia, exploring the means of production in their most grounded sense; creating parrot-resistant maize or hybrids from Bunya Nuts and Parana Pines - species that haven't been on the same continent together since the tectonic plates last shifted and Australia became separate from South America.
Shane is a polymath's polymath: he has a PhD in biochemistry which means he can trace down ideas to their roots and then extrapolate back up and join them with other ideas to create something new. He celebrates the old gentleman scientists of Victorian times who may have been innately colonial products of the trauma culture, but they played at science, they did things that weren't obviously oriented to producing the next paper or winning the race to the next patent: they had fun, they followed their intuition and most of the really big advances in our technologies arise from them. Shane is also aware that most of the big advances in human evolution came when we were under serious pressure as a species.... kind of like we are now. So he's made it his life's task to find ways we can feed ourselves with low technology in a changing world. What species will survive and how might they grow? What hybrids can we intentionally create that will open up new spaces of possibility? How can we - how will we - transform ourselves in this changing world?

Zero Input Agriculture Substack https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/
The Going to Seed Podcast with Joseph Lofthouse and Shane Simonsen https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-going-to-seed-podcast/id1713240427
Shane's speculative fiction 'Our Vitreous Womb' https://haldanebdoyle.com/
Taming the Apocalypse - Shane's non-fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212297242-taming-the-apocalypse

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1955162/
Gail Tverberg Our Finite World https://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/
Going to Seed Online Community https://goingtoseed.org/pages/community

Any Human Power Book Club Sunday 15th September 6-8pm UK time (BST) https://accidentalgods.life/any-human-power-discussion/

Finding the Courage to Care - Ways to build a Mothering Economy with author Jenny Grettve

28 augusti 2024 | 86 min

When is a Tree not a Tree? The 'Net Zero' Wood Burning Scam - with Dr Mary Booth of Partnership for Policy Integrity

21 augusti 2024 | 65 min

We live in a burning world. As we record, there are record wildfires across the Americas, record temperatures around the world, falling oxygen levels in the oceans and however much supposedly renewable energy we produce, Jevons' Paradox means we keep on burning fossil fuels. This is not a great combination, but even the so called renewables have more under the hood than appears on the surface. Burning wood - or grasses - for 'Green' Energy is both a massive accounting scam and one of the ways that the predatory industrial complex sucks in eye-watering quantities of public money - while selling us the lie that this is somehow net zero. It isn't, but sometimes we need someone who really knows what they're talking about to spell out the details for us and this week, our guest is one of those people.

Dr. Mary Booth is the founder and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a Massachusetts-based think tank that uses science, communications, and strategic advocacy to protect forests and our climate future. Mary worked as Senior Scientist in the Environmental Working Group in the US, working on water quality. Now, she directs the PFPI’s science and advocacy work on greenhouse gas, air pollutant, and forest impacts of biomass energy and has provided science and policy support to hundreds of activists, researchers, and policy makers across the US and EU - and now that the UK is no longer in the EU (sigh) in the UK as well.

I heard Mary on the Economics for Rebels podcast back in February and was blown away by her grasp of the essential science, and also by the sheer mendacity of the companies involved: the lies they tell, the false accounting they use and the extent to which they are destroying the biosphere to give us - or at least, those who set our policies and spend public money - an illusion of somehow being more 'green', more sustainable, more ethical.

I wanted to give listeners to Accidental Gods the chance to hear Mary in action, so here we are: people of the podcast, please welcome Dr Mary Booth of the Partnership for Policy Integrity.

Partnership for Policy Integrity https://www.pfpi.net/
PFPI international work https://www.pfpi.net/international-work/
Guardian article by Greta Thunberg https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/sep/05/burning-forests-energy-renewable-eu-wood-climate
Land Climate Blog https://www.landclimate.org/the-problem-of-bioenergy-in-the-eu/
Forest Defenders Alliance (EU) https://forestdefenders.eu/
Forest Litigation Collaborative https://forestlitigation.org/
BBC Panorama: Green Energy Scandal Exposed https://vimeo.com/795555785/c6e9420ff6

A trillion willing helpers: Exploring the microbiome of people and animals with Joe Flanagan of Ingenious Probiotics

14 augusti 2024 | 100 min

Governable Spaces: Solve for democracy on the internet and our outer politics becomes a lot more sane - with Nathan Schneider

7 augusti 2024 | 66 min

The Western world is in a crisis of democracy - but we learn a lot of our principles from the ways we interact online and the internet is essentially a feudal space that gives absolute power to a few and robs the many of agency. Nathan Schneidersuggests that if we were able to shape a more liquid democracy online, our experience of generative interactions would spill over into the outer world. Has to be worth a try, right? So how do we do it?

As we spend increasing amounts of our time, energy and emotional bandwidth online, so we are increasingly exposed to what passes for democracy online. And then we internalise the inherent autocracy and are at risk of exporting this to the real world. So what can we do to change things? What's democracy for in the first place and how can we experiment with increasing the scope and scale of agency and accountability so that we can build trust in the processes that define our lives.

Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the Media Economies Design Lab and the Masters program in Media and Public Engagement. The book that drew me here is 'Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for online life', - which you can buy as a paper copy, but you can also download for free. He has also written 'Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the Next Economy', 'Thank you Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Movement' and God in Proof, the Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet. He's edited other books about crypto and co-ops, writes numerous articles and his blog posts are essential reading. He serves on the boards of Metagov, Start.coop, and Waging Nonviolence. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website

In essence, discovering Nathan has been like discovering the well of life... He's deeply enmeshed in that liminal space where the best of human technologies meet the leading edge of digital technologies and he brings to it the sense of deep wonder, humility and humour that I've only otherwise met in meditators or contemplative mystics. I feel I only scratched the surface of his thinking in this conversation and would dearly like to go back for a second round, but only after I've re-read everything he's written - and dived into some of the online spaces. In the meantime, as a taste of what's possible, please do enjoy this podcast.

Nathan's website https://nathanschneider.info/
Governable Spaces https://nathanschneider.info/books/governable-spaces/
Everything for Everyone https://nathanschneider.info/books/everything-for-everyone/
Thank you, Anarchy https://nathanschneider.info/books/thank-you-anarchy/

University of Colorado Media Economies Design Lab https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/

MetaGov https://metagov.org/

Net Zero Cities: Crafting a Generative Urban Future with Georgia Cameron of Dark Matter Labs

31 juli 2024 | 102 min

Cities: most of us live in them and most of them are geared around the old values of the last century. But what if our core question was: what does it take to have pride in the place I live? How can we completely rethink the way cities act and are shaped to put a flourishing future at the heart of all they do? Georgia Cameron of Dark Matter Labs lays out the visions of Net Zero Cities that goes way beyond just the carbon.

Of the 8 billion (ish) people on the planet, over half now live in cities. If we're going to create a just, equitable, enduring transition to that more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, how we live, work, play and connect with each other in urban centres is going to be key. Which is why we're talking today to Georgia Cameron, who is a policy strategist and innovator at Dark Matter Labs who is currently working with the 112 cities involved in the EU Climate Neutral and Smart Cities Mission helping navigate the legal, regulatory, economic and social barriers they face in advancing transition pathways.

For over a decade, Georgia studies, researches and works at the intersection of law, public policy, organisational strategy, and community organisation. She practised as an urban planning and environment lawyer at a top four law firm in New Zealand before completing a Masters in Regenerative Economics (with Distinction) from Schumacher College, UK in 2021, and now, as we said, she's working with the Net Zero Cities Mission which aims to achieve ‘climate neutrality’ in those cities taking part, although, as you'll hear, those at the heart of this are really clear that it's not just about the carbon, and that everything we do must enhance our connections with ourselves, each other and the wider web of human and More than Human life.

This Mission is one of five within the EU - and miraculously, wonderfully, totally encouragingly, the plan is that all of these will be integrated: that each Mission will feed into the others. So this conversation roamed wide and deep through the theory and practice of this relatively new initiative, exploring the changes in political, inter-personal (and intra-personal) and regulatory thinking that will allow a complete phase-shift in how we work, play, live, commute and engage with the world. At heart, the question boils down to, What does it mean to live well in any given city - or indeed, anywhere? What does it take to feel pride in your neighbourhood? How can those in charge removed obstacles as much as putting new ideas in place? How can all of us work from the ground up to make changes - and what are the stories of change, of being and belonging, that will make this feel like a just, equitable - and desirable - transition?

Georgia on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgia-cameron-frsa-8a90668a/
Net Zero Cities https://netzerocities.eu
Net Zero Cities EU 2024 Conference in Valencia https://netzerocities.eu/2024/07/04/thats-a-wrap-key-takeaways-from-the-2024-cities-mission-conference-in-valencia/
Net Zero Cities Circular Economy Paper https://netzerocities.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Policy-brief-Circular-Economy-Policy-Lab.pdf
Net Zero Cities Nature Based Solutions Policy Paper https://netzerocities.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Policy-brief-Nature-Based-Solutions-Policy-Lab-2024-06-23.pdf
Dark Matter Labs https://darkmatterlabs.org/
Mariana Mazzucato https://marianamazzucato.com/

Earth and Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos with Leah Rampy

24 juli 2024 | 71 min

Creating Quantum Theatre: radical story-becoming to change the world with Jenifer Toksvig

17 juli 2024 | 88 min

Humanity is a storied species - everything we do from forming partnerships, to buying stuff, to moving house, to getting a new job… arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. If we’re going to shift to a new way of being, the route will be led by the stories we can build of how it will look and feel, how we’ll be more alive, more connected, have a deeper sense of being, belonging, becoming…

So - how do we tell stories of transformation in ways that engage everyone, that give everyone the agency, support, encouragement and freedom to be what they need in any moment - in every moment?

This week's guest is theatre maker and champion of access, Jenifer Toksvig. Jen is creator of the Copenhagen Interpretation, which takes concepts of uncertainty and fluidity evolved to describe the quantum process in physics, and applies them to theatre, to the telling of living stories in a shared space in a way that fosters connection, creativity, and personal growth. Clearly we on Accidental Gods believe that the stories we tell ourselves and each other of ourselves and each other - and our place as more or less conscious nodes in the web of life - are crucial to how we navigate this moment of total turmoil in our cultural, energetic and biophysical worlds. We not only need new stories, we need new ways of telling those stories, new ways of experiencing different ways of being and this, it seems to me, is what Jen is creating.

When I first learned of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and The Broad Cloth that arises from it, when I first took part in Jen's gathering of a Fairy Tale, it felt as if someone was opening doors in my mind; that here is a way safely to explore the emergent edges of interbecoming that are where the magic happens. So I wanted to bring some of this magic to the podcast, to let Jen tell her story and to see if we could bring it home for you. So here we go, stepping into a place of magic and emergence, people of the podcast, please do welcome Jenifer Toksvig of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Jenifer Toksvig

https://linktr.ee/toksvig
https://www.jenifertoksvig.com/

The Copenhagen Interpretation
https://www.worldanvil.com/w/thecopenhageninterpretation

Open Space Technology - Harrison Owen
Original: https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/what-is/
Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_space_technology

Our version: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/thecopenhageninterpretation/a/open-space-article

Joseph Campbell - The Hero's Journey (aka 'arrow narrative')
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
https://stillmoving.org/resources/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction
https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Ursula-Le-Guin/The-Carrier-Bag-Theory-of-Fiction/24443320

Navigator of Current See: Diana Finch
https://www.dianafinch.info/

Navigator of Gathering: Ess Grange

https://slgrange.com/

Navigator of Accompanying: Flo O'Mahony / ZooCo - Perfect Show For Rachel
https://www.wearezooco.co.uk/shows/perfect-show-for-rachel

Copenhagen Model: The Fairytale Library
https://www.instagram.com/the_fairytale_library/

Copenhagen Model: The Broad Cloth
https://www.worldanvil.com/w/thebroadcloth

The Broad Cloth: producing partner, Scandinavia
The Field Station on Ingøya - Oliver Dawe
https://www.fieldstation.no/
https://www.oygrid.no/ - this is Harald Hansen, Oliver's husband, who is working in renewable energy on the island

https://www.favli.no/ - this is Harald's company for renewable energy work elsewhere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ing%C3%B8y

The Broad Cloth on the Isle of Wight: partners

- Ventnor Exchange, host organisation
https://ventnorexchange.co.uk/

- Lisa Kerley, caretaker
https://memoriesofthesea.uk/
https://farmingmemories.com/

- Art Ecology
https://www.artecology.space/

- Arc Biodiversity
https://arcbiodiversity.co.uk/

- Wolfguard Viking Reenactment
https://www.wolfguardiow.co.uk/

The Tools we Need: Raising the Collaborative Commons with Resilience Strategist Michael Haupt

10 juli 2024 | 85 min

We know by now that the old system is crumbling, that the old paradigms are no longer fit for purpose and we need to take part in the birth of something new: this is what this podcast is for. But what are the tools and how can we begin actually to build something relevant and useful within the strictures of a system that is still trying to cling onto legitimacy and power?

Michael Haupt was a key figure in the widespread introduction of mobile telephones to South Africa ahead of the first all-race elections in 1994. He was head-hunted soon after and the next decade saw him working around the globe in 16 cities on 6 continents. He was in Thailand, taking a year out when he had a vision - an actual not-expected, not-planned, not-drug-or-meditation-mediated set of visions - that showed him how the world could look and feel like if we manage to craft a route through to what he calls the Transition Phase of our evolution.

This moment was pivotal in his life. Now he's a 'Resilience Strategist' bridging between those businesses that are switched on enough to know that corporate greenwashing is no longer useful, and agile enough to find what is. He's building mycelial links to others who are working in this area and he's thinking deeply - so deeply - about where we could go and the actual logistics of how we might get there. I've been holding a lot of conversations on the back of launching Any Human Power about how we could build a future that is fit for purpose, where the human and More-Than-Human worlds flourish on a thriving planet. Thanks to Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl, I can see some of the routes through to political and technological change. Thanks to the Gaia Foundation, the Sustainable Food Trust, the million and one permaculture organisations around the world, I can see a way to mending our totally broken food and farming system. I can see ways to shift transport and power generation and city design. What I have lacked, until now, is the ideas that might bring the great behemoth that is the corporate world on board in a way that's useful. And this is what Michael is doing. As ever, this was a wide, deep conversation and it pushed the edge of my thinking, but it brought me to a place where I can more clearly see a few more steps forward. I hope it does the same for you.

00:00 Introduction: Reconnecting with Nature
01:19 Welcome to the Podcast
01:40 Michael's Journey to Resilience Strategy
02:14 Load Shedding in South Africa
03:49 Understanding Resilience Strategy
04:52 Michael's Life Journey and Worldview
07:40 The Vision on the Beach
12:15 Potential Futures and Human Coordination
15:22 Cycles of Civilisations
18:12 Class-Based vs. Values-Based Societies
20:19 Emerging Consciousness and Systemic Change
22:01 The Role of Currency and Mutual Credit
27:25 Coordinating for Systemic Change
28:55 South African Elections and Corporate Responsibility
32:10 Legal Personhood for Natural Entities
35:12 The Mycelial Network and Future Coordination
38:28 Encouraging Systemic Change
39:13 Resilience Strategies and City Exclusion
40:12 Rural Experiments and Human Purpose
41:12 Challenges of Implementation
45:27 Local Currencies and Community Commitment
50:50 Ownership vs. Stewardship
53:22 Rediscovering Connectedness
57:26 Emerging Incentive Mechanisms
01:09:35 Forking Governance and Parallel Systems
01:16:25 The Power of Narrative

Michael on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhaupt/
A blog past about the Thai beach experience: https://michaelhaupt.com/the-beach-4b6e60e407e8
Michael - Liminal School liminalschool.org
Cycle of Civilization: https://bit.ly/7-Phases-Glo
Interstructure: https://bit.ly/Int-Struct
Roger Briggs, Emerging World - explains the shifts in consciousness: https://bit.ly/Em-World
Will Ruddick, Commitment Pooling: https://bit.ly/CommPool
Joe Brewer Bioregional Movement: https://bit.ly/JBrewer
Clare Graves' Momentous Leap: https://bit.ly/MoLeap
GaiaNet: https://www.gaianet.earth/
Dark Matter Labs: https://darkmatterlabs.org/

How the System is Slaying Us - and What to Do About It: Getting Healthy in Toxic Times with Dr Jenny Goodman

3 juli 2024 | 108 min

How does our increasing destruction of the earth's biosphere also impact our health? What diseases are we seeing in almost pandemic proportions and how much younger are the people in whom we're seeing them? Above all, what can we do to step away from the system that's extracting everything from us - our health, our futures and our potential to be good ancestors?

Our guest this week is Jenny Goodman who is a doctor - and also an author. Her first book, Staying Alive in Toxic TimesL A seasonal guide to lifelong health is a fascinating look at how we can stay well, but it's her second that we're going to explore today, partly because at the time of recording, it's just about to be launched. 'Getting Healthy in Toxic Times: an ecological doctor's prescription for healing your body and the planet' is a mind-bending read. I really did think I knew this stuff, but there are large parts of this book that have blown all my fuses, not just for the health impacts - particularly on children and young people (did you know we're seeing Alzheimer's now in teenagers?) but for the cold-blooded way it's been allowed to happen. Every part of this book is essential reading - not just because it shows us how we're being poisoned by our food, our water, the air that we breath, the things around us that we can't even see - but more importantly because it details how we can get healthy again and help restore the integrity of our soils, our water, our air…the whole world we live in.

As you'll hear, Dr Jenny Goodman is a medical doctor, lecturer and broadcaster. She qualified in Ecological Medicine with British Society for Ecological Medicine and practiced this for over two decades, giving rise to many of the case studies in her books. Jenny has appeared with Terry Pratchett in ITV’s documentary What’s in Your Mouth? and has been featured on the Victoria Derbyshire show, BBC One’s Inside Out and numerous other TV and radio shows.

00:00 Introduction to Microplastics in Clothing
01:10 Welcome to the Accidental Gods Podcast
01:44 The Journey of Dr. Jenny Goodman
03:12 From Conventional Medicine to Ecological Medicine
10:07 The Impact of Industrialised Agriculture
13:17 The Dangers of Glyphosate and Pesticides
23:10 The Epidemic of Chronic Diseases
26:55 The Importance of Organic and Regenerative Farming
35:57 Filtering Water and Avoiding Toxins
36:42 The Hidden Dangers in Our Water
46:01 The Problem with Synthetic Clothing
52:23 The Impact of Fossil Fuels on Air Quality
54:21 Heavy Metals and Air Pollution
55:19 Political and Personal Actions Against Air Pollution
57:01 The Clash of Freedoms: Clean Air vs. Car Ownership
57:25 The Need for Efficient Public Transport
59:27 AI and the Future of Public Transport
01:02:49 Electric Vehicles and Ethical Concerns
01:06:43 Nuclear Power: Risks and Realities
01:07:39 Protecting Yourself from Nuclear Radiation
01:19:33 Electromagnetic Radiation: Hidden Dangers
01:31:08 Making Your Home a Safe Haven
01:40:29 Final Thoughts and Resources

Pre-Order Jenny's book here:

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

Amazon

Jenny's website
Jenny on Facebook
Jenny on LinkedIn
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny on Instagram

The British Society for Ecological Medicine

Election Special 4: What is Governance for and how can we shape genuine democracy - with Glen Weyl of the Plurality Institute

28 juni 2024 | 63 min

If the current electoral/governance system is not fit for purpose (and who could possibly imagine it was?) how can we lay the foundations for new ways of organising democracy, new ways of voting, new ideas of what governance is for and how it could work in the twenty-first century. How, in short, do we create space for future generations to be able to decide their own futures in ways that are not constrained by material or political strictures they've inherited from us?

In this fourth election special, I have a profound conversation with Glen Weyl - economist, philosopher, film producer and visionary thought-leader for our time. We explore how we can break away from traditional governance structures and how spiritually acknowledging the complexity within each individual can pave the way for more inclusive, fluid, and efficient democratic systems.

Glen is co-author with Audrey Tang of the ground-breaking book Plurality, which emerged partly Audrey's experiences in re-shaping the democracy in Taiwan towards connection, collaboration and - above all - peaceful resolutions of the many internal contradictions of that state.

He introduces the concept of quadratic voting (of which he is the creator) as a significant innovation in this field. The conversation expands to the potential of technology in aiding governance reforms, and Glen shares insights from his work with the Plurality Institute and Radical Exchange. We also touch on the success of Taiwan’s innovative governance, influenced by Audrey Tang.

Join us as we discuss creating experimental, adaptable governance systems aimed at ensuring peace and human flourishing in an ever-complex world.

Glen currently works at Microsoft where he is the founder and research lead of the Microsoft Research Special Project the Plural Technology Collaboratory, though he was previously GeoPolitical advisor to the CTO. He also founded and serves on the board of the RadicalxChange Foundation the leading thing tank in the web 3 space, and is founder and chair of the Plurality Institute which coordinates an academic research network developing technology for cooperation across different disciplines.

He's also senior advisor to the Getting-Plurality Research Network at the Harvard Edmond and Lily Saffra Centre for Ethics. He previously lead Web 3 technical strategy at Microsoft's Office of the CTO and taught economics at the Universities of Chicago, Yale, Princeton and Harvard.

00:00 Introduction to Polarisation and Complexity
01:04 Welcome to the Accidental Gods Podcast
01:31 The State of Global Democracy
02:15 Quadratic Voting and Governance
02:51 Defining Governance in the 21st Century
03:13 The Role of Peace in Governance
04:36 Harnessing Human Diversity for Progress
08:42 Challenges to Current Democratic Systems
11:11 Expanding the Polity and Legal Innovations
11:58 Lessons from Historical Societies
13:42 Imagining Future Governance Systems
19:42 Locality and Pluri-locality in Governance
26:39 Metaphors and Toolkits for Governance
27:33 Concrete Voting Designs
28:55 Dynamic Voting Systems
30:48 Quadratic Voting Explained
35:06 Liquid Democracy and Emotional Literacy
37:24 Taiwan's Unique Political Landscape
41:27 Audrey Tang's Impact and Philosophy
47:06 Glenn's Diverse Background and Vision
54:43 Concluding Thoughts and Future Directions

Glen's website
The Plurality Institute
RadicalxChange Foundation
Quadratic voting explained

PLURALITY - the book

Audrey Tang on Twitter
Trailer for film biopic about Audrey Tang: The Good Enough Ancestor
Project Liberty

Quadratic Voting - with Ruth Catlow in Episode #193

Beautiful Trouble - crafting a political Alternative - and an independent Scotland - with Indra Adnan and Pat Kane

26 juni 2024 | 85 min

The question of how we reshape democracy, walking the fine line between stagnation and populist rage - is the defining problem of our time - with a coherent strategy, we can shape anything. In its absence, we’re going to end up spinning in pointless circles, arguing about trivia while the world burns.

We set this podcast up months ago, thinking we’d talk about the example Scotland sets for the UK and the rest of the world as a way *maybe) to shape democracy. And then Nicola Sturgeon stepped down and Scotland fell into the kind of turmoil I thought only impacted England. And then the turmoil in England sparked a general election. So now we’re talking about how we can use this moment to affect the digital, distributed democracy that we need with two of the smartest people in our eco-system - people who give their entire lives to thinking about this question: Indra Adnan and Pat Kane of The Alternative.

This week's guests are Indra Adnan and Pat Kane. Indra is the author of The Politics of Waking up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age and Pat is a musician, writer, curator, consultant, activist and futurist and his substack is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the ideas in our eco-system. The reason we're here, they're, Co-Initiators of The Alternative, which is a socio-political platform hosting #PlanetA: new ground to stand on for a flourishing future - and a daily blog and a forum, or perhaps a melting pot - for new ideas and new ways being. Acknowledging that the systems we are embedded in - media, economic, political - take our power away. The Alternative and Planet A ask us how we achieve the world we know deep down is possible.
You have to experience The Alternative really to understand what it is to explore ideas at the leading edge of our emergent inter-becoming, to think through the lens of cosmo-localism, to hold new truths of who and how we are and to frame radical new political options in this age of cardboard cut-out politicians spouting ever more stale lines that were out of date in the 80s and are certainly not fit for purpose in the third decade of the twenty first century.
So this conversation takes us deep into this territory. Recorded on the day after the EU elections, as France heads to the polls and the UK's general election descends ever further into infantile name-calling and political posturing that no longer even pretends to be the adults in the room, it was - and is - really refreshing to explore ideas of what's possible with people whose entire lives revolve around the concepts of emergent change.

The Alternative
Indra's book
Indra in episode #124
Pat's music
Pat on Substack and at The National
Pat's Blog - The Play Ethic www.theplayethic.com
Ecological Civilisation

Manda's novel Any Human Power

Election Special 3 - Labour party Manifesto - anything worthwhile? with Jeremy Gilbert

23 juni 2024 | 66 min

Taking back the Power: Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and onto the good stuff with Howard Johns of OneZero

19 juni 2024 | 66 min

The Jay, The Beech and The Limpetshell with author Richard Smyth

12 juni 2024 | 59 min

Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Politics - Election Special 2 with Baroness Natalie Bennett of the Green Party

10 juni 2024 | 38 min

Answers to the Questions of life: Biomimicry, Complexity and Peacebuilding with Dr Deborah Benham

5 juni 2024 | 84 min

Breaking the Doom-Loop of UK Politics with Neal Lawson of Compass

4 juni 2024 | 37 min

Wild shamanic theatre and becoming embodied: with Jessica Buckler of the ALEF Trust

29 maj 2024 | 67 min

This week's guest, Jessica Bockler is one of those people who sparks every fire in my being - and i hope in yours, too.

Jessica is an applied theatre practitioner and transpersonal psychologist who co-founded the Alef Trust a globally-conscious non-profit organisation offering online graduate education programmes, and open learning courses for people who want really to step into what Indy Johar so beautifully calls the emergent edge of Inter-Becoming. Jessica is integral to the Nurturing the Fields of Change Programme that brings people together from diverse walks of life to create an emerging community of practice around change - and she's Programme Director for the Trust's academic programmes in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology.

