In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. And yes, I say this every week at the start of the podcast. And yes, I do believe it, but there are times when I’m stretching my belief, and then there are other times when I come across someone who absolutely reignites my certainty that this is true. And this week’s guest is one of these. Michael Pawlyn is an architect, the founding director of Exploration Architecture Limited, and a groundbreaking pioneer not just of biomimicry as the design foundation of architecture and the built environment, but of the ways we might look at the web of life and take inspiration from the absolute magic and wonder of it, to co-create the paradigm shift, the epochal shift that humanity needs in this moment. As you’ll hear, before setting up his own practice, Michael was central to the team that radically reinvented horticultural architecture for the Eden Project in 2018. He jointly initiated Architects Declare a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency, which has since spread to 28 countries, with over 8000 companies signed up to a declaration of action. In addition to his architectural work, he advises companies and governments on how to make the shift from sustainable to regenerative design. And we will go into the difference between these two in the conversation that you’re about to hear. Beyond this, he lectures widely, and his TEDx talk has been viewed over 2 million times, which gives you a sense of the scale and the scope of the possibilities that he opens up.

Manda: With Sarah Ichioka, Michael co-wrote the book Flourish, which remains one of my favourite books, and we spoke to Sarah back in episode 147. There is a link in the show notes if you want to go back and follow it up. But now Michael is back with the third edition of Biomimicry in Architecture, which came out on the 1st of September. And my goodness, this book has the capacity to change our world! If every decision maker on the planet was given a copy of this book and took the time to read it and had the bandwidth to understand it (and all of this is quite a big ask; but even so, if they did this) I genuinely think we would be in a different world. Because over and over again, Michael shows the ways that the natural world has designed things that are more efficient or stronger or more resilient than anything humanity has created or could create. But then we can go a step further. We can use the designs that we have begun to understand and build new things with them that the natural world has not imagined. This is the step change that Michael has envisioned and shows that we are co-creators, that we could take pride in being human. We could become the self-conscious nodes in the web of life, and we could build things that the web of life otherwise doesn’t get to. We could build realities that allow for the flourishing of humanity within the rest of the web of life.

Manda: And this seems to me a really radical shift. So often I come across people who are fundamentally ashamed of being human. We see the damage we are inflicting on the world, and we either head into denial and despair and rage and push our projection outwards, or we shrink inwards and do our best to do less harm, to take up less space on the world. We might focus on the inner change, on the gratitude and the compassion and the generosity of spirit that we know the world needs of us, and this is not bad, and it may well be necessary. But I think also there is a step change to looking outwards, to looking at what we could co-create, if we could begin to understand what the world needs of us, what the web needs of us. So this is where we’re going in the conversation you’re about to hear. We ranged far and wide and deep, and I genuinely believe that by the end of it, you will want to go out and get Michael’s book. To buy copies for all of the people you know who are perhaps not so switched on to the spiritual side of things, but who really will get the engineering, the architecture, the design, the possibilities inherent in all of the examples that Michael brings to the table. So with that endorsement ringing in your ears, people of the podcast, please do welcome Michael Pawlyn, architect, designer, thought leader, and author of Biomimicry in Architecture.

Manda: Michael Pawlyn, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this bright, sharp autumn day?

Michael: Hi Manda, well, thanks so much for inviting me. So I am in my home studio in North London and fortunately we live near Hampstead Heath, so I’ve been out for an early walk with my partner and our little dog friend, and the light is amazing. There was a mist over the ponds and there’s this really sharp sunlight cutting through it. So I’m feeling really invigorated.

Manda: And alive and of course, you have to tell me about your dog friend before we go any further. Who is your friendly dog?

Michael: She’s called Daisy, she’s a cockapoo, getting to be quite an old lady now. She’s 11, nearly 12, which is quite old for a cockapoo. But anyway, still full of life. Yeah.

Manda: Yes, yes, because the cocker side, my old dog was a cocker, and they never really change from being puppies. I have a new puppy coming in ten days time. So people, by the time this podcast goes out, new puppy will be here. There will be chaos. There will be a few podcasts where there will probably be puppy chaos, but this is not one of them. So last time we were here, I was talking to Sarah Ichioka, with whom you wrote flourish, which remains one of my favourite books. Because you started with a Murray Bookchin quote which just made my heart sing. And realising that you and I had both studied at Schumacher, and so we exist in a similar intellectual space, and I keep getting oh yes, that! Yes, yes, why does everybody not know that? Every time I listen to you or read anything you’ve written. And so now you’ve come to this amazing book, Biomimicry in Architecture, which is just glorious. And this is the third edition, totally up to date, and it is going to be the book that I buy for the science oriented people in my life, for whatever winter holiday gift we call it. Just because everything that we need to know of who we could be and how we could be, feels like it’s in here. So tell us a little bit about how you came to write this and how you got to update it for this third edition.

Michael: Well, thank you so much for those kind words about flourish and about the new book. It’s really, really kind of you. I mean, as you know, as a writer, it takes a colossal effort, so when books are appreciated. Yeah, it makes makes a big difference. So in some ways the origins for this book go back to when I was a teenager. I was passionate about three things: design, biology, and the environment. At that point, I didn’t really see the connections between them, and I thought about studying biology but it didn’t really seem to be a creative pursuit. So I left that behind and studied architecture. And then when I was 30, I had a chance to join the team working on the early stages of the Eden Project. I jumped at that. And then a few years into that, I had a really transformative moment, and that was when I went on a five day course at Schumacher College, led by Janine Benyus and Amory Lovins. And I learned more in those five days than I had learnt in the previous ten years of going to seminars, listening to architects talk about how clever they are. And it was then that I realised that there was so much more to biomimicry, and also that I realised that I could bring those three strands together, of design, biology and the environment.

Michael: So I carried on working on the Eden Project and stayed with that company, Grimshaw, for ten years. And then I got to the point where I just wanted to focus all my time on biomimicry and regenerative design. So I set up my own company and after a talk I gave, I was approached by a publisher, Riba publications, the Royal Institute of British Architects, that is. So they commissioned me to do the first edition and then I did a second edition some years later and then a third edition. And I’ve enjoyed doing the new editions each time, actually, because my thinking and the discipline as a whole has moved on quite a lot each time. And this time I’ve aimed for a much more transformative approach for biomimicry. Partly out of a slight frustration that a lot of architects still seem to see it as an aesthetic, and it’s not that for me at all. And also, it has tended to be applied largely to enhancing the performance of certain products. And I just feel there’s much more potential for this, to really rethink architecture from first principles. And so that’s what I set out to do.

Manda: And actually by the end of it, you’ve not just thought architecture from first principles, you’ve thought humanity from first principles. And what interests me a lot about all of this; everything interests me about this; and one of the things that really struck me was that Indy Johar, who is also one of our foremost thinkers at the moment, also started off as an architect. So there’s something about the interplay of designing for human flourishing that requires us to think about what humans are for. And you get to the phrase of ‘participatory consciousness’ towards the end of the book, which sparked everything alive in my brain. We talk about participatory governance, participatory budgeting, about bringing people into how we structure our society, but I hadn’t really thought before about creating that phrase as a way of looking at how do we offer ourselves in service to life? How do we become self conscious nodes in the web of life? Which for me is what humanity is for. And participatory consciousness is another way of saying that. And quite early on you say we need to rethink not just the way we plan our building and cities, but our entire role as beings on a living planet. And this ends up in counterbalance to something that came past my Facebook feed yesterday, which is from Politico: kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the partnership for New York City, a non-profit organisation that represents the city’s top business leaders, said Republicans in the US have told her that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump”.

