Accidental Gods

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...

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 ,...

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...

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...

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 ju...

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', publishe...

In this week's episode, we have a return guest to the podcast. Ruth Catlow has taken the amazing work she did in lockdown and held live festivals in the park where people get to become one of the seven core species: a dog, a Canada goose (just visiting!) a tree, grass… and, yes, a stag beetle. What they're not being, are people. So they're looking at the world through new eyes, hearing it with new...

This is the part of the podcast where we talk about voting systems, specifically the quadratic voting on the blockchain that Ruth has made into an app that's in use in the Park.  Then we moved into her work with Government ministries and big corporations, bringing the aliveness and liveliness, and special insight of Live Action Role Play into politics and industry to help people see things from a...

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 fir...

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.' ...

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...

It's the summer solstice, the longest day and the shortest night. What matters now in our world is that we reconnect with the rhythms of the living web. This meditation is designed to help you connect to the rising sun on this day of longest light. This version of the summer solstice meditation has periods of silence in which you can explore your own feelings and observe the focus of your awarenes...

It's the summer solstice, the longest day and the shortest night. What matters now in our world is that we reconnect with the rhythms of the living web. This meditation is designed to help you connect to the rising sun on this day of longest light. This version of meditation has birdsong overlaid so there is no silence.  As with all meditations, please find a safe, quiet place where you can be com...

At the halfway point of the year, Manda looks back on what's been on the podcast, forward at (some of) what's to come, thoughts on where we're at as a world, and explores the books and podcasts that have stood out in the past six months.  Non fiction    A People’s Green New Deal by Max Ajl https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-people-s-green-new-deal-max-ajl/5731783?ean=9780745341750 Building Tomorrow...

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 Natu...

This is the fourth of our ongoing series with Dr Simon Michaux.  As ever, we ranged far and wide, but this time within the remit of 'what does the world look like in 2050 if we make good choices now?'   Specifically, how do we construct and power our civilisation beyond the emergence of the new system.  And yes, that's impossible to predict exactly, but it's not overly hard to make some basic obse...

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...

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...

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...

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 thes...

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 an...

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. A...

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 W...

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.  An...

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 equitab...