She teaches on a range of topics, bringing spiritual perspectives to activism and social change - so you can begin to see why I find her work so enthralling. She stands at that nexus where transpersonal psychology meets shamanic practice, where being and becoming are an art and a practice in themselves, grounded in modern science - not the reductive, Head Mind science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but twenty-first century science where complexity and systems thinking lie at the heart of all we do, where we recognise that only by becoming fully present in the moment, can we access the whole, vast intelligence of the All That Is and find what is ours to do.

Jessica brings all this into being in social prescribing programmes, in theatre, in change facilitation, in the MSc at Liverpool John Moores University and in her daily life and she shares it in the conversation you're about to hear - including a clip of one of her own practices, that is solid podcasting gold. If you're interested in finding out how we can access our own inner intelligence and build with others to co-create the foundations of that more flourishing future we'd be proud to leave behind, then this is the podcast for you.

ALEF Trust https://aleftrust.org
Nurturing the Fields of Change https://www.aleftrust.org/alef-applied/nurturing-the-fields-of-change-programme/MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology https://www.aleftrust.org/academic-learning/masters-degree/
Live Event: Healing Humanity, 1st June 2024, Broughton Sanctuary, Yorkshire eventbrite.co.uk/e/healing-humanity-imagination-embodiment-and-community-tickets-887551710057
Workshop: Embodied Imagination for Social Change, 2nd & 3rd September, Oxford eurotas2024.com/pre-post-conference-workshops/towards-emergence-embodied-play-and-sourcing-for-transformation
Conference, 4 – 8 Sept, Oxford: Creative Bridges: embodied consciousness, psyche & soul in research and practice eurotas2024.com
National Academy for Social Prescribing https://socialprescribingacademy.org.uk/
Inner Green Deal https://innergreendeal.com/

The Story is in our Bones: Rewilding Ourselves with author and activist Osprey Orielle Lake

22 maj 2024 | 65 min

Once in a while, a book comes along that changes how we see the world, that re-sets something fundamental in who we are and our capacity to engage with the Web of Life. Braided Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer was one of these: at once poetically beautiful, spiritually inspiring and deeply thought-provoking.
And now Osprey Orielle Lake has written 'The Story is in our Bones: How Worldview and Climate Justice can Remake a World in Crisis'. This is a genuinely beautiful book on every level: full of living mythology, opening doors to how the bones of our language make the world around us, offering other perspective, other ways of being, living stories of where we came from and who we are and who we could be. It's deeply honouring of Indigenous wisdom from around the world, and of the struggle of all those who suffer most and have done least to unleash the poly crisis that is so obviously impacting our world.

The author is an extraordinary person, founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) which was created to accelerate a global women's movement for the protection and defense of the Earth’s diverse ecosystems and communities. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature whose goal is to 'transform our human relationship with our planet' and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is modelled on the Nuclear non-proliferation treaties of the last millennium, and seeks to manage a global transition to safe, renewable and affordable energy for all. In short, she works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future.

This is one of those conversations that dived deep into the heart of what really matters - how we bring ourselves to a place of genuine connection with the Web of Life - in time - and in ways that will create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We could have talked for hours, and I have no doubt we'll come back again, but in the meantime, please enjoy the many layers of being and belonging that Osprey brings to all her work.

Buy the Book 'The Story is in Our Bones'
Osprey's website: https://ospreyoriellelake.earth/
Women's Earth and Climate Action Network International https://actionnetwork.org/groups/wecan-international
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature https://www.garn.org/

Osprey on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ospreyorielle.lake/
Osprey on GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137212679-the-story-is-in-our-bones
Osprey on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ospreyoriellelake/
Osprey on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/osprey-orielle-lake-4286bb12/

Any Human Power - Manda Scott talks about her new Thrutopian Mytho-Political thriller

15 maj 2024 | 91 min

This week the tables are turned and Maddy Harland, editor of Permaculture Magazine interviews Manda about her new 'seismic' Mytho-Political thriller, Any Human Power, which will be available from 30th May.

"From a bestselling storyteller who brings together myths and speculative futures with a radical compassion, comes the story of a family at the heart of a political crisis and the ensuing uprising of a disenfranchised generation. A family that harnesses the skills and stories needed for real change, if they can choose the right path, before it is too late …

As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. Fifteen years later, her teenage granddaughter, Kaitlyn, triggers an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole betrayed generation. For one shining fragment of time, the world is with her. But then the backlash begins and soon she and those closest to her find themselves facing the wrath of the old establishment, who will use every dirty trick in the book to fight them off.

Watching over the growing chaos is Lan, who taught them all to think independently, approach power sceptically and dream with clear intent. She knows more than one generation’s hopes are on the line. Nothing less than the future of humanity stands in the balance.

Grand in scope, rich in courageous characters who breathe new life into ancient wisdom, here is a dream of a better future: a world we’d be proud to leave to our children and their children and on, generations down the line.

‘A polemical thriller like no other, an absorbing manifesto to change the world. It constantly surprises. Manda Scott’s characters play havoc with your emotions, her narrative keeps you turning the pages, and her ideas might just change your life.’ANDREW TAYLOR, AUTHOR OF THE SHADOWS OF LONDON

‘The critical task in present times is to find a way out of the world-destroying political status quo. To make that happen we first have to imagine how it could happen. In Any Human Power, Manda Scott uses her own supreme imaginative powers as a novel is t to open windows into the flow of possibilities.’CHRIS SMAJE, AUTHOR OF A SMALL FARM FUTURE

‘This book brilliantly depicts the frightening reality facing those who mobilise against a violent global establishment. However, instead of regarding cosmic and spiritual forces as separate from politics, this book transforms our sense of what is possible.’RUTH CATLOW, CO-FOUNDER OF FURTHERFIELD"

Ordering:
If you're in the UK, please either order through your local independent bookstore or by following this link https://linktr.ee/anyhumanpower
If you're elsewhere in the world, you have options (NB - the book is currently only available in English. If you know a publisher who'd like to publish a translated copy, please let me know)

You can order from the UK at the link above and they'll ship a hardback to you anywhere in the world
If you'd like to order through your local independent bookstore, you can let them know that the books are available through the distributors - Gardners UK or Ingrams US
or
You can order an ebook from your national Amazon, Kobo or Apple stores

and whichever you do - if you like it, please do leave a review at Amazon and Goodreads as well as whatever other social media follow - word of mouth is our best possible friend!

Permaculture Magazine https://www.permaculture.co.uk/subscribe/
Manda's Website https://mandascott.co.uk

No such thing as Waste, No such place as 'Away'! - Composting our way out of the meta-crisis with Nicky Grady Scott

8 maj 2024 | 72 min

Writing the Deluge: Dark nights, Apocalypse and Hope with author Stephen Markley

1 maj 2024 | 49 min

Eco-Spirituality - Exploring Deep in the Woods of the Divine with Woodford Roberts and Rupert Read

24 april 2024 | 80 min

In this deep, thoughtful conversation, two of the men at the heart of the Climate Majority Project discuss their own journeys into eco-spirituality - what they believe it to be and why it's a core, foundational bedrock of their lives.

If you follow anything else that Faith and I do together, you'll know that we believe heart-felt connection to the All That Is forms the bedrock of human existence and is the pathway to human flourishing, to our being good ancestors, to laying that foundation on which future generations can build a world where we are an integral part of the web of life.

The whole of the Accidental Gods membership program exists to help people find ways to make this heartfelt connection and the Dreaming Awake contemporary shamanic training takes it more deeply. We don't often get to unpick this in depth here on the podcast. But long term friend of the podcast, the author, philosopher and academic, Rupert Read, suggested a while ago that we might like to have a three way conversation with him and Woodford Roberts who is an integral part of the Climate Majority Project of which they are both founder members. Both have been active in Extinction Rebellion. Both have moved on to believing that change happens in other ways, and both have at the core of their actions and activism a heartfelt connection to the All That Is, however we define it. We have regular guest appearances by people who work deeply in shamanic traditions, or other aspects of contemporary spirituality, but this is the first time we've had a chance to explore what we might call western 'eco-spirituality' in a way that is practiced distinctly from contemporary - or indigenous - shamanic practice.

Rupert is a philosopher who has studied both Quaker and Buddhist traditions, naming Joanna Macey and Thich Nhat Hahn as his teachers. Woodford Roberts - who is called Rob within the movement - comes from a more meta-cognitive stance, but still deeply embedded within western psycho-spiritual philosophy, albeit with personal experience in the shamanic realities. So this was a deep, wide ranging, thoughtful episode and I hope it helps you to navigate your own routes to thinking, feeling and being in these turbulent times. So please welcome back Rupert Read and welcome for the first time, Woodford Roberts, both of the Climate Majority Project.

Bios:

Woodford Roberts is a writer based in Cornwall. With a focus on eco-spirituality and emotion, Woodford's work seeks to help readers stare down the truth of the metacrisis as he seeks to do the same, sharing his own spiritual journey of navigating the challenging terrain of a time between two worlds and the lessons found within. His work appears in Dark Mountain Books, Resurgence & The Ecologist. His first book, called 'How To Be Happy At The End Of The World' is currently in development, and he publishes on a Substack of the same name.

Prof Rupert Read is co-director of the Climate Majority Project and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of several books, including This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future, Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Do you want to know the truth? The surprising rewards of climate honesty. His spiritual teachers have included Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh.

Links:

Climate Majority Project https://climatemajorityproject.com

Rob in Resurgence https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article3855-waking-up-to-the-world.html
Rob Substack https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com/
'Kisses on the Wind' - A heartfelt essay written by Rob since our conversation (trigger warning - he discusses his own brush with suicide) https://howtobehappyworld.substack.com/p/kisses-on-the-wind
XR Writers Rebel by Rob https://writersrebel.com/read-this-is-for-my-children/
Motes In A Sunbeam published with Dark Mountain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdmr96gVFgw

Rupert's website https://rupertread.net/
Rupert on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupert-read-6717548/?originalSubdomain=uk
Rupert on Twitter https://twitter.com/GreenRupertRead
Arts Council-Funded Play inspired by Rupert's work www.phoenixdodobutterfly.com
Rupert - Ebor Lecture in York https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ebor-lecture-earth-hope-with-professor-rupert-read-tickets-811255837047 (also available online for those not in Yorkshire)
Rupert 'Thin Red Line' paper https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/film.2002.0023

Climate Majority Culture Peace Gathering https://climatemajorityproject.com/culture-peace-gathering/

Life Itself https://lifeitself.org/programs

What do we really think about Food? Revolutionising what we eat with Sue Pritchard of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission

17 april 2024 | 76 min

We're told so often that people 'don't want the nanny state to intervene' in what we eat or drink or smoke - and often the people saying this are those who employ literal nannies to raise their children. But is it true? What would we learn if someone courageous, with vision, depth and care were to find ways to ask ordinary people what they really feel? #TheFoodConversation is huge - in scope and depth and duration - but more in terms of what it teaches us about how people actually feel, what they actually think, and the massive difference that we can make by helping ordinary people to understand more about how food could be healthy, nutritious and affordable - as opposed to how it is now.

If you've listened to previous episodes of this podcast, you'll know that total systemic change is one of our foundational beliefs: it's coming whether we like it or not and we'd like to manage a just transition rather than waiting to see what arises from the ashes if we keep pushing business as usual until our entire bus dives over the edge of the biophysical cliff.

And so we are always on the lookout for people who not only think systemically, but who get it; who aren't just talking the talk, but who are making things happen on the ground that will lead us all closer to the tipping points of change. Sue Pritchard is one of these people. She's the Chief Executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, leading the organisation in its mission to bring together people across the UK and the world to act on the climate, nature and health crises, through fairer and more sustainable food systems, and a just transition for rural communities and the countryside.

She is a Trustee of CoFarm Foundation and is an independent Governor at Royal Agricultural University. Sue lives an organic farm in Wales, where she and her family raise livestock and farm for conservation.

This conversation was sparked by the FFCC's inspiring Food Conversation - which brings together ordinary people and begins to unpick the web of deceit surrounding our food - and replaces it with something that is real and decent and nourishing on a physical and systemic level. This was such an inspiring, invigorating conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Food Farming and Countryside Commission
The Food Conversation
Food Conversation YouTube
The case for AgroEcology
CUSP Nature of Prosperity Dialogue
Chris van Tulleken - Ultra Processed People (book)

How do we live, when under the surface of everything is an ocean of tears? With Douglas Rushkoff of Team Human

10 april 2024 | 71 min

Evolving Education: Building a Doughnut School with Jenny Grettve of When!When!

3 april 2024 | 66 min

Building Trust - One Conversation at at Time: Cooperation Hull with Gully Bujak

27 mars 2024 | 64 min

Today we venture into the heart of Hull, where the seeds of change are being sown by the hands of ordinary people. Gully Bujak, our guest this week, is a force of nature who, since her awakening to the climate crisis in 2018, has channeled her energy into the creation of Cooperation Hull, a beacon of participatory democracy and local empowerment.

Drawing inspiration from the groundbreaking work of Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, Gully and her team have set their sights on the city of Hull, a place where political disengagement and socioeconomic challenges have forged a community ripe for change. With the lowest voter turnout in the UK and facing threats from climate change, Hull's residents are finding their voice through the innovative approach of neighborhood assemblies.

Gully shares the powerful story of how these assemblies are not just meetings but crucibles of collective wisdom, where residents from all walks of life come together to listen, to speak, and to find common ground. From the facilitation of respectful dialogue to the co-creation of community-driven initiatives, these gatherings are rekindling the art of conversation and the flame of active citizenship.

As we listen to Gully's journey from Extinction Rebellion activist to a catalyst for grassroots transformation, we are reminded that the future is not a distant dream but a living reality being woven by the hands of those who dare to act. Cooperation Hull is more than an organization; it's a movement, a call to action for communities everywhere to reclaim their power and shape the world from the ground up.

For listeners who feel the pull to be part of this unfolding story, who yearn to see their own neighborhoods awaken to their potential, this episode is an invitation to step into the arena of change. Be inspired by the vision of Cooperation Hull, and consider what it would mean to ignite a similar spark in your corner of the world.

Gully's Bio: Gully Bujak is an activist and community organizer who has dedicated her life to the pursuit of a just and sustainable future. From her early days with Extinction Rebellion to her current role at the helm of Cooperation Hull, Gully embodies the spirit of resilience and hope. Her commitment to direct democracy and local empowerment is not only changing the landscape of Hull but also serving as a model for others to follow.

For those eager to learn more and to connect with the movement, visit the show notes for links to Cooperation Hull, upcoming assemblies, and resources to fuel your journey into community-led revolution. Tune in, be inspired, and join the wave of change that starts right at your doorstep.

Cooperation Hull https://www.cooperationhull.co.uk/
Cooperation Jackson https://cooperationjackson.org/
Jackson Rising Redux - NEW Book https://cooperationjackson.org/announcementsblog/2023/3/2/jackson-rising-redux-out-now
Guardian Article re the HSBC Action and Acquittal https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/windows-major-bank-jury-climate-crisis
Giroscope https://giroscope.org.uk/
Accidental Gods Gatherings https://accidentalgods.life/gatherings-2024/

Vulture Capitalism - Exposing the toxic system and how to outgrow it with Grace Blakeley

20 mars 2024 | 68 min

This week's guest is one of those who understands the nuts and bolts - the iniquities - of the current system - and has ideas of how we can shape something better from the hot mess of corruption and greed in which we're mired.

Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and author of several books, including 'Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom' in which she peels back the layers of our economic system, exposing the stark realities hidden beneath the veneer of 'free markets' and 'democratic' institutions.

Grace's journey from the New Statesman to the frontlines of political commentary has equipped her with a unique vantage point to critique the fusion of state and corporate power, illuminating the dark corners of corporate greed and government complicity. With a narrative as gripping as a thriller, she exposes the corruption that led to tragedies like the Boeing 737 MAX crashes and the grim theatre of financial crises.

In our conversation, Grace challenges the notion that some are born to rule while others to be ruled, advocating for a new democratic settlement that truly empowers people. She shares inspiring examples from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Cooperation Jackson, highlighting communities that are redefining resilience and self-governance. Her call to action is clear: it's time to question, to demand, and to actively participate in shaping a future that is just, equitable, and truly democratic.

As we navigate the most critical moment in human history, Grace's insights are not a roadmap toward a world where the many, not the few, hold the power. For anyone feeling the weight of our current system's failures, this episode is a clarion call to join hands, make your voice heard, and be part of the collective effort to weave a future we can all be proud of.

For those ready to dive into the mechanics of Grace's analysis and to explore the potential of a society reimagined, visit her website for links to her other books and to upcoming events.

Grace's Bio: Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune magazine, author, and a prominent voice in economic and political commentary. Her work has taken her from the New Statesman to BBC Question Time, and now to the forefront of the movement challenging the entrenched powers of capitalism. With a sharp wit and a clear vision, Grace is not only dissecting the present but also sowing the seeds for a future where democracy and economic justice are not just ideals but realities.

https://graceblakeley.co.uk/

Accidental Gods Spring Equinox Meditation 2024

19 mars 2024 | 27 min

Seeds of Hope: Cultivating a Future of Flavour and Resilience with Sinead Fortune and Kate Hastings of the Gaia Foundation

13 mars 2024 | 68 min

In this nourishing episode of Accidental Gods, we delve into the fertile world of seed sovereignty with Katie Hastings and Sinead Fortune of the Gaia Foundation's Seed Sovereignty Programme. Katie, hailing from the lush landscapes of Wales, and Sinead, rooted in the rugged beauty of rural Aberdeenshire, share their passion for reviving ancient grains and fostering communities of growth.

Embark on a journey through the tales of black oats, a crop once on the brink of oblivion, now experiencing a renaissance on the cliffs of Pembrokeshire. Discover how these oats, intertwined with the stories of generations, are being brought back into circulation by a vibrant network of farmers, engineers, and chefs, all dedicated to preserving the diversity of our seed heritage.

As we explore the practical steps and the profound joy of seed saving, we're reminded that every seed sown is a vessel of potential, a beacon of hope in an ever-changing climate. Katie and Sinead illuminate the path towards a more resilient food system, where local, open-pollinated seeds adapt and thrive, offering unique flavors and a promise of sustainability.

This episode is a clarion call to reconnect with the origins of our sustenance, to embrace the community spirit inherent in the cycle of seed to harvest, and to participate in the movement towards a future where our choices at the dinner table also nurture the earth.
Whether you're a seasoned grower, a curious gardener with a windowsill plot, or simply someone who cherishes the act of sharing a meal, this conversation is an invitation to join hands in shaping a world where the diversity of our plates reflects the diversity of our landscapes.
For those inspired to take root in this revolution, visit the show notes for links to local seed initiatives and resources that will guide you in becoming an integral part of this flourishing movement. Tune in and let the stories of seeds sow inspiration in your heart, as we cultivate a world abundant in flavor, joy, and resilience.

Katie's Bio: Katie Hastings is the Wales Coordinator for the Gaia Foundation's Seed Sovereignty Programme, where she works alongside farmers and growers to build a more resilient seed system from the ground up. As part of this work, she facilitates the Wales Seed Hub - a cooperative of agroecological seed growers, and Llafur Ni - a network of people working together to revive rare Welsh oats.

Katie is co-founder of the community organisation Mach Maethlon, where she has coordinated a horticultural training programme, food hub and community growing scheme.

Katie's seed journey started when she had a mental breakdown and was referred for horticultural therapy by her doctor. She found hope for the future in growing food in community with others.

In her free time she swims in her local river and walks her dog up Cadair Idris mountain.

Sinead's Bio: Sinéad Fortune is Programme Lead for the Seed Sovereignty Programme, as well as coordinating the programme work in Scotland where she's based. She works with coordinators around the UK and Ireland to support community groups, market gardeners and farmers to train in seed production and to develop and strengthen the connections that make the seed sovereignty movement thrive. Her academic background in Political Ecology focused on food security and community empowerment, and her diverse professional experience spans community food movements, alternative sustainable food production, science education and behaviour change. When Sinéad isn’t working in seed sovereignty or willing her crops to grow, she can be found wandering the woods looking for interesting fungi, crafting herbal lotions, potions and remedies, or playing a few tunes on the fiddle.

Gaia Foundation https://gaiafoundation.org/
Seed Sovereignty www.seedsovereignty.info
Seed Hub Wales https://www.seedhub.wales/about-us/
Open Food Network Seed Hub Shop https://openfoodnetwork.org.uk/hwb-hadau-cymru-wales-seed-hub/shop

The momentous black oat feast: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/welsh-oats-back-in-black/
Llafur Ni film: https://vimeo.com/489406001
Guardian coverage of the Black Oat story: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/28/black-oats-llafur-ni-wales-crops-grains-growers-farmers-aoe
Katie's article about the issues with oat processing: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/oat-quest-inching-towards-tasting-our-oats/
Recent Oxford Real Farming Conference panel discussion I hosted: https://soundcloud.com/user-775591787/orfc2024-the-story-of-black-oats-lost-and-found
Katie's guide to starting your own seed cooperative: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/so-you-want-to-start-a-seed-coop-week-1-finding-your-varieties/

Finding a Cure for Civilisation: Delving Deep into the Roots of Being with visionary and shaman, Drea Burbank of Savimbo.

6 mars 2024 | 65 min

“Respect is earned. Honesty is appreciated. Trust is gained. Loyalty is returned.”

— Oscar Auliq Ice - quoted on Savimbo website

In this pivotal episode, we journey with Drea Burbank from the depths of a fundamentalist Mormon cult to the rainforests of the Colombian Amazon. Drea's life story, chronicled in her book "Shaman Gurl" (linked in the show notes), is a testament to human resilience and the quest for truth. From her escape over the mountains, through the fiery trials of being a firefighter, to her awakening during medical school, Drea's path has been anything but conventional.

Now, as a co-founder of Savimbo, Drea is part of an extraordinary mission: to introduce a human rights code for nature. With the support of 60 indigenous leaders from across the globe, she is leading the charge to bring legislation to the UN that enshrines the rights of nature into law. This episode is an urgent call to recognize the voice of nature and the indigenous custodians who have preserved 30% of the planet's intact land and 80% of its biodiversity.

Drea's conversation is a revelation of the indigenous perspective on ecotourism, cultural competency, and the necessity of a post-colonial lifestyle. She shares the transformative impact of ecotourism training programs and the importance of creating safe spaces for spiritual awakening in a world that often suppresses regrowth. As she and her colleagues prepare to share their vision with the world through a series of powerful videos, we invite you to become bridges for this crucial movement. Follow Savimbo across social media platforms, amplify the voices of these indigenous leaders, and help turn the tide towards a future where the rights of nature are not just recognized but revered.

For those who are ready to be part of this monumental shift, to stand with the guardians of our planet's remaining wilderness, this episode is an essential listen. Join us as we explore the profound connections between human healing and planetary health, where the fight for nature's rights is a fight for our collective future.

We were speaking on a starlink and we lost the connection several times so I apologise in advance for any glitches in the conversation, but this was solid gold and I wasn't going to let minor issues of technology get in the way of your hearing it. Enjoy!

Links

Drea’s website
Savimbo
Drea on Medium (on Carbon Credits and Blockchain)
Shaman Gurl
Johnson et al ‘Cultural Competency’

River Charters, Net Zero Cities and BioRegional Banks: Creating a Life-Ennobling Economic System with Emily Harris of Dark Matter Labs

28 februari 2024 | 85 min

In this week's episode of Accidental Gods, we dive into the visionary world of economic transformation with Emily Harris of Dark Matter Labs. Emily, a chartered accountant with an MA in regenerative economics, is not your average number cruncher. She's at the forefront of reimagining our financial systems, exploring the intersection of technology, governance, and the natural world.

Join us as Emily unveils the bold concept of life-enabling economics (LEE) and the radical aspiration of establishing bioregional banks — a system where money is no longer a mere transactional tool but a means to foster a thriving web of life. From a watershed-scale project in Scotland to the Sheffield River Don project, Emily details practical steps towards making these ideas a reality, including the creation of relationship registers and multivalent currencies like 'river coins'.

The conversation also touches on the challenges of aligning current political and economic systems with these pioneering concepts. Emily shares insights into the Net Zero Cities team's efforts, working with 112 mission cities to forge climate city contracts and policy labs that embody a mission-oriented methodology.

This episode is a call to action for all listeners to engage with these transformative ideas. If you're inspired by the potential of a future where financial systems are in harmony with ecological and social well-being, then tune in, offer your thoughts, and be part of the change. Emily's work is a testament to the power of collective imagination and the tangible steps we can take towards a regenerative economy.

For those ready to delve deeper into the mechanics of these groundbreaking ideas, visit the show notes for links to the thought-provoking blogs and learn how you can contribute to this evolutionary journey. Accidental Gods is the platform where we explore the edges of possibility — and this episode is a beacon of hope for a world in dire need of economic renaissance.

As I say at the top of the conversation, these are amongst the most interesting concepts I've ever read - and I spend my life exploring this field. I'd like to read you the opening paragraph of the Concept paper:

"Instead of focusing on labour, property, individual or democratic rights, this vision seeks to unfurl the full potential of a

growing planetary consciousness. It is an expression of practical realism embedded in a deep respect for all

manifestations of life; past, present, human, more-than-human, the sacred and the machine. This economy

seeks to move beyond the everyday codes of property, labour, capital and private contracts and break free

from the constrictive dance of socio-political isms. It offers an unbounded understanding of agency, inviting

the full range of adjacent possibilities, thus refuting the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few."

and then a few paragraphs down,

"At its core, this is a provocation of the heart. An invitation to cultivate lives of profound collaboration, dignity,

psychological and physical freedom. It is a framework meshed in human embodied experience that critically

includes machine and non-human systems, integrating them into the same expansive beyond-paradigm of

inter-becoming."

The two papers are in the show notes and they're definitely worth reading. In the meantime, this conversation moved even beyond these into whole new areas that, once again with DML, breached the boundaries of my thinking - in a good way.