Manda: So the gloves are off, the masks are off. Nobody anymore is pretending that capitalism is in service to life. Which in many ways is quite a relief. We can stop pretending that capitalism has the answers, and we come instead to this concept of participatory consciousness and designing for living. And what is it that humans are for? Which feels to me what your book is getting to; that we can, we have all the tools. This is something that this podcast says and that you are saying; we have the answers, provided we can all agree what the question is. This feels like Douglas Adams and the answer is 42, what was the question? Let’s design an entire planet to work out what the question is. And we have the answers if we want to make the flourishing of humanity and participatory consciousness be what we’re here for. The flourishing of humanity as an integral part of the web of life. And your book shows time after time after time, that humanity, if we design ourselves as such, can become an integral part of the living web of life and can enhance the web of life. So that’s that’s not even a question, that’s just a statement. So I need to open the door for you. You started at Schumacher, you studied with Janine Benyus. Let’s open up for people who don’t know yet what biomimicry is and does; your understanding of what it is. And then let’s have some examples of exciting ways that biomimicry is already being used in design structures. Over to you, say what you like.

Michael: All right. So I think one of the most articulate commentators on regenerative design is Bill Reid and his colleagues at the Regenesis Group, and they have a diagram that you may well have seen that shows the difference between sustainable and regenerative. And there’s a kind of neutral axis of getting to the point where we’re 100% less bad, which used to be the kind of ultimate aim of sustainability; it was felt that was the most we could aim for. And of course, now it’s become clear that that’s nowhere near enough. And just as we had lively debates about what the ultimate in sustainability meant, now I think we need an equally spirited debate about what the ultimate regenerative means. And I concur with his view that it’s getting to the point where humans are participating as nature and co-evolving as nature. And because of that, I think biologically inspired design approaches have a huge amount to teach us. So there are approaches like biophilia, which is more of a sort of psychological discipline and very much complementary to biomimicry. Biomimicry, I think, is more of a kind of functional discipline. It’s about understanding how the web of life works, and using that understanding to rethink the way we do things as humans. And there’s one example I sometimes use to convey the potential of biomimicry. It’s an insect called a wood wasp, and it’s evolved this amazing kind of drill bit that can drill into wood. And because continually rotating body parts are pretty difficult, it’s evolved a drill bit that’s in two semicircular halves, and it works in a kind of reciprocating action like that. So it puts it into a crack in the wood, and then the ridges on one side mean it can pull on that and slightly push on the other. And it can drill into wood with no net pushing force. This has inspired a new type of medical drill, designed almost identically, and it can be used in very delicate surgery, drilling into, say, a skull with virtually no pushing force. And because it’s in two semicircular halves, it can follow a curved path.

Manda: Yeah. So clever.

Michael: So by combining human ingenuity with the amazing array of highly refined adaptations in biology, that can produce very fertile combinations, really. Far richer than we would achieve just with human ingenuity alone. And it is worth distinguishing that humans are capable of inventing ab initio, kind of out of thin air, whereas Evolution develops through kind of tinkering over long periods of time. But the combination of those two is really significant. And then kind of coming on to the bigger questions that you were alluding to, I really had quite a significant turning point in my career in 2018, when the IPCC report came out and realised just how far adrift we were. And so a lot of what I’ve done since then, including writing Flourish with Sarah, has been my attempt to to really think how architecture and the built environment needs to shift in order to meaningfully address the planetary emergency. And I wouldn’t make any claims to be an intellectual. This is me as an architect, trying to rethink architecture from both a philosophical and a practical perspective. And then I think that kind of leads on to that big question you ask, which is arguably the biggest question anyone can ask: what’s humanity for? And I find Freya Mathews’ distinctions very useful.

Michael: I’ve referred to her a lot in the book, and she’s had a big influence. And I think her thoughts and writings deserve to be much more widely known. So she describes three distinctions: anthropocentric, biocentric, and bio inclusive. So I think most people know what anthropocentric is; so it’s actions that prioritise humans. Biocentric is at the other end of the spectrum, and in architecture that would probably mean kind of designing buildings to be completely subsumed into nature. And what Freya Mathews suggests is that there’s another category which is bio inclusive, and she defines this as an inclusive conception of nature, that includes the human and the more than human components of the greater life system, without collapsing the distinctions between them. And of course, there are some pretty key things that are different about humans; use of tools and language and cognitive abilities. But rather than that leading to human supremacy, we could use those differences to justify a higher level of responsibility. And humans could really aspire to becoming a keystone species that co-enables the flourishing of all life for all time. And for me, that is a really exciting possibility.

Manda: Right. And I would like to really pause and just emphasise that: that we could become a keystone species that could co-enable the flourishing of all life for all time. And I don’t know that there are many people who, if they were presented with that as a genuine option, would say, no, no, I’d really rather keep poisoning the entire atmosphere and kill everything. The sixth mass extinction is so much more attractive than that. I think people don’t know that this is a possibility. And what your book does is open up so many worlds of things that are already happening. You’ve got pictures of giant 3D printers that use clay and can print houses that look like beehives. Or amazing buildings that grow up trees. Or, I’m trying to think of different things, things that have used analogies to, was it humpback whales? Or the surfaces of different marine species to create buildings that can gather water and store water and at the same time prevent floods. And just the whole concept of what are we doing? For the last however many thousand years when we’ve considered ourselves to be separate, we’ve battled against the living world to try and keep ourselves warm and dry and safe and fed. And what you’re offering is ways where we can look at things like the woodwasp, or the way that spiders create their silk, or the way that mussels bring themselves down into the sea floor, and go okay, that’s really interesting. And because we have the slightly bigger, slightly more folded brain, we can use that amazing technology that has evolved over millions of years for mussels, and we could embed wind turbines better into the seafloor. I want you to tell us about this in a minute, in more detail.

Manda: The capacity that we have, that can be a gift to the world rather than a way of destroying the world, then opens up doors to ways of living that are entirely different to the constant under threat that most people feel. So you must have some favourites. The Cardboard to Caviar was a really interesting set of evolving, circular, but that’s more circularity. But of the things that you write about or even things that you’ve discovered since. Here’s an idea: if you and I were to sit down and somebody gave us the whole of the island of Britain, say, because we both happen to live here, and went, okay, let’s let’s co-design this in a way that every human has a flourishing life that is part of a flourishing web of life. How would we redesign the world and the cities? I remember there was an architecture course that you described where the 18 year olds had got in and they got to redesign the world. And then a year later they got to redesign a nation. A year later, they got to redesign a city, and a year later they got to redesign a building. And by the end of it, they were redesigning a bit of a building. Yes! Let’s do that. How would we redesign things? How would you, if somebody said, here’s as much money as you could possibly need, Elon Musk has decided to do good things with his trillion dollars, let’s redesign Britain. Go for it.

Michael: Wow. You’re good at asking big questions, Manda! That story about the person, Peter Smithson was his name who was interviewed for the job of running one of the big architectural schools. That was his idea. And it’s the opposite to the way most people are taught how to do architecture. Normally you start with really small things and you build up to the more complicated. And that means that a lot of architects don’t have a kind of overall systems view, which is now becoming clear is essential. If we’re to address what is, I think coming into focus as one of the really big challenges, which is to learn to integrate everything we do as humans into the web of life. So how would we go about this? Well, I know from listening to lots of episodes of your podcast that you’re as big a fan of Donella Meadows as I am. And so if we were to really go about this, I think we would need to start with the kind of big paradigm shifting leverage points. So redefining the purpose of the economy would be a good start. It’d be great if the whole of the UK were to join the wellbeing Group of governments, which I hope will expand over time, and in time challenge the kind of growth obsessed boys club of the G8 and the G20. So redefining a purpose for the economy so that it is about the long term maximisation of planetary health. That would be, I think, one of the single biggest things that we could do.

