Accidental Gods

As the old paradigm splinters into rage-filled, grief-stricken fragments, how can we lay the foundation for the total systemic change we so badly need? Even beyond the listeners to this podcast, it is obvious by now that there is no going back. As Oliver Kornetzke wrote in a particularly sharply written piece on Facebook back on 22nd January - before Alex Pretti was murdered by Trump's Federal Age...

Across the world, our legal systems are crumbling, the rule of sane law dismantled in real time. Yet at the same time, rivers, mountains, bees are being granted legal rights in ways that would have been thought impossible even a few years ago.  And in boardrooms around the planet, C-suites and businesses are increasingly looking to the natural world for guidance on how to be in ways that heal the...

We live in an ever-changing world, but it is not always obvious what kinds of evolutionary change we are seeing in the broader web of life: in physiology, behaviour, language - and human responses to these.  How plastic is the natural world? How resilient?  How capable - or not - of adapting to the chaos of the climate emergency, the cascade of toxins in our air, soil and water, to the plastics, h...

If we ever had a genuine democracy (and I would argue we never have) then it is clearly disintegrating now, along with the entire system with which it was entwined.  Everyone agrees we need something new, what we don't necessarily agree on across the board is the design of this new thing.  This week's guests are two people who spend their lives imagining how things might be different, particularly...

Well…2025 was the year the masks came off the old system: nobody is pretending it's there to help us, or that those who have stolen the reins of power have any intention of 'saving the planet', still less resolving the horrors of inequity or anything at all but feeding the ravenously hungry ghost of capitalism. So how do we bring power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power?  If we ha...

At the end of a turbulent year that has seen the masks come off the death cult in ways that were probably predictable, but still shocking, we reconvene our December Solstice Traditional conversation. Manda is joined by Della Duncan of the Upstream Podcast and Nathalie Nahai of 'Nathalie Nahai in Conversation' to explore the things that have stood out for each of us in our explorations this year—an...

Here's our December Solstice Meditation for 2025 - please find a place and time where you can relax, take space for yourself, and build the connections to the web of life that will carry us forward. Details of 3iATLAS https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/3i-atlas-facts-and-faqs/

How do we create the stories that will bring a whole new generation back to the web of life, that will help people find hope again, and lean into their heart's yearning for connection, relationship, being and belonging? This week's guest, Ally Kingston, is a creative facilitator and strategy lead at Purpose Disruptors , where she co-developed the breakthrough Agency for Nature , a pop-up agency br...

Here's Manda's round up of (some of) the best books, poetry and podcasts she's come across this year.   Most of the links are to Bookshop.org in the UK where you can link to an independent bookshop of your choice.  In some cases, we've linked to the authors' website. Fiction Rachel Neumeier - Rihasi, Marag, Sekaran, Hedesa - all four are part of the TUYO series. 8 Doors from Dawn to Midnight is a...

If we are to build systems that meet our real needs we have to first understand what those needs are and start growing the stuff that will allow us to thrive: good food from healthy soils, safe and supportive homes and communities, space to develop and express our creativity, opportunities to increase our capacity for co-operation and kindness.  As much as these, though, we need to understand what...

We all know by now that plants grown in living, thriving, life-filled soil, give us living, thriving, life-filled food... but the steps to getting there in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive - and highly profitable - ultra-processed 'food-like substances' are harder to see.  This week's guest, Daphne du Cros, spends her life deep in the mycelial n...

What does it mean to (re)orient our entire culture around the power of love?  To answer this, we have to understand the nature of love and of power and how both of these have many meanings in our culture, some of them essential to moving forward - and some of them so toxic they turn the entire concept into a poisoned cue. This week's guest is friend of the podcast, Jamie Bristow. We spoke to him b...