Dark Matter Labs https://darkmatterlabs.org/
Life Ennobling Economics Position Paper https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EiU8MQ3JKtuCJIUTrxkl2Fzx0xWBiWDu/view
Life Ennobling Economics Concept White Paper https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hNpgVEyYiERE0Jj3gczUfK9ki9GmrFRm/view
Blog on BioRegional Banks Part 1: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/towards-multivalent-currencies-bioregional-monetary-stewardship-and-a-distributed-global-reserve-dac459dc844e
Blog on BioRegional Banks Part 2: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/towards-multivalent-currencies-bioregional-monetary-stewardship-and-a-distributed-global-reserve-38ed3849395f
Blog on BioRegional Banks Part 3: https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/towards-multivalent-currencies-bioregional-monetary-stewardship-and-a-distributed-global-reserve-951ca09dd76d
Blog on BioRegional Banks Part 4:

The Swedish Cornerstone prototype was co-developed with Linnéa Rönnquist with the support of Samhällskontraktet

Emily Harris in Episode #176 https://accidentalgods.life/bridging-from-the-necessary-to-the-possible-with-emily-harris-of-dark-matter-labs/
Indy Johar Episode #205 https://accidentalgods.life/becoming-intentional-gods-claiming-the-future-with-indy-johar-of-the-dark-matter-labs/

Dung Beetles, People and helping the Keystone Species with Claire Whittle, the Regenerative Vet

21 februari 2024 | 77 min

End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken and How we Fix it, with James Plunkett

14 februari 2024 | 72 min

This week, I spoke with James Plunkett, a man who has spent his career at the intersection of policy and social change. From the halls of Number Ten to the charity sector's front lines, James's unique perspective has birthed a book that critically examines what's wrong with our society and offers tangible fixes. Together, we dissect our societal challenges, from outdated institutions to the technology of gods, and discuss structured ways to mend a fractured system.

James has spent his entire career thinking laterally about the complicated relationships between individuals and the state, with a particular focus on digital transformation and public policy, from the social innovation agency Nesta to the charity Citizens Advice and before that roles at 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, and the Resolution Foundation think tank.

James combines a deep understanding of social issues with an appreciation of how change is playing out not in the ivory tower, but in the reality of people’s lives. As a result of all these insights, he's written an optimistic book, 'End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken and How we fix it.' that explores how we can reform the state to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

As you'll hear, he didn't think of this as a hopeful book when he began - it was more of a response to seeing the ways the old system of the 20th century was not keeping up with the new world. How we have, in EO WIlson's words, 'Paleolithic emotions, Mediaeval Institutions and the Technology of gods' and this isn't necessarily a good combination to face the meta-crisis. But James did come out with hope for the future and structured ways our current system could make these happen. Accidental Gods often inhabits a world where the current system is broken beyond repair and the only answer is to create a new one and help people shift into it. So this was fascinating, enlivening conversation with someone who has lived and worked in the heart of the superorganism and can see ways through to a world where the human and more than human worlds flourish.

James's book https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/james-plunkett/end-state/9781398702202/
James on Twitter https://twitter.com/jamestplunkett
James on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/jamestplunkett.bsky.social
James on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-plunkett-a1472827/
James on Medium https://medium.com/@jamestplunkett

Growing a Public Chorus for Change: reshaping democracy with Alex Lockwood of the Humanity Project

7 februari 2024 | 46 min

We don't have a democracy, we have a kleptocracy that elevates to positions of power those amongst us who are most comfortable with leaning into their inner Dark Triad of Psychopathy, Narcissism and basic low cunning. Then, when they get there, we're surprised that they go on to wreak havoc with all that we believe to be good and right and beautiful.

Doing the same thing time after time is the very definition of insanity - clearly we need a new way of connecting, of communicating, of articulating our needs and wants that give us a sense of connection, agency and sufficiency, that bring out the best of us, not our own inner dark triads. We need a new means of governance that works from the ground up and works for a thriving future for the human and more-than human world.

This week's guest is absolutely immersed in the questions of how we transform our governance. More than this, he is immersed in actually making it happen. Alex Lockwood was a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Sunderland University and he practiced what he taught - because he's also the author of a novel, The Chernobyl Privileges and a non-fiction memoir, The Pig in Thin Air.

More recently, he was actively involved in Animal Rebellion, a kindred organisation to Extinction Rebellion and then that evolved into becoming a founder member of The Humanity Project, an astonishing, life-affirming, inspiring collective movement for change. At the times when the news about climactic tipping points and the loss of sulphur particles and the impact of el Nino combines with the horrors of political destruction around the world, it's really good to remember there are highly motivated, highly intelligent people getting together to create visions for change that will work and to which we will all look forward. This podcast rekindled my belief in a future that can work. I hope it does the same for you.

Humanity Project https://humanityproject.uk/
Hard Art Festival in Manchester "The Fête of Britain" https://hardart.metalabel.com/ha002/
Global Assembly https://globalassembly.org/
Lee Jasper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jasper
Clare Farrell https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61534/1/extinction-rebellion-xr-co-founder-clare-farrell-prison-hsbc-windows-smash
Alex on Twitter https://twitter.com/alexlockwood
Alex on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-lockwood-narrative-leadership/

Dancing with the god within: Finding the Sovereign Feminine with thought-leader Maggie Ostara

31 januari 2024 | 77 min

How does each of us find our sovereignty, our sense of what it is to have agency and be alive in the world, and align this with the part in all of us that is anchored in compassion, connection and empathy? How, in short, do we encounter and encourage our own sovereign feminine?

Dr Maggie Ostara is a long-time friend of the podcast - she was with us in episode 116 when we talked about finding our purpose in the world: What's mine to do, what's yours to do and what's ours to do together? I've put a link to this in the show notes in case you want to go back and listen. Since then, Maggie has written the international Amazon best-seller: Feminine Sovereignty: Eight Pillars for Regenerating Ourselves and Our World. It was published towards the end of last year and I've been wanting to talk to Maggie ever since.

Her book is absolutely of our time and for our time: it's courageous and hard-hitting in terms of its dissection of where we are, but it's full of compassion and wisdom and embodied exercises that you can do as you go along. And as you'll hear in the podcast, in 2024 she’ll be offering the Feminine Sovereignty Explorers Club and the Feminine Sovereignty Leadership Incubator based in the principles of the 8 Pillars. She’s a certified Human Design and Quantum Human Design Specialist, Level 4, a certified Radiant Body Yoga Instructor, and a certified Clarity Breathwork Practitioner. She supports her global audience through her thriving YouTube channel and works with clients 1:1 and in groups.

So this is a perfect sequel to Nina Simons last week - yet again, we are talking about ways of finding the god within - and engaging outwards with the world.

Maggie's previous Accidental Gods episode #116 https://accidentalgods.life/daring-to-risk/
Where to buy the book and/or get the first 50 pages for free FeminineSovereigntyBook.com Where to find out about the Feminine Sovereignty Explorers Club FeminineSovereigntyBook.com/explorersclub

Where to find out more about the Feminine Sovereignty Leadership Incubator FeminineSovereigntyBook.com/incubator
Where to find out more about Human Design SovereigntybyDesign.com and YouTube.com/maggieostaraphd

Susan Harper, Master Teacher of Continuum ContinuumMontage.com Where to find Maggie on Facebook Facebook.com/maggiesaleostara

Where to find Maggie on Instagram Intstagram.com/SovereigntybyDesign

On Nature, Culture and The Sacred with Elder and Visionary, Nina Simons

24 januari 2024 | 66 min

"Consciousness creates matter,

Language Creates Reality,

Ritual creates relationship' - Oscar Miro-Quesada quoted by Nina Simons in her book ’Nature, Culture and the Sacred’

One of the extraordinary privileges of hosting a podcast like this is that I get to talk to some of my heroes, to ask questions, to have a conversation about the things that really matter. This week's guest is one of these. Nina Simons is an author, a leader - and we'll hear how that word was imposed on her and then she learned to embody it, she's a visionary in the deepest sense, and I would say, in a world that is crying out for the wisdom of elders, she is an elder, a wisdom-bearer, someone who has brought deep humility and authenticity to the whole of her life. In more outward terms, in 1990, she co-founded Bioneers, which started off as a conference and has grown into one of the foremost trailblazers of the movement for a whole and healed earth. On the website it says 'We act as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.'

Nina is also a writer. She's a co-author of 'MoonRise: the Power of Women Leading from the Heart' and then more recently, she wrote Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, which is the kind of book that opens new doors, it's got the crackle of authenticity and the deep wisdom of someone who really does listen, to the earth, to other elders, to her own body, who has the capacity to walk the earth, asking, 'what wants to come through me?' without presuming to know the answer and then the integrity to write what comes. And what came in that particular walk was this: "This is no time for small talk. This is a time for mythmaking. This is a time for epic poetry. This is a time to tell the tales that will become our compass for the days ahead. " So, with this as our guiding light, please enjoy the conversation.

Nina's website https://www.ninasimons.com/
Bioneer's website https://bioneers.org/
Nature Culture and the Sacred (Introduction is available for Free Download here) https://bioneers.org/ncs/
Bioneers Learning https://www.bioneerslearning.org/
Bioneers You Tube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@bioneers
Nina on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ninasimonsauthor
Nina on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-simons/
Nina on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/1ninasimons/
The Burning Times Film https://youtu.be/34ow_kNnoro

Gathering the Memes of Production: Building Co-ordi-Nations with Josh Davila of Blockchain Socialist podcast

17 januari 2024 | 78 min

Those of you who've followed the podcast for any length of time know that I feel our capacity to connect across long distances, to share ideas in real time, is one of the things that has shifted our culture from being complex to super-complex, or hyper-complex, or whatever adjective we want to create that intimates a massive increase in the complexity of our communications and our actions. One key part of this is the evolution of blockchain, particularly in its Ethereum incarnation. Most of us know blockchain, if we know it at all, as the core of Bitcoin, but it's progressed far beyond this in the last decade, not only in the core technology, but in the thinking around it. Once, a libertarian playground, there is now a whole infrastructure of interconnected mycelial webs of progressive, regenerative communities who are building on and with Ethereum. I know this can often feel as if it's not part of our world - and it isn't an integral part - yet - in the way mobile phone technology is, or Zoom, or using a banking app, or a meditation app, or measuring your blood glucose in real time... but it's going to be a part of things in the same way these are soon. In the same way mobile phones became indispensable, I think some of the experiments in smart contracts and ways of hooking up currencies are going to become integral to our lives. And even if I'm wrong, there are a few certainties: The old paradigm is crumbling; the superorganism has to be dismantled; we do need to learn to live more regeneratively, connected more deeply to ourselves, each other and the web of life.

And it's this connection that inspires our guest today. Josh Dàvila is host of one of my must-listen podcasts, Blockchain Socialist, where he, often joined by Primavera de Filipi hold fascinating, deep, thoughtful conversations that take me right to the edge of my understanding so that I have to listen to each episode three or four times to really get to grips with the ideas. Josh is also an author. His book 'Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It' is essential reading for anyone who's remotely interested in this space. Like Diana Finch in last week's episode, he has the capacity to take mindbendingly complex ideas and render them straightforward and even obvious - and in Josh's case, he's rendering social concepts of how our culture is run and how we can change it, in parallel to the evolution of blockchain, the nature of Ethereum and what can be done with it. And then he and Primavera are right in the middle of a whole host of conversations about the concept of Coordi-Nations - which are what I would have called communities of passion and purpose, as opposed to communities of place (though there's nothing to stop a community of passion and purpose arising in a specific geographic location. In the end, I think that's likely to happen). But we're getting ahead of ourselves: If I'm right that 2024 is the year when the tipping points become obvious even in the mainstream, then we need the ideas that will shift us out of business as usual and into new ways of being. Josh and his co-thinkers are having those ideas and I dearly wanted to share some of them on the podcast. So here we go.

Josh's Website https://theblockchainsocialist.com/
Blockchain Radicals book https://theblockchainsocialist.com/blockchain-radicals-book-announcement/
in the UK here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/blockchain-radicals-building-beyond-capitalism-josh-davila/7441624?ean=9781914420856
Josh on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist
Check back here for the Audio book after February 6th

BlockchainGov.eu https://blockchaingov.eu/

Primavera De Filipe and Jessy Kate Co-ordi-Nations Blog https://jessykate.medium.com/coordi-nations-a-new-institutional-structure-for-global-cooperation-3ef38d6e2cfa

Rojava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava_conflict

Let's get rid of Money and start afresh! Dismantling the Super-Organism with Diana Finch

10 januari 2024 | 109 min

Happy New Year. It feels to me as if this year, the journey is going to be one of continual change and of challenge - that 2024 will be the year when it is impossible for anyone to pretend that the life we knew, the life we grew up believing would go on indefinitely - is going to continue. The old order is dying, but if we're to absolute collapse on a global scale (because clearly it's happening locally all over the world, usually pushed by the governments of people who are statistically most likely to be listening to this podcast) -but if we're going to avert absolute breakdown everywhere, then we need to dismantle the super-organism of the markets. Markets, globalisation, the entire neo-liberal model of free trade that was neither free nor liberal, nor particularly new... these are the common thread that perpetuates the world we know. Yes, we have to change our political systems, our power generation, our food systems..... all of these are core, but it's the markets and our concepts of value and money - the core of capitalism that keep the whole show on the road.

One way or another, they are going - either there's a crash and nothing... or we succeed in managing a degrowth curve to a much simpler system that is not just less extractive, it's regenerative - it repairs some of the desperate harm we've done in recent times.

So I want this podcast really to begin to look at how we could shape this downward slope - to play with ideas that could take use forward into something different - to begin to build narratives, stories, mythologies, collective heroic journeys of how we as a culture could affect the change that we need. Yes, the super-organism feels as if it has a life of its own, but it is composed of individuals and if we all change our behaviour, our expectations, our understanding of what's good and what isn't - then it will change.

I still believe this is possible and I'm definitely working towards this. As is our guest this week. Diana Finch has worked in senior leadership roles in a variety of socially and environmentally focused non-profit organisations since 2001. Through this work, she became convinced that our economic system is the root cause behind the environmental and social challenges the non-profit sector is trying to address. She started to become interested in the field of new economics, and was thrilled to join the Bristol Pound team as Managing Director in 2018. She continued to be a director until the organisation was wound up in 2023. The experience helped her develop an understanding of the problems with our existing economic system, creating a determination to share what she has learned by writing a book called 'Value Beyond Money: an exploration of the Bristol Pound and the building blocks for an alternative economic system' The book is not out until September, but it I was privileged to read it early and was so struck by Diana's capacity to lay out clearly the various different ways we have begun to see money and the alternative systems that people are trying - the Bristol Pound was an astonishing endeavour and the story of how it came about and why it ended are remarkable in and of itself. But it's the ideas that come after - why did it not work and what could we do now - what could help us shift from exactly where we are, to where we need to be - these are the solid gold. We did talk for a long time. If necessary, we'll split this into two bits. I'm not sure if we're going to need to, so... we'll see. In the meantime, enjoy the ideas of how we could be different - and then if you know of anyone who could fund this, please do let us know.

PreOrder Diana's book https://crowdbound.org/product/value-beyond-money/
The Bristol Pound legacy homepage https://www.bristolpoundlegacy.info/

Holochain https://www.holochain.org/
Art Brock Metacurrency https://www.artbrock.com/metacurrency/resources
Bradford Citizen Coin https://bradford.citizencoin.uk/
Mark Fisher Ghosts of my Life https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/ghosts-of-my-life-writings-on-depression-hauntology-and-lost-futures-mark-fisher/517207?ean=9781780992266
Mark Fisher Capitalis Realism - Is there No Alternative https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/capitalist-realism-new-edition-is-there-no-alternative-mark-fisher/7313424?ean=9781803414300

Confessions of an Economic Hitman Short Animated Version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYtb5zatgMg

New Economics Foundation https://neweconomics.org/
Positive Money https://positivemoney.org/

Reference books

Less is More: How Degrowth can save the world by Jason Hickel https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/less-is-more-how-degrowth-will-save-the-world-jason-hickel/364774
Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/doughnut-economics-seven-ways-to-think-like-a-21st-century-economist-kate-raworth/

Promethean Project - Part 2: Crafting the future with Dr Simon Michaux

3 januari 2024 | 74 min

Welcome to the second part of our conversation - if you haven't listened to the first part, please do so - it's here [LINK]

and

Simon has very kindly agreed to come back to join our Cutting Edge gathering on Sunday 19th March at 7pm UK time. He'll be with us for an hour during which you'll have a chance to ask him the questions that matter to you - all the things I don't think to ask - and then we'll have another hour together to explore ways each of us can ground what we're learning in our own lives. So you can sign up for this at accidentalgods.life - go to the Gatherings page. I've also put a link in the show notes. And while we're talking about Gatherings, there's still space on Dreaming Your Death Awake on Sunday 7th January. This is our chance really to delve deeply into the year just gone, and look ahead at how we want to shape our attention and intention for the year that's coming. After all the outward connection of the holiday season, this is a time to go inwards, to be kind to ourselves, to explore all that we can be and want to be. This, too, is part of our Accidental Gods tradition and we have people who've come year after year to give themselves the gift of time and space and the company of people who share the journey. So please do come along, we would love to share this time with you. I've put a link in the show notes and it's also on the website accidentalgods.life under the 'Gatherings' tab.

Prometheus Project Link:

Episode 172 https://accidentalgods.life/transforming-industry-to-create-a-genuine-green-revolution/
Episode 175 https://accidentalgods.life/drawing-humanity-out-of-the-cave-with-dr-simon-michaux/
Episode 183 https://accidentalgods.life/lifeboats-and-volcanoes-part-3-of-our-series-with-simon-michaux/
Episode 184 https://accidentalgods.life/bonus-reality-check-less-quantity-more-quality-in-a-future-that-will-work-part-4-with-simon-michaux/

Cutting Edge - come and meet Simon - ask him your questions - and we'll gather afterwards to see how we can apply all we're learning in our own lives https://accidentalgods.life/the-logistical-realities-of-our-world/

The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux

3 januari 2024 | 72 min

Happy New Year. My guest this week is a long term friend of the podcast. Dr Simon Michaux has been a physicist and geologist and then became an expert in the reality of the circular economy. He now works in the Geological Survey of Finland and is a regular advisor to the Finnish parliament. The day after we recorded this podcast, he was talking to the British consulate in Helsinki and in the last year, he's explained the reality of where we're at over 200 times, and one third of those talks was to governments around the world.

He's been extraordinarily generous with his time on Accidental Gods. He was with us in podcasts number 172, 175, 183 and 184 with a series of excoriating, fact-filled, grounded, lucid conversations on the reality of the transition we face, so who better to start us off into 2024 with a conversation about where the world is going, where it could go, where it might go, where it should go in the coming year. This was one of our longest ever podcasts and truly, my brain had turned to slurry and was leaking out of my ears by the end, but Simon's ideas of how we could build a different way of being - and his ability to turn ideas into action feels revolutionary to me in the best possible way. We talked for hours. Many ours - and because we ended up defaulting to Zoom for the recording so we do have a video - the entire unexpurgated hours of which we will put up on YouTube - so if you want to see Simon's slides, head over there. But Caro has edited this down to the highlights so that it makes for easier listening, even so, we're spanning more than one podcast. At the time of recording, I don't know exactly how many, but we'll release them all at once, so just let your favourite podcast provider just stream them all for you.

One thing to say before we head into the first conversation is that Simon has very kindly agreed to come back to join our Cutting Edge gathering on Sunday 19th March at 7pm UK time. He'll be with us for an hour during which you'll have a chance to ask him the questions that matter to you - all the things I don't think to ask - and then we'll have another hour together to explore ways each of us can ground what we're learning in our own lives. So you can sign up for this at accidentalgods.life - go to the Gatherings page. I've also put a link in the show notes. And while we're talking about Gatherings, there's still space on Dreaming Your Death Awake on Sunday 7th January. This is our chance really to delve deeply into the year just gone, and look ahead at how we want to shape our attention and intention for the year that's coming. After all the outward connection of the holiday season, this is a time to go inwards, to be kind to ourselves, to explore all that we can be and want to be. This, too, is part of our Accidental Gods tradition and we have people who've come year after year to give themselves the gift of time and space and the company of people who share the journey. So please do come along, we would love to share this time with you. I've put a link in the show notes and it's also on the website accidentalgods.life under the 'Gatherings' tab.

Simon's Website https://www.simonmichaux.com/

Prometheus Project link to follow

Episode 172 https://accidentalgods.life/transforming-industry-to-create-a-genuine-green-revolution/
Episode 175 https://accidentalgods.life/drawing-humanity-out-of-the-cave-with-dr-simon-michaux/
Episode 183 https://accidentalgods.life/lifeboats-and-volcanoes-part-3-of-our-series-with-simon-michaux/
Episode 184 https://accidentalgods.life/bonus-reality-check-less-quantity-more-quality-in-a-future-that-will-work-part-4-with-simon-michaux/

Cutting Edge - come and meet Simon - ask him your questions - and we'll gather afterwards to see how we can apply all we're learning in our own lives https://accidentalgods.life/the-logistical-realities-of-our-world/

Plant Spirit Teachers: learning from the Elder Plants with Dr Simon Ruffell

27 december 2023 | 77 min

Meditation for the Winter solstice of 2023

20 december 2023 | 17 min

Solstice Dreaming: 3 podcasters gather round the Dark-Nights fire: Della Duncan, Nathalie Nahai and Manda Scott

20 december 2023 | 86 min

This is the fourth year of our now-traditional Winter Solstice podcast get-together in which Nathalie Nahai, Della Duncan and I sit around our virtual dark-nights fire to reflect on the podcasting year just gone and explore what has changed for us since the last time the seeds of new beginnings were grounded in the heart of what has passed. This is becoming one of the highlights of my podcasting year - a chance to range far and wide and deep in the company of two women whose podcasts never fail to touch me deeply, and whose opinions on life, the universe and everything are always inspiring and enlightening.

Della Z Duncan is a Renegade Economist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a co-host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, a faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, a founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and the designer and co-facilitator of the Cultivating Regenerative Livelihood Course at Gaia Education.

Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of the Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She's author of the international best-sellers Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She's a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.

Before we head into the conversation, I want to invite you to 'Dreaming Your Year Awake' which takes place on Sunday the 7th of January. This is our chance really to delve deeply into the year just gone, and look ahead at how we want to shape our attention and intention for the year that's coming. After all the outward connection of the holiday season, this is a time to go inwards, to be kind to ourselves, to explore all that we can be and want to be. This, too, is part of our Accidental Gods tradition and we have people who've come year after year to give themselves the gift of time and space and the company of people who share the journey. So please do come along, we would love to share this time with you. I've put a link in the show notes and it's also on the website accidentalgods.life under the 'Gatherings' tab.

And now, People of the Podcast, please welcome Della Duncan, co-host of the Upstream podcast and Nathalie Nahai, host of the Nathalie Nahai podcast, and me.

Links

Summer Solstice Meditation - Essence https://chrt.fm/track/8F5463/media.transistor.fm/6f621f9a/7a43d63f.mp3
Summer Solstice Meditation with Birdsong With Birdsong https://chrt.fm/track/8F5463/media.transistor.fm/6f621f9a/7a43d63f.mp3
Poem: The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Theory: Two Loop Theory by Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
Conversation: Marxism & Buddhism with Breht O'Shea on the Upstream Podcast
Conversation: A Marxist Perspective on Elections with August Nimtz on the Upstream Podcast
Conversation: Beyond the Clock with Jenny Odell on the Upstream Podcast
Organization: California Doughnut Economics Coalition
Riversimple: Future Guardian Governance https://www.riversimple.com/governance/
Planet Local Summit https://planet-local-summit.localfutures.org/about/
Podcast: The way out is in: Grief and Joy on a Planet in Crisis: Joanna Macy on the Best Time To Be Alive (Episode #12)(https://plumvillage.org/podcast/grief-and-joy-on-a-planet-in-crisis-joanna-macy-on-the-best-time-to-be-alive-episode-12)
Flourishing Futures Salon: https://www.ffsalons.com
Pre-order Any Human Power https://linktr.ee/anyhumanpower

Bright Fires, Dark Nights: Connecting deeply and building tribe as we head to the Solstice with Angharad Wynne

13 december 2023 | 61 min

This week, as we head down towards what, in the northern hemisphere at least, is the long nights, the dark nights, I wanted to explore our heritage, the way we celebrate the solstice in this land, the land of Britain. I'm aware that quite a lot of you listening are from the southern hemisphere where you're heading up to your long sun and your fires burn differently. I recorded a summer solstice meditation at our long days in June and when we get to the meditation - after the podcast with Della Duncan and Nathalie Nahai, I'll put that up. In the meantime, I hope this conversation with Angharad Wynne helps open doors to reconnection wherever you are in the world. Angharad is a story-teller, a placemaker, a myth-creator holder of tribe and of the land. A native of Wales, she is deeply connected to the land there, and holds retreats and workshops designed to help people connect with the living spirits of the land. In the podcast you're about to hear, she describes her 3 year "Dadeni" training which helps to create the deep tribe-connections, community-connections we speak about in the podcast. If you're interested in this, applications are open until 21st January and the link is in the show notes.

I'd also like to remind you that if you have ideas of previous podcast guests - including Angharad, or anyone you've heard over the years - that you'd like us to invite for one of our Sunday evening 'Cutting Edge' events please click the link in the show notes, or go to the podcast section of the website and find the button there and let us know. this is your chance to talk to people, to ask the questions I didn't get around to asking, but you wish I had. And then afterwards, there'll be a chance to connect with other people in breakout rooms, to share your thoughts and ideas and ways of grounding what you've heard in everyday life.

So, it's the dark month, the time when we rest, and regather and recoup. The time when we light the fire and invite our tribe to join us. In the spirit of connection, people of the podcast, please welcome, Angharad Wynne, a bard of Wales.

Angharad's site https://www.angharadwynne.com/
Dadeni Programme https://www.dadeni.org/
Dreaming the Land https://www.dreamingtheland.com/about
Three Degrees of Influence - https://exploringyourmind.com/impact-the-three-degrees-of-influence-theory/

Braced for Impact: Cutting through the Greenwash and Lies with Rachel Donald of Planet: Critical podcast

6 december 2023 | 88 min

Our guest this week is host of one of my must-listen podcasts - one I've been following since the spring, when Dr Simon Michaux mailed me and said, you need to listen to Rachel - and he was right.

