In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still just possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to create the foundations of a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week, I am one of the authors of a new book, Transformative Adaptation, with the subtitle Another World is Still Just Possible, which you may recognise. The main editors and contributors are friend of the podcast: author, activist and co-founder of the Climate Majority Project, Professor Rupert Read; and new to the podcast Morgan Phillips, who is an educator currently working for Global Action Plan, an environmental charity that mobilises people and organisations to take action on the systems that harm us and our planet. The book is published by Permanent Publications, of which you have heard, because this is the book publishing arm of Permaculture Magazine, and that’s why I’m in it. Maddie Harland, who edits the magazine and has published the book, brought together the five articles I wrote on Thrutopia for the magazine; what it is, why we need it, and how we get there. And with a bit of light editing, they have been fitted into the mix. They’re not the bulk of it, though. The bulk of it comes from other people who are completely immersed in the transformative adaptation world, and the launch has been timed to coincide with the end of COP 29, just before this podcast goes out.

Manda: At the time of recording, we actually have no idea how that COP will go. If it’s like all the previous 28 COPs, it will be a triumph of obstructionism and irrelevancy masquerading as action. We might be surprised. We really hope that we are. But even if the nations who truly understand the magnitude of the meta crisis somehow manage some kind of world wide diplomatic miracle and succeed in making it clear that we need total systemic change, we still need guidelines that will help everybody to see what this looks like and how it can happen. We need ideas of what to do at a local and national level, examples of the kinds of deliberative democracies that we will need to bring everybody on board. Just because the US has gone full-on fascist, doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. We need templates of how the world can be if we actually bring all our creativity to bear on the single most important issue of our time. And that’s clearly what this podcast is for, all of it. But this particular episode lays out the detail from the concept of a sixth mission for the UK government and any other national government that wants to take it up, to examples of how we might shift our educational focus to why building flood defences is really not enough. Never going to be enough.

Manda: And how could we shift our communities to stop reacting and start adapting? None of this is easy; we do know this. It’s not getting any easier, but at least we can start having the important conversations. This is what we’re doing here on the podcast, and this is what the book is for, and we hope you find it inspiring enough to buy the book, read it, give it to your friends, your family, your colleagues. Do whatever it takes to help your local community to find creative, flourishing, inspiring, regenerative ways to meet the chaos of our world. This needs to feel good. So how can we help other people to understand that feeling good and facing what’s coming are not necessarily mutually incompatible. That’s what we’re here for. So here we go. People of the podcast, please welcome Morgan Phillips and Rupert Read and me, of Transformative Adaptations; Another World is Still Just Possible 

Manda: Well, welcome both of you to the Accidental Gods podcast, where we get to talk about a book that all three of us have contributed to, which is new. I love doing new stuff. So, Morgan first and then Rupert, how are you and where are you this lovely Friday afternoon?

Morgan: Hi, Manda. Hi, Rupert. It’s great to be with you. I am fine, thanks. Yeah, it’s been a long week, but surviving it. And, I’m in west Wales, in Ceredigion, a very fortunate place to live.

Manda: Are you near the sea?

Morgan: Yeah, I can see it out the window.

Manda: Can you? Oh, okay. I have sea envy. All right. And, Rupert, you’re near the Norfolk Broads. I remember because we nearly drowned in them last time I came to visit you. How are you? And I’m assuming you are in Norfolk, although you have just come off a live thing with Times Radio, which does leave me very impressed.

Rupert: Yeah, yeah, I’m very busy because it’s COP time. And I am here at home, so I can look out my window onto our wonderful third of an acre, where we’re trying to build a little bit of local resilience and certainly growing a large amount of food in a biodiversity friendly way. As I look around the room I’m in, which is a garden house, I can see a truly enormous number of squash and pumpkins, which is always incredibly exciting for me. So yeah, I’m doing all right.

Manda: And now I have squash envy, because all of ours got hit by frost over here in the west of England. So my plants all died. I think we had one plant survive into actually making stuff. So you guys are going to be feeding the rest of us when Trump and his cabal manage to completely crash the world economy, and we’re all left fending for ourselves. Exciting life just around the corner. However, we are recording this while COP 29, I believe is still in process. I have to say I’ve been listening to Ed Miliband, who seems extremely bullish about this. We’ll get on to what you think about it later. But to begin with, Rupert, I think you were the progenitor of this book. Morgan and I both contributed to it. Tell us a little bit about how it came about and what you want from it.

