Accidental Gods

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 an...

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 literat...

Following our podcast with Grace Rachmany, we stayed online and talked about the banking crash. At the time of recording, we only knew about Silicon Valley Bank - Credit Suisse hadn't gone down yet - but we talked about the nature of finance, of cryptocurrencies, of the totally unsustainable nature of the economy.  This is the kind of conversation that I often have with guests after the podcast is...

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.  I...

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...

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...

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...

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 direc...

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 b...

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...

Chris Smaje is a social scientist by training and a small-scale farmer by occupation. For the past 19 years, he has co-worked a small farm in Somerset, in southwest England.  Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surry and the Dept of Anthropology at Goldsmith's College. HIs focus was aspects of social policy, social ide...

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. ...

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...

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 scal...

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 towar...

Eva is a climate activist, process designer and facilitator. She has co-convened the Transformative Conflict for Transition Network summit, supports sociocratic system development, decision-making and facilitation in many contexts including Extinction Rebellion Scotland. Justin is an anthropologist and activist from Edinburgh. He is a member of Extinction Rebellion Scotland. Since 2009, has worked...

As we move from our third to our fourth year, it seemed like a good time to look back on the origins of the whole Accidental Gods project - why and how we started and what our original aims were - and then to look forward to the coming year and what we're focussing on both on the podcast and within the membership.   So much has changed even in such a short time. We're all more aware than ever of t...

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 f...

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 w...

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...

Professor Julia Steinberger researches and teaches in the interdisciplinary areas of Ecological Economics and Industrial Ecology.  She is the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for her research project 'Living Well Within Limits' investigating how universal human well-being might be achieved within planetary boundaries. She is Lead Author for the IPCC's 6th Assessment Report with...

Dr John Collins worked for the UK's Central Electricity Generating Board in the days when such things were nationalised industries. His PhD involved creating a real-time dosimeter for workers in nuclear plants so they didn't have to wait 2 weeks to learn the results of the film-based dosimeters that were in use. In doing so, he saved the CEGB considerable amounts of money - and, mere importantly, ...

Rupert Read is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, but he is also a Green party activist, and a prolific speaker, media spokesperson and author advocating for a wholehearted, whole-culture response to the Climate and Ecological Emergency. A long-term friend of the podcast, Rupert joins us today to talk about his new book: 'Do You Want to Know the Truth: The Surprisi...

As we do each year, we've curated a list of the Accidental Gods' favourite podcast and books of 2022.  Enjoy! Podcasts Nate Hagens The Great Simplification - fourth of four (so far) with Daniel Schmachtenberger https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/id1604218333?i=1000583952697 The Sustainable Food Trust episode with Dr Michael Antoniou https://podcasts.app...

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 resea...