Rachel Donald is host of Planet: Critical one of the world's top-rated podcasts on the poly-crisis and systems change. She interviews some really big players on the world stage with integrity and panache - her conversation with Alastair Campbell where she never lets him off the hook is an absolute exemplar of how to hold power to account and I think we're seeing the change in real time on his podcast with Rory Stewart.

When she's not podcasting, Rachel is a climate corruption journalist who investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. With world exclusives in major papers, Rachel investigates the gaslighting which props up our broken systems. She travels the world talking on - and off - the record to heads of government and oil industry executives, to the people who make our current system tick and who are often just as afraid as we are about the direction and speed of travel towards the edge of the extinction cliff.

Rachel has an almost unique insight into the nature of the systemic catastrophe we've built for ourselves and therefore of the ways we might address it. This was a bracing conversation. There are no easy answers and I had some of my rosier tinted lenses broken along the way. But in the end we came to the place we often get to with this podcast - that building communities of place, purpose and passion where we value each other, and our capacity to love bravely is what might - perhaps - bring us to the emergent edge of inter-becoming that Indy Johar spoke of a few weeks ago.

So brace yourselves, this is not an easy podcast, but we need to know where we're at so we can let go - again - ever more completely - of our assumptions about business as usual and do whatever we can, wherever we are, to be that emergent edge.

Planet: Critical podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/planet-critical/id1545009586
Planet: Critical website https://www.planetcritical.com/
Rachel on Twitter https://twitter.com/CrisisReports
Rachel on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-donald/
Diem25 - Democracy in Europe Movement https://diem25.org/en/

Cars of the future (NOT EVs!) - Transforming transport and business with Hugo Spowers of Riversimple Movement

29 november 2023 | 90 min

Our guest this week is Hugo Spowers, Company Architect of Riversimple, whose purpose is 'To pursue, systematically, the elimination of the environmental impact of personal transport.'

Modernity demands that we have personal transport and the thought of giving it up is one of the many sticking points when people try to imagine a way through to a regenerative future: nobody wants to be limited to their immediate vicinity for work, leisure or social connection.

At the same time, we're becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of electric vehicles - Simon Michaux has explained in detail the logistical limitations to rare earth batteries, and the environmental catastrophe created by their mining

Which is what makes the Riversimple's hydrogen fuel cell car so transformative. They've gone right back to the basics of what makes a car in the first place and then how could it be made better - not just lighter and more efficient and fuelled by something that doesn't create greenhouse gases - but how could it be made so that the aims of the manufacturer and the customer are aligned - and both are aiming for a habitable planet.

On its own, this would be inspiring - but Riversimple doesn't stop there. The company is structured with the innovative - and I genuinely believe transformative - 'Future Guardian Governance model' - Hugo describes this in near the end of the podcast so I won't go into it here, but it seems to me that if every company in the world shifted to this model tomorrow, by the day after, we'd be on our way to healing many aspects of the meta-crisis.

So with this in mind, sit back and prepared for a fundamental shift in how we see our role in the world and how we could move towards the future we need, with Hugo Spowers of Riversimple.

Riversimple https://www.riversimple.com/
RIversimple Subscription model https://www.riversimple.com/subscription/
Riversimple Future Guardian governance model https://www.riversimple.com/governance/
Invest in Riversimple here https://www.riversimple.com/investment/
Paul Hawken 'The Ecology of Commerce' https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-ecology-of-commerce-revised-edition-a-declaration-of-sustainability-paul-hawken/883510?ean=9780061252792

Beyond the Brink is the Beginning with Richard Wain - Launching 27th November 2023

25 november 2023 | 67 min

Words have the power to change worlds. Powerful words, powerfully written can open doors to the future. Beautiful words, beautifully written, can give us hope . Richard Wain's new collection of poetry is doing all of these, with panache, and heart and soul.

We all know by now that we need total systemic change - and a central thesis of this podcast is that we'll get there best by creating narratives that build this - both highlighting the need for it and exploring possible paths through. What's becoming clear is that this is an emotional and spiritual journey long before it's a logistical one. So we need to find ways to reach beyond people's head-minds into their heart-minds and spirit-minds.
With this in mind, our guest this week is a poet, an entrepreneur and an artist. Richard Wain is founder and director of the digital marketing agency Vu Online, and of the Positive Nature Network, both committed to creating networks of businesses that can support each other in the move towards a regenerative, flourishing future. He is also a poet with a commitment to celebrating openness and vulnerability and he has now written a beautiful, generative book of poetry called Beyond the Brink is the Beginning.

I met Richard when he came to our 6 month Thrutopia Masterclass back in May of 2022 - and was struck by his capacity to grasp the big ideas. Then I began to read the poems that arose out of our classes and was really in awe of his capacity to take these big, complex ideas, find the emotional spark at their core and weave it into something that could open hearts and help others to understand what really matters. We've been planning this podcast for ages, but his book is coming out soon, so now is the time - though in the end, as always happens, we roamed far and wide beyond the book, to the positive nature network and how small businesses and their owners, who are often their founders and may well be the sole employee, can begin to be part of the solution. As ever, we approached our own edges, which, a bit like poetry, is what this kind of medium is all about.

Richard's book will launch on 27th November 2023 at The Barrel House in Totnes. Go along if you can!
Here's the event link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/beyond-the-brink-is-the-beginning-book-launch-tickets-74349440076

Buy the Book here: https://www.beyondthebrinkbook.com/

Positive Nature Network https://www.positivenaturenetwork.co.uk/
Vu Online https://vuonline.co.uk/
Richard on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@richardwainpoet

Building Lifeboats to the Emerging Futures with Sophia Parker of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

22 november 2023 | 85 min

My guest this week is someone who is both right at the edge of the emerging futures and in a position to exert leverage at some of the highest points of the scale at which change happens.

Sophia Parker is the Emerging Futures Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a philanthropic organisation with a long history of progressive work, aiming for social and cultural equity. It is still committed to the research that sheds new light onto the nature and scale of poverty and injustice in the UK. It is still advocating for change and supporting the people who are making it happen - but newly it is supporting those who are at the leading edge of paradigm shift, exploring all the myriad ways we could break out of late stage capitalism and towards that more flourishing future our hearts know is possible.

And there are so many ways - one of the many things I took on board from this conversation was the number of people and organisations around the world who are working in and expanding the radical spaces we've touched on recently with Indy Johar and then Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy.

In her role as the Director of the Emerging Futures Programme, Sophia is working at the heart of the change, connecting ideas, exploring how best to support them in ways that will grow us forward and not just keep propping up the old system and the old narratives. She's delving deeply into ways to change the narrative, the levels at which that happens, where are the tipping points in our culture and how do we support and entire ecosystem of transformation. Near the top of the hour, we talked about hope and truly, I came away from this conversation a lot more hopeful than when we started.

Bio:
Sophia Parker was CEO of Little Village, the London-based charity she founded in 2016 that works to tackle child poverty. Now, she is the Emerging Futures Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a philanthropic organisation with a long history of progressive work, aiming for social equity. The Emerging Futures programme was set up to imagine and grow radical new approaches to tackling poverty, in collaboration with partners and people with lived experience of poverty.
Previously she has held senior leadership positions in think tanks and charities, as well as working in government locally and nationally, and was a Research Associate at Harvard's Kennedy School).

Share your ideas for future Gatherings: https://accidentalgods.life/ideas-for-gatherings/

Sophia's Blog Emerging Futures at JRF - two years in, the story so far | JRF
Joseph Rowntree Foundation https://www.jrf.org.uk/
JRF Emerging Futures https://www.jrf.org.uk/society/emerging-futures/
Little Village https://littlevillagehq.org/
Geoff Mulgan Another World is Possible https://www.geoffmulgan.com/another-world-is-possible
Meg Wheatley - Two Loop theory https://transformationallearningopportunities.com/two-loop-theory
EF/JRF Imagination Infrastructure Event https://www.imaginationinfrastructuring.com/imagination-infrastructure-initiatves/iievent-pw8gj
The Onion Collective: https://www.onioncollective.co.uk/
The Onion Collective: Liminal economics paper - https://medium.com/onioncollective/liminal-economics-swimming-at-the-edge-of-the-economy-f16fb476daa4
Centre for Public Impact https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/europe
Canopy https://www.canopy.si/
Center for Economic Democracy https://www.economicdemocracy.us/
York: New Constellations https://newconstellations.co/journey/york/
Opus in Sheffield https://weareopus.org/
CoLab Dudley https://dudleyhighstreet.uk/colab-dudley/
SuperFlux https://superflux.in/
Cassie Robinson Emerging Futures, Patterning the Emerging Horizon https://videos.theconference.se/cassie-robinson-emerging-futures
Lankelly Chase https://lankellychase.org.uk
ThirtyPercy https://thirtypercy.org/
Dimple Abichandani https://www.ncfp.org/people/dimple-abichandi/
Nkem Ndefo https://lumostransforms.com/team/nkem-ndefo/

The Animate Earth Responds: Initiation in a time of Crisis with Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy

15 november 2023 | 91 min

How do we move ourselves – individually and collectively – from the broken Trauma Culture of our times, to the Initiation Culture that will allow us to step forward, healed and whole?

Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy have co-authored a book: Post-Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.

Vandana Shiva says of it, “Ladha and Murphy walk us through the deep logics of neoliberalism, the foundations of globalisation and the ideology of corporate free trade … the authors dissect philanthrocapitalism. And they indicate the possibilities of reclaiming the true economies of the gift, of solidarity, of caring and sharing. For now, I invite you to please read on as if Life depends on it.”

On every level, this is a remarkable work, grounded in the understanding that we hold our realities in our bodies, that we have been born into a trauma culture, even as we yearn for the our birthright and our legacy as inheritors of initiation cultures. This is one of several genuinely transformative concepts that Lynn and Alnoor bring to the table: the intellectual capacity to explore the crisis of the moment – coupled with absolute grounded, experiential knowing that we are spiritual beings first, that we are mystical beings, and that if we can find the humility and the willingness to change, if we can bring ourselves to the web of life full open, asking for help, the Animate Earth responds.

Biographies:
Lynn Murphy is a strategic advisor for foundations and NGOs working in the geopolitical South. She was a senior fellow and program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where she focused on international education and global development. She resigned as a”‘conscientious objector” to neocolonial philanthropy. She holds an MA and PhD in international comparative education from Stanford University. She is also a certified Laban/Bartenieff movement analyst.

Alnoor Ladha is an activist, journalist, political strategist and community organiser. From 2012 to 2019 he was the co-founder and executive director of the global activist collective The Rules. He is currently the Council Chair for Culture Hack Labs. He holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.

Post Capitalist Philanthropy https://www.postcapitalistphilanthropy.org/
Transition Resource Circle: https://www.transitionresourcecircle.org/
Alnoor on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alnoor-ladha-85a1882/
Alnoor on Twitter https://twitter.com/alnoorladha
Episode 56 'Four Arrows Flying' https://accidentalgods.life/four-arrows-flying/

Bringing Indigenous food back to the people: a conversation with Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedod's

8 november 2023 | 73 min

Power to the People: Changing the way things work with Simon Oldridge

1 november 2023 | 82 min

We all know the climate and ecological tipping points are terrifyingly close. What can we do - as individuals and collectively?

Simon Oldridge has ideas that answer both of these. Simon first joined us back in episode #182 when he joined his colleague Anthea Simmons and they spoke eloquently about the strategies of the South Devon Primary group which are aimed at raising one progressive candidate in borderline constituencies in the UK, so that the hard right doesn't swan through the middle on a minority of the votes because the anti-Tory vote has been split (again). Getting progressive politicians into power is their primary aim, but they also want to make sure the candidates who become MPs understand the concerns of their constituents and are prepared to act as independent-minded individuals in the House of Commons, not simply lobby fodder.

So that was a fun and sparky conversation, but it seemed to me at the time that we could have delved down a lot more deeply into SImon's broader work to find politically viable ways to address the climate and ecological emergency, particularly his work with Zero Hour, the campaign for the Climate and Ecology Bill and which has produced a number of detailed and fascinating reports, including one about the Ambition Gap we have as we head for Net Zero and another entitled, 'Creating a Nature-Rich UK'. Hence, we came back for another conversation - because apart from anything else, it's so enlivening to talk with someone else who spends their entire life thinking about these things: and if I can't have fun on the podcast, what's the point?

I am well aware that many of you listening are not in the UK - and that politics is a very siloed space: we all have our own rules to work within and our own levels of bureaucracy and kleptocracy masquerading as democracy that we're trying to reform. So I hope that some of the ideas we explore, particularly the bigger ones of global power systems and routes to net zero and nature-based solutions strike home far outside the boundaries of this island. And yes, I still have Covid, so I apologise in advance for the state of my voice.

Target Seats suitable for replicating South Devon Primary https://www.politicalprimary.org/target-map

South Devon Primary on Twitter https://twitter.com/sdevonprimary
South Devon Primary on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/sdevonprimary/
Simon on Twitter https://twitter.com/SiOldridge
Simon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-oldridge-17207a206/
Zero Hour: https://www.zerohour.uk/
Zero Hour Reports https://www.zerohour.uk/reports/
Zero Hour on Twitter https://twitter.com/@CEBill_now

CREDS - https://low-energy.creds.ac.uk/

Stanford study: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-miracle-tech-needed-how-to-switch-to-renewables-now-and-lower-costs-doing-it/
Oxford study on how Decarbonising the Energy system could save $Trillions https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-09-14-decarbonising-energy-system-2050-could-save-trillions-oxford-study

Climate and Ecology Bill:https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2943
Episode 182: South Devon Primary https://accidentalgods.life/primary-strategy-growing-a-new-voting-paradigm-in-the-south-devon-primary/

Becoming Intentional Gods: Claiming the future with Indy Johar of the Dark Matter Labs

25 oktober 2023 | 71 min

If we're at the moment of choice between flourishing and destruction, what would you choose?

We are at a moment of decision: We either step forward into our own Great Destruction, which could theoretically see us wipe out all of humanity and most of the More than Human World…Or we could step into what Indy Johar calls 'The Great Peace', claiming our birthright as the Interstitial Generation between the old paradigm of extraction, consumption and pollution—and the new one that could arise where we accept the interbecoming of all things, where we as individual humans take our place in a community of care and experience that encompasses all of the world.

This is our potential, laid out in clear terms, by thought leader and evolutionary, Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs. Indy is an architect by training and a maker by practice; he is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation, and, amongst many other things, he co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission, and was a good growth advisor to the Mayor of London. He is an explorative practitioner in the means of system change & the dark matter design of civic infrastructure finance, outcomes, and governance. Indy is a co-founder and Director of 00 and Dark Matter Laboratories - a field laboratory focused on building the institutional infrastructures for radicle civic societies, cities, regions and towns.

Dark Matter Labs says, 'Around the planet, we’re feeling the consequences of outdated institutions and inadequate infrastructures incapable of coping with planetary-scale challenges. At Dark Matter, we believe in taking on these challenges via a new, civic economy.'

Their many strands of work include the Radicle Civics experiments (where 'Radicle', is the first part of a seedling to emerge from the embryonic seed of a plant), which explores, amongst other things, how we could re-imagine houses as autonomous beings, not things we own . One of the many exciting things about Dark Matter Labs is that they create these experiments on the ground: I've put a link to their blog post on Repermissioning the City in the show notes and really, if you have time, I encourage you to read it for ideas of things that are actually happening as we speak.
Beyond that, Indy and Dark Matter explore so much of what this podcast is about: governance systems, economics, management, the nature of the world if we were able to take our place within it as fully conscious beings in a fully conscious web of life. This took me right to the edge of my thinking, which is such an exciting, enlivening place to be: walking the knife edge between what we know (or think we know) and what might yet be possible.

Both Indy and I had various viruses so there's some coughing and some rough-speaking, particularly from my end, but if you can manage that, I think this is one of those episodes that has the power to change worlds. So people of the podcast, please do welcome, Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs.

Dark Matter Labs https://darkmatterlabs.org/
Radicle Civics https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U9LXY3CTN2upEG38oz4j4vW8Vb0Yq21u/view
Project 00 https://www.project00.cc/
Dark Matter Blog https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org
Repermissioning the City https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/re-permissioning-the-city-unlocking-cities-growing-underutilised-spatial-assets-for-an-emergent-1550997714a4
Indy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/indy-johar-b440b010/
Dark Matter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/darkmatterlabs/
Dark Matter Labs on Twitter https://twitter.com/DarkMatter_Labs
7Gen Cities https://www.7gencities.org/
7Gen Cities CiFi Gathering Report https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/6462104f72fa898a55556e56/651ec633d3229a3920f0c03a_CiFi_Report_7GenCities_0410.pdf
Emily Harris, AG podcast #176 https://accidentalgods.life/bridging-from-the-necessary-to-the-possible-with-emily-harris-of-dark-matter-labs/

Systems change needs Democratic change https://ddc.dk/why-systems-change-will-lead-to-democratic-renewal/#

Courageous Conversations - talking about what matters with Rowan Ryrie of Parents for Future

18 oktober 2023 | 72 min

How can we, as parents, grandparents and anyone who cares about the fate of future generations, live our lives in such a way that when our children ask us why we didn't do more, we can say with honesty that we did all that we could? How do we help them to build resilience, to feel safe in a supportive community and in connection with the natural world so that as they grow, they can face the truth about the world they have inherited?

And how can we use our role as parents to create conversations that matter, not only with people with meet in our daily lives but also with those in positions of power.

These are some of the core questions that prompted environmentalist and movement-builder, Rowan Ryrie to co-found Parents for Future, a fast-growing group of parents who have come together to support each other in navigating the climate crisis and trying to secure a safer, fairer world for children everywhere.

Rowan says, 'Together, we can be much more courageous than we can alone,' and she's brought this understanding to their latest project, 'Courageous Conversations'. It's a pilot project just now, but when the results are in next year, it will be spread out around the UK and then, if there's funding, around the world, to give us emotionally literate tools to engage with the people we encounter in our communities of place, purpose and passion.

This feels to me to be right at the cutting edge of the emergent future we need to create. It's grounded in a theory of change that makes sense in the realities of overall systemic change, while at the same time, understanding that shift happens one courageous conversation at a time, and that we all feel better if we can share our fears and build hopes that work for everyone. Rowan specifically wanted me to assure everyone that Parents for Future is not only for those with young children - or any children - if you care about the world we're leaving to the generations that come after us, human and more than human, then do join. There are 28,000 members and rising, all around the world - and if there's not a physical, location-based group near you, and you want to set one up they'll help.

Parents for Future https://parentsforfuture.org.uk/
Larger Us https://larger.us/
Climate Psychology Alliance https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/
Climate Parent Fellowship https://ourkidsclimate.org/climate-parent-fellowship/
The Week https://www.theweek.ooo/
The Britain Talks Climate research paper https://climateoutreach.org/reports/britain-talks-climate/

Social Media links

Rowan, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowan-ryrie/
Rowan Instagram @rowanryrie
Twitter https://twitter.com/rowanryrie

Parents for Future LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/parents-for-future-uk/
Instagram https://instagram.com/@rowanryrie
Twitter https://twitter.com/parents_4future
Mastadon: https://climatejustice.global/@Parents4FutureUK

FB: https://www.facebook.com/ParentsForFutureUK/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/@parentsforfuture_uk

Mastadon: https://climatejustice.global/@Parents4FutureUK

FB: https://www.facebook.com/ParentsForFutureUK/

The Web of Life & New Tech Webs – A Beautiful Connection? with Monty Merlin of ReFi DAO

11 oktober 2023 | 84 min

How much do you know about AI, blockchain and Web 3.0? If you're like us, the answer is probably very little. But these techs are going to change our world out of all recognition and while there is the potential for catastrophe, in the right hands, the same technology has the potential to help us shape the future we'd all be proud to leave behind and this is what this podcast is about.

Monty is one of the founders of ReFi DAO. Monty is working deeply and effectively at the cutting edge of emergence, a change-maker working on many different scales to build a future we'd be proud to leave behind. He is helping to build a global network of regenerative communities and start-ups and then taking those ideas out into the world as a public speaker and evangelist for ReFi & Regeneration. His public work includes a TEDx talk titled 'Can Crypto Regenerate the World?'. He has an undergraduate and Master's degree in Management & Innovation, with specialism in sustainability, digital technologies, blockchain, and design & systems thinking.

This conversation ranged across landscapes from the nature of greenwashing to the potential for borderless nations, from the way financial markets currently underpin the existing structures, to how they could be tilted to underpin a whole new regenerative paradigm. We explored the difference between what's sustainable and what's regenerative - and discovered what's actually happening now, that you could be involved with in your communities of place, purpose and passion. I say the word, 'inspiring' way too often in this podcast, and I apologise in advance, but it's true: knowing that this is happening is one of the bright points of this year and I am genuinely thrilled to be able to share it with you.

ReFi DAO https://www.refidao.com/
ReFi podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/refi-podcast/id1609683147
ReFi blog https://blog.refidao.com/
Monty's TEDx 'Can Crypto Change the World?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-4HW3iPtfo
Ecological Benefits Framework https://canyouchangethefuture.org/
Toucan https://toucan.earth/
Celo https://celo.org/
Cosmolocalism explained https://www.cosmolocalism.eu/publications/
Julia Hailes MBE https://juliahailes.com/

What your Food Ate - Or why you should never eat industrially farmed food ever again- With Anne Bicklé and David Montgomery

4 oktober 2023 | 77 min

How does soil health intimately and profoundly impact human health? What's the link between the soil microbiome and the human gut microbiome? How can we begin to restore our health, and the health of the living earth in concert with each other?

These are the questions posed by the outstanding book 'What your Food Ate: How to heal our land and reclaim our health' and the co-authors, Anne Biklé and David Montgomery are this week's guests as we delve deeply into the nature of soil, the functions of fungi, the populations of bacteria we depend on that inhabit our guts, and how we might affect total systemic change in the food and farming system. So a little light listening for your day.

In detail, Anne Biklé is a biologist, avid gardener. She is among the planet’s leading experts on the microbial life of soil and its crucial importance to human wellbeing and survival. She is married to David Montgomery, who is a professor of Geomorphology at the University of Washington. David has studied everything from the ways that landslides and glaciers influence the height of mountain ranges, to the way that soils have shaped human civilizations both now and in the past.

All of this has led him to write a number of books, including Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisations which explores how our historic - and contemporary - farming practices have critically undermined the living soil on which we depend. Following this, David and Anne co-wrote, The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health and the book we're going to be exploring in depth today: What your Food Ate: how to heal our land and reclaim the our Health. David also plays in the band, Big Dirt, which is, and I quote directly from their Facebook page: Americana Alternative. Whatever that means. Roots folk-rock with something to say and fun to listen.

I read What your Food Ate earlier this year and if you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, you'll have heard me mention it more than once. It's the most readable exploration I've come across of how our food is grown, and how it could - and should be grown - it's really easy to read, but it's full of the kind of mind-blowing data that we need if we're going to change our habits. You'll hear more in the podcast, but truly, the detail they gathered on the difference in content between food grown in the modern agri-business farm and that grown on a regenerative farm with no chemical inputs and no or minimal ploughing, one that strives to build the soil health and so build the health of everything else... it's both terrifying and inspiring. If you want something to persuade you that you need to change the places you buy your food, this is it. So, here we go. People of the Podcast, please welcome Anne Biklé and David Montgomery.

Dig2Grow Website https://www.dig2grow.com/
Buy the Books: https://www.dig2grow.com/books
Big Dirt https://www.reverbnation.com/bigdirtmusic

Transforming Narrative Waters with Ruth Taylor of the Common Cause Foundation

27 september 2023 | 80 min

Here at Accidental Gods, we are increasingly of the opinion that our most urgent need as we face the polycrisis is to find a sense of being a belonging that changes our life's purpose. We all know we're not here just to pay bills and die, but knowing what we're not here for is not enough: we need to feel at the deepest level what we are here for, to rebuild the deep heart connections to the web of life such that we can take our place in the web with integrity and authenticity and a true sense of coming home.
As we head into our sixteenth season, our third century of episodes, this is our baseline. The membership is here to delve deep into the practice and to give the time and the space to building the connections and the podcast exists to outline the theory and to give a voice to other people on this path.

And with that in mind, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to this week's guest, the narrative strategist, Ruth Taylor. I came across Ruth when she published a Medium post entitled 'To UnPathed Waters and Undreamed Shores' - and just that title alone was enough to get me to read it. And then I was blown away by the ideas Ruth put forward, by her theories of narrative change, which are clearly at the heart of all we do, and by the clarity of her thinking and writing. I've put the link in the show notes so you can read it for yourself. In the 6 months since she agreed to come onto the podcast, she's published several other posts and a long paper called Transforming Narrative Waters, which delves even more deeply into the need for, and practice of, narrative change.

Ruth works for the Common Cause Foundation which I first came across when I was at Schumacher College and had my eyes opened to the emotional intelligence behind it, and the astonishing work it's been doing in the world. Ruth is particularly interested in narrative change and writes a regular newsletter called In Other Words that collates the latest thinking in this field so she was an ideal person to explore the nature of framing, and story and how we can get to grips with changing the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we're here and how our relationships to each other and the world can still shift us away from the cliff's edge.

CCF is a not for profit that works at the intersection between culture change and social psychology. Over the past ten years, it has pioneered a new way of inspiring engagement through catalysing action that strengthens and celebrates the human values that underpin the public's care for social and environmental causes. Its work is centered on the research findings that, 1) people are more likely to support environmental and social change when they place importance on their intrinsic values, such as equality, curiosity, broadmindedness and community, and 2) that the majority of people in the UK place importance on these values, but are constantly having their more extrinsic values primed due to the consumerist culture in which we live. With this in mind CCF offers training and support to a range of organisations on how to develop messaging and campaigning strategies that engage with people’s intrinsic values in order to rebalance the value norms in our societies.

Ruth on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-taylor-14747173/
To Unpathed Waters and Undreamed Shores https://commoncausefoundation.org/to-unpathed-waters-undreamed-shores/
Transforming Narrative Waters https://ruthtaylordotorg.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/transforming-narrative-waters.pdf
Culture and Deep Narratives blog (Medium) https://medium.com/inter-narratives/culture-deep-narratives-and-whac-a-mole-16cc1ecfc0a9
Online Course: Values 101: Creating the Cultural Conditions for Change https://www.tickettailor.com/events/commoncausefoundation/820814?