Rupert: Yeah. So I’ve been working with others for quite a long time now on the concept of transformative adaptation. And when I turned more to trying to form, along with others, a sort of transformative adaptation movement, and this started in about late 2019 and started to ramp up in in 2020. It became an idea that eventually started to take form as a potential book project. The book has been a long time actually coming. I think it’s coming to fruition at a really wonderful time for it, because we’re at a moment when really, for the first time, a lot of people are frankly waking up to how bad the situation is and are realising that a decarbonisation only response is plainly now not adequate. And Morgan came on board at a pretty early stage because, of course, Morgan has been one of the leading voices for taking adaptation seriously in his book Great Adaptations, and also in his work with the charity The Glacier Trust. So it was relatively easy for Morgan and I to decide that we wanted to do this book together. The book, as I hope we’ll be coming on to, is pretty unusual in that not only does it have a lot of us in it and a lot of you Manda, but it’s got a lot of other voices too. You know, this book is a truly collective work, as befits the whole idea of transformative adaptation. It comes from this kind of mini movement, which has taken form in the Transformative Adaptation Collective, in the experiences that we’ve had. And I mean we, a whole load of us. And that have taken form in various organisations that now exist, as well as the sort of incipient movement, as I say, of transformative adaptation itself.

Manda: Okay. Thank you. So, Morgan, fill us in a little bit. Rupert’s been on the podcast more than anybody else except Simon Michaux. So tell us a bit about yourself. Tell us a little bit about Great Adaptations and the Glacier Trust and everything else that you do. And then your introduction to the concept of transformative adaptation, if you can unpack that a little bit for us.

Morgan: Thank’s Manda. Yeah, I guess I’ve been an environmentalist of different types, I think, for most of my adult life. I think it really was in my adult life that I started to become more awakened to it. So this was late 90s, early 2000’s. I’m a geography graduate, environmental science, PhD in environmental education and followed by working in various NGO worlds. Both kind of in environmental education directly, so working on the eco schools project for a number of years, working as a kind of freelancer, going and delivering environmental education sessions of different forms in schools, and that kind of that kind of work, which was great and on the ground. And then coupled that with sort of an interest in the global South and that there’s a bigger world out there than just the UK. And so I’ve been fortunate enough to work for smaller charities that focus on intercultural understanding and taking me to various places around the world, to get a better appreciation of what life is like there. And then inevitably, how environmental impacts are shaping what the world is like. And around about ten years ago, maybe eight years ago, I joined the Glacier Trust, which is a very small charity focussed on enabling climate change adaptation in the Himalayas in Nepal. Quite a lot of the work in Solukhumbu, which is in the Everest region. And I was very, very lucky to do that work. I did it for five years, visited Nepal five times in that period to really understand what is happening, the impacts of climate change happening in those in those mountain environments. Both the kind of large scale, they’ve just had an horrific flood in Kathmandu and up the Kathmandu Valley, which kind of got lost in the news cycle.

Morgan: But it happened and many lives were lost. But working there on agroforestry projects largely. So really my role was to fundraise for them and to raise awareness of them, which is what led to Great Adaptations. So that was a book written to look at different forms of adaptation that are happening in different parts of the world, and just trying to talk about them. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are spontaneous, some of them are planned, some of them have a good transformative impact, and some of them have negative impacts. And so really unpicking a whole load of quite interesting case studies from around the world, as a kind of what’s going on in the adaptation world. And so as a result of that and having conversations, I think probably I first met Rupert about 15 years ago or so through the Common Cause movement. And we reconnected, I guess, around the time of Extinction Rebellion and became aware of what Rupert was doing around transformative adaptation. Then worked together to think, yeah, we need to capture this moment of the emergence of this idea of transformative adaptation. There were various bits of writing happening, which Rupert was spearheading, but we felt we should document them in a book of some sort. So that’s kind of part of how this came about.

Manda: Okay. And we should have Maddie Harland on here, really, as the editor of Permanent Press. But she and Rupert and I did another video which will be out and which I will link to this in the show notes. So, Rupert, for people who haven’t followed every single episode of the podcast, there must be 1 or 2 people out there who haven’t. Tell us what adaptation is, what transformative adaptation is, do those two briefly. And then I’d really like to unpick the concept that decarbonisation is not enough. And who else gets this? Because I think there’s a lot about decarbonisation at Cop that seems to be rattling around in a bit of its own sealed container, as if that was enough. So let’s head down that road.

Rupert: Yeah. Very good. So let’s start off with an even more broad concept of climate action. What do you think of when you think of climate action? I think what a lot of people think of is stuff like putting in solar panels and doing various other things that will reduce our collective carbon footprint. And that’s great, but it’s not good enough, frankly, at this moment, for that to be the main image that we have of climate action. Climate action also needs to be us protecting ourselves against climate impacts. And that’s basically what climate adaptation is. Climate adaptation is the process of proactively and reactively responding to the actual vulnerabilities, which increasingly we are subject to. So, as Morgan has already mentioned it’s entirely possible for adaptation to go in the wrong direction if all you do is what’s called defensive adaptation or critically called shallow adaptation. If all you do, for example, against the risk of flooding, is build ever higher hard flood defences, then you’re doing something which is carbon heavy, something which is fragile and actually makes your setup more fragile, because eventually those defences will give out or be overtopped if that’s all you do, right? You’re just making sure that the situation will eventually overwhelm you.