Michael: And then in terms of the the built environment, I mean, there are different kind of actions necessary for different professions. So in the legal profession, it’s already quite impressive to see how some of them are stepping up and using the law to protect nature and to recognise the rights of nature and so on. But in the built environment, which is obviously where I work, what I’ve suggested in the latest edition of the book is that this needs to start with systems thinking, and there are a few projects around that have demonstrated just how much can be achieved by shifting towards the characteristics of ecosystems. And in the book, I include a contrast between conventional human made systems and ecosystems. And so ours tend to be quite isolated, monofunctional, produce quite a lot of waste, they’re extractive, they run on fossil fuels, etc. And ecosystems are all the opposites to that. They’re densely interconnected, interdependent; all waste becomes nutrient for something else in the system, they run on almost entirely on solar energy, and they’re regenerative to their places rather than extractive. And the project that I really focussed on a lot is the Cardboard to Caviar Project, which is a favourite. And frustratingly it’s not around anymore, it was a victim of very single minded, reductive economics. But anyway.

Manda: Just before we go into it, I thought about that. It seems to me that there are aspects of capitalism that are deeply threatened by anything that’s regenerative. Was it killed because it was creating a new paradigm?

Michael: I don’t know enough detail to know that. The story I was told by Graham Wiles was that their funding was cut, simply because the benefits of the project, which were huge, were hard to substantiate.

Manda: And monetise.

Michael: Yeah, which is tragic. But maybe if I describe a bit more and then we can come back to that.

Manda: Yeah. Explain it. Go on. Yes.

Michael: So this started as a very engaging little story about Graham Wiles working with people with disabilities, collecting cardboard from shops and restaurants, shredding that and selling it to equestrian centres as horse bedding. They were then paid to collect it, they put it into worm composting systems, which produce worms which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produce caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants. Which is like a form of alchemy, because it’s transformed a very low value material into a high value material. And I was so intrigued by this that I invited myself up there. And Graham was very generous with his time, showed me all around the project and the biggest story was so much more interesting. Because he adopted a very kind of emergent, opportunistic in the best sense of the term, mindset to expanding this project. Essentially, any time he saw something that was underutilised within his little system or nearby, he looked at that as a way to add something to the system to create more value. And the way it kind of developed was that he was given quite a big bit of industrial land, quite denuded industrial land, next to one of Yorkshire Waters treatment facilities. And he was offered as much treated fertiliser sludge as he wanted. So they restored this land, planted willow to run a biomass boiler, which meant that the fish kept growing in winter.

Manda: Because they’d been too cold before, and he needed to heat up the water.

Michael: Yes. Exactly. Yes. And then he started working with quite difficult kids, mainly teenagers on drug rehab programs. And he got them involved in looking after the fish. He was very successful in getting them off drugs. I think prior to that, the kids were on rehab programs costing almost £100,000 per addict per year, with something like 80 or 90% failure rate. And he achieved the opposite. He managed to get like 90% of them off drugs and back into something more productive. He also got them growing vegetables to make fish food to supplement the worms. And then they restored more land, planted orchards, so there was more stuff to sell back to the shops and restaurants. Then someone who came from the Philippines and was used to working with very basic technology, redesigned the water treatment for the fish tanks and used beds of watercress above the tanks to take out the excess nitrates and phosphates, so then the water could go back into the fish tanks. And that was another thing to sell to the shops and restaurants. Then he heard that there was a bakery nearby chucking away loads of mouldy bread each week. And apparently you can grow maggots on mouldy bread with none of the smells of meat based production.

Michael: The next thing is that he started working with ex-service personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder, on building and running a smokehouse for the fish, to add value to the fish. And he got those to buddy up with the difficult teenagers. And so he was inventive with waste in every sense, including what is arguably the most deplorable form of waste, which is underutilised human resources. He managed to reintegrate three often marginalised groups back into a system that was very regenerative. He transformed this industrial wasteland into a haven for biodiversity, and it was just a wonderfully successful project. And for that then to be denied funding because it wasn’t delivering enough benefits is insane. Because a broader perspective on economics, would have recognised some value to all those benefits that he was giving. And just taking unreformed heroin addicts, you know, they cause all sorts of problems to society.

Manda: And you were saying the council will have been paying somebody £100,000 per child per year to somehow try and help these kids, and he’s getting them off drugs. Somewhere in the book I heard you say that the kids ended up eating most of the vegetables that they were growing, but that’s great because it means they’re on actual, proper, nutrient dense foods and getting off the ultra processed rubbish. So they’re probably also not getting type two diabetes while they’re at it. And the saving of that, if there were any sensible cost accounting. Even with the current extractive system, that system was paying back hugely. And it must depend on the council, because I remember talking to Tamar Grow Local, when I was at Schumacher. And they grew stuff and put it into boxes and the local GPS are allowed to prescribe these food boxes for people. And the local council reckoned that they got a 17 to 1 return on that. For every pound they paid for food boxes, they got a £17 return in terms of people being healthier. So they were doing perfectly good accounting. And I remember Simon at Tamar saying he didn’t really believe the numbers, but for him, the email that he got one day from one of the single mothers who said, it’s like Christmas when your box arrives, the kids just run down and they’re desperate to come and get the box. And they were given free cookery classes to learn what to cook from the seasonal vegetables that come in. And the local council there was perfectly capable of doing sensible arithmetic. It feels to me like somebody was feeling threatened by an actual regenerative system and decided to close it down, which is incredibly sad, but also probably my paranoia is just strident. Obviously. Anyway, it was a really good circular system that existed within the existing system and didn’t take huge amounts of architectural design. It was more social design.

Michael: Yes, and some people might wonder how this is relevant to the built environment. And the relevance is that we can start to incorporate building materials into these systems. And if we bring together cycles of food, energy, water and materials, then we can start to achieve really useful synergies. It becomes much more productive, regenerative, and we’re getting closer and closer to the actual way that nature operates or the web of life operates. And also, I think there’s a reasonable argument for saying that people involved in systems like this will steadily become more connected with the web of life, and to develop this bio inclusive culture that could become self-reinforcing.

Manda: Yes, I want to go back to design things, but let’s just talk a little bit about the bio inclusive culture that could be self-reinforcing. Because it seems to me this is at the core of the transition that needs to happen quite urgently in humanity. And I occasionally am sort of adjacent to some astrological stuff and all the astrological world is agog with various alignments that are haven’t happened before in the history of humanity, apparently. And a maybe comet that’s arriving from somewhere that hasn’t arrived before either, and that this is a time of total transition. And it’s really easy to get into a kind of blinkered state of spiritual bypassing, but suppose that they’re right? Or even suppose we just look at the world and go, we need to shift. We’re either going over the edge of the cliff, accelerating there with Donald Trump with his foot on the gas. Or, we all go, guys, you know what we’ve been about before, which is basically trying to survive and make money in fighting the whole of the natural world to do it, was not a clever idea.

Manda: And instead, what would we like to feel? We would like to feel connected. We would like to feel respected. We would like to feel useful. We would like to feel that what we’re doing is enhancing the lives of everything around us, the humans and the more than human world, because then we could relax and feel confident and worthwhile and valued and all the things that actually make us feel good. As opposed to the little dopamine drips that just make us feel frantic to get more dopamine drips. And your book, and the way of life that it suggests is possible and shows is happening, seems to me to open the door. And the only bit that you don’t really address, because this is a book for architecture students, at the bottom of the line, is the spiritual step that says, this is what we’re here for and this is how we will feel good. And I’m thinking that that is a place that you are, even though you haven’t necessarily said. You’ve unpicked politics, and you’ve gone into regenerative farming a little bit. And, and all of the regenerative cycles of food and power and water and air and connectivity with the land. And I wonder where you end up in, in that liminal space of being and belonging, how do you feel connected to the web of life? Does that make sense as a question?