Global Action Plan https://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/
Internarratives https://inter-narratives.org/
The Common Cause Foundation https://commoncausefoundation.org/
HumanKind Book https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/humankind-a-hopeful-history-rutger-bregman/4969515?ean=9781408898956
CultureHack https://www.culturehack.io/
Narrative Initiative https://narrativeinitiative.org/about-us/
The Culture Group https://theculturegroup.org/

Parents for Future https://parentsforfuture.org.uk/

Equinox Meditation: Finding the balance point in ourselves and the world

23 september 2023 | 22 min

Walking the edge between light and dark: Equinox reflections on Accidental Gods past, present and future

23 september 2023 | 25 min

Meeting the Spirit of the Land: exploring Spirituality in Farming with biodynamic grower, André Tranquilini

20 september 2023 | 86 min

In this, our 200th episode of Accidental Gods podcast, I am delighted to be joined by André Tranquilini, estate manager at Waltham Place, a 220 acred biodynamic estate in Berkshire, in the UK.

André is a biodynamic farmer, consultant and teacher. He has been the manager at Waltham Place since 2018. André has worked extensively as a market gardener, Steiner school teacher and farmer, and was a founding member of the seed company, Living Seeds, in Portugal. Born in Brazil, André has had the opportunity to work and manage farms in his homeland, as well as Portugal and the UK. He has traveled widely teaching workshops and lecturing on Biodynamic Agriculture and is recognised as a biodynamic consultant by the international Biodynamic Agriculture section at the Goetheanum in Switzerland.

This was one of the podcasts where we could have talked for hours, if not days. With is background in Brazil and coming from a mix of several racial groups, both colonised and colonisers, André brings a unique mix of perspectives just from the outset. Then with his training in Steiner's philosophy, and at Emerson College, coupled with his choice to specialise in biodynamic farming, he offers insights into the spirituality of agriculture, of how we can bring genuine deep connection with the web of life into our reality to re-connect the disconnections of the last ten millennia.

He is passionate about the nature of living food and really knowledgable on how different it is from the industrially farmed and processed foods we are generally offered. He's part of a think-tank, A Bigger Conversation, that's looking into appropriate technology in farming and is at the leading edge of innovation in the biodynamic field, bringing the best of our new world together with the depth of experience that has grown out of the connection with the land. This was an inspiring and generative conversation and I bring it to you with great joy.

Waltham Place https://www.walthamplace.com/
Waltham Biodynamic Education: https://www.walthamplace.com/biodynamic-gardening
Biodynamic Association https://www.biodynamic.org.uk/
Emerson College https://emerson.org.uk/
A Bigger Conversation Think Tank https://abiggerconversation.org/
DOK Trial: https://www.biodynamic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/42-years-of-the-DOK-trial-research-Star-furrow-issue-139-Spring-2023-pages-22-23.pdf
Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tropical-forests-may-be-getting-too-hot-for-photosynthesis/

Making The Nettle Dress: a journey of attention and intention and magic and loss with Allan Brown and Dylan Howitt

13 september 2023 | 79 min

"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/

Healthy Human Culture: Diving deep into ourselves, each other and the world, with Sophy Banks

6 september 2023 | 62 min

Inspiring the climate majority with Prof Rupert Read

30 augusti 2023 | 68 min

The Art of Living Well - A Creative Life on the Land with Elisa Rathje of AppleTurnover TV

23 augusti 2023 | 74 min

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

Spiritual Activism: Permaculture of land, heart and people with Maddy Harland

16 augusti 2023 | 74 min

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/

This Mighty Heart: exploring the power of Heart Intelligence with Scilla Elworthy

9 augusti 2023 | 53 min

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 Peace to 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/

The Mighty Heart in Business program: 18th October - 6th December 2023 https://thebusinessplanforpeace.org/the-mighty-heart-in-business/

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/

AI: Integral to the future or existential risk? (or both) - conversations on current evolution with Daniel Thorson

2 augusti 2023 | 78 min

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

Walk Deep, walk true, and listen to your dreams: wordsmithing the human spirit with Abigail Morgan Prout

26 juli 2023 | 80 min

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

A Green New Deal that Works for People and Planet with Max Ajl

19 juli 2023 | 80 min

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

ORGANISATIONS SUGGESTED BY LISTENERS

Compass https://www.compassonline.org.uk/

#DemocratizingWork https://democratizingwork.org/

Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

Eco-socialists in Australia https://socialist-alliance.org/

New Economy Network Australia https://www.neweconomy.org.au

Becoming a Stag Beetle! Living the Interspecies Treaty of Finsbury Park with Ruth Catlow

12 juli 2023 | 66 min

Voting our way to a fairer future: Contemplations on quadratic voting with Ruth Catlow

12 juli 2023 | 38 min

Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse with economist Gaya Herrington

5 juli 2023 | 76 min

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/

Exploding the Myth of a Farm-Free Future (and fake meat!) with Chris Smaje

28 juni 2023 | 82 min

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

Psychedelics: the key to evolution or (yet more) big Pharma hype? With Dr Ros Watts of ACER Integration

21 juni 2023 | 78 min

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

Summer Solstice Meditation - with Manda Scott (with birdsong behind)

20 juni 2023 | 23 min

Summer Solstice Meditation with Manda Scott

20 juni 2023 | 23 min

Manda - Summer Solstice Roundup, Reading and Listening

20 juni 2023 | 51 min

The Sacred Depths of Nature: exploring the interface of science, spirituality and religion with Ursula Goodenough

14 juni 2023 | 89 min

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

Reality Check: Less Quantity, More Quality in a Future that will Work, Part 4 of our series w Simon Michaux

11 juni 2023 | 77 min

Lifeboats and Volcanoes: part 3 of our series with Simon Michaux

7 juni 2023 | 68 min

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/

Primary Strategy: Growing a new voting paradigm in the South Devon Primary

31 maj 2023 | 70 min

As you'll know by now, one of our core motivators in creating this podcast was the realisation that the 'democratic' systems of the world are largely broken and are not a useful way to affect change. I used to be a political activist. I thought I'd given all that up, but today's conversation has definitely re-awakened my political instincts because today I'm talking with two of the people who set up South Devon Primary: a group committed to changing the political system in the UK.
So the first thing to say for those of you who live elsewhere is that this episode is focused on the need for change in the Westminster Parliament. But the issues are worldwide and whatever your political system, it could probably do with being shaken up. We need to share best practice across the globe and what Simon Oldridge, Anthea Simmons and Ben Long have created feels like a template that could be replicated not just throughout the UK but across the world. The principles are basic and while it's not going to take us to full democracy in one giant leap, it's definitely a step in the right direction. If adopted around the nation (and the world) it could see us move away from the politics of hatred, fear and resentment to something a great deal more generative.

To look at these three in more depth and so understand where they're coming from: Simon Oldridge was an accountant with Ernst and Young and then CEO of a manufacturing company. More recently, his awareness of the climate and ecological crisis has led him to engage with a group endeavouring to put forward a Climate and Ecology Bill to the UK parliament (he talks about this in the podcast) and to set up the South Devon Primary campaign which you'll hear about in much more depth.

Anthea Simmons is Editor in Chief of the progressive online paper, West Country Voices, speaker for Devon for Europe and author of a number of books, including one for young climate activists. Before that, rather like Simon, she worked in financial asset management. She's a passionate advocate for the South Devon Primary and invented the Democracy Meter, which you're also hear about in the conversation.

Ben Long is an author and educator and currently helps his partner run her ceramics business in Devon. He didn't join us on the podcast - partly because I think two extra voices is enough to contend with - but he's a core part of the work of South Devon Primary.

And that work is practical, active, really intelligently targeted and if it were taken up around the country, could do more, I think, to shape the outcome of the next general election than anything else I've found. Listen, enjoy - and then make this happen as near to wherever you live as you can.

South Devon Primary Website https://www.southdevonprimary.org/
Zero Hour https://www.zerohour.uk
Anthea Simmons on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/antheasimmons/
West Country Voices on Twitter https://twitter.com/WCountryVoices
Simon Oldridge on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-oldridge-17207a206/
Simon on Twitter https://twitter.com/SiOldridge
South Devon Primary on Twitter https://twitter.com/SDevonPrimary
Ben Long on Twitter: https://twitter.com/benwhlong

Simon - Twitter thread w Local MP https://twitter.com/SiOldridge/status/1641713280967213056

No More Fairy Stories: Writing the way through, one tale at a time - with Denise Baden

24 maj 2023 | 77 min

If you've listened to this podcast at all recently, you'll know that I'm in the editing phase of the new book - the phase where we 'carve it into tiny pieces, throw significant chunks of it in the recycling (because words are never wasted and text storage is basically free) and rebuild the rest into something shinier, sharper and generally more succinct.' And I'm telling you this because this week's guest is a fellow writer who knows what it's like to stare at a blank page until your forehead bleeds - but in this case, she's also an academic psychologist who has the data to back up the value of Thrutopian writing.

Dr Denise Baden is a Professor of Sustainable Practice at the University of Southampton, and she says, that 'working in sustainability and climate change, the more you know the scarier it is. Like the sun, you can’t look too closely at it, but face to one side, you make your way, because in fact, it’s easy to put everything right. All the solutions are right here, they just have to catch on. Walking lightly and mindfully upon the earth is so doable. I started writing as therapy, with green solutions as the main ingredient, stories to soothe my soul. Then my characters and their stories took over centre stage, leaving the green solutions to season the stew.'

Denise is one of those people who sees a problem and starts creating real world solution. in 2018, she set up the series of free Green Stories writing competitions to inspire writers to create positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like, and to tell stories that showcase solutions, not just problems because her data show that's what we need. In the process she continued to research what works in terms of fiction and climate communication - as a result of which, she has written a novel, Habitat Man, and she compiled an anthology of short stories called No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet. which she had ready by COP27 so there was a copy for every delegate to read. Magnificently, she is on the Forbes list of Climate Leaders: https://www.forbes.com/sites/solitairetownsend/2023/03/19/68-climate-leaders-changing-the-film-and-tv-industry/

Denise Website https://www.dabaden.com/
Green Stories website https://www.greenstories.org.uk/ NEXT NOVEL PRIZE DEADLINE IS 26th JUNE
Denise on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DABadenauthor
Denise publications and academic record https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5wzjrb/professor-denise-baden
Sustainable HairCare project: https://ecohairandbeauty.com/
Details of the project with Bafta and Albert https://www.greenstories.org.uk/climatecharacters/

Key hashtags are #ClimateCHaracters and #HotOrNot. The survey is here (please go an complete it!) bit.ly/433n71w

The images were designed by https://www.rubberrepublic.com/ (check out their website – the first and third especially are hilarious and the one about the old XR protestor is incredibly moving.

Thrutopia website https://thrutopia.life

Books mentioned by other authors
Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4935015-the-carbon-diaries-2015
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-ministry-for-the-future-kim-stanley-robinson/2164043

Meeting the Ocean: Rekindling our deepest connections through art and science with Markus Reymann

17 maj 2023 | 79 min

How do we really create systemic change? How do we shift narratives towards a generative future? How do we bring artists, scientists, policy makers, educators, conservationists, journalists, and all the different siloed tribes together in ways that let them genuinely communicate and listen to the web of life?

This week's guest is someone who is actively working on so many levels to change all these things. As you'll hear, Markus Reymann is a Director of a European Arts foundation, which doesn't sound nearly as exciting as it is. Because this is an arts foundation with a difference.

TBA21 says of itself that it is a leading international art and advocacy foundation and it stewards the TBA21 Collection and its outreach activities, which include exhibitions, educational offers, and public programming. The TBA21–Academy, which Markus helped set up, is the foundation’s research center, 'fostering a deeper relationship with the Ocean and other bodies of water by working as an incubator for collaborative inquiry, artistic production, and environmental advocacy. For more than a decade, the Academy has catalyzed new forms of knowledge emerging from the exchanges between art, science, policy, and conservation in long-term and collaborative engagement through fellowships and residency programs. All activity at TBA21 is fundamentally driven by artists and the belief in art and culture as a carrier of social and environmental transformation.'

We talk a lot about social and environmental transformation on this podcast: it's what we're here for and what we believe is essential not just to creating that future we'd be proud to leave behind, but to creating any liveable future at all for most of the species on the planet. We talk a lot, too, about systemic thinking, about paradigm shifts and about our capacity as a species to let go of our dominant narratives, and the need for someone, somewhere to bring together the scientists, the artists, the policy makers, the journalists, the educators…and do it in a way that breaks down the barriers, lets them actually understand each other - and then shows them other cultures that think differently, that have different value systems than ours ,so they can see that there are different ways of doing things that will work.

And this, is what Markus is doing. Here is someone who understands systemic thinking and who is applying it with depth and breadth and great heart.

Bio:

Markus Reymann is Director of TBA21–Academy, a non-profit cultural organization he co-founded in 2011 that fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange surrounding the most urgent ecological, social, and economic issues facing our oceans today. Markus leads the Academy’s engagement with artists, activists, scientists, and policy-makers worldwide, resulting in the creation of new commissions, new bodies of knowledge, and new policies advancing the conservation and protection of the oceans.
In March 2019, the Academy launched Ocean Space, a new global port for ocean literacy, research, and advocacy. Located in the restored Church of San Lorenzo in Venice, Italy, Ocean Space is activated by the itinerant Academy and its network of partners, including universities, NGOs, museums, government agencies, and research institutes from around the world.

Reymann also serves as Chair of Alligator Head Foundation, the scientific partner of TBA21–Academy. Alligator Head Foundation established and maintains the East Portland Fish Sanctuary, and oversees a marine wet laboratory in Jamaica.

TBA21 https://tba21.org/
TBA21–Academy: https://tba21.org/tags/?tag=tba21_academy
Ocean Space in Venice https://tba21.org/tags/?tag=ocean_space
Walid Raad https://www.walidraad.com/
Anthropocene Observatory https://www.territorialagency.com/anthropocene
Woods Hole Oceanographic Observatory https://www.whoi.edu/

Proudly Mad: exploring mental health and the climate emergency with Charlie Hertzog Young

10 maj 2023 | 77 min

How did one man make the shift from Not wanting to live in this world, to refusing to live in this world?

If you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, you'll know that I did the Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher college in 2016-17. It was a genuinely life changing experience not least because I met some of the most inspiring people I could imagine - young, motivated and incredibly bright. And of them all, Charlie was the brightest. Even before we met, he'd studied economics at Harvard and SOAS which for those of you not in academia, are both hardcore and supremely activist. And while doing the MA, he was acting as researcher for one of our best known non-fiction journalists and writers. What I didn't know was that he was already an award-winning activist who, over the course of his career has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders.

Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum and written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian.

I should have guessed most of that. What I perhaps also ought to have understood better was that he was bipolar - he now says of himself that he's proudly mad which I love - and how deeply it influenced who he was and what he did. So when he contacted me a while ago with news that he'd written a book, I wasn't remotely surprised. What was slightly surprising was that he is now a double amputee, and that his book is written about the interface between mental health, the climate emergency and what we now call eco-anxiety but which I think needs a rather stronger name than that implies. But definitely, this is something I wanted to talk about on the podcast - the edges to which our awareness of this time brings us, the frustration that arises out of living in a culture that still, broadly, gaslights all of us and does its best to rob us of the power to bring about change. Note that I don't think it's succeeding, and Charlie's book is a testament to the not-succeeding of the dominant culture, to the resilience of people around the world who are living with the reality of the climate, ecological and societal crisis and are forging paths through the chaos. Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future is an extraordinary book. It approaches head on the things we often turn away from, and we did this too, in the podcast - so this is a potential trigger warning. We do discuss Charlie's suicide attempt and how he ended up with two prosthetic legs, so if this is going to be hard for you, please tap into whatever are your resources before you listen. And then sit back and enjoy, because Charlie's brought his astonishing capacity for humanity, deep thought, and huge emotional intelligence to this and I loved it.

Charlie's website https://charliehertzogyoung.cargo.site/
Charlie on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-hertzog-young-frsa-40b50b162/?originalSubdomain=uk
Charlie's book, Spinning Out https://footnotepress.com/product/spinning-out/
Charlie at Hay on Wye https://www.hayfestival.com/p-20173-charlie-hertzog-young-and-mya-rose-craig-talk-to-areeba-hamid.aspx

Building Tomorrow: Bonus addition: Painting 2050 if we get things right

4 maj 2023 | 12 min

Paddy and I recorded a brief 15 minute bonus of how the world could look if we actually employed all the strategies in 'Building Tomorrow' - so sit back, soak it in - and then let's make it happen...

BIO:
Author, Paddy le Flufy read mathematics at Cambridge, then - as seems to have happened with quite a lot of our recent guests, he took a job in the city and qualified as an accountant with KPMG.

And then, as also seems to happen with our guests, he didn't buy into the system, but instead spent years, living a double life in which he worked as a finance specialist in London for six months of the year and then used the money to live in remote places, alongside people whose lives were radically different from his own. He has traveled with economic migrants, been taught to fish by the rural people of Mozambique and lived with Hadza hunter-gatherers. He spent two months living with an indigenous tribe in the Ama§on rainforest, then won a Royal Geographical Society Award to spend an entire year being taught by traditional wisdom-keepers from another jungle culture. Since 2015, he has been based in the UK and then Canada, researching how we can redesign our economic system to avert the impending environmental catastrophe.

His book is the result and it brought together some ideas we've explored already on the podcast, but knits them with things I had never heard about, and it creates a whole that has the potential to change the way our culture functions - which is genuinely exciting.

Paddy's website https://paddyleflufy.com
Paddy on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/paddy-le-flufy/
Paddy on Substack https://paddyleflufy.substack.com
Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/
RiverSimple https://www.riversimple.com/governance/
Sovereign Money https://positivemoney.org/our-proposals/sovereign-money-introduction/
FabLab https://www.fablabs.io/
Curitiba Bus Tokens https://brazilianexperience.com/curitibas-bus-system-2/
Cosmo-Localism https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2019/5/13/what-is-cosmo-localism-and-why-we-think-its-a-game-changer

Building Tomorrow: Practical steps to a new economic system with Paddy Le Flufy

3 maj 2023 | 89 min

As you will know by now, this podcast searches long and hard for answers to the over-riding question of 'what do we need to do, to get us from where we are, to where we need to be to set the stage for that generative future our hearts know is possible?' So when I got a book that directly asked and then answered that question, I dived straight in. 'Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System' does exactly what it says on the cover. It's full of concrete examples of individuals, organisations and businesses who are forging new ground at the leading edge of change, weaved into a coherent imagining of a future that runs by different rules.

Author, Paddy Le Flufy, read mathematics at Cambridge, then - as seems to have happened with quite a lot of our recent guests, he took a job in the city and qualified as an accountant with KPMG. And then, as also seems to happen with our guests, he didn't buy into the system, but instead spent years living something of a double life, earning money as a finance specialist in London then spending it living in remote places, alongside people whose lives were radically different from his own. This period culminated with a year, funded by a Royal Geographical Society Award, being taught by indigenous wisdom-keepers in the Peruvian Amazon. Since 2015, he has been based in the UK and then Canada, researching how we can redesign our economic system to avert the impending environmental catastrophe. His book is the result of this research. It brings together some ideas we've explored already on the podcast, but knits them with things I had never heard about, and it creates a whole that has the potential to change the way our culture functions - which is genuinely exciting.

Paddy's website https://paddyleflufy.com

Building Tomorrow on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Tomorrow-Averting-Environmental-Economic/dp/1739345207/
Paddy on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/paddy-le-flufy/
Paddy on Substack https://paddyleflufy.substack.com

Paddy on Twitter www.twitter.com/paddyleflufy
Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/
RiverSimple https://www.riversimple.com/governance/
Sovereign Money https://positivemoney.org/our-proposals/sovereign-money-introduction/
Fab Labs https://fabfoundation.org/
Torekes currency https://www.torekes.be/nl/home/
Cosmo-Localism https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2019/5/13/what-is-cosmo-localism-and-why-we-think-its-a-game-changer

The Cosmolocal Reader https://clreader.net/

Building Bridges to the Future with Cat Tully of the School of International Futures

26 april 2023 | 75 min

If you've listened to the podcast at all over the past few years, you'll know that the search for routes to total systemic change has always been the driver of what we're doing and why we're doing it. Even so, it's not often I talk to someone who is singlemindedly exploring the routes to that systemic change and who has the tools to help everyone explore the potential for what might come next.

And so this week, I am immensely happy to have had the chance to talk to Cat Tully, a remarkable woman who spends her life helping people to bridge the space between where we are and where we need to get to, in ways that drag as little of the past with us as possible, while opening the widest gates we can to the systems, structures and practices that stand the best chance of a generative future.

Cat leads the School of International Futures (SOIF), a not-for-profit international collective of practitioners based in the UK that use futures thinking to inspire change at the local, national and global levels. SOIF has worked with organisations like the UN, Omidyar, NATO, the Royal Society and national governments across the planet - all with the explicit intention of making the world fairer for current and future generations. SOIF also supports a growing network of Next Generation Foresight Practitioners - young people under the age of 35, who can advocate for and engage with change in their communities and the wider world.

There is so much that the SOIF is doing - so many people it's bringing together - we could have spent our time together talking about specific instances, and Cat does use specific examples of projects she's involved in to highlight specific areas, but in general, we wanted to explore the ideas, the systems, the ways we might think differently so that you can pick them up and run with them. Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear as our future unfolds - which is that none of us knows what it is, and it's going to take all of us, using the best tools we have, to make it clear. Cat is bringing us those tools, honed and ready for use.

SOIF Projects:

If you are interested in learning strategic foresight to shape the future of your community or your organisation, SOIF offers an annual in-person Summer Retreat in Strategic Foresight, happening from 24 to 28 July 2023 in the UK and virtual courses throughout the year. The next virtual courses in 2023 are starting in May and September.
Futures toolkit for leaders: SOIF and California 100 published "Beyond Strategic Planning: Foresight Toolkit for Decision Makers"—a primer for leaders looking for straightforward, pragmatic ways to apply foresight to their work.
The National Strategy for the Next Generation programme engaged 16-30-year-olds, Next Generation Champions, to imagine futures of the UK's international development role in 2045.
SOIF developed the Framework for Assessing Intergenerational Fairness with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The tool has been used by All Parliamentary Party Groups for Future Generations (APPG) in their initiative Futures Check, and we have developed a policy brief on Building a Coalition for Intergenerational Fairness in the European Green Deal.
Next Generation Foresight Practitioners, an initiative by SOIF, is the largest global network of next-generation future-alert changemakers democratising the futures and foresight field. With 100 fellows and 500 members of a global network, the initiative supports young change agents that use foresight to shape better futures for their community and the world, e.g. NGFP members in Africa imagining Digital Futures of the continent, seeding collaboration with an Impact fund and creating opportunities for members to be visible, BBC Futures article, Youth Climate and Energy Futures Lab at COP26 and contributing to United Nations General Assembly on the SDG Moment Closing Panel.

Bridging from the Necessary to the Possible with Emily Harris of Dark Matter Labs

19 april 2023 | 74 min

IF the present system is broken - and is in fact the heart of the meta-crisis - how can we transform peacefully to something that will work to create the future we'd want to leave behind?

That's the core question of this podcast and so it was with great joy, that I found Dark Matter Labs. DML says of itself, "We’re working to create institutions, instruments and infrastructures for a more equitable, caring and sustainable future.

Around the planet, we’re feeling the consequences of outdated institutions and inadequate infrastructures incapable of coping with planetary-scale challenges. At Dark Matter, we believe in taking on these challenges via a new, civic economy. An economy that’s community-led, and based on many-to-many relationships. An economy that prioritises mental wellbeing and Nature-based Solutions as platforms for further change. We’re an ambitious not-for-profit designing and building the underlying infrastructure to support this new civic economy, exploring how ownership, legal systems, governance … might begin to change."

Which sounds exactly like what we need in our world as we head to the edge of total transition - and exactly what this podcast is about.

So I asked if there was someone I could talk to - and connected with Emily Harris. Emily is a Chartered Accountant. She also holds an MA in Regenerative Economics (Distinction) from Schumacher College and a BSc in Medical Sciences from Imperial College. She trained with Deloitte in London and was a manager in their Big Ticket Restructuring Team during the 2008 global financial crisis.
Prior to joining DML, Emily spent 11 years running her own consultancy business which took her all over the world and included a number of international CFO positions.

In our current meta crisis, Emily has a view from both sides of one of our major divides - and now she's bringing all that experience, and a brilliantly sharp analytical mind to finding answers. Running after the conversations with Simon Michaux and Zahra Davidson, this feels like a further piece in the broader puzzle of how we are going to get from where we are, to where we need to be if we're going to create the future we want to leave behind. We spent a long time exploring Emily's background, so that I - and so you - would understand the depth she brings to this. And then we launched into what she's actually doing and it was really very inspiring. There is hope, and Emily and the teams at DML are at the core of our potential. Be ready to grasp the depth of the problem - and the many possibilities for change.

Dark Matter Labs https://darkmatterlabs.org/
DML on Medium https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/
DML Medium on Financing Civic Transition https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/financing-city-transitions-a-public-civic-deep-code-innovation-challenge-9f2ef55b4bda
Nora Bateson Aphanipoiesis https://norabateson.medium.com/aphanipoiesis-96d8aed927bc
Gillian Tett Warrior Accountants Leading the Green Revolution https://youtu.be/jR0n8mekzro

Drawing Humanity out of the Cave with Dr Simon Michaux (Part 2 of a series)

12 april 2023 | 92 min

This week, we're returning to the second part of the ongoing series with Dr Simon Michaux. If you haven't listened to the first part, I'd recommend you do and I'll put the link in the show notes, but the edited highlight is that Simon is a mining engineer who is dedicated to crunching the numbers that nobody else bothers to crunch - of how much stuff there is: key stuff, like copper and lithium and cobalt and concrete - and where it comes from and how much power it takes to dig it up and move it around and where that power might come from.