Rupert: So we’ve got to have a way of adapting which actually rolls with the punches, which works with nature rather than against nature, which works with decarbonisation rather than against decarbonisation, which works in the direction of the kind of society we need to be having and want to be having anyway. The changed society, the better society that our hearts know is possible, right? And that’s basically what transformative adaptation is. Transformative Adaptation is a name for the right kind of adaptation. And you know, there’s a clue in that word transformative. We’re looking at a future which is going to be very different. And we need to create that future in a way that is fully aware of how very difficult the path that is ahead of us is going to be. Because we’re going to be having to deal for a long time to come with a rising tide of of impacts and with literal rising tides. So that’s essentially where transformative adaptation comes in. Now, what was the last bit of your question?

Manda: The fact that a lot of the world seems to think that decarbonisation is enough, and we know that it’s not.

Rupert: Yes. Good. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. So, as I say, it’s clear now that awareness of this is starting to grow. But I emphasise the word starting. If you look at the coverage of COP, for example, it’s still overwhelmingly about decarbonisation. Well, I say that. I mean actually a lot of it’s about how the president of Azerbaijan wants more oil and gas and how the process is corrupt and so forth. But let’s leave that on one side if we’re able to. There isn’t nearly enough focus, and there isn’t nearly enough money going into adaptation and into what is called loss and damage, which is actual compensation for when people have these terrible events happen to them at scale. So what we’re saying in the book, and also what we’re saying more generally in the Climate Majority project, which I run, is that now is the time to focus much more on the right kinds of adaptation. Not as a complete alternative to decarbonisation of course, as I’ve already mentioned actually, transformative adaptation seeks to go hand in hand with decarbonisation. But to put much more of an emphasis on adaptation. To be, in a certain sense, adaptation first, actually. I mean, here’s one good reason for being adaptation first in one’s approach: if you are not robust against impacts, then you risk getting knocked out. You risk getting derailed. This is an increasingly real risk that think tanks are starting to write about. As I say, they are just starting, but it is happening. For example, the IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, has done 1 or 2 very good reports on this recently. I’ve been talking with them quite a lot.

Rupert: So one needs to avoid derailment. Think about it in the context of the UK, for example, where I know you have quite a lot of listeners Manda for obvious reasons. The government here has its five missions, but what we’re seeing in the Climate Majority Project is there needs to be another mission, and that mission is to protect us against climate impact. Because if we don’t have that mission, all the other missions, especially the decarbonisation of the electricity supply mission, risk getting swept aside. So that’s really the point. There is a real sense in which it does make sense to have a kind of adaptation first approach. Here’s another way in which adaptation is a really good place to start. For a lot of people, decarbonisation is awfully distant. You know, there are these endless litanies of gases and percentages in years 2035, 2050, etc. Adaptation is much more concrete. It’s kind of in the here and now. You see what’s happening in Spain, say, or indeed in this country in September with the bad floods that we had here. And you start to realise we’ve got to handle this differently, right. We’re looking at a changed situation that there is no new normal. We’re going to be in a constant posture now of trying to adapt and transform in relation to what’s happening. Adaptation is more concrete to people, you know, and in that sense, it could be crucial to the ambition of seeking to mainstream climate action, which, as you know, is an ambition that’s very close to my heart.

Manda: Okay. There are a huge number of things I want to unpick in there, particularly the sixth mission. But before we do that, let’s come back to Morgan. And for you, Morgan, just could you unpick your version of what transformative adaptation means, but particularly I want to go down the route of the fact that this is a way of framing the kind of society that we want to get to. Because it seems to me that we’ve had the US elections, if they were not stolen, and if it is not the case that there is some change possible, then we’ve lost the US. It’s basically going to be full on fascism, project 2025. They’re going to have their white supremacist, patriarchal theocracy that Bannon’s been working for so hard. And they’re going to go flat out for fossil fuel consumption and all the way down on anything that they consider to be green. I don’t think that ideology actually ever beats biophysical reality, but it’ll take a little while for that to hit them. So what can we do to help to shape the kind of society that we would like to see in a way that we can express to people who don’t necessarily get their news from where we get it from, and don’t necessarily think as we think. Over to you. Morgan. That’s a big ask, I realise. Pick whatever you want out of that.