Michael: Mm, yes. So there was something you said earlier that I wanted to pick up on, which is partly related and then I’ll come on more specifically to your question. So a question that’s always hovering in the background is, well, this sounds great, but how do you actually bring these ideas about? And there’s a workshop technique that I use quite often, which is based on Joanna Macy’s work developed by the Long Time Project. If you don’t know them, they’re well worth looking into. And it’s a kind of time meditation called Human Layers. And I’ve done this with quite a few groups now on design projects. And it’s a way of connecting with your ancestors and thinking deeply about the kind of world that your grandchildren or people of that age will inherit. And it’s incredibly effective for getting people to think really carefully about the kind of legacy they want to create. And if you couple that with a description of the difference between sustainable and regenerative, and convey the point that most sustainable stuff is really just part of a degenerative cycle, it’s about being less bad and we know that’s not enough. I think there are very few people who would actively want their legacy to be degenerative. And last year I ran this workshop with two very different client groups. One was a very conservative one in both senses of the term, and the other was a much more left leaning one. And the kind of ideas emerging from these two groups about the futures that they wanted to create were almost identical.

Manda: That’s so good.

Michael: Yeah, it’s a really useful way of firstly getting people into a much more transformative way of thinking, but also getting beyond the kind of ideologies that have hampered us, particularly in the culture wars.

Manda: Before we go on, can I ask a question then? So you did this with these two client groups. What has emerged from those? Because I’m guessing both go back to whatever their work is with a heartful and a sense of connection. Have they been able to manifest behavioural change?

Michael: Yes. So there’s one project which was a master plan for quite a new area, a quite big area with lots of new homes and so on. And this helped raise the level of ambition right at the start of the project and we got that locked into the brief pretty effectively. And also as part of this workshop, it’s a really good time to introduce quite challenging subjects. And so the one that I introduced for that workshop was the idea of human supremacy as described by Eileen Kris. And that was one of the most uncomfortable things that I encountered when I was writing Flourish with Sarah. You know, this idea, as she puts it, that we’ve got this kind of assumed right to go wherever we please to disrupt ecosystems, to drive species to extinction and so on. And you know, what the hell gave us that right? And I realised when I read that that, yes, you know, as an architect, I’d been, at least to some extent, guilty of that in the past. And it’s a challenging idea that could make people kind of push it away and say, oh, well, that’s just ridiculous. But it’s much more courageous if you acknowledge that there’s some truth to it. To think, all right, well, what do we do about this? And in this particular workshop, we explored what the opposite of human supremacy would look like on this project.

Michael: And there were lots of ideas that came out from that about how to make this much more bio-inclusive as a project. And amusingly, the kind of head of the client organisation even said, all right, well, from now on, I want the Lorax represented at the design table, at every design team meeting, which is quite fun.

Manda: Yes, yes. And in the book, you list some companies that have brought the web of life in some form or another onto their boards. I want at some point to introduce you to Hugo Powers of Riversimple, because they’ve got their Future Guardian Governance model; the shareholders have one place, the local community, the customers, the supply chain, the global environment and the local environment are their board. And in fictional terms, I also brought in seven generations. Because it strikes me if every company on the planet had boards that were structured like that, instead of simply a fiduciary duty to provide profit to their shareholders, we’d be halfway towards a regenerative community overnight.

Michael: Totally. By coincidence, I met Simeon Rose a few weeks ago from Faith in nature.

Manda: Oh, cool. Tell us a little bit about that then. And then let’s go back to the other.

Michael: Yes. Well, Faith in nature were the first company to actually formally appoint nature to the board. With a human proxy, essentially someone speaking on behalf of nature. And that involved certain formal processes and generously they’ve made this completely transparent; so they’ve said they were the first, but they don’t want to be the last. They’d actually be delighted if lots of other companies followed suit. And I happen to know that he’s writing a book about it, which will be coming out in due course

Manda: But I’m really intrigued because I recently was at a gathering of animist Systems Change People, which was really interesting. And we undertook Joanna Macy’s Council of All Beings, which is a way of stepping into, it’s very shamanic basically; you take on the identity of another species and then speak from that place. And one of the things that we were very clear on, the thing that came up for all of us, is that there’s a difference between my projection of what I think, speaking as, let’s say, woodpecker might be, and actually doing all of the work, which could take me a lifetime, to really understand what it is to be a woodpecker and speak from that place. And one can be laden with projections and the other is real, and we need to be able to distinguish between those two. There’s nothing wrong with the laden with projections, it’s a worthwhile step. And yet we need to be aware that those projections exist and that they can skew and colour the output that arises. 90% of shamanic work is learning to see the projections and then try and sink deeper. And I’m interested in how Faith in Nature, or anybody, helps the person who is speaking for the web of life to navigate that dichotomy. And you may not know the answer, but I’m curious if you do.

Michael: I don’t really, and I suspect that some of our initial efforts to do this will be a bit clumsy. But, you know, we just need to learn and share and improve over time.

Manda: I guess. And it’s not hard to look at, for instance, you talk about the way that we designed the sewage system in the UK and that there was somebody going, no, no, we’re throwing lots of nitrates and phosphates and we’re going to run out. We need to have a a circular return to the land, because otherwise we’re going to be losing a lot and poisoning the sea. And they went, no, no, it’s all right we’ll just open the sewers into the sea, it’s fine. And we had a choice way back in Victorian times to do it differently. And because of our human supremacy, we chose an entirely linear, toxic, extractive system instead of something different. So it wouldn’t be hard for somebody speaking for the web of life to go, okay, these big things are not useful at the moment. That’s effortless. We got sidetracked. So we’re heading back towards how would we design a world that’s different. But you spoke to two separate client groups; one was conservative, one was more progressive. And one is now designing a town in a way that is much more aligned to the web of life and is aware of the nature of human supremacy. Which, in a world where even human rights are being questioned and white supremacy, white male, cis heteropatriarchal Christo Fascist supremacy is becoming a thing, simply to say that human supremacy is not necessarily useful or necessary, or what we would all want feels like a radical act. So that was one group. The other group, do we have a similar behavioural shift, and did you use a similar route in?

Michael: The same workshop, it was similarly effective in raising the level of ambition, and the only sort of hesitation that you can probably detect in my voice is that that project hasn’t proceeded yet.

Manda: Okay. Right. And we don’t want to talk about things that are client confidentiality. Okay. Let’s let that go. All right. So you and I are still designing a regenerative Britain. We’ve got cardboard to caviar. We’ve got circular flows of the principle that the output of one process should feed in the feedstock for the next one. So quite early in the book, you quote somebody as saying we need to stop asking the question of which bits of our hair gel is it okay to put into the rivers and then to the seas? And instead start asking, what is it that rivers want us to want? And so this then begins to look at the whole of the structure of what we design and the materials that we use. And you make a big distinction of most things in nature are composed of a very few elements and we humans use an awful lot. And a lot of them don’t break down very easily. So let’s talk about structure and of the things that we make and use.

Michael: Yes. So that quote was another incredible insight from Freya Mathews. And she was picking up on a very influential book called Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Braungart, which has been very influential in the circular economy and Rethinking the Way We Make Things was it’s subheading. And in that book, the authors say, imagine you’re the manufacturer of a hair gel. What you should do is think about the river that that hair gel will end up in, and ask yourself what does the river want from the hair gel? And Freya Matthews says, well, that’s along the right lines, but it doesn’t go far enough. We should be asking, what does nature want us to want in the first place? Rather than how can it make use of our by-Products? And that’s clearly a very challenging thought. And it can make quite a lot of modern architecture look like kind of monuments to anthropocentric arrogance. But anyway, I think it leads to a major rethinking of the materials we use. What elements of the periodic table should we be using? It’s that level of kind of rethinking that is required. And the living world, 96% of it is made from just four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. And of the remaining 4%, that’s nearly all a further seven elements.