Our original plan for this 2nd part in our conversation was to explore Michaux' hierarchy of needs - the logistical things we'll need as we move to a low entropy, post-carbon, (which is to say, post-fossil-fuel) world. Everything in these conversations is predicated on the understanding that we've got to where we are by burning fossil fuels, which is to say concentrated ancient sunlight, laid down over millions of years - millions of years ago - and that this sudden access to vast quantities of readily transportable energy has changed who we are. Our civilisation is built on this stuff. But we haven't necessarily used it wisely. If I had time, I might write the counter-factual history where we discover oil in a culture that isn't predicated on power hierarchies and the accumulation of resources to the few by the many. But we don't live in that culture. We live in this one and we've burned more oil since 1995 than the whole of the rest of human history before that point. In doing so, we've brought ourselves to the point where the entire ecosystem on which we depend is breaking down and we need urgently to step back and think differently.

Which is the entire point of this podcast - what does the thinking differently look like? How can we connect to the web of life in a way that allows us to play a constructive, regenerative part in a flourishing web? What are the spiritual and psychological and conceptual shifts this will take and how best can we make those shifts?

In all those questions, I've tended to take for granted, for instance, the idea that we need to shift to renewable sources of power without actually thinking about whether that was a logistical possibility. Which is where Simon comes in because he does think about these things and he has the numbers to back it up. He gave his baseline talk 91 times in 2022 - sharpening it at every iteration - and now he's talking at governmental level to people who are listening, even if they don't yet know quite what to do. Unless you're listening in Scandinavia, he is probably not talking to your government. But he should be. So part of the reason for continuing the conversation is so that we - all of us who care - can get our heads around reality and then we can use that understanding to create governance systems that work.

Link to Part 1 with Simon https://accidentalgods.life/transforming-industry-to-create-a-genuine-green-revolution/
Balanced Resource Economy Paper https://www.centrumbalticum.org/files/5598/BSR_Policy_Briefing_2_2023.pdf
Simon's Site https://www.simonmichaux.com/
Alice Friedman site https://energyskeptic.com/
Alice Friedman - When the Trucks Stop Running https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/27136955
The Venus Project https://www.thevenusproject.com/
Sam Harris TED Talk on AI https://youtu.be/8nt3edWLgIg
Biomimicry Institute https://biomimicry.org/what-is-biomimicry/

The Fine Art of Huddles: multiplying our potential by the power of our peers with Zahra Davidson of Huddlecraft

5 april 2023 | 59 min

How can we begin to shift away from the old hierarchical dominance structures of our past 2,000 years, towards something where everyone brings the best of themselves and embraces and celebrates the best in other people?

It was in hunting for answers to this, that I came across this week's guest: someone who is opening doors all round the world in the creation of a regenerative, emotionally literate future.

Zahra Davidson was Co-founder of and is now the Chief Executive and Design Director at Huddlecraft, an organisation that promotes and supports peer to peer learning. With a background spanning social entrepreneurship, service design, system change, sustainability and visual communication. she describes herself now as a purpose-led designer and strategist, working for a post-growth future for our finite planet.

As you'll hear, Zahra and Huddlecraft have evolved a system of peer to peer learning that absolutely helps those involved to grow the emotional literacy - to exercise their conceptual and psychological muscles - as a way of shifting our culture's centre of gravity in a more generative direction.

As part of this, she is Strategic Advisor to Money Movers (formerly called OwnIt), a movement designed to empower women to take Climate Action by moving their personal finances - and they are aiming to move £1billion by 2030.

She and Huddlecraft are also involved in the newly formed Collective Imagination Practice Community - and any of you who have listened to more than a couple of podcasts will know that I'm fairly firmly of the belief that if we're going to get to that flourishing future we'd be proud to leave behind, we'll need a massed act of collective re-imagining of our trajectory.

Huddlecraft https://www.huddlecraft.com/

Huddlecraft 'Huddles' (peer learning groups) currently open for sign-up https://www.huddlecraft.com/huddles

Huddlecraft 101 training (learn to apply the power of peer-led approach) https://www.huddlecraft.com/101

Money Movers: women moving money for the planet https://www.wearemoneymovers.com/

Collective Imagination Practice Community https://medium.com/imagination-practice/collective-imagination-practice-community-2023-24-1c1405d33662

Joseph Rowntree Emerging Futures https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/emerging-futures-update

Doughnut Economics Action Lab https://doughnuteconomics.org/

CIVIC SQUARE https://civicsquare.cc/

Medium post on creating 'microclimates' for learning and change inside organisations https://medium.com/huddlecraft/how-can-we-create-microclimates-for-learning-and-change-inside-organisations-70aae0266d9d

Medium post on creating a 'surge' of peer to peer learning over the next decade https://medium.com/huddlecraft/a-surge-of-peer-to-peer-learning-through-multiple-intertwining-movements-55a101b5db5a

Zahra on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zahra-davidson-84710920/

Huddlecraft on Twitter https://twitter.com/Huddlecraft

Huddlecraft on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/huddle.craft/

Meshworks of Being: Building Community on the DAO with Grace Rachmany of Priceless DAO

29 mars 2023 | 81 min

We know that the future is based on Community. What we lack are practical routes to creating communities of community on a worldwide scale - ones that can form and will be resilient enough to survive.

In this week's podcast, therefore, I'm genuinely thrilled to introduce you to one of the women who is breaking new ground in the creation of communities at scale and across wide geographic areas. In quite specific order, Grace Rachmany is a mother, a tech industry trouble shooter, author of over a hundred White Papers, creator of Voice of Humanity, Gangly Sister and - crucial to the trajectory we're taking just now - co-creator of Priceless DAO.

If you've heard our podcast with Cory Feco back in episode #170, you'll know we invited Cory to tell us about DAOs specifically because we knew we were going to talk to Grace and wanted you to have at least a grounding in the nature of Disseminated Autonomous Organisations and the nature of the Web 3 revolution so that we could head straight into Grace's ideas and work in this podcast.

And here we are: Grace is one of those people who has thought outside the boundaries of our current system, about the nature of the current system, about economics and governance and politics and decision making and the creation of viable communities as we head out of the old paradigm into something new and different. The result is Priceless , which is a cause-based DAO in the form of a networked nation, which says it is dedicated to creating a true alternative economy and alternative citizenship for its members.

In pursuit of this, Priceless funds economic experiments that are designed to replace the current monetary system. The holders of PricelessDAO tokens can create whatever they want with the DAO, while the founders of Priceless Economics develop decentralized economic models that support life on earth.

At Priceless, we are convinced that the existing financial system is crumbling and at the end of life. While many projects seek to salvage what we’ve got, Priceless is looking forward to creating a completely new system that will be a destination for those trying to escape the collapse of everything.

I mean, you know everything’s collapsing, right? What can you do about it? At the very least you can give your sh*tcoins to PricelessDAO. Any funds we have will be used to research, design, prototype, and deploy economic models that respect humans and the planet.

Which is just what we're here for. Truly. If you want to know more, or to be part of her thinking, follow the links below - and then stay tuned for the bonus podcast, in which we recorded the follow-up conversation on the nature of cryptocurrency and Ponzi schemes and the global financial crash(es).

Grace's website https://gracerachmany.com/
Priceless website https://pricelessdao.io/
Grace's Medium posts https://rebeccarachmany.medium.com/group-currency-what-if-you-could-only-transact-as-a-community-38f4234f72c
Grace on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccarachmany/recent-activity/
Drea Burbank and the Savimbo project: https://www.savimbo.com/

Bonus: Exploring the banking crash with Grace Rachmany - in which I ask all the questions I never asked before...

29 mars 2023 | 46 min

Dancing with the Muppets of Cutthroat Island: Transforming Industry to create a genuine Green Revolution with Dr Simon Michaux

22 mars 2023 | 75 min

How much actual stuff do we have in the world compared to what we need to make the 'Green Revolution' happen?

This week's guest is another of those recently elevated to my pantheon of people I Must Listen To whatever they say and however they say it and I am genuinely thrilled to welcome him onto the podcast.

Dr Simon Michaux has been a physicist and geologist. His PhD is in mining engineering and he worked for years in the mining industries in Australia. In 2015, he moved to Europe and became involved in urban mining, or reverse metallurgy, which is to say the recovery of essential minerals from existing waste - what we would call the beginnings of the circular economy - and from there, he moved to Scandinavia where he now works in the Geological Survey of Finland and is a regular advisor to the Finnish parliament.

From all of which you will gather that Simon is deeply embedded in the actual physicality of the world we inhabit - and, because he's also committed to creating the future we want and need, he is growing ideas of the future we could inhabit. Of all the people I've encountered as I roam the digital web for ways we can shift our relationship with the living web, Simon is the one who has his finger on the actual logistics of what's going on - he can list the reasons why most of the targets for our transition away from fossil fuels are simply logistically impossible. It's not until you hear his crunching of the numbers that you begin to realise how much arm waving is going on in the corridors of power. How much raw self-delusion is being practice by the people who we still, at some deep subconscious level, trust to keep the show on the road. And I think we need to know this. It's hard. It's sobering. It's shocking, on many levels, but if we aren't grounded in reality then we're not going to build forward So hold onto your seats - this isn't easy, but we do need to know it. And then we need to plan our responses. Fast.

(NB - the accompanying image is of a copper mine and the pollution from it is destroying an entire water system)

Simon's website: https://www.simonmichaux.com/
Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
Answers to Hot Topics around the above report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdJH3tKjvzM
What are the Raw Material Supply Bottlenecks to the Green Transition? The Need for a New Plan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o0xzCa2fLQ
Interview with Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute https://www.manhattan-institute.org/presidents-update-2021/interview-mark-mills

Reasons to be Sheepful: from wedding shawls to burial shrouds with Yuli Somme of Bellacouche

15 mars 2023 | 78 min

Our crisis, our challenge, our opportunity is complex. More than ever, it matters now that we not get caught in separate silos where we focus just on atmospheric carbon, or just on plastic pollution, or just on our cultural addiction to fossil fuels. We need responses that cover all of these fields, new stories that let us move into a future we can barely imagine.

So, that's what this podcast is for: to give a platform to people whose perspectives are new or different or challenging or inspiring in ways that will help us all to weave new stories of how we could do things differently - and this week, we're talking to Yuli Summe of Bellacouche, whose work has taken her from weaving to felt making to the creation of burial shrouds. Yuli is a maker, someone deeply grounded in our connection to the ancestry of the land and the ways we have sustained ourselves from it. She's been working with wool since childhood and is embedded in the rich lore of shepherd, farm and land, of the fullers and spinners and weavers that were so much a core of our history - and will be again as we move to a more localised, simpler economy and way of living. This conversation moved from the courage of one man in the second world war, to the courage of his daughter in laying to rest her fear of death, through fields and high tors and the rhythms of feltmaking. It felt to me like a song to our future and I hope it leads you forward in the same way.

Bio
Yuli was born in Norway and although she has lived most of her life in Devon, the traditional weaving and knitting heritage of Norway has deeply influenced her since she was old enough to hold needles to knit with. She is a member of Make SouthWest and through this organisation, has been an active teacher of felt making and textile understanding in schools, and is part of the Green Maker Initiative.

At the turn of the millennium, an Arts Council grant allowed Yuli to travel to Turkey to work with traditional master feltmakers, and it was there that she started thinking about a “lifetime” garment made of felt, inspired by witnessing the making of a ‘kepenek’, a felt cloak traditional to Kurdish shepherds.

Yuli is a member of the South West FibreShed – a growing community of fibre and dye growers, processors, makers and manufacturers across the South West whose aim is to produce home-grown textiles and garments in a more healthy, resilient and regenerative textile ecosystem. This group is affiliated to the international FibreShed group.

Another Man's Shoes https://www.waterstones.com/book/another-mans-shoes/sven-somme/9780954913731
Yuli Somme Bellacouche https://www.bellacouche.com/yuli-somme/
Human Composting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LJSEZ_pl3Y
Good Funeral Guide https://goodfuneralguild.co.uk/
Natural Death Centre http://naturaldeath.org.uk/

Technology for a future that works with Cory Feco of the DOI Foundation

8 mars 2023 | 77 min

The one big question that this podcast exists to answer is - what does our future look like when it works?
When we endeavour to answer this, there seems quite a clear divide between those us born in the twentieth century who grew up in a world before broadband, and those born in the nineties and later who never got to know the strange weeble of the dial up tone, but instead grew in a world where their every move was dissected by their peers on social media.

We can look some other time at the emotional and spiritual impact of that but today I wanted to look at the people who are determined to use the rapidly evolving technology for good. I'm going to interview someone called Grace Rachmany in a couple of weeks time. She's setting up a DAO, a disseminated autonomous organisation, to create not just a community, but a network of communities that - she says - could be free of the need to use dollars, or pounds or the currency of their nation, in 10 years.

Which sounds pretty exciting. But I to understand how it works and what it is she's planning to do, we needed to know what a DAO actually is. And to get to that, we have to unpick Blockchain a bit, because the one thing I learned when we invited Reiki Cordon to speak on blockchain last summer, was that it went over a lot of people's heads.

So this is the first time I've actually sought out someone on the basis that they could tell me what I wanted to hear. I wanted an idiot's guide to blockchain, to DAOs, to web 3.0 and the web 3 revolution because that seemed like something this podcast ought to know about.

All of which leads me to introduce this week's guest.

Cory Feco is a member of the DOI foundation which describes itself as 'an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure.' Cory himself is a podcaster at the DOICast - which is one of my must-listen podcasts - I've put a link in the show notes. Beyond that, he describes himself as a web 3 impactivist, and a recovering workaholic. He started as an entrepreneur at 9 selling products from catalogs door to door and ever since have been the most satisfied when walking the path less tread. He has founded and failed, founded and sold, trained hundreds, consulted dozens, lead teams of many, lead only himself, won some awards, and made countless mistakes - and through this the one constant has been growth.

He is completely plugged in to a world about which I only have a transient and shallow understanding, but I know enough to know that it could make or break our chances of a flourishing future.

Advaya https://advaya.co (soon to be advaya.life)
Advaya course with Nathali Nahai https://www.digitalage-course.com/

DOI Foundation https://www.doi.org/
DOICast podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-doicast/id1618462106
CryptoWorld https://shopcryptoworld.com/
DOA HQ https://www.daohq.co/

EarthSong Seeds https://earthsongseeds.co.uk/

Be Kind, Be Useful, Create Giants in the Sky: transforming community with Alan Lane of Slung Low

1 mars 2023 | 67 min

The Accidental Gods podcast exists to set the conditions for emergence into a new system: to bring a critical mass of us to a place where emergence into a new system is a rewarding reality. To get there, we bring to you some of the many astonishingly creative, compassionate, switched-on people who are working at the leading edge of change.
Alan Lane is one of these people. He's the artistic director of the theatre company Slung Low, which in turn is one of the most innovative theatre companies in the UK, if not in the world. Absolutely embedded in the neighbourhood in which they work, Slung Low are committed to their core principles of 'Be Kind, Be Useful, Everyone gets to do what they want. Nobody gets to tell anyone else what they can't do.' (within obvious limits - as you'll hear).

Alan is also the author of the book 'The Club on the Edge of Town' which is subtitled 'A Pandemic Memoir' but is so, so much more - this is the story of how Slung Low arose, how it came to be entered in the oldest Working Mens' Club in England (unable to change the name), and ultimately became a Food Bank during the pandemic. It's the story of standing in the rain, of keeping promises, of integrity and grit and sheer bloody-minded tenacity. Most of all, it's a story of how a small group of committed people made a huge difference to the lives of their neighbours and community. It is also the story of the culture clash that you'll hear more about in the podcast, and that led, ultimately, to Slung Low moving elsewhere in Leeds.

Since then, their transformation to being part of the team that put on the utterly magical opening event of the Leeds Year of Culture 2023, where the city's most famous pop star spoke to a god - is the stuff of legend.

In their new world, their core purpose is to make Awe and Wonder happen - and they are doing it with commitment, integrity, enthusiasm and raw inspiration.

In this episode, Alan tells the story that led from standing in the rain in Nottinghill to creating technical magic on a stage in Leeds. We explore the power of story to change people's lives and the value of commitment to the things we believe in. We dig deep into Alan's absolute moral imperatives and his compassion for the people around him, people he values, people he teaches to value themselves in a world that, in his words, 'teaches us we're cogs in a machine and we're scum' is heartbreakingly wonderful. Truly, if the whole world was inspired as Leeds is being inspired, we'd be in a different place. (And the god that rose out of the river was a world first: made with drones, everyone said it was impossible. And Alan and the team made it happen anyway. How good of a metaphor is that for what we have to do now in our emerging new system?)

Bio:
Alan Lane is Artistic Director of Slung Low directing most of their work over the last decade including projects with the Barbican, the RSC, The Almeida, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Liverpool Everyman, Sheffield Theatres, Singapore Arts Festival and the Lowry. Slung Low make large scale people’s theatre work on stages, trains, castles, swimming pools, fishing boats and town centres.

In 2017 Slung Low headlined Hull UK City of Culture 2017 with Flood by James Phillips: a 4 Part epic performed online, live and on the BBC. Over half a million people saw a part of Flood. It won a Royal Televisual Award Yorkshire for innovation in drama.

In 2019 the company took over management of the oldest working men’s club in Britain, The Holbeck in South Leeds. Initially, they ran this venue as a Pay What You Decide creative and community space, but during lockdown, they transformed into one of the only non-means-tested Food Banks in the country. Their work there was transformative and Alan wrote the book 'The Club on the Edge of Town' out of their experiences there.
Late last year, the company moved venues to a warehouse next to their favourite primary school and began to help organise the astonishing, miraculous, technologically outstanding (and magically wonderful) opening event to Leeds Year of Culture 2023, which culminated in Corrine Bailey Rae talking to a god in front of a rugby stadium filled with 10,000 artists.

Slung Low https://www.slunglow.org/
Arts Together Leeds https://artstogetherleeds.co.uk/partner/slung-low/
Leeds 2023 https://leeds2023.co.uk/
Buy 'The Club on the Edge of Town' https://salamanderstreet.com/product/the-club-on-the-edge-of-town-paperback/
The Club on the Edge of Town audio version https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Club-on-the-Edge-of-Town-Audiobook/B0B8TKMXWQ

One Planet Living: Mapping Minds to create a new Consciousness, with Pooran Desai, OBE.

22 februari 2023 | 66 min

It is our mission on this podcast - and the wider membership community from which it arose - to open doors and break down barriers, to bring forward the ideas and the actions of, and give voice to, the absolutely amazingly creative people who get that business is not usual, that the reality we have created for ourselves is misguided at best - and dangerously toxic at worst - and are doing their best to bring about change in a timescale that matters.

This week, we spoke with Pooran Desai, whose scope and scale and grasp of the nature of the problem is unmatched. Pooran is a serial environmental entrepreneur and it felt like a breath of fresh air, to connect with someone who sees the bigger picture and is working to affect change at all levels.

We explored topics that ranged from the building of Britain's first sustainable community at BedZED in London, to the nature of the meta-crisis and why measurement of single indices is one of the key factors in the emergency. On the way, we discusses the different natures of left and right brain thinking and how they apply to databases (and why databases are so critical to the way that business and so politics works in the world), the evolution of sustainable development goals (and why those started out well but have become yet another way of greenwashing business in its endless drive for profit), the nature of reality and how Daoist meditation can give us insights into our own delusions…and ways we could save the NHS 80% of its costs. This was a hard-hitting conversation. We didn't mince words or step around ideas. I found it exhilarating, enlightening and inspiring and hope you do to.

Bio:

Pooran Desai has been a neuroscientist, a property developer, and a technology entrepreneur, but all of it has been in service to a regenerative future. In 1994, he co-founded one of the world’s first sustainability organisations, Bioregional which is responsible for setting-up enterprises in sustainable forestry, organic farming, recycling and real estate development.

He assembled a wealth of environmental and sustainable talent to create the UK’s first zero-carbon urban eco-village, BedZED, which was completed in 2002. In 2004, he was awarded an OBE for services to sustainability - in the days when the word still meant something seriously worthwhile.

Pooran led Bioregional’s One Planet Living® initiative for 18 years, leading teams that created sustainability strategies in 30 countries creating a set of principles that served as inspiration for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).

Pooran is author of OnePlanet Communities: A Real-Life Guide for Sustainable Living, and is a trustee of the Design Council, supporting their 'Design for Planet' mission.

In 2019, Pooran founded OnePlanet, to create a software suite that helps people, companies, policy makers shift to networked thinking - to let go of the constraints of consensus reality and the linear thinking that got us into this mess, and move towards systemic thinking that might get us out of it.

Links

Alan Watts recordings https://alanwatts.org/audio/
Sharon Blackie Post-Heroic Journey https://open.substack.com/pub/sharonblackie/p/the-post-heroic-journey
Knepp https://knepp.co.uk/

Saving Chocolate! and finding solutions to the meta crisis with Nicola Peel

15 februari 2023 | 74 min

Accidental Gods podcast exists to open doors and break down barriers, to bring forward the ideas and the actions of and give voice to the gloriously creative people who give their lives to the idea and realisation of a regenerative future. In this wide-ranging conversation with Solutionist and film-maker, Nicola Peel, we learned of the horrors of oil spills in the Amazon and the ways fungi could clear them if only the oil companies would let the work begin. We explored the nature of regenerative farming in the global north and - particularly - in Ecuador where agro-forestry is rebuilding soil on land that had previously been devastated by beef farming - and how the polycultures might save the cacao industry. We contemplated death and burial, whether carbon offsetting can be useful, the concept of air as a global commons and how to integrate localism into the map of a flourishing future. At the end - as often happens - I stopped recording but we carried on speaking and it seemed that Nicola was saying things that definitely should have been in the podcast. So I hit record again. Twice. We've stitched those bits on at the end for you.

Bio
Nicola Peel is a Solutionist, environmentalist, film maker and host of the Solutions podcast. For over 20 years her work has been focussed on environmental solutions. As a filmmaker, she has made documentaries to raise awareness, built rainwater systems for those drinking contaminated water and brought together scientists to use fungi to clean up oil spills. She has built buildings made of thousands of plastic bottles filled with rubbish and taught agroforestry to regenerate the soil and prevent further deforestation of the Amazon.

She believes that around the world, people are waking up to the climate and ecological breakdown we are facing. For many they think it is up to governments or big business or someone else to fix the problems and feel disempowered to be a part of the change themselves. Believing, too, that every one of us have different strengths and different areas of expertise, Nicola's focus is to identify the issues we face and see what opportunities and solutions there are to address these issues.

Nicola's website https://www.nicolapeel.com/
Nicola's Solutions podcast https://www.patreon.com/solutionist
Nicola's annual newsletter https://mailchi.mp/3bb712bfc940/a-year-in-the-life-of-a-solutionist-nicolas-news-and-views-2022
Film 'Blood of the Amazon' https://youtu.be/Y5b--eRsX9o
Film 'A Solution to Pollution' https://youtu.be/KO1WjFRL_XA
Research into Taro and its impacts https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5610413/taro-market-analysis-report-industry-size

Living in a Post-Carbon, Post-Capital, Post Urban world - with Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

8 februari 2023 | 65 min

Unlocking Curiosity: Regenerating Business from the packaging up with Jo Chidley of Re and Beauty Kitchen

1 februari 2023 | 60 min

Jo Chidley is one of those forces of nature, unconstrained by the way things are usually done. As the co-founders of Beauty Kitchen, she and her partner refused venture capital, keeping their business free to become a B-Corp and to put people and planet ahead of profit. She's dedicated to producing the best outcome for the people who work for her as well as for the people who buy her products. And in the process of finding the best ways forward, she came across the horror of single use packaging and the devastation it's causing both in terms of the extraction and the post-use pollution. So Jo founded 'Re' to find ways to bring 'reuse' back into the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' triad. Now, she's invited to Davos to speak about the way this could transform the vast global packaging industry.

So in this week's podcast, we talked about why this is essential to transforming our world, and how it could work. Jo has ideas that seem (and are) innovative now, but ten years from now, will be the way things are done. With enthusiasm, integrity and a great deal of humour, she offers solutions to the meta-crisis that rely on each one of us changing behaviour - and she's devoting her life to making it possible - indeed inevitable - that we do.

Bio:
Jo Chidley is a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of Beauty Kitchen and Re.

Founded in 2014, Beauty Kitchen is the highest scoring B Corp in the UK beauty industry and it's changing the face of the beauty industry with its aim to create the most effective, natural, and sustainable beauty products in the world. Jo went on to found Re, a company devoted to reducing the mountains of waste from our global $1tr annual single use packaging industry. As one of the pioneers of sustainable beauty, Jo and her company have accelerated the transition to Reuse through sustainable innovation by implementing Cradle to Cradle design into Beauty Kitchen’s circular approach. Jo's been instrumental in developing the world’s first closed-loop solution for beauty packaging and powered the service behind the ground-breaking Re programme which is resuable packaging for personal care brands & retailers. Beauty Kitchen is recognised on the UK’s 50 Most Disruptive Companies list and has won numerous industry awards, including ‘Who’s Who in Natural Beauty’.

Jo has won multiple industry awards, including the Natwest Everywoman Award in the Brand of the Future Category and was recognised as one of the 10 most influential people in Natural Beauty in the UK. She’s been featured in the likes of ELLE, Woman & Home magazine and BBC News and is a founding member of the Global Advisory Board for Sustainable & Natural Cosmetics. Jo was voted Nr 2 in the 2018 Who’s Who of Natural Beauty.

The Beauty Kitchen https://beautykitchen.co.uk/
Re https://www.rereworld.com/
Jo on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/jochidley/
wet uplink https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/
The Ethical Consumer https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/

Stop eating Chicken! - The future of food with Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox

25 januari 2023 | 54 min

Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert with The Soil Association. 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 goodness, it's been a world changer - since its hardback publication, Rob's become a global superstar: invited to speak to groups across the spectrum of industry and culture about the nature of our relationship with the food that we eat. We left our first conversation each feeling that we'd just begun to scrape the surface of possibility and it would be good to talk again.
We had scheduled another podcast for later this year, but I saw that the book had just come out in paperback and that coincided with our having a total technological crash in this week's interview. So Rob really kindly agreed to fill in at super short notice so that we could talk more about life and death and food and the nature of the meta-crisis.
There's so much to this that really cuts to the core of who we are and where we're heading as a species, and we ended - again, feeling that there was more to say. But in the meantime, we explored the nature of the food system, the concept of precision fermentation, what makes 'whole' foods and how we might feed the world without industrial agriculture. Rob gave his one big suggestion for moving things forward - stop eating chicken.
At the end, we opened another huge topic and began to explore the nature of death, and who our fear of the unknown leads us to denial of the meta-crisis and, in the end, denial of death itself. So we'll be back when Rob's next book comes out, but in the meantime, here are more thoughts on the social, political, practical and moral aspects of how we take in the building blocks of life.