Morgan: Thanks, Manda, yeah. We’ve talked about it a bit already, but I think the thing to recognise is that we are in the age of adaptation now, and whether you like it or not, you’re adapting to climate change. And it’s happening probably subconsciously as well as consciously. You know, it can come down to smaller things, such as having a slightly bigger bottle of water when you go out during a hot day. That’s an adaptation. And so this adaptation is going on and I think there’s a need to become conscious of the fact that we’re adapting in the first place, because if we don’t, if we’re not conscious of it and not thinking about the the impact of our adaptation choices, we can end up creating collateral damage. But we can also obviously end up creating collateral benefits as well, if we’re smart about how we’re doing the adaptation. So I kind of think about adaptation in the same way as I think about transport or food. There are green ways to adapt, just as there are green ways to travel. And so we need to think about what sorts of adaptations we want to be doing, and be conscious of the adaptations that we are doing, but probably not quite aware of at the minute.

Morgan: But this is ultimately a book about societal transformation, because I think if we were to look back, 100 years from now, people will look back at what’s happening in this age, in this period now, and will see the human species that is wreaking horrific damage on the planet, and on our own species as well as other species. We will see efforts to try to make people aware of that and to try and sort of slow that down and limit that. We’ll see that going on and we’ll see this kind of scramble to adapt, which is happening like most most things, in an unequal equal way. If you’ve got more resources, you can afford to adapt. I live on the west coast of Wales. Just up the coast here in Aberaeron, which is where I went to school, a huge sea wall is being built. And Rupert’s talked about the pros and cons of building concrete sea walls, but it’s being built to protect the town because already the football pitch in that town which I used to play on, is under sea level as it is. And so it needs to be protected from the rising sea levels. And £30 million has been spent on that. But if you go to a different part of the world, they don’t have £30 million to spend on the sea wall. I mean, most most of Wales doesn’t have that sort of money, but Aberaeron is a jewel in the crown of Welsh tourism, so it obviously does get protected. Which is great, I mean I love it, it’s one of my favourite places in the world. So we’re in this age of adaptation, but societal transformation needs to happen within it. So that’s kind of how I think about what transformative adaptation is. Are we also transforming society at the same time? Because ultimately, if we don’t transform society, the planet and the atmosphere and climate change will accelerate to a point where it’s impossible to adapt to it, we won’t be able to build high enough seawalls.

Manda: The sixth mass extinction will happen, and it’s not going to be the large, hairless bipeds that are amongst the 3% that survive.

Morgan: So the societal transformation needs to be happening at the same time as the adaptation is happening. So again, if we’re looking back from 100 years hence back to now, we’ll hopefully be able to recognise that transformation was happening. And in terms of what that is, I mean, I think this is a really interesting area which lots of us are exploring all around the world at the moment. As we see the rise of fascism and maybe the end of neoliberal capitalism and fascism being part of the end of democracy, the end of Western civilisation. These things are starting to be eaten by their own contradictions and starting to collapse around us, it seems. And what emerges from that? You know, will it be successor civilisations as opposed to a successor civilisation? And what would those look like? And so this is where we talk in the book quite a bit about Rojava in northern Syria or southern Kurdistan, depending on your perspective, which is an example we think of kind of a trad type movement happening based in the thinking of Murray Bookchin, which is adopted by Abdullah Öcalan. And then sort of creating this society based on ecological principles and feminism, equality and multiculturalism and essentially and most importantly I think, decentralised democracy in the kind of democratic confederalist model. Which is a different form of democracy, which doesn’t lead to power grabs.

Morgan: And so we’re seeing these sorts of things emerging and they’re based on ultimately an understanding that we are not independent selves, we are interdependent selves. And it’s also based on trusting that human beings deep down are good and we can trust them to make good decisions. And so therefore decision making can be devolved, because we can trust the people to make good decisions for themselves about their own lives. And that’s the kind of societal transformation that the citizen movements and things going on, and deliberative democracy and citizens assemblies, these sorts of things seem to be a kind of bubbling up of that, which I think is there. We capture some of that in the book, I think, but Rupert will have more to say, I’m sure. And yourself, Manda.