Michael: And as Janine Benyus has pointed out, nature uses a very limited and safe subset of the periodic table. And we could be doing the same because the living world has evolved materials with equal or higher performance to our highest performance materials. And it’s done it using an absolutely tiny fraction of the amount of energy and it doesn’t produce long term pollution at all. So as an example, to make glass, we dig stuff out of the ground, we heat it up, we form it. And there’s an equivalent in the living world, which is the glass sponge that has evolved to make glass of higher optical quality with just many orders of magnitude less energy. Because it does it all at ambient temperature and pressure.  And still with materials, but thinking about some of the rules from systems thinking; it’s clear that we need to design out all toxins, because long term toxins are simply incompatible with life. And the idea that was common within conventional sustainability of just trying to make things a little bit less toxic, well, that’s not enough. Everything we do needs to be aligned with life. And that means we need to design out toxins.

Michael: And then looking at how nature has evolved to use and make materials, there’s lots of tricks, for want of a better word, adaptations that we could learn, to make our materials perform much better and to use a fraction of the amount. So, for instance, I talk about abalone shell, which is made of these layers of calcium carbonate discs connected together with a flexible protein almost identical to ordinary blackboard chalk. But because of that microstructure it achieves 3000 times the toughness. And there are lots of other examples of how we could achieve factor ten and factor 100 savings in resource use. And also shift towards making more and more of our materials from atmospheric carbon, and conceivably getting to the point where everything we build is genuinely net positive. Is taking carbon out of the atmosphere and moving things in the kind of direction we want.

Michael: And there are certain technologies. I’m not a kind of complete techno optimist, because I think cultural shifts are more important, but there are some technologies that are going to help us get much closer to the way things are made in nature. So 3D printing allows us to get much closer to the really quite complicated and efficient ways that materials and structures are assembled in nature.

Manda: Yeah, and you say quite regularly in the book, or you point out that in the natural world, materials are expensive and design comes free, or design took millions of years of evolution and a lot of things dying when they got it wrong. But by the end stage, you’ve got things like bird skulls or glass sponges or mussels or whatever that have evolved really astonishingly complex but effective ways of doing things that we’ve done, exactly as you said, with huge amounts of toxins and high temperature and pressure. And the abalone shell as an example, you’ve got these little disks and they’re held together with that matrix that is in itself not very tough, but the combination, the way that they are combined is massively more structurally competent than anything that we could do by just piling cement into blocks and building stuff with it. And there’s lots of examples in your book of building structures from either waste products turned into bricks, or there’s, I think, a house made of corn husks compressed into bricks. It’s amazing the number of things that you could turn into bricks that aren’t concrete, that are things that have gathered carbon in order to build them, and the ways that we can make things much lighter. I think that was one of the things that struck me, was even with the Eden Project, you created something that weighed much less and therefore required a fraction of the foundations.

Manda: And that a lot of what we build, again it’s that human supremacy and I suppose our evolution of if you want something that isn’t just a straw hut and you want to build it stronger. We all grew up with the three Little pigs, and you don’t build your house on sand, you build it on rock otherwise, the big bad wolf will blow it down. And so it was just the way things were done. And what’s so inspiring about what we’re learning now, is that we can do so much better if we change why we’re doing what we’re doing. And we’re doing it not just to build the biggest thing in the middle of London that looks like a phallic tower, and we can all feel good about it. We’re trying to build something that offers more biodiversity. There was an a lagoon, a tidal island of Denmark that struck me as really interesting, because it was offering generation of power and protecting the coast and offering biodiversity increase. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Because that seemed quite exciting also.

Michael: Yes. So there are a couple of examples in the chapter about energy that show what could be achieved by bringing forms of renewable energy together in synergistic clusters. So that particular one, it’s a tidal lagoon and that can be filled and emptied using excess wind energy when that’s available. Then that can be released half a tidal cycle later. And it’s made from boulders and geotextiles, which effectively creates a long length of rocky shoreline, which is really rich habitat. And it also had a floating solar array in the middle, and it had wind turbines around the edge. And actually, by having a diversity of generation sources, it makes it easier to balance out the peaks and troughs. And there are quite a few examples of how forms of renewable energy can actually restore land or enhance biodiversity, particularly in really arid regions.

Manda: Yes, or indeed here. This is something that we’re hitting up against here, and I’m not sure this is the fossil fuel industry throwing it out, but I was recently contacted by someone who wanted me to help them to create a ritual to bless a particular area of land, and it turned out that the blessing of the land was basically to bring it on side to stop the wind turbines being built. Which isn’t what I think necessarily. You know, this is back to we asked the river what it wants, not tell it which bits of hair gel it’s allowed to compost for us. And you go to the Land and you ask the Land, what do you want of me? And how else are we getting our power? I completely can see that wind turbines that are owned by, you know, some company in Russia and are basically another extractive process are really not fun. But I don’t think the people who don’t want the wind turbines were planning to minimise their power use to only be what they could get from, say, solar panels on the roof. So somehow in the world that we’re evolving, we need local distributed power generation, where the power is either not travelling very far, or as you say in the book, there are places in the world where the solar gain is huge. And if we use direct current rather than alternating current, we can send a lot more power a lot further without the 30% loss that otherwise happens in the cables, and that this could end up creating more political stability than the current wars over fossil fuels allow. Can you speak a little bit both to the design of what’s possible and then the way that we could create a world that was flourishing?

Michael: Yes, sure. So in some of the North African countries and Middle Eastern countries, is this colossal amounts of solar energy. And this is where something that is sometimes put forward as a kind of drawback of renewable energy actually becomes a benefit. The drawback is that you can’t store it for very long. But the benefit is that countries that kind of went big on solar energy, there’d be a big incentive for them to become reliable suppliers and sharers of that energy. And there’s also a good incentive for them to cooperate with countries in kind of HV/DC grids, high voltage direct current grids. And that’s very different to the fossil fuel system where you can store it and you can be a very awkward neighbour. And so part of the promise of a renewably powered future is that we have far less wars fought over energy.

Manda: And that some of the structures, I think, again, we tend to see perfectly good fields turned into solar parks as being a catastrophe. And yet some of the things that you show in the book are really clever designs, so that the solar panels are tracking the sun and they’re helping to provide condensed water, and then you can grow more and then you can begin to turn the Sahara back into a green space. I hadn’t realised or hadn’t realised until I read your book, that until the Romans arrived and basically cut all the trees down, the Sahara was forested. And I learned recently, again, listening to Nate Hagen’s podcast that Australia was also forested until the first people arrived and began burning the forest around the edges, because that created lots of new growth, and the new growth drew in animals that were easier to hunt. But then they destroyed the biotic pump, which is the process by which a forest sends rain inland and Australia became desert. And it’s mind blowing, actually. And yet if we worked towards being a flourishing part of the web of life, the Sahara could be green again. Can you remember enough about the project that created? I don’t remember it in detail, but it was in the generation chapter.

Michael: Yeah, sure. So this was one that I was involved with and I helped initiated called the Sahara Forest Project. And the core of it, it brings together three synergistic technologies. So it’s forms of solar energy, it’s a type of greenhouse cooled and humidified with seawater, and then it’s forms of desert revegetation. And when you bring those together, they’re actually much more productive together than they are individually. And we built a version of this in Qatar, and we showed that we could grow crops throughout the baking hot Qatar summer.

Manda: You were growing cucumbers?

Michael: Yes. With half the amount of fresh water of conventional approaches. And then we also monitored what was happening to the biodiversity. It wasn’t just a technological project. We were twiddling the knobs trying to refine it as a system, but it was also delivering all sorts of benefits in revegetating deserts, bringing back birds and insects and mammals.

Manda: You got dragonflies in a place where it was miles to the other dragonflies, and they just turned up. It’s astonishing. As soon as you got your algae ponds going, there’s the dragonflies. And I think this is what gives me hope, is that if we all understood that the route to healing is both straightforward and fast and allows human flourishing, then everybody would get on board. I think people are tending towards the nihilistic dystopian futures because they don’t understand that we have technologies that could bring life back.