Radio 4 Book of the Week https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hf27
Rob's website https://rob-percival.com/about/
The Meat Paradox in paperback https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9780349144573
Rob on Twitter https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_
Previous Episode https://accidentalgods.life/the-meat-paradox/
Green Alliance https://green-alliance.org.uk/
GA Report https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/shaping-uk-land-use-priorities-for-food-nature-and-climate/

Bionutrient Food Association https://www.bionutrient.org/
Global Governance Futures podcast that refers to how we cope (or don't) with the inevitability of our own mortality https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-governance-futures-imperfect-utopias-or-bust/id1548522280?i=1000590656384

Cultures of Commoning: Quadratic voting, indigenous connectivity and pacifist chess with Ruth Catlow

18 januari 2023 | 71 min

This week's conversation ranges over an astonishingly wide range of topics from ways to facilitate interspecies communication through play and ways to play 3-person pacifist chess (and thereby change the world), to the nature of democracy and how the use of quadratic voting on the blockchain to inspire artistic endeavours in north London might be expanded nationally and internationally on the scale of global governance to shift the cultural dominance away from capital hegemony to a more fluid, genuinely inclusive democracy.

All this in conversation with Ruth Catlow. Ruth is co-founder (with Marc Garrett) and co-director (with Charlotte Frost) of Furtherfield, a project based in Finsbury Park in London which organises for inclusivity and equity in art and technology and advocates for their use in imagining and building real social change and positive environmental impact.

Background and Bio:
Furtherfield's mission is to open up the tools and debates of the exclusionary realms of art and technology for collective action for collective good. Ruth and her colleagues invest time and energy in decentralised and distributed p2p practices, fostering new creative collaborations between artists and communities, as well as challenging debates about the role of art and technology in society.

With this, Ruth's work advances critical discussions of emergent technologies and their implications and she has, for example, led the way in terms of understanding what blockchain technologies mean for the arts and beyond. She directs the Furtherfield decentralised arts lab, DECAL and is also key to the development of live action role play (LARP) games for research, partnering with researchers to craft imagined/futuristic scenarios in which a group of players explore a complex socio-digital issue.

Since late 2020, Ruth has been immersed in the massive Interspecies Treaty LARP as part of her participation in the EU Horizon 2020 funded CreaTures project. All participants advance more-than-human justice by playing the game as other species, representing them in Assemblies to discuss and plan an Interspecies Festival that will celebrate the signing of 'an Interspecies Treaty of Cooperation (known as 'The Treaty of Finsbury Park') in 2025.
Ruth is also one of the organisers of the 'Radical Friends' conference in 2022 and co-author/editor of the book that arose from it called 'Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts' and co--PI of the Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab.

Furtherfield https://www.furtherfield.org
DECAL https://decal.furtherfield.org/
Ruth's website https://ruthcatlow.net/

CultureStake app https://www.furtherfield.org/culturestake/
More on the XDai blockchain https://medium.com/mycrypto/what-is-the-xdai-chain-and-why-should-i-try-it-40f539732fb4
Radical Friends https://torquetorque.net/publications/radical-friends/
Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/blockchain-lab/
The Treaty of Finsbury Park https://www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/

Cade Diehm - paper co-written with Ruth https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/finsbury-park-2025
Finsbury Park https://www.parksandgardens.org/places/finsbury-park
PBES Report https://ipbes.net/global-assessment

Being the Change: Journeys in Service to Life with Gail Bradbrook

11 januari 2023 | 64 min

This week's guest is a friend of the podcast, Dr Gail Bradbrook. Best known for her role in co-founding Extinction Rebellion, Gail is one of our nation's (and our world's) deepest thinkers on radical change: what will it take to shift the juggernaut of predatory capitalism from the orgy of extraction, consumption and destruction that has brought us to the edge of crisis, and instead turn it towards a celebration of life in all its forms?
Gail is also a leading beacon of practical activism - how can we bring the collective conversation to bear on the existential crises of our time?
In our conversation, Gail honours the teachers that have helped her to find balance and insight, and to find practical, clear-eyed hope amidst all the potential for despair. We go on to explore her work in BCAN (see below) and, particularly, to explore the nature of horizontal organising. In a world where half the (western) population is wedded to the old hierarchical, patriarchal structures of top-down dominance, what happens in the other half when we experiment with other, less culturally familiar ways of being? Extinction Rebellion was one of the biggest, and most public expressions of horizontal organising in the modern contemporary world. A great deal of theory was put into practice and the results were often visible in newspaper headlines. Recorded a mere handful of days after the 'We Quit" press release from XR, we look at some of the lessons learned, and how we might do things differently next time.

BIO:
Dr Gail Bradbrook has been researching, planning, and training for mass civil disobedience since 2010 and is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR). Since its launch in October 2018, XR has spread around the world so that now, there are more than 1150 XR groups in 75 countries.
Gail has trained in molecular biophysics, and her talk on the science of the ecological crisis, the psychology of active participation, and the need for civil disobedience has gone viral and been inspired many to join XR. She is from Yorkshire, the mother of two boys, the daughter of a coal miner, and was named by GQ as one of the top 50 influencers in the UK, and honoured in the 2020 Women’s Hour Power list for her part in instigating a rebellion against the British Government.
More recently, she is one of the cofounders of the Be the Change Affinity Network of XR activists exploring ways to shift our cultural rigidity into something regenerative and distributive by design.
Gail is a genuine visionary leader - one of one of the deepest, most enlightened thinkers we know; living at the leading edge of change and exploring radical answers to the questions of our time. She's also deeply spiritual and emotionally thoughtful, and it's always an enormous joy to explore with her the big questions of our time: what are we here for and how can we shift the entire nature of our culture in practical ways?

TED Talk - My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor https://youtu.be/UyyjU8fzEYU
Gail's Telegram link: https://t.me/+i4zNgXH_oDc4YjM0
Amanita Dreamer https://www.amanitadreamer.net/
Seed Sistas - https://seedsistas.co.uk/
3 Horizons model - https://www.boardofinnovation.com/blog/what-is-the-3-horizons-model-how-can-you-use-it/
Netflix How To Change Your Mind - https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80229847

Plan. Pause. Reset: Real Steps to Radical Transformation with Eva Schonveld and Justin Kenrick

4 januari 2023 | 75 min

Three years on: Manda's reflections on our third anniversary - and looking forward into 2023

30 december 2022 | 40 min

Food, Farming and Feeding the Soul: with Satish Kumar in conjunction with the Oxford Real Farming Conference

28 december 2022 | 59 min

Satish Kumar is one of the absolute titans of the Regenerative movement in the UK. In 1962, he and and one of his fellow Jain monks made an 8,000 mile mendicant peace pilgrimage around the world, stopping in the capitals of what the nuclear nations of the earth: Russia, USA, China, France and the UK. He settled in the latter and soon became known for his work in connecting people and ideas. He founded the Small School in Devon and went on to found Schumacher College, deeply rooted in his ideas that education should engage head, hands and heart. In 1973, he founded Resurgence Magazine (now: Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine) and for the next forty three years, was its Editor in Chief, stepping down on his 80th birthday.

This week, Accidental Gods teamed up with the Oxford Real Farming Conference, to speak with Satish as he prepares to head to Oxford where he'll lead a meditation for farmers on the morning of Friday 6th. We explore more deeply his concepts of education, food and farming and the re-connection of people to the living web of life. He ends with a meditation, similar to the one he will lead live in the conference.

Now entering its thirteenth year, the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) is the unofficial gathering of the agroecological farming movement in the UK, including organic and regenerative farming, bringing together practising farmers and growers with scientists and economists, activists and policymakers in a two-day event every January. Working with partners, the conference offers a broad programme that delves deep into farming practices and techniques as well addressing the bigger questions relating to our food and farming system.

Working with partners in the UK and internationally, the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) brings the real food and farming movement together, attracting people from around the world who are interested in transforming our food system. In 2021 and 2022, the conference went entirely online, but the physical gathering has traditionally been in Oxford (it was set up as an alternative to the Oxford Farming Conference, which happens at the same time) and this year, there will again be a physical programme.

ORFC has always been the place to share progressive ideas. Subjects include agroecology, regenerative agriculture, organic farming and indigenous food and farming systems. The broad programme delves deep into farming practices and techniques as well as addressing the bigger questions relating to our food and farming system.

Crucially, it has always been the participants who provide the ORFC programme. The sessions reflect their diversity, ranging from the intricacies of soil microbiology to new kinds of marketing; setting up a micro-dairy to the value of introducing mob grazing and agroforestry to the farm; from the joys and tribulations of farming to the kind of economic structure we need to support the kind of food system we need. It is this diversity of participants and interests that keeps ORFC alive and growing.

Online tickets are available. The ORFC works with the interpretation collective, COATI, to make sure sessions are accessible.

Follow the conference on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook for all the latest news and speaker announcements.

Online Programme https://orfc.org.uk/orfc-2023-online-programme/

Traditional Solstice Celebration: Looking back and looking forward with Della Duncan and Nathalie Nahai

20 december 2022 | 64 min

As the year stills and tilts afresh, we bring you our annual moment of reflection with two podcast hosts we really admire. There's a meditation at the end, to bring you into your own space of stillness and reflection, but ahead of this, we delve into where we think the global human psyche is at this moment, how we feel when we look upstream, and what we see; and what makes our hearts sing, and what does it prompt us to do: core questions that open up a wealth of ideas, reflections and imaginings of how our world could be as we step forward into 2023, amidst all the tipping points, clear-eyed, strong-hearted and ready to give it all we've got.

Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of The Hive Podcast, a series that enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. With a diverse background in human behaviour, persuasive tech and the arts, she brings a unique vantage point from which to examine the complex challenges we face today. Her best-selling book: Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion has been adopted as the go-to manual by business leaders and universities alike, and her new book, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. A consultant and facilitator to Fortune 500 companies, Nathalie also serves as a behavioural science advisor and helps organisations to ethically apply behavioural science principles to enhance their business. Having lectured at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, Nathalie's ability to ignite conversation and offer tools and strategies with which to harness human potential, has helped countless organisations transform how they approach business online, with clients including Google, Accenture, Unilever and Harvard Business Review, among others.

Della Z Duncan is a Renegade Economist. Areas of her livelihood garden include hosting the Upstream Podcast, challenging mainstream economic thinking through documentaries and conversations including most recently, The Green Transition Pt 1: The Problem with Green Capitalism and Pt 2: A Green Deal for the People, supporting individuals as a Right Livelihood Coach, helping transition businesses and organizations as a post-capitalist consultant, and teaching and facilitating retreats and workshops on the Work that Reconnects, Systems Change, and Post-Capitalist Economics. Della is also the Course Development Manager of Fritjof Capra’s Capra Course on the Systems View of Life, a founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and a Senior Lecturer of Renegade Economics and Regenerative Livelihoods at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Santa Cruz Permaculture, Vital Cycles Permaculture, and Gaia Education.

Upstream podcast with Della Duncan https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/upstream/id1082594532
The Hive podcast with Nathalie Nahai https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-hive-podcast/id1387510537

Earthborne Rangers: Playing our way to a future that works with Andrew Navaro

14 december 2022 | 85 min

The average child in the western world attends 10,000 hours of school - and plays 20,000 hours of games. In the 'adult' world, many of us spend hours devoted to levelling up our characters and exploring imaginary worlds. If the Tech-bros get their way, we'll soon live entirely in the Metaverse and have minimal contact with the real world beyond the walls of our concrete hutches.

But imagine a different world: where the people of earth have come together to solve the multi-polar traps of the climate, ecological, sociological, economic and political crisis of our times. How might the world look in a couple of thousand years if we've made it through to the flourishing future we want for our descendants? That's the premise of Earthborne Rangers, a tabletop card game that's the brainchild of Andrew Navaro, Founder and Creative Director of Earthborne Games, a company that 'creates breathtaking tabletop games that prioritize environmental sustainability in every aspect of their creation – from manufacturing to fulfillment. Every Earthborne product is made as sustainably as possible, with unparalleled transparency throughout the process. There’s a hopeful future on the horizon, one that reimagines our relationship with the Earth and the stories we tell on the gaming table, and we’re going to create it together.

In this week's inspiring episode, we talk to Andrew about the game's genesis, about how where we set our energy defines where we go, and why it was important to him to create a game that fostered cohesion and community, sharing and exploring while still being fun and exciting to play. As the game nears completion and launch, we talk about the Kickstarter campaign that funded it and the design challenges, as well as the deeply thought-through ethos of the world Andrew and his team have created.

As we head into the holidays, join us for a world of new ideas.

Order the game here https://earthbornegames.com/
The Rulebook https://earthbornegames.com/wp-content/uploads/EBR001_Rulebook_web.pdf
Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal https://uk.bookshop.org/books/reality-is-broken-why-games-make-us-better-and-how-they-can-change-the-world/9780099540281

Living Well within our Limits: Actions for systemic change with Prof Julia Steinberger

7 december 2022 | 42 min

Data is the New Plastic! Ethics, Accuracy and AI with Dr John Collins of Machine Intelligence Garage

30 november 2022 | 59 min

Telling the Truth and Moving Forward: Building the Moderate Flank with Rupert Read

23 november 2022 | 58 min

End of year round-up: Manda's favourite podcasts, fiction and non-fiction of 2022

16 november 2022 | 56 min

Regenerative by Design: Creating Communities that work with Charlie Fisher of Transition by Design

9 november 2022 | 73 min

In a world that feels as if all the certainties are breaking down, how can we build the communities of place and of purpose that will give us the resilience to bridge from the old structures to the new? Exploring deeply practical ways to build community with Charlie Fisher.

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 use can 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/

Fractal Improv: finding generosity, connection and compassion amidst our fear with Belina Raffy

2 november 2022 | 70 min

We know our climate is in crisis and that time is running out. But we also know that screaming at people to wake up is not working. What if we gave ourselves permission to tell the truth - and the skills to do it with humour and compassion so that we didn't trigger the resistances of fear? This Episode, we explore stand-up and improv in sustainable communications with Belina Raffy.

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/ .

Compass: Charting a Progressive Route through the Political Maelstrom with Neal Lawson

26 oktober 2022 | 52 min

In a world where our 'democracy' is manifestly not fit for purpose, how can we turn the brief, bright fireworks of political sanity into floodlights of progressive values, of liquid democracy that leads to an equitable, regenerative culture? With Neal Lawson of the progressive campaign group, Compass.

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

The Kindness of Strangers: Ocean Rowing, Solitude and Transformation with Dr Roz Savage MBE

19 oktober 2022 | 72 min

What happens when we realise we're trying to be something we're not? For Roz Savage, this led to a transformation that took her from Management Consultant to the first woman to row solo across the world's 3 big oceans. Now she devotes her life to the healing of the planet.

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/

Matereality and Corporate Mischief: reshaping Business as if the job were to create a world that works with B.Lorraine Smith

12 oktober 2022 | 64 min

What if businesses existed not to price-gouge consumers and destroy the planet, but to be part of a pathway to a flourishing future? What if the end-of-year reports were not expensive exercises in greenwash, but were actually truthful - and useful. With B.Lorraine Smith, creator of Matereality.

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

Flourish: Designing new paradigms and expanding our agency with Sarah Ichioka

5 oktober 2022 | 76 min

What will it take to restore balance in our world? How can we repair our devastated environments, and secure future generations' survival? And what's they key to unlock the mindset shift to enable truly regenerative transformation? With Sarah Ichioka, co-author of 'Flourish: Design Paradigms for our Planetary Emergency'.

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

Planet, not Profit: Envisioning a genuinely sustainable future in a not-for-profit world with Jennifer Hinton

28 september 2022 | 76 min

Re-Enchantment: Creating rituals to re-discover our embodied sovereignty with Isla McLeod

21 september 2022 | 66 min

The Meat Paradox: Ethics, morality and shamanic spirituality: exploring the politics of protein with Rob Percival

14 september 2022 | 73 min

We are human because for most of our evolutionary history, we have eaten meat whilst treating animals as relations and giving thanks to them. We held these the two sides of this paradox in tension. But in the past decades, we have created hells on earth in our industrialised farming and abattoirs so that eating from them is no longer remotely ethical. How do we resolve the paradox? Is global veganism the answer or are there other ways to create a generative relationship with our humanity and the food we eat? With Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox.

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

Hagitude: Paving the way to empowered elderhood with Sharon Blackie

7 september 2022 | 77 min

Beyond the tribal divisions of right and wrong: Exploring Restorative Engagement with Sophie Docker

31 augusti 2022 | 70 min

We know that tribalism is destroying us, that the need for 'us' to be right and 'them' to be wrong and to become enraged when we're challenged…is what's destroying us. But how do we change? How do we connect across our differences and hear pain without attributing blame? Exploring all this and more with Sophie Docker of The Restorative Engagement Forum and Open Edge.

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.

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

Co-Creators of the future: exploring the birth of a new education system with YouthxYouth co-founder Zineb Mouhyi

24 augusti 2022 | 64 min

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:

A Wild Farming Life: Building a regenerative croft from scratch with Lynn Cassells

17 augusti 2022 | 75 min

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/

The Politics of Being: Wisdom and Science for the new world with Dr Thomas Legrand

10 augusti 2022 | 71 min

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/

Banking on the Beetles: Creating a local circular agro-economy with Liberty Nimmo of The Three Turnips

3 augusti 2022 | 74 min

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/

Of Course We Can! Lifting the lid on possibility with James Brown, mulit-Paralympian Gold Medalist and Climate Activist

27 juli 2022 | 71 min

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

Bridging the Gap: finding truth, reconciliation and climate justice with Saurav Roy

20 juli 2022 | 66 min

Trees, Trees, Trees! How we can grow food around, within and on them - with Ben Raskin

13 juli 2022 | 70 min

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

Weaving with the Land: The future of regenerative farming with Caroline Grindrod

6 juli 2022 | 69 min

Finding the adjacent possible: routes to political and social transformation with Dave Snowden of The Cynefin Company

29 juni 2022 | 65 min

Designing Education fit for the 21st Century with Prof David John Helfand

22 juni 2022 | 52 min

We live in a world where facts are at our fingertips and yet we increasingly live in conceptual silos where ideas are neither broad nor deep. How can we transform our ways of educating ourselves as we grow to adulthood/elderhood in a world where the ground is shifting under our feet? With Professor DJ Helfland, educator and astronomist.

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. 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 to teach. 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

How the World is making our Children Mad - and what to do about it - with Louis Weinstock

15 juni 2022 | 59 min

Connecting with Power: How the media could reframe our world - and why they must - with Donnachadh McCarthy

8 juni 2022 | 54 min

How do we bring the world's media on board with the climate and ecological emergency? What would happen if they became the fourth arm of the climate movement? Donnachadh McCarthy, journalist, columnist, author and long term climate activist explains why this is the single most urgent action we can take.

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

Net Positive: Designing a regenerative future with Prof Janis Birkeland

1 juni 2022 | 59 min

How do we design our built environment to be more than just 'sustainable' (doing things slightly less badly) and instead to be genuinely regenerative where all we build and make heals people and the planet?

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

Imagination Activism: exploring radically better futures (and SolarPunk) with Phoebe Tickell

25 maj 2022 | 47 min

What are the most effective tools we can engage to create new, different, better futures? How do we translate our visions of a generative future into action now? What are our bridging tools, that exist now and take us forward to a world that would work for everyone?

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)

BioRegionalism: The Design Path for Regenerating Earth with Joe Brewer

18 maj 2022 | 57 min

The Holocene is over, we all know this. The Anthropocene may segue into the Symbiocene, with the opportunity to experience the surprising abundance of the world, but only if we work at it. Joe Brewer, bioregionalist and earth regenerator, offers a rawly honest evaluation of where we are, and where we could go.

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/

Regenerative Renaissance: Managing the new economy with Rieki Cordon of Seeds. Part 2 of 2

11 maj 2022 | 41 min

Regenerative Renaissance: Weaving new worlds with cryptocurrencies based on community, with Rieki Cordon of Seeds. Part 1 of 2

4 maj 2022 | 50 min

Thrutopia Bonus: 10th Anniversary of Sacred Economics: Charles and Jimi Eisenstein with Della Duncan

29 april 2022 | 60 min

It's long been said that it's easier to imagine the total extinction of humanity than it is to imagine an end to capitalism. But Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics blew that away. An updated version has been released on the tenth anniversary of publication. Here, Della Duncan talks to Charles and his son Jimi about life, capitalism and building the more beautiful future our hearts know is possible.

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

Waking Up: Power, possibility and politics in a Fractal Age with Indra Adnan

27 april 2022 | 61 min

We all know the current system of politics and governance is utterly dysfunctional. But what will it look like - what will it feel like - to organise ourselves so that everyone has a voice, so that we come together as co-creators and build networks and movements based on our common visions and values? With Indra Adnan of The Alternative Global, author of The Politics of Waking Up.
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

Beautiful Methane: Powering the transformation with Will Llewellyn

20 april 2022 | 57 min

Transformative Connection: Mapping the way through with Thrutopia's originator: Rupert Read

13 april 2022 | 56 min

Down to Earth Derby: Growing a city Green from the inside out

6 april 2022 | 61 min

As our world balances on the edge of transformation, how do we rewild ourselves and our inner cities? How do we build communities of place and of purpose that work, that give us resilience, life, hope - and a deep, enduring, magical connection to the earth? Jamie Quince-Starkey and Ross Nicholson of Down to Earth Derby describe the utterly inspiring work they are doing to achieve exactly this.

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

Buccaneer Economics: Blowing away the old and inventing what works with Prof. Steve Keen

30 mars 2022 | 69 min

The Business of Awakening: Finding a generative future within our businesses with Garry Turner

23 mars 2022 | 62 min

The Gentle Power of Craftivism: With Sarah Corbett of the Craftivist Collective

16 mars 2022 | 67 min

What can you do if you want to be a gentle, careful, strategic activist? The kind who catalyses change in empathic ways, who strives to understand people in power and who uses the magic of hand-crafts to connect at the level where (r)evolution happens? Sarah Corbett of the Craftivist Collective does exactly this and empowers others to join her.

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/

What's an Economy for, anyway? Building an economy for people and planet with Yannick Beaudoin

9 mars 2022 | 61 min

Manda's Basic Tips for Writers

7 mars 2022 | 47 min

Daring to risk: finding our purpose in a turbulent world with Maggie Ostara.

2 mars 2022 | 65 min

What do we do when the world isn't working for us? When our every fibre rages against the machine and our place in it? Maggie Ostara talks about her own path from a high-flying academic career, through to a life of clear purpose and contribution that has authenticity, integrity and power.

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

Activism by Design with David Johnson of the Stanford Law School

23 februari 2022 | 62 min

Stairway to Heaven: Food, Farming and the Regeneration of our landscapes with Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust

16 februari 2022 | 45 min

How can we improve our health, reduce the costs to the NHS by 50%, restore soil biodiversity, reduce flooding, reverse ecosystem decline and draw carbon down from the atmosphere into the earth's crust? Regenerative Farming does all of these and more - and Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust is at the heart of a movement to spread the word around the world.

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

The Whispers of a New World: Stepping into a different future with Tamsin Omond, activist and visionary

9 februari 2022 | 75 min

Thrutopia Masterclass: Writing our Way to a Future we can be Proud to leave as our Legacy.

5 februari 2022 | 18 min

We live on stories. We thrive on visions of futures we want - or terrify ourselves with those we definitely don't. But when it comes to our own near-term future, we don't have the stories that tell us how we got it right. So we need to write them - Urgently!

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

Business Unusual: Can Business sweep us to a Regenerative Future? With Nathalie Nahai

2 februari 2022 | 66 min

Earth Alchemy, Ceremonies and Soul Journeys with shamanic teacher Isla McLeod

26 januari 2022 | 60 min

The UnderTorah: Exploring an Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams with Rabbi Jill Hammer

19 januari 2022 | 65 min

Communities of craft and purpose: building a future that works with Alice Holloway of the London Urban Textiles Commons

12 januari 2022 | 71 min

Parenting in the Climate Emergency: Building a future we'd be proud to leave to our children - with Eva Bishop

5 januari 2022 | 73 min

Power to change the world - for good or really, really bad. With Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute

29 december 2021 | 61 min

Three-Way Solstice PodBoom: The Hive, Upstream and Accidental Gods virtual solstice party

20 december 2021 | 68 min

As we head down into the dark nights of the year, the quiet time of introspection, of assessing the year just gone and thinking forward to the one yet to come, Accidental Gods joins with the hosts of Upstream and The Hive podcasts: 3 women engaged in the best of change to bring the world to a flourishing future.

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

Winter Book Round up with Manda - Best of the Fiction, non-fiction - and podcasts - to share this season

15 december 2021 | 39 min

Ministry for the Future: exploring the ways through that work with Kim Stanley Robinson

8 december 2021 | 62 min

How can we get from the current edge-of-catastrophe to a world where we have addressed the huge issues of the climate and ecological emergency? Only in fiction can we bring the answers together in a vision of a better world. Author Kim Stanley Robinson talks about his 'The Ministry for the Future' - One of Barack Obama's favourite books of last year.

'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

Your money or our lives: Economics, Green New Deal and a post-COP world with James Meadway

1 december 2021 | 66 min

Weaving the Web of Meaning: Building Eco-Civilisation with Jeremy Lent

24 november 2021 | 63 min

How do we evolve the radical new sense of community, connectivity, mutual support - and resilience - that we need as we move into a world of climate breakdown? Jeremy Lent's book The Web of Meaning is the 2nd of 3 that build a picture of an eco-civilisation. In this week's episode, we explore the ways we can all be part of the solution.

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/

Transport for a flourishing Future: Zero deaths, Zero Emissions, Zero Carbon - with John Whitelegg.