Do you love the dark?  Do you yearn for sunset and the amber glow of a fire with the night growing deeper, more inspiring all around you?  Most of us don't - though our ancestors through all of history have lived by firelight, moonlight, starlight... until the modern era of light at the flick of a switch.  But there's a world out there of sheer, unadulterated magic that is only revealed when we pu...

This week's guest, Andrea Leiter, is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but astonishing depth to the work of bridging the worlds of technology, biodiversity and international law; bringing them together in service of a new way of being built from the ruins of collapse. Andrea works at the intersection of law, digital transformation, and economic innovation. Director of Amsterdam C...

What is the true vow of your life, the one it would kill you to break?  This phrase comes from the poem 'All The True Vows' by David Whyte, but there can be no better introduction to this week's guest, who knows how to help people - ordinary, every-day people from our culture -  build true, heart-felt connections with the web of life such that we come to know what we are here for, our unique gift...

What is an eco-civilisation? What are its values and what are the frames within which it works? Why do we need it in the first place and what will the Establishment do to maintain business as usual? Most importantly, what can each of us do to live an eco-civilisation into being? This week's guest, Jeremy Lent, explores these ideas in depth in his forthcoming book, Ecocivlization: Making a World th...

How do we heal ourselves from the 'lost-ness' that afflicts our culture? How do we move on from the strange—and wholly untrue— belief our culture holds that we are separate from the natural world, that our cycles of exploitation, extraction, destruction, pollution are the way the world is, that this is the natural order and there's nothing we can do to change it, individually or collectively? Know...

'Each of us was put on this earth at this time to personally determine the fate of humankind.  Do you think you were put here for something less?' Chief Arvol Looking Horse.  We exist in a world where the ultra-rich are getting richer, powered by a system we call 'the economy' which is serving to funnel power and value up to an ever-shrinking core of wounded individuals who then project their trau...

What is humanity for?  What happens if we rethink not just the way we plan buildings, but our entire role as beings on a living planet?  These are the central questions driving Michael Pawlyn's third edition of the life-changing book, Biomimcry in Architecture.  Michael Pawlyn is an architect, the founding director of Exploration Architecture Ltd and is a ground-breaking pioneer, not just of biomi...

Let the Wild Gods Rise.  Easy to say and harder to do - but if you were offered a portal, a way to step into the other-worlds, to reconnect with all that we have been and could be, would you take it? If you're listening to this, you are likely steeped in the mechanical world of our culture - but it doesn't have to be like this.  The other worlds are alive, present…wild—and just within reach. All w...

How do the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other and our place in the web of life shape our world? How can we craft narratives that can shift the way we see and experience the world? Is this even the best leverage point to start off with or is there a deeper/wider/more effective acupuncture point we could explore as we evolve to become…what?  What are we aiming for?...

Why are we here? How do we think? What is the nature of life? What are the boundaries between ourselves and the rest of the living web—between ourselves and the rest of the universe across space and through time…and in the timeless, formless place from which everything arises? These are the big, foundational questions of our existence, and how we answer them shapes how we see ourselves and our rel...

Our western (Trauma Culture) economies run on two falsehoods - we might go so far as to call them lies. The first is that economies have to grow to be 'successful'.  The second is that government spending is limited by the tax take.  That is, they need to take money in as taxes in order to spend it out into the economy.  Both of these are untrue, and understanding that they are untrue, and the pol...

As the old system is splitting apart, a few brave souls are already working to hospice this old system, acting as Death Doulas to the Great Dying—as well as helping people to awaken the seeds of a new world within.  One of these is our guest this week. Sara McFarland is a Soul Initiation and Wild Mind Mentor and Guide, Artist of Consciousness and a Death Doula for the Great Dying. Their website sa...

Our Trauma Culture has spread across the globe with terrifying speed and ghastly efficiency.  But the tide is turning and people of good heart in many nations are beginning to understand that what we need now is a move towards a 21st Century Initiation Culture. The language is often different, but at heart, this is where we need to go. Our guest this week, Hilary Giovale, is a mother, writer, faci...