Michael: Yeah. And maybe that’s a segue into talking about theories of change, because I think that’s just as crucial. And your podcast has done a great job of encouraging people to talk more about theories of change. So that’s something I’ve thought about a lot during the writing of this third edition and actually since. And so I’ve got some thoughts I’d love to share with you and these aren’t fixed.

Manda: No, no, they’re evolving.

Michael: And this is very much open to evolution with your input. The way I see it, I think a really good way to start on a theory of change, is with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Venn diagram. She encourages people to think about three overlapping circles that represent what am I good at? What brings me joy? And what’s the work that needs to be done? And if you can find that intersection point, that’s where you’re likely to achieve the most. And then the next stage is, I think this comes from Naomi Klein when she was asked, well, what can I do as an individual? She said, first thing is stop thinking of yourself as an individual, because you’ll achieve far more if you join up with a group. And then I think it’s a really good idea for people to familiarise themselves with Donella Meadows’ leverage points, and aim for the most influential points. And also, I think it’s important to try and distinguish what theories of change have been used in your particular field and whether they’ve been successful or not, because a lot of them haven’t. And I know that in my field, there’s an awful lot of theories of change that are just assumed and really haven’t worked. So there’s the information deficit model, which you’ve talked about, still very common. You know, surely if we bombard people with enough information, they’ll come on board. There’s one that is called the trim tab model that comes from Buckminster Fuller. So a trim tab is like a mini rudder on the back of a rudder, if you think of a massive ocean going ship, and Buckminster Fuller wanted to be like a trim tab. By having a small input in a certain place, you can bring it back a much bigger shift in the system. And it’s an attractive idea, but it doesn’t acknowledge major system blockers, really. And there aren’t many examples I can find of trim tab projects.

Michael: Another very common one in the design world is solutions advocacy, which is not bad, just talking about solutions. The trouble is, most of the time it just wasn’t looking upstream enough, which is where the problems were. And then there’s also the trailblazer theory of change, which kind of collapsed last year with Unilever. So I guess your listeners are familiar with that.

Manda: I think they’re probably not, actually, if you could unpick that for us.

Michael: Oh, okay. Well, the theory was that with a massive company like Unilever getting on board with sustainability, they would attract all the conscious consumers, they would attract the best staff, and then all the competitors would be compelled to follow. And for a time, it looked as though it was working. But then last year, they and a number of other big companies, took massive steps backwards. And so I don’t think we can rely on that. And so I’m increasingly coming to the view that what we need is an epochal shift, really. I don’t think anything less than that is going to address the planetary emergency. And I think I understand and agree with your reservations about stage models like Spiral Dynamics and Integral theory, but tell me if I’m not getting this right. For me, the two main criticisms which are related are firstly, the implication that each stage was better than the one before, which is quite offensive.

Manda: It’s kind of human supremacist, really.

Michael: Yeah. It is. And then the second was the assertion that each stage transcended and included the one before. And it so obviously didn’t, you know, there’s loads that got left behind. Particularly indigenous wisdom. But I think there are two aspects of stage model that are really useful. So one is that it seems that the shift from one epoch to the next occurred when enough people lost faith in the narratives that had dominated up to that point, and became sufficiently persuaded by the emerging narratives of the next epoch. And I think the other thing that’s really useful about the next stage, let’s call it the Metamodern stage, is that I think it involves moving on from the old binaries of left versus right and market versus state, and embracing the full history of human thought without ideological baggage. And when I think about how I was trained as an architect, we were encouraged to think that everything before the modern era was just bourgeois nonsense. And actually there’s so much that we can learn, particularly from indigenous ways of building, from traditional forms of construction, in terms of rethinking the materials, to be consistent with the circular economy and so on. And that was just regarded as kind of unacceptably backward looking and so on.

Michael: And if we look at where we are now, at least in the rich industrialised nations in a late stage of postmodernity, a lot of the stories that we’ve been encouraged to believe are really running out of steam. You know, the idea of endless growth, conscious consumerism, less bad sustainability, the idea that technology will save us. Fewer and fewer people really believe those. And meanwhile, the emerging stories are gaining ever more credence. So planetary health, long term thinking, ecological economics, possibilism or Conscious Evolution as some people refer to it. And then in terms of how do we bring about this shift? I used to subscribe very much to Buckminster Fuller’s idea that you don’t bring about change by fighting the existing reality, you just talk positive from the new paradigm. But I’ve shifted now and am much more aligned with Donella Meadows, which when she was asked how do you shift paradigms? She said, well, you keep pointing to the flaws and anomalies in the existing paradigm, and you speak loudly and with assurance from the new paradigm. And the reason I think that’s really useful, that sort of pairing of old paradigm versus new paradigm, is it brings in the subject of metacognition, thinking about how we think. Because if you do pair an old story with a new or newly appreciated story, it helps people distinguish the fact that it was a story in the first place.

Michael: You know, if you take the idea of ‘time is money’, that’s been repeated so often that people just assume, well, that is reality. And it takes a more persuasive story to replace that. And the one that Sarah and I talked about in Flourish, which was the Gross National Happiness Project in Bhutan, which is that time is not money, time is life. And someone who subscribes to that view, is much more likely to respect people and to think carefully about how they want to spend their precious time on planet Earth. And so I think as individuals, but even better in groups, by talking in the way that Donella Meadows talks, by by pairing the old paradigm versus the new or newly appreciated one, we can move towards this epochal shift. And it’s not something that can be forced. It’s only going to happen when enough people come on board with it. And it may be that no large protest is enough by itself to make this shift. It needs to be more of a sort of mycelial spreading of ideas. Anyway, those are my thoughts. I’d love to hear your response.

Manda: Okay, this is so exciting. Thank you. So many things. It depends what level we’re looking at it. So something that I discovered recently is that if I asked you to imagine what would life be like when you wake up tomorrow morning, it takes five parts of your brain, because basically tomorrow is an iteration of yesterday, and all you have to do is figure out is, let’s just say tomorrow is a Wednesday, what did last Wednesday look like? So five parts of your brain to work out let’s restructure tomorrow because it’s going to be pretty much like, we know. If I say, what will it be like in ten years time? It takes 11 parts of your brain, because there are too many unknowns. And what I do is I go into or we/you/I go into our hippocampus and look at everything that we know, and I cannot fashion anything new. You said earlier that people make new stuff, and I don’t know that people do. What people do is refashion the existing bits that are in their head in new ways. But if all I have is red and blue Lego bricks, I can only ever make something that’s going to be red and blue in a different format. I can’t bring in green because I don’t know what green looks like.

Manda: I’m not entirely sure it’s true, but there is a thesis that the Romans didn’t have a word for blue, or that certain cultures didn’t have a word for green. And you need the word there in order to be able to see the sky or the grass. Let’s not go into cultural stuff because I’m not sure it’s true, but you cannot have ideas of what the world would be like that are different to the component parts that you’ve already got. So you have a look in your hippocampus and you restructure those parts. Then you go to your ventromedial prefrontal cortex and say, does this fit with my aims and desires? And then you go to your limbic system and go, how do I feel about this? And if the last bit is, no, I don’t like this, then you put more effort into rejecting it than you’ve already done creating the picture. So we have a number of components there. One is it’s not just over twice the amount of work, it’s exponentially greater, because you’re building new pathways, you’re bridging new things. And we’re not really designed to think that hard very often. We’re very, very good at assessing how do we feel, good or bad, yes or no, do I want to take this on board or don’t I? We’re good at matching does this fit aims and desires? We’re not good at stepping out into kind of stepping off the edge of the cliff into open space where we don’t know any of the parameters.