17 november 2021 | 68 min

As we lurch towards irreversible climate chaos, how can we begin to pull back from the edge? This week, we look specifically at the area of transport: how can we be mobile and yet reach the 3 Zeroes of Death, Emissions and Carbon? What would it mean to live in an area with fair, free, extensive public transport? And how can we make this happen. Our lively, inspiring conversation with Dr John Whitelegg has answers.

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 also 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

New Myths for Humanity: With Alina Siegfried, author of 'A Future Untold'

10 november 2021 | 61 min

Untangling the Entanglements of Activism with Anthea Lawson, activist, author and organiser

3 november 2021 | 77 min

Anthea Lawson is a campaigner who’s interested in the connections between our inner lives and the world we create together.

In a world of such astonishing inequity, where ever fewer people hold ever more power, how do those of us whose lives are given to change, meet the reality that we are embedded in the system? If we are an integral part of the problem, how can we live the solution into being? Is that even what we're here for? Anthea Lawson has thought about this in immense depth and with huge courage.

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/

COP26 and Beyond: Future strategies to keep us alive with Rupert Read

27 oktober 2021 | 67 min

Be What you Love: total systemic change, one fractal conversation at a time: with Dr Anna Birney of Forum for the Future

20 oktober 2021 | 54 min

If we are going to meet the challenges of the climate, ecological and cultural crisis, we're going to have to change the systems that surround us: Education systems, health care systems, food systems, economic systems... ultimately systems of government. How can we do so peacefully and kindly without leaving vast numbers of people in freefall?

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/

The Future is Farming - Part 2 of 2 with Ffinlo Costain

13 oktober 2021 | 39 min

Regenerative Farming - the key to the Climate and Ecological emergency: with Ffinlo Costain - Part 1 of 2

13 oktober 2021 | 48 min

Towards a Progressive Future: politics and activism in the world of climate change with Jeremy Gilbert

6 oktober 2021 | 61 min

How can we build a progressive political movement that spans the world and that will take us to where we need to be: a future we can be proud of and towards which all of us will want to work? Taking politics, activism, progressive ideals with Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London.

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/

Medicine Woman Speaks: Deena Metzger, elder, wisdom-keeper, poet and visionary brings 19 Ways to a Viable Future

29 september 2021 | 58 min

Thresholds to Truth: Conversations on Climate Change with younger generations with Louis Weinstock

22 september 2021 | 60 min

In a world of uncertainty, transformation and potential catastrophe, how can we find our own truth and, from there, speak with authenticity to the children and young people in our lives about the world that is coming? Louis Weinstock is a celebrated psychotherapist who finds ways to help people of all ages connect with their own truth and share it. In this episode, we explore our attitudes to death, loss - and the climate emergency - and how we can hold the conversations that need to happen.

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. His book about How The World Is Making Our Children Mad And What To Do About It - is available now. See also Episode 131 of the podcast where we talk to Louis about it.

Louis Weinstock: https://louisweinstock.com/
A Part of Me https://www.apartofme.app/
Wider Horizons Summer Festival: https://widerhorizons.events/

Sounds like Magic: a journey into the wild magic of sound with Caro C

15 september 2021 | 58 min

Accidental Gods Podcast bookclub with writer and commentator, Ece Temelkuran

12 september 2021 | 63 min

Circles of Power: Urban Micro Anaerobic Digestion with Rokiah Yaman

8 september 2021 | 56 min

Thresholds of Being: Connecting to the webs of land, life and death with Dr Sharon Blackie

1 september 2021 | 59 min

Power to the People: an Energy R-Evolution for the 21st Century with Howard Johns

25 augusti 2021 | 59 min

Beaver ReWilding: Gateway to Transformation - with Eva Bishop of the Beaver Trust

18 augusti 2021 | 62 min

Meeting the World unmasked - with Forrest Landry

11 augusti 2021 | 63 min

When Forrest Landry was 16 years old, he took a vow to meet the Natural World openly, fully, without any projection or expectation on his part - he was not going to take one step and wait for the rest of the world to take 99 steps to him - he was going to go all the way. His life has been shaped by the experience - and he talks to us this week about where that has taken him.

"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

Climate Pilgrimages converging on COP26 with Bamber Hawes and Benjamin Christie.

4 augusti 2021 | 64 min

COP26 takes place in Scotland in November. How can ordinary people persuade our elected Overlords that they need to change the system? Across the UK, Climate Actions are being prepared. We speak to two people involved in Pilgrimages to Glasgow about what drives them and what they hope will change.

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

A Bridge to the Future: Walking the path between Wisdom and Despair with Matthew Taylor

28 juli 2021 | 52 min

Active Hope: bringing resilience and reconnection to the world with Chris Johnstone and Madeleine Young

21 juli 2021 | 60 min

Being, Belonging, Beyond: Bringing the sacred to a turbulent world with Sue Philips of Sacred Design labs

14 juli 2021 | 56 min

As we hover on the edge of the Great Turning, how can we find a spiritual practice that draws from the roots of who we are and yet provides the sustenance we need to help us navigate our changing world? Sue Philips of Sacred Design Labs explores the possibilities.

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

The Mermaids had to happen! Reflections on G7 activism - and beyond with Sophie Miller

7 juli 2021 | 45 min

Fire at Sea: bringing activism - and mermaids! - to the G7 summit with Sophie Miller

30 juni 2021 | 50 min

How to Save the our Planet: the Facts - with Professor Mark Maslin

23 juni 2021 | 65 min

How did we get here? How bad are things really? Is there still hope? (Yes!) and... crucially - what can we do, individually, collectively, in our businesses, in our governments, around the world, to turn the bus from the edge of the cliff? Professor Mark Maslin is a climate scientist with a mission to explain in clear terms all we need to know. And he does it with panache, enthusiasm and optimism.

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

Behave More! Rebuilding Our World Differently with Alexandra Kurland

16 juni 2021 | 59 min

Behave! - Solving the existential crisis of our times, with Alexandra Kurland

9 juni 2021 | 48 min

The Hijacking of our Common Law - and how to set it free: with Mothiur Rahman of the New Economy Law Center

2 juni 2021 | 68 min

Braver Angels: building trust, empathy and decency across the political chasm

26 maj 2021 | 52 min

River Dart Wild Church: Druid Christian Sam Wernham, founder of a land-based church explores the nature of wild contemplation.

19 maj 2021 | 65 min

Why dignity matters more than nationalist pride with bestselling political columnist Ece Temelkuran

12 maj 2021 | 57 min

ReWorlding: Co-Creating a Politics of Wholeness with Eva Schonveld and Justin Kenrick

5 maj 2021 | 69 min

Webs of Connection: Rebuilding soil, talking with bees and the magic of fungi with Navona Gallegos

28 april 2021 | 58 min

Regenerative Farming - or Agro-ecology - is being widely recognised as one of the best ways to mitigate the climate crisis. But how does it actually work? What can we do with our back gardens, our rooftops, our local verges to make a difference? Navona Gallegos explains the science - and the spirit - of working with the land.

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."

Swimming in a New Sea: creating a different world of money with Jonathan Dawson of Schumacher College

21 april 2021 | 64 min

Wild Weeds/Living Foods: Katrina Blair of Turtle Lake Refuge on Wild Foraging, Plant Whispering and healing the earth

14 april 2021 | 57 min

Honouring the Children: We bequeath them the Earth. What do they need from us in this time of transformation?

7 april 2021 | 48 min

“No decision shall be made and no action taken unless it holds the good of the children of all beings, of this generation and seven hence, at its heart.”

How would our world be if we based every act on the impact it would have down the generations? What do our children - and their children - need us to do now, to grant them a flourishing future? A simple video asks that question and invites our children to answer. We talk to its makers.

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

Wild Law and Justice in action: Spiritual Activism with Mothiur Rahman, founder of New Economy Law

31 mars 2021 | 62 min

ReWilding the Forests of Life: Alan Watson Featherstone, Trees for Life and moving forward

24 mars 2021 | 62 min

Seeds of Change: Growing a different Future with Alan Watson Featherstone

17 mars 2021 | 54 min

Parents for A Future: Creating a world we're proud to bequeath to future generations with Rupert Read

10 mars 2021 | 62 min

Meeting our needs, healing the earth: Donnie Maclurcan of the post growth institute

3 mars 2021 | 72 min

Breaking the Austerity Myth: The system is broken - but we can mend it. With Richard Murphy

24 februari 2021 | 70 min

The Town that shaped its world: Pam Barrett on FlatPack/DIY Democracy and taking charge of politics

18 februari 2021 | 68 min

We all know national politics is in chaos. But local governance can be a place of enlivening, inspiring, radical change. Pam Barrett speaks of her work to change the nature of her local town council - what she achieved - and how we can do the same.

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

The Subtle Shaman: Chris Taylor, living our purpose and the Tao of R-evolution

10 februari 2021 | 59 min

Models of Mind: bringing emotional intelligence into the heart of governance with Rachel Lilley

3 februari 2021 | 62 min

How different would our world be if we understood how our minds - and feelings - worked? How would our workplaces change if everyone was doing their best to understand how everyone else experienced the world? Dr Rachel Lilley describes how shifting our perspectives changes everything - from work to home to government.
Rachel 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: A PodBoom on The Climate and Ecological Emergency

28 januari 2021 | 107 min

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.

Kindness, tribalism, faith, hope: exploring Christianity in the climate crisis with David Blower

27 januari 2021 | 65 min

The Ocean is Alive: Ocean-shaman Glenn Edney speaks of the living waters of the Earth.

20 januari 2021 | 59 min

Trust The People: Creating a politics that works

13 januari 2021 | 56 min

Four arrows flying: Alnoor Ladha, activist and visionary on changing the stories we tell ourselves.

6 januari 2021 | 66 min

Building Soil: Healing the Earth: Feeding Humanity - Regenerative Farming with Navona Gallegos

30 december 2020 | 61 min

All the Best of 2020: Books and Podcasts that will lift you into the new year - and beyond.

23 december 2020 | 31 min

Birthday/Solstice Celebration: a new Anniversary tradition, with Della Duncan and Nathalie Nahai

21 december 2020 | 74 min

It's our Birthday... and it's the December Solstice, the time of transition and potential transformation . In honour of which, we are crafting a new tradition: a PodBoom shared with Della Duncan of UPSTREAM podcast and Nathalie Nahai of THE HIVE.

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

Living to Learn: transforming education with Rachel Musson of ThoughtBox

16 december 2020 | 62 min

How can we make learning a genuinely transformational experience? One that's fun, and inspiring and that teaches us HOW to think, not WHAT to think? Rachel Musson had given her life to asking this question and ThoughtBox is her answer.

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

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Responding to Climate Change with Dr Paul Behrens

9 december 2020 | 60 min

Breaking the Rules to save the world: How to be More Pirate, with Alex Barker

2 december 2020 | 62 min

How can we take the radical, renegade, rule-breaking, revolutionary ideals of the golden age of Pirates and transmute them to gold in our world? Alex Barker, author of 'How to be More Pirate' lays out the maps to the treasure of change.

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

Spiritual Activism, Raw Courage and Being the Change: Sophie Miller of the Red Rebel Brigade

25 november 2020 | 54 min

Codes for a Healthy Earth: New rules for a flourishing world with Shelley Ostroff

18 november 2020 | 58 min

Adapting Business:Transforming our systems, careers -and the landscape of business with Mike Raven of AQai

11 november 2020 | 68 min

City Repair: Planet Repair: Human Repair. Mark Lakeman on building regenerative cities to heal ourselves and the world.

4 november 2020 | 62 min

The Path of the Trembling Warrior: Gill Coombs on activism, courage and resilience

28 oktober 2020 | 60 min

Trauma, Politics and Empathy: re-democratising democracy with Eva Schonveld and Justin Kenrick

21 oktober 2020 | 62 min

How do we re-democratise democracy? Understanding that our current system is broken is the first step, but then we need to find ways to gather voices and give agency to those with wisdom, so that we re-create our systems of governance from the ground up.

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

Dreaming a flourishing future: Rob Hopkins on radical creativity, activism and re-booting our imaginations

14 oktober 2020 | 56 min

If Climate Change is a failure of the imagination 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 of the Transition Town movement, has explored the depths of our imagination and creativity. Our society is a dis-imagination machine. But we can reverse it.

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 wen...

Grief Walker and Fire Keeper: Medicine woman Fiona Shaw speaks of Trust, Grief and Emotional Authenticity

7 oktober 2020 | 56 min

The Doughnut Economics Action Lab explained by Rob Shorter

30 september 2020 | 61 min

Hero, Sleepwalker or Manipulator? Our Choice in the Game of Life with Gill Coombs

23 september 2020 | 64 min

Communities of Earth Protection: embracing the law with Jozette Khimba

16 september 2020 | 52 min

Fractal Flourishing in the Symbiocene: Building an Ecological Civilisation with Jeremy Lent

9 september 2020 | 63 min

Hearing our Calling - exploring the world of our soul’s true calling with Gill Coombs

2 september 2020 | 58 min

Daring to be Wild: Mary Reynolds of 'We Are The Ark' on reWilding our lands and lives

26 augusti 2020 | 73 min

Four steps to transformation - Manda Scott in a podcast Q&A

19 augusti 2020 | 57 min

Growing into Relationship with the Earth: Mac Macartney, visionary, leader and teacher offers transformation

12 augusti 2020 | 70 min

Feeling for the Edges of Ourselves - talking empowerment, neuroscience and societal change with Adam Hamdy

5 augusti 2020 | 67 min

ReBirthing Civilisation - Part 2: Elder Councils and the United Peoples' Coalition with Benjamin Ross

29 juli 2020 | 37 min

How can we reWeave the political governance, not just of individual nations, but of the world? In Part 2 of our conversation, Benjamin Ross outlines the ways in which One Nation Politics is creating Elder Councils, a United Peoples' Coalition and how the One Thousand Fractal shards of Burning Man might ignite change across the world

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

ReBirthing Civilisation: a Pattern for a new governance with Benjamin Ross of One Nation

29 juli 2020 | 45 min

How could our entire political system be rewoven so that it met the needs of all humanity - and the More than Human world? How can we step beyond the tribal toxicity that is tearing us apart and find ways to build a future that work? The One Nation Party is a key to a radical new mode of governance. Here, Benjamin Ross describes how it arose, what draw him to it and how it can work to transform the world.

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

What Humanity Wants - Moral Imagination & a new kind of change with Phoebe Tickell

22 juli 2020 | 68 min

Imagineering 2: Weaving a flourishing future with Miki Kashtan

15 juli 2020 | 63 min

Imagineering: ReWeaving the Human Fabric with Miki Kashtan - Part 1

8 juli 2020 | 59 min

How can we reweave the fabric of humanity to create a world where everyone's deepest needs are met? How do we even know what our deepest needs are - for security (physical and emotional), freedom, connection and meaning? In part 1 of 2, Miki Kashtan gives us answers - and a vision of the future.

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.)

Fierce Tenderness and White Horse Hill Woman: the teachings of Carolyn Hillyer

1 juli 2020 | 69 min

No More Rat Race. Creating a world without bullshit jobs - with renegade economist, Della Duncan

24 juni 2020 | 63 min

No More Business as Usual: A second interview with Rupert Read of XR

17 juni 2020 | 74 min

Nurturing our bodies and souls: Talking to Abel Pearson of Glasbren

10 juni 2020 | 61 min

Humanity Rising: the global summit that will change the future

3 juni 2020 | 58 min

If we're on the edge of chaos, how can we bring all the good ideas together - the right people with the right skills at the right time - and craft an ecosystem of ecosystems to affect radical change? How can we save ourselves from extinction. Humanity Rising offers an answer.

"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

When we can't meet in person, how can we build connection? A second conversation with Sarah Schlote

27 maj 2020 | 65 min

Activism in Service to the Earth: A conversation with Gail Bradbrook of Extinction Rebellion

20 maj 2020 | 74 min

How do our deepest selves find balance? Part 1 of a conversation with Sarah Schlote

13 maj 2020 | 61 min

Death, Dead and Dying - ways of navigating our own mortality: an interview with Dr Judith Wester

6 maj 2020 | 60 min

Lockdown: A moment of death and rebirth - A conversation with Angharad Wynne

29 april 2020 | 62 min

Explorations of Being: a Conversation with Nathalie Nahai

22 april 2020 | 65 min

What If....? A journey through time and place

22 april 2020 | 30 min

Conscious Evolution: The time is now. A conversation with Rob Cobbold

15 april 2020 | 73 min

Shaman: A conversation with visionary and healer Chris Luttichau

8 april 2020 | 64 min

Movement Medicine in the time of Corona Virus. A conversation with Ya'acov Darling Khan

1 april 2020 | 76 min

Inner Resilience: finding clarity, courage and connection in a time of Corona Virus

25 mars 2020 | 32 min

Finding stillness, Finding wholeness: Sharing enquiry with Daniel Thorson of Emerge

18 mars 2020 | 62 min

Dreams of Divinity: Rabbi Jill Hammer on mysticism and the meaning of life

11 mars 2020 | 51 min

This Civilisation is Finished: a conversation with Rupert Read

4 mars 2020 | 32 min

If, as philosopher, Green party activist, University Professor and XR activist, Rupert Read is right, our civilisation is finished. We'll either collapse, or transform to the point of being unrecognisable. So... this being the case, what can we do? Rupert Read is one of our generation's greatest, and deepest green thinkers. Join us in this discussion of how we can move forward.

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

Healing Our Selves and the World: an Interview with Della Duncan

26 februari 2020 | 50 min

If we can open our eyes and look in the mirror of the world, we can open ourselves to the InterBeing that allows Active Hope as we face the chaos of our world. In this interview, Della Duncan, Renegade economist, host of the Upstream podcast, and practitioner of Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects, explores the ways to a sustainable and equitable future.

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/

Feelings: How to shape the ones we want

19 februari 2020 | 29 min

For most of us, falling in love with the absolute wonder of being alive is a distant dream. Nonetheless, 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 really to fall in love with the act of living. So that each moment of 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

Emerging from Complexity: how we become the change we need to see with Manda Scott

12 februari 2020 | 24 min

Hacking our Habits:Letting go of the old stuff, to make way for something new

5 februari 2020 | 29 min

Changing our Minds: Mind hacks to shape our habits with Manda Scott

29 januari 2020 | 36 min

The Route to Heart Coherence with Manda Scott (part 3)

22 januari 2020 | 25 min

How do you create heart coherence and inner resilience? This episode of the podcast explores the ways we can balance head-mind and heart-mind to create the kinds of inner equanimity that allow us to flourish, whatever the outer world throws at us.
If we’re going to reach conscious evolution, we need to be able to stand in balance in the world – a key part of which is that we learn how to open the routes from head to mind to heart so that we can begin to feel what we choose to feel – rather than reacting to our amygdalas.

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 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

Growing into Coherence: How to build focus & intent with Manda Scott (part 2)

15 januari 2020 | 19 min

Growing into Coherence: What it means and why we need to do it with Manda Scott

8 januari 2020 | 25 min

(Re) Awakening into Connection with the Web of Life

1 januari 2020 | 25 min

Conscious Evolution: ReWilding Humanity's Soul

24 december 2019 | 19 min

Accidental Gods

Another World Is Possible.

Om podden

Avsnitt

The Phoenix Always Rises: Evolving into the Future Human with Prof Chris Bache, Author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe

Democracy Rising: Making 2025 the year we recover from Peak Polarisation with Audrey Tang, Ambassador at Large for a safer, kinder world

Heart of Oak: Talking Druidry, Spirituality and the nature of Magic in the MetaCrisis with Philip Carr-Gomm

Seven Generations Perspective Meditation for December 2024

Solstice Cheer: Three Friends uphold a Podcasting Tradition with Della Duncan, Nathalie Nahai and Manda Scott

Must Read, Must Listen, Must View: Manda's favourite books, podcasts and videos this Winter Season

The Power of (good) Food with Nick Weir of the Open Food Network

Avoiding Burn Out, Fall Out, Drop Out (and Freak Out): Practical Routes to a whole, healed future with Dan McTiernan of Earthbound

Adaptation is Here: Launching the TrAd (Transformative Adaptation) Book with Rupert Read and Morgan Philips

Holding the Paradox: Navigating a changing world with Andrea Hiott of Making Ways

Being the Best Ancestors we can - with Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network

Bonus: The System is Dead. Long Live the (new) System! Thoughts on the US election and the self-terminating algorithm

Turning waste into wellbeing, wildlife, food and forests: Bringing permaculture to schools with Elliot Riley

Having your C.A.K.E. (Compassion, Awareness, Knowledge, Empathy) and sharing what you learn - with Andrew Hale of Dog Centered Care

Rethink, Repair, Rebuild – with Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

The Lama, the Oath and the Web of Treasure Vases - with Cynthia Jurs, author of 'Summoned by the Earth'

Living Well in a Tiny House with Rachel Butler and Maddy Longhurst of Bristol Tiny House Community

Of Reindeer, Donkeys and the verb that is Water. Stories of climate-healing with Judith Schwartz, author of The Reindeer Chronicles

Building an Economics of Happiness: How - and why - our Future must be Local with Helena Norberg Hodge of Local Futures

Autumn Equinox meditation 2024

Thoughts at the Autumn Equinox 2024 - how, what, when, where and why

Forking the Future: building routes to viable change with Tim Frenneaux of Pivot

Stop killing the planet! Shaping International law so it's on the side of Life – with JoJo Mehta of Stop Ecocide International

The Manic Fire Monkeys Do It Again (and Again): Exploring the wonder of human evolution with Dr Shane Simonsen

Finding the Courage to Care - Ways to build a Mothering Economy with author Jenny Grettve

When is a Tree not a Tree? The 'Net Zero' Wood Burning Scam - with Dr Mary Booth of Partnership for Policy Integrity

A trillion willing helpers: Exploring the microbiome of people and animals with Joe Flanagan of Ingenious Probiotics

Governable Spaces: Solve for democracy on the internet and our outer politics becomes a lot more sane - with Nathan Schneider

Net Zero Cities: Crafting a Generative Urban Future with Georgia Cameron of Dark Matter Labs

Earth and Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos with Leah Rampy

Creating Quantum Theatre: radical story-becoming to change the world with Jenifer Toksvig

The Tools we Need: Raising the Collaborative Commons with Resilience Strategist Michael Haupt

How the System is Slaying Us - and What to Do About It: Getting Healthy in Toxic Times with Dr Jenny Goodman

Election Special 4: What is Governance for and how can we shape genuine democracy - with Glen Weyl of the Plurality Institute

Beautiful Trouble - crafting a political Alternative - and an independent Scotland - with Indra Adnan and Pat Kane

Election Special 3 - Labour party Manifesto - anything worthwhile? with Jeremy Gilbert

Taking back the Power: Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and onto the good stuff with Howard Johns of OneZero

The Jay, The Beech and The Limpetshell with author Richard Smyth

Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Politics - Election Special 2 with Baroness Natalie Bennett of the Green Party

Answers to the Questions of life: Biomimicry, Complexity and Peacebuilding with Dr Deborah Benham

Breaking the Doom-Loop of UK Politics with Neal Lawson of Compass

Wild shamanic theatre and becoming embodied: with Jessica Buckler of the ALEF Trust

The Story is in our Bones: Rewilding Ourselves with author and activist Osprey Orielle Lake

Any Human Power - Manda Scott talks about her new Thrutopian Mytho-Political thriller

No such thing as Waste, No such place as 'Away'! - Composting our way out of the meta-crisis with Nicky Grady Scott

Writing the Deluge: Dark nights, Apocalypse and Hope with author Stephen Markley

Eco-Spirituality - Exploring Deep in the Woods of the Divine with Woodford Roberts and Rupert Read

What do we really think about Food? Revolutionising what we eat with Sue Pritchard of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission

How do we live, when under the surface of everything is an ocean of tears? With Douglas Rushkoff of Team Human

Evolving Education: Building a Doughnut School with Jenny Grettve of When!When!

Building Trust - One Conversation at at Time: Cooperation Hull with Gully Bujak

Vulture Capitalism - Exposing the toxic system and how to outgrow it with Grace Blakeley

Accidental Gods Spring Equinox Meditation 2024

Seeds of Hope: Cultivating a Future of Flavour and Resilience with Sinead Fortune and Kate Hastings of the Gaia Foundation

Finding a Cure for Civilisation: Delving Deep into the Roots of Being with visionary and shaman, Drea Burbank of Savimbo.

River Charters, Net Zero Cities and BioRegional Banks: Creating a Life-Ennobling Economic System with Emily Harris of Dark Matter Labs

Dung Beetles, People and helping the Keystone Species with Claire Whittle, the Regenerative Vet

End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken and How we Fix it, with James Plunkett

Growing a Public Chorus for Change: reshaping democracy with Alex Lockwood of the Humanity Project

Dancing with the god within: Finding the Sovereign Feminine with thought-leader Maggie Ostara

On Nature, Culture and The Sacred with Elder and Visionary, Nina Simons

Gathering the Memes of Production: Building Co-ordi-Nations with Josh Davila of Blockchain Socialist podcast

Let's get rid of Money and start afresh! Dismantling the Super-Organism with Diana Finch

Promethean Project - Part 2: Crafting the future with Dr Simon Michaux

The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux

Plant Spirit Teachers: learning from the Elder Plants with Dr Simon Ruffell

Meditation for the Winter solstice of 2023

Solstice Dreaming: 3 podcasters gather round the Dark-Nights fire: Della Duncan, Nathalie Nahai and Manda Scott

Bright Fires, Dark Nights: Connecting deeply and building tribe as we head to the Solstice with Angharad Wynne

Braced for Impact: Cutting through the Greenwash and Lies with Rachel Donald of Planet: Critical podcast

Cars of the future (NOT EVs!) - Transforming transport and business with Hugo Spowers of Riversimple Movement

Beyond the Brink is the Beginning with Richard Wain - Launching 27th November 2023

Building Lifeboats to the Emerging Futures with Sophia Parker of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

The Animate Earth Responds: Initiation in a time of Crisis with Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy

Bringing Indigenous food back to the people: a conversation with Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedod's

Power to the People: Changing the way things work with Simon Oldridge