Manda: Brilliant. Yes. Yes, Murray Bookchin is amazing. And I will put links to some other writing about Rojava, because it’s really impressive. I never know whether it’s municipal federalism or federal municipalism, but either way they do create this decentralised democracy in a way that actually works. Which is one of the reasons why, until very recently, the US and Turkey and everywhere else were all trying to destroy them, but they haven’t succeeded yet. So Rupert, let’s go back to needing a sixth mission. First of all, can you tell us what the sixth mission actually is? And then if Starmer and Miliband, so this is in the UK, or anybody around the world, I am seeing movements to create bioregional nations, to get rid of nation states and move towards co-ordi nations. So all of the things that we will need to do if we’re going to face fascism, I think, is find federalised, decentralised, democratic ways of actually trusting people. And I would say clearly at this point that I think one of the differences between fascism and whatever we want to call Adaptationism (possibly?) you will think of a more catchy word than that, is that we trust the people. We trust people. Whereas the whole point of fascism is that they trust nobody except an inner cabal. If we’re going to spread trust and the concept of decentralised democracy, such that people are able to make decisions and share in coherent, useful group decisions that are not necessarily bound by Hobbesian concepts of nation states, on what would that be predicated? How are we going to help, or what do you see as possibly, the roots of a likely new kind of democratic concept and a new society that would get us forward? So sixth mission and then what are its base lines, really.

Rupert: Yeah. So the Labour government in the UK has five missions, which one can debate how good or bad these missions are. They do seem to include some good things, like the idea of decarbonising the electricity supply. And the point I was seeking to make is that all of these missions risk getting swept away. Everything that we care about risks getting swept away as the pace of climate chaos steps up, which, tragically, we’re locked into that stepping up for some considerable time to come now. So the idea is there needs to be another mission. You have to have a climate adaptation mission, not just the climate decarbonisation mission. If you don’t have a climate adaptation mission, then you don’t actually really even have a climate decarbonisation mission. You don’t have one that’s secure, because your pylons may get blown over or whatever. I’m not a technical expert on this, but my understanding is that there is some good reason to believe that the electricity supply in this country, including the new stuff, which this government wants to bring in with the greening of the electricity supply, has not been thoroughly robustified against the kind of winds and storms and heat waves, etc. that we’re likely to have.

Manda: Can I interject there? Partly because I was in Cambridge earlier this week. Hi to the people who listen to the podcast and then hold groups to discuss it. Hello people in Cambridge! One of my friends is in a village outside Cambridge, and the local landowner wishes to set up a solar park, five square miles of solar panels for which they will earn £2 million per year. Nobody in the community will earn anything at all. And it seems to me that decarbonising the electricity supply means massively increasing other material consumption, first of all. Where is the copper coming from? Where is the silicon coming from? How much power is in all of those solar panels? But also, I am not seeing any effort at all to create what I would call regenerative power creation. In that what impact is this going to have on five square miles of currently farmland? Can we perhaps increase the soil depth? Create carbon sequestration. Increase biodiversity, somehow, within a solar farm. Are you aware, either of you, of any effort to do something other than just blanket solar panels across the land? Rupert, yes, go for it.

Rupert: Yeah. So it’s a really good set of points. One point to make in relation to that is that, of course, you are absolutely right that it is scandalous the way that decarbonisation is being done, mostly without any regard to actually building or involving communities. But that of course could be changed.

Manda: It could be a community farm and they could have the 2 million. But no, somebody who’s already got too much money is going to make it. So this is basically predatory capitalism on steroids.

Rupert: That’s what should happen. Yeah. In terms of the impacts of a solar farm, they can actually be good if you do them in the right way. They can be good for biodiversity, incredible though it may sound.

Manda: Have you got links for that that we can put in the show notes after? Because I think people will find it interesting.

Rupert: I can try to find some. A lot of British farmland of course is a nature desert, whereas a solar farm can be done in a different way. It can also be good for soil regeneration. The most exciting prospect is of what’s been called agrivoltaic farming, where you actually have solar panels which are deliberately raised above the ground and you can grow crops under them. This may be a really smart idea if we continue to go down the path of global overheating in this country, because we may get to a stage where some crops are being basically burnt in the fields by having too much sunlight. And this idea of agrivoltaic farming is quite an exciting possibility.

Manda: But my really basic understanding of botany is that anything that grows needs actual sunlight in in order to do basic photosynthesis, which is kind of fundamental to plant life.

Rupert: Of course. But my point is, you can have too much of a good thing. And we’re liable to get too much of a good thing coming in the overheated climate that we’re moving into. And by the way, that’s just a little sidebar there, before we go to Morgan on this. And this is possibly something we should come back to. That one of the really big adaptations that we need to be making is and this is genuinely transformative, is to be actually taking seriously the idea that we do not know that we’re going to have a future of getting hotter and hotter in this country. We could get colder. We have to be open to both colder and hotter futures. That’s the true adaptation challenge.

Manda: Yes, because we’re in climate chaos, not just climate change. And if the Amoc switches off, we’re seeing -40 degrees in the winter and I don’t think we’ve adapted for that at all, frankly. Okay, Morgan, you had your hand up. Go on, let’s have an input from you.