Manda: So our inclination is not to do that. And yet, if we can go in at the level of aims and desires and the work that you do when you do the ancestral thinking, the deep time thinking, I also lead a similar one where we go back to before the big Bang, and then we come forward and we step seven generations down the line, and we look into the eyes of a young person there and we say, are you proud of us? And what can I learn from you? What can you need from me? Or questions similar to that? And people always come back profoundly moved. There’s a sense of the legacy that we leave that really touches people. And what Zack Polanski is doing really, really well at the moment in the Green Party in the UK is critique the existing system, yes, it’s crap. And that happens to be exactly what Farage and Reform are doing on the really hard right. Critique the existing system is not hard. I don’t know a single person who thinks the existing system is working well.

Manda: Where we then differ is okay, so what do you want? And we can either huddle into the defensive I just want to feel safe and that means I become incredibly tribal and I reject anyone who isn’t of my tribe. Or, and this is where I think the paradigm shift comes, is can we help people have the building blocks for the fact that there is a future where I feel confident and safe and connected, and I have that reciprocal pride that everybody needs of people I respect look on me with respect. I have respect for people, and they have respect for me. And I can have pride in doing well, what it is to be me. And that’s not something that our culture has ever allowed to be what humanity is for. And if I have understood Graeber and Wengrow and others, it’s exactly what indigenous cultures did very, very well and still do very well. Is that what is it that I do well that only I can do well? What is that intersection between my heart’s greatest joy and the world’s greatest need, and the doingness, the beingness of me. And so we bring all of those together. And how do we offer people their Limbic sense of feeling safe and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of my aims and desires are to flourish. Instead of my aim and desire is to reject everything and to create a little bastion of safety.

Manda: And that seems to be the epochal shift. And in the politics of our time, the right are very, very good at taking an amount of distance in the past, let’s say, the 1950s, and polishing it up and going, you were powerless in the 50s (because you were ten), and now you’re grown up and you have power and you’re going to make the 50s be like you wanted it to be. And that’s effortless; five parts of our brain. And all I’m doing is taking the past and repackaging it. And okay, you grew up in a place where heteropatriarchal white supremacy was a thing, let’s make it a thing again. And that doesn’t take much effort. And it’s easy to describe and for some people it’s really attractive. We have a much bigger job because we want emergence into a new system. And the point about the new system is that it’s completely unpredictable from the perspective of the old system. If I can predict it, it’s not a new system. If I can describe it with the old building blocks, it’s not a new system. How do we give everybody the new building blocks, of a yearning for flourishing? Because people will climb Everest once they know it’s there, and they have that yearning to get to the top.

Manda: How do we describe the Everest of we don’t know what it looks like from the top of Everest yet, but we know that it’s possible, and we know that humanity can be an integral part of the web of life, and our self consciousness then becomes something of which we are proud. Because at the moment most people are ashamed of being human, because being human means destroying the web of life. How do we flip that and go no, we could be an integral part that is so good at being what we are, we could do all these amazing things. We could become part of a world that is greater and more flourishing and more compassionate, and embodies more generosity of spirit. So I think we need to change the values by which we live. I think the values we live by at the moment are those of diminishment and human supremacy, and we’re not proud of that, actually, at a core level. And what are the values? This is an open question; I’m going for integrity, compassion, generosity of spirit, but that’s open to change. What are our core asks? And mine are clean air, clean water, clean soil. Because again, it’s quite hard to argue with no, I want to have toxic air, toxic water and soil that kills us.

Manda: And those are really basic. If that’s what we need, then how do we design a world that offers us those things? And then we also need to do the inner work. We need to create the clean, clear, compassionate, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves. So we need to do the inner work first and then between ourselves and each other. So we need to build communities that work in the 21st century and then between ourselves and the web of life. So we need to create the communities of being. But I don’t think we can create the communities between humans and humans in the web, until we’ve done the inner work. Dick Schwartz says that almost all of us, almost all of the time, are walking around in a state of internal civil war, which is the nature of the trauma culture. We have to do the individual, collective and ancestral healing, and that’s a big ask. And I’ve sat in groups with people who get very cross with being asked to do that level of healing, because it’s too much. And yet I don’t actually think it’s optional not to anymore. I just think we’re so close to the edge of the cliff, that if you’re alive at the moment, then this is the work of now.

Michael: Yeah.

Manda: And that that’s the bit that can be missing. I don’t think it’s missing from your book at all. But if we don’t bring in that bit, we can design all we like, but we won’t get to where we need to go. Over to you. How does that land?

Michael: Yeah, well, I agree with pretty much all of that. And I think you and Rupert Read are really onto something with what you’ve said about thrutopian ways of thinking. And also when you were talking, it was reminding me of something that George Ferguson said once. Do you remember he was the independent mayor of Bristol?

Manda: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Michael: And he achieved a lot in his term. I remember him saying that when you go through a consultation exercise, if you just say to people, well, what do you want? It tends not to go very well. But if you have consultation with inspiration, then you help convey what is possible and you get much better results. And of course, since he was talking about that, we’ve had massive increase in the use of participatory processes. And I think that’s where the real strength lies, that you can engage people in a meaningful conversation about the kind of future that would be possible. And yes, it can be difficult to get people to engage with new ideas, I think maybe the term neuroplasticity is the right one. You know much more than I do about neurological stuff. But I think a lot of people can get engaged in the kind of future that could be created and feel a sense of responsibility, particularly if they’ve got kids. So I think a big expansion of those participatory processes is part of what we need to renew our democracy and to start conveying the idea that there is a better future that is possible, and that actually we can step into a new role as humans, and there’s very little to be afraid of. There’s actually a huge amount to be gained. And then in terms of the inner work, I don’t know what you think, but I think people have to kind of draw their own conclusions on that. I’ve done certain things that I’ve found really transformative, you know, like Family Constellations and the Landmark Forum and Advanced Course and so on. But I’d be very wary of trying to push that too hard for other people.

Manda: Yes. I think we can suggest that the inner work needs to be done, I don’t think we can tell people how to do it. I think we can open doors, I think you’re right. Family constellations is a thing. IFS is a thing, say a little bit about the other.The landmark?

Michael: The Landmark forum is run by an organisation called Landmark Education. And for me, it was a really good way of learning about what made me the person I am and why I think certain ways and unless you distinguish the reasons why you react to certain situations the way you do, then it’s much more difficult to move on from those kind of maladaptive ways of thinking or existing. II got a lot out of it. Some people find it a little bit cult like, but for me it was a really good experience.

Manda: Okay. And I think this is what’s so exciting about the moment. We have the design technologies that you write about in the book, some of which are mind bendingly amazing. And if everything that we designed were designed on the principles of this book, we would be so far along the route towards a regenerative future. And we have the social and the individual technologies that we didn’t have. Family constellation is relatively new. IFS is relatively new. I’m guessing the landmark work is relatively new. You know, 50 years ago we didn’t have these. It wasn’t possible to take the steps of healing that are available now. And they’re evolving. They’re changing all the time. They’re getting better, because healing is an additive process. And what we need on top of that, I think, is letting people know that it’s possible and creating the space where they can do it. Because you and I have the privilege of sitting here in the middle of a Monday morning and talking to each other, and we’re not trying to hold down three jobs just to pay the rent. We need some kind of universal basic services, which we’ve talked about endlessly, Some way of giving people the space. Rob Hopkins says capitalism is a dis imagination machine, and it’s designed to keep people spinning on the hamster wheel so that they haven’t got the time and the space to do the healing, to think differently, to step off the wheel. Because otherwise, as the quote said at the beginning, the people who run capitalism think that the threat of democracy to capitalism is greater than the threat of Donald Trump to democracy. And and I think we have to accept that there are bad faith actors who are very deliberately throwing spanners in the works of what we’re trying to do. And I think my assumption up till now has been that everybody will get on board because the world is going to be better, and there are actually people who will actively endeavour to maintain the old system.

Michael: Yes. And that’s partly why I’m now more aligned with Donella Meadows’ way of thinking. I think we do have to point to the flaws in the old system, and I think the adaptive cycle model is actually quite useful in that sense. So to explain that: it was developed by two ecologists, Holling and Gunderson, as a way of analysing how ecosystems develop over time.