Morgan: Yeah, I was just I was just going to come in at a point about shade. Just a brief point, from my learnings in Nepal. So one of the adaptation strategies they’ve put in place there is to grow more coffee. Because coffee can thrive in higher altitudes now because of climate change. So it’s moving gradually up the hills. But coffee is a plant that needs shade. And so if it doesn’t have shade, it gets too hot, insects land on it, bore inside and kill it from the inside. So they’re shaded with banana trees usually, but also bamboo and so on. And then they can have layer farming, so they can grow bananas, coffee.

Manda: So kind of like a food forest.

Morgan: Yeah. So it’s a lovely sort of obviously uses a small amount of land which on terraced mountainsides is really important. So yeah, that’s a quick one on shade. But I also wanted to make a quick point about decarbonisation of the UK is the problems around local resistance to large scale renewable projects. In a Welsh context, we have a lot of opposition to wind farms, but the opposition is more to the pylons than the wind farms, because of how many pylons are needed to transport the energy. And I think two things are going on; if a community has more say over how they’re going to power their town and village and is able to make the choices themselves, they will likely make choices to have green energy rather than fossil fuel energy, because we expect most people do want climate action, all the data shows that. And so we’ll look hopefully at situations where one person doesn’t horde all the wealth that comes from doing that. And so that will hopefully enable more acceptance of the decisions to build renewable infrastructure, compared to when they’re centrally controlled.

Manda: Is that happening? Are you seeing any inclination on behalf of any government, anywhere in the world, to make the power generation more communitarian and less predatory capital?

Rupert: Yes. In some other countries there’s much more like that. For example, in the German speaking countries.

Morgan: Yeah there are examples. And the other the other point is, we talk about decarbonisation, but I think what we’re seeing at the moment is just more electricity being generated.

Manda: Right. And, we’re still burning more fossil fuels and all we’re doing is increasing more power use.

Morgan: We’re just adding more and more. So I think that feeds into the, I mean, I don’t like seeing fields covered in pylons and windmills. I’d rather they be fields, you know. But I accept it because of my beliefs about the climate. But it’s a harder pill to swallow, if that electricity generation isn’t replacing fossil fuel energy and actually just adding to it, because it’s actually just creating more problems ultimately and not really solving anything.

Manda: This is Jevons paradox and it’s applying full time.

Morgan: We’re not actually Decarbonising, that’s the truth of it.

Rupert: Yeah. And of course that’s true. And what that really accentuates is the terrible trouble that we’re in. The really low probability, frankly, if one was a betting man, that we’re going to get out of it. And all this does is accentuate the need for adaptation. And this is one of the key points about adaptation. It’s a kind of backstop to everything. Whenever something goes wrong, even if it goes wrong with adaptation itself, the answer is more adaptation. So what do I mean by that? So, for example, if, as is likely to be the case, the government fails to adopt a sixth mission and fails to protect us adequately? The answer isn’t, of course, just to kind of throw up one’s hands and give up. The answer is, well, then we default to the local level and the community level, and we seek to to make the adaptations that we can there. And that’s a lot of what the book is about. I mean, that’s a lot of what transformative adaptation, the Trad Collective is about, and the other examples that we feature in the book. The foreign examples from Nepal and Rojava, the domestic examples that have started that people in the book are involved with, like community climate action, like the climate hubs and so forth.

Manda: Right. So let’s come to this because I have in my notes you mentioned the IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and you’ve been talking to them quite a lot recently. And my question was, to what extent is central government listening to the IPPR? Because if you talk to them full time, that’s really lovely. But not if they’re whistling in the wind and nobody is paying attention to them. And I’ve been listening to Ed Miliband at COP, and he is extremely aware that one of the convenient excuses for why the American election appears to have gone the way that it appears to have gone; I’m using a lot of conditionals in there, because I think there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on; is that whatever Biden did, however inadequate it was in terms of adaptation, he was at least nodding in the direction of climate chaos being a thing and wanting to do something about it. But what he wasn’t doing was explaining to “ordinary people” how this impacted their lives. He didn’t say, you’re going to get better jobs, you’re going to have lower costs because we’re going to insulate your houses better. We’re going to reduce the impacts, we think, of more climate chaos.

Manda: This last one is obviously impossible, but people still mop it up in their narratives. And I think he’s really taken on board the fact that he’s probably got four years to change the narrative or Reform UK is the next government in the UK. And everywhere around the world, we need to get through to the people who’ve never listened to podcasts like this, that there are things that will impact their lives now, that will make them better, they will be happier. But it seems to me if happier better means ‘and then you get to consume more, you can buy more boxes off Amazon, you can have more flights to the sun, you can lie on beaches forever’ then you’re right, then we are basically screwed. I think I’m allowed to say that – it’s my podcast. And I want to quote you guys from von Wilkins’s PhD thesis. He’s got a concept that humanity, our culture, the trauma culture, the Western educated, industrial rich democratic culture (WEIRD), is locked in a set of psychopathological behaviours which are identical to trapped zoo animals. And he says, I’m going to read this out:.

Manda: ‘The collective developmental trauma that we experience points to a cage, that is constructed through norms and conventions, and a faulty definition of sanity that condones us living in a way that is killing our own life support system. By living in a way that is anti ecological and hurting us, but then naming it sanity, we validate and condone it and then teach it to our kids. It becomes a secret cage that prevents us from living as functioning members of the Earth community’

Manda: So I’d like to come to Morgan first, because teaching it to our kids. We, I think, are born expecting to arrive in tribes and to be cherished in a kind of serotonin mesh of care and companionship and connection. And instead we find the horror of Western culture with its separation, scarcity and powerlessness. And unless we can unpick the collective developmental trauma, then we’re not going to be able to change people’s behaviours. And however much we tell them that insulating their house is a good thing, they’re going to continue behaving the way they continue, they have before. How are you finding that education lands with the kids, and does it ripple out to their wider community? And then, Rupert, I want to come and talk to you about community change. So, Morgan first; education. Over to you.

Morgan: Yeah, it’s a big, big question. And I think that quote is powerful and I wouldn’t disagree with it. What we’re finding in my work at Global Action Plan, which is my sort of day job now as director of education, doing lots of work around the kind of worldviews and beliefs that young people hold and how those are formed over time. And the research we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do around young people’s values and their perceptions of other people’s values has been really instructive. So we’ve seen that when we speak to young people and interview young people about the values they hold, most of them hold compassionate, caring, collaborative, creative values. So the kind of intrinsic values of compassionate values, self-direction, values. But crucially, they they also see others as holding those values, which is accurate, as most of us do. Most of us, deep down, are compassionate people. You have some psychopaths, obviously, but 70-80% of the population is is inherently deep down good people. But what happens and what the research we did shows is that as young people get older, their perception of others, they become more and more sort of pessimistic about other human beings. They start to see them as being more self-interested, more competitive, more individualistic, less compassionate, less collaborative, less likely to help others out.

Morgan: And so this perception gap opens up. And we know from other research previously, Common Cause have done some great work on this around the values perception gap that exists in adults. And we see that when when we believe that others are self-interested, we are sort of more despondent about taking action ourselves. We’re less motivated. We don’t see the point. We don’t feel any solidarity, we feel alone in caring. And so we’re seeing that if we can, from an educational point of view, if we can help young people to continue to hold on to that accurate idea that they are not alone in being caring compassionate people, then they are more likely to understand that they are not independent selves, their interdependent selves. And they’re more likely to collaborate, more likely to feel that solidarity about taking social action and just more inclined to do it. And so the design of the education projects that we do at Global Action Plan are all grounded in that that idea that we need to help young people to either hold on to that or to critique their belief that others are self-interested. And I think that’s something which needs to happen gradually.

Manda: How do you do that?

Morgan: In numerous different ways. We’re constantly learning and we’re constantly experimenting in how to do it. But the key thing is that all work is group work. We don’t have individual projects, young people are working together in a group and understanding the different roles they play, learning each other’s strengths, taking on different roles at different times to learn more about them, to grow the sort of empathy between we. We talk about the research with them. We actually show them what’s happening. We do things like interview people to see what they care about and then show those interviews to their peers. Not their best friends, but kind of their acquaintances within the school. Then they say, oh, I thought that person just cared about their own status and image and fame, but actually, it turns out that on the weekend they volunteer at whatever they volunteer at. Or they do care about animals or stuff they’d be embarrassed to say in a sort of individualist society. So even just doing that, to help them to see it and help them to unpick that sort of thing. But there’s really interesting stuff I’ve been reading about recently by Hikaru Komatsu, who’s an academic in Japan.

Morgan: Looking at the the difference between the independent self and the interdependent self and showing that in Japanese schools, they’re actually purposely setting out to help young people to understand their interdependence. And this filters right through to how they run lunchtime. Adults eat with young people. Young people are involved in growing their food, they understand the interdependencies that are going on and that is a way of kind of reinforcing and activating those compassionate values. So there’s lots of ways that, like I said, we’re exploring them and experimenting and innovating as much as we can in that space at the minute. Because we think that a big part of the internal transformation that needs to go on to create the societal transformation, is a transformation of our worldviews and beliefs. So if we have these worldviews that everybody’s selfish, then those worldviews need to be transformed, especially in individualistic societies like the UK and the US, where they’re hyper individualistic. A big part of the challenge to create societal transformation is that internal transformation that needs to happen.