Manda: We’re going to get to panarchy, aren’t we? I love Panarchy. Go on.

Michael: And they hypothesise that these systems go through four stages; there’s a growth stage, a consolidation stage, a release stage and a reorganisation stage. So as an example of that in an ecosystem, imagine you have a landslide bare patch of land. You get lots of pioneer species and then waves of colonising species, each of which changes the environment slightly and creates other niches. That’s the growth phase. And then eventually that leads to a climax ecosystem like oak woodland, and that’s the consolidation stage, as it becomes more and more dominated by one species. And what I think is particularly interesting about this is that in that first growth stage, the system responds to external changes by adapting to them, but in the consolidation phase, it responds to external change by resisting them. And then eventually it becomes more and more fragile and you get a release phase like, say, an insect infestation or a forest fire. And then there’s the reorganisation phase, and it can return to something similar, or it can go back to a very different system. And since they created this model, people have applied it to human made systems.

Michael: So for instance, you could look at, say, the American car industry. There was an initial growth phase, eventually becoming dominated by a limited number of players. The oil crisis of the 70s was the first release phase, and in many ways, the industry just sort of went back to its old bad ways of being dominated by a few limited players, very densely interconnected with the media and politics, resisting change. And so the next release phase was the financial crisis. And what Obama did, which was really unfortunate I think, was bailed them out, which was basically just returning them to that late consolidation phase. It would have been much more courageous if he’d said, no, we’re not going to do that. I’m going to fund a richer ecosystem of smaller, more innovative players. And you could even look at the whole kind of industrial age of humankind with this. Initially, there was a long growth phase with masses of resources, and then the era of neoliberalism coincides with consolidation phase, in which our systems have become more and more interconnected; media, big business, politics.

Manda: And owned by very few at the time.

Michael: Yes. And that’s where we are now. And, you know, they have more than enough power to block brilliant ideas and really meaningful change. And so I think we’re only going to create a positive future if we can bring about a release of that system.

Manda: Yes. There’s a wonderful bit in your book where you describe the whole of Earth’s evolution in a day, and I can’t remember the exact numbers, but basically, humanity is in the last 15 seconds of the last hour of the last day. And neoliberalism is a fraction of a second. I’ve probably got the numbers wrong, but it’s a tiny amount. And it seems to me that I occasionally look at Steve Bannon’s work, and they are aiming for a 10,000 year Reich of a white heteropatriarchal supremacist theocracy, run along the lines of the Inquisition, because, hey, it’s easy to remember what it was like in the 1600s, and we liked it like that, bizarrely. But they’re not going to get it because bio physical reality is a thing, and we are heading over the edge of the sixth mass extinction. And so it seems to me that we are alive at a very exciting time, because that consolidation phase is rigid. There’s no resilience in it at all. And one way or another, change is coming. It will either collapse into a mass extinction. There have been five before and there’s no reason why our species has particularly got a necessary supremacist risk to keep going. But we could emerge into something completely different. And once we know that, then there’s nothing to lose by giving everything we’ve got to supporting the emergence. Because the old system cannot hold. And in a way, Donald Trump and Project 2025 are a bit like a forest fire, because I don’t think Obama would have lasted if he had decided not to bail out the banks. The banks, or the people behind the banks held the power.

Manda: And what we have at the moment, if Bernie Sanders had come in and done what Trump is doing, which is basically to dismantle the whole of the American economy, there would have been a military coup within days. And he’s dismantling the whole of the American economy. And at the current look, he’s about to summon Someone all 800 leaders of the American military to one place at one time. And my supposition is he’s going to get them to swear an oath to him and the ones who refuse will be arrested by the ones who do it. And that wasn’t a thing. That could not have been… Obama, Biden, Bernie, none of them could have done that. They would not have got away with it. So the forest fire is in process, and it’s not great. I’m not suggesting that I’m enjoying watching the dramatic and rapid destruction of a system. And all the time we spent at Schumacher, nine months, was trying to work out how to get the glide path to a soft landing. That was exactly explicitly what we were doing, but we didn’t find it. It would have taken the whole of humanity cohering around the idea that what we needed to do was dismantle neoliberalism. And absent that, what we’re seeing is neoliberalism eating its own head. And The cracks are where the light gets in. Which may be a cliche, but if you and I and people like us can engender the idea that an entirely different way of being is possible, a totally different paradigm is possible. And here are the tools.

Michael: Yes. Yeah. I think part of the problem is a lot of people subscribe to the view that there is no alternative and it’s often difficult to know how to tackle that. But there was a very good report from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. I can look it up afterwards. I can’t remember exactly what it was called, but one of the points it made was that unsustainable systems, by definition, come to an end. And we have a system that is not remotely aligned with life. And the longer we delay that point of kind of release and reorganisation, to use the adaptive cycle model terminology, the more disruptive and dangerous it’s going to be.

Manda: So it’s in everybody’s interests to to get that glide path and then to build out of that the new paradigm that is emerging. Michael, we are so far over time. I’ve used so much of your time.

Michael: I was looking at the time a little bit, but that’s fine.

Manda: And there’s so much we still haven’t talked about. We didn’t talk about connectivity and we didn’t talk about Bucky Fuller’s metaphor of the steel ball. Just as a close, because I think it’s a lovely one to close with, tell us that and then we’ll stop.

Michael: Sure. Okay. So, Buckminster Fuller was a genius, and he was a very good communicator. And he used really effective metaphors for conveying what it is really that we’re existing on. He called it Spaceship Earth. And he encouraged people to imagine a two metre diameter steel ball in front of them. And imagine if you breathe on that and the condensation forms on that surface. The thickness of that condensation in relative scale terms is the same as the thickness of the biosphere. That’s the zone within which all life has happened. Every human act, every act of love and war and so on. It’s all taken place in that incredibly thin zone around our lump of rock hurtling through space. And it’s quite an amazing thing to think about.

Manda: It’s mind blowing. That’s from the bottom of the Marianas Trench to the top of the atmosphere. All the life within that. On scale terms, you breathe on this steel ball, and it’s the condensation. That! That. We exist in that. And we can either kill it or we can help it to flourish. It’s a pretty amazing thought. Michael, you’re amazing. And I am so, so in love with your books. So thank you and thank you for coming on to the podcast.

Michael: Well, thank you, Manda, and thank you for all your work. I mean, it’s just amazing the body of work that you’ve built up with Accidental Gods, so thank you.

Manda: Well thank you. And given how incoherent I was today, it’s kind of amazing it’s got this far. But hey, everybody, you want to read this book, you genuinely do. And at some point, one last thing. What next? I mean, you’re not quite about to do a fourth edition. What’s the most exciting thing happening in your world just now?

Michael: I’m working on a project about deep time, actually. That’s one thing I’m really excited about. Can’t say much about it yet.

Manda: When it’s ready, you can come back on.

Michael: I’d love to talk all about it. Yeah.

Manda: Fantastic. Right. There we go. Michael Pawlyn, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast and for giving us so much of your time.

Michael: Thank you Manda.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Michael for all that he is and does for the vision that he brings to all that he offers the world. I have said this before, but I do think this is a step change in our understanding of what it is to be human. How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and you had a sense of being a gift to the world. Of everything that we do contributing to the flourishing of the web of life in ways that were tangible. I think that would be a pretty radical shift. And I think it’s a story that we can tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other, and our place in the web of life. So, as I’ve said about a dozen times now, you want to go and get Michael’s book. You want to buy copies for all of your friends. If nothing else, it’s a work of art in itself. It’s beautifully designed and the pictures are actually mind blowing. So there we go. That’s your homework for this week.

Manda: We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowell’s of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website, the Tech, all of the work behind the scenes and the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as always, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who needs to understand the real potential of humans in the world, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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