Manda: Yeah. And I’m wondering to what extent is the societal narrative impacting the young people? I’m really struck by your assertion that they start off being feeling connected, feeling their interdependence. But as they grow older, they see the rest of the world as being more cut off and and more motivated by extrinsic values than their own intrinsic values. And I wonder how much of that is our television, movies, I suppose by now Tik Tok videos, YouTube. And that if we were able to change the broader narratives of, I don’t know, let’s say a bond movie and all of the soaps and the Marvel franchise and things were less obviously extrinsically motivated. Is it coming from those? Or is it coming from watching everybody else glued to their phones and buying stuff off Amazon?

Morgan: It’s all of it, I think, and the education system itself is inherently competitive. Young people are in competition with each other. Schools are in competition with each other. Teachers are in competition with each other. And it’s very individualised as well. We’re individualistic. And so they’re naturally drawn into this cycle of competitiveness. I mean it goes right back to ideas around survival of the fittest and the kind of enlightened self-interest. It goes that far. But what we’re learning through the kind of studies that we’re seeing more and more of, is survival of the friendliest, more than survival of the fittest is the true story of human evolution.

Manda: Is there any move in schools, anywhere to shift away from the competitive model? I remember Zack Stein saying in the US that there are schools in North Carolina where every single child in the school has got gastric ulcers. And this really struck me; testing does not assess the children. Very quickly it assesses the school’s capacity to game the system. So all you’re achieving is finding out how fast your teachers can learn how to game whatever system you set up. It’s completely pointless. And yet we still hang so much on kids capacities to be coached through whatever the system is. Is there any move in our kind of hierarchical education system to step away from that?

Morgan: We could probably do a whole podcast on it.

Manda: We could actually, let’s do that.

Morgan: I mean, even within the UK, the education system here in Wales is quite different to the one in England and Scotland again as well. So like in Wales it’s more decentralised. Teachers are trusted more to shape the curriculums locally. It’s not as centrally controlled, it’s less corporatized in Wales compared to in England. There’s a curriculum assessment review going on in England right now, and probably my main focus at the minute is how can we influence what the new national curriculum looks like. And will it move more towards a Welsh-Scottish type model or will it continue down its path which it’s on now, which is still around very traditional forms of education. In a way it’s knowledge heavy and not really thinking about skills and values all that much.

Manda: And we’re the current generation can get anything they like off Google. They don’t need that, they need the skills. Anyway, I’ve watched Rupert looking like he wanted to come in several times. Rupert, you were going to say something? Say what you want to say 

Rupert: Well, just to start on what you have just been talking about, just to take us back to the book, that Morgan has a wonderful chapter on transformative education in the book. So anyone who wants to go further, that’s a good place to start. And also to comment that it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point of mentioning Darwin and evolution and so forth. And this, it seems to me, is one good reason for using the term adaptation. People sometimes say, oh, isn’t the term a bit sort of remote or academic? But actually there is a very well understood meaning of the term adapt, which is connected with Evolution, which is contested but is interestingly relevant to what we’re talking about. I mean, ultimately what we need to be doing, folks, and this won’t come as a surprise to listeners to this podcast is evolving, right? Really the transformative adaptation is a kind of way of understanding in a set of straightforward but wide ranging ways, the kind of evolution that humanity needs to go through. And that to some extent, as we’ve been saying, we will inevitably go through. The extent to which we embrace it will be the extent to which we avoid collapse and various kinds of horrors and missteps along the way. But that’s what we need to do.

Rupert: And you wanted to talk about community, Manda. This, to me, is the nub of it all. So we could think about transformative adaptation, (TrAd, as we call it) in one of two ways, and I think they’re both super valid. The kind of negative way, which is often the way one starts is by thinking about TrAd as a response. We need to transformatively adapt because these bloody impacts are coming and we need to find ways of dealing with them. And that’s of the essence of the reason why adaptation is essential. But then there’s the positive way of thinking about it, which I think is equally important, which is what does this actually bring us? And what does this buy us? And what is the direction of the kind of flourishing society that we could become? What does this start to look like? And so if we think about, for example, the way we try to model this through the Transformative Adaptation collective. So one of the main things we do is we gather every year, as you know, Manda at the The Green Gathering on the edge of Wales. And a wonderful little community forms for about a week there. And honestly it is such a joy to participate in. So much so that what some of us have been saying to each other recently, and it’s really quite an obvious thought, is why don’t we always live like this?

Manda: Yes, yes! That’s the shamanic monastery. I have been trying to create the shamanic monastery for about eight years. Yes.

Rupert: And isn’t that what people really want? I mean, in this hyper individual society that we’ve been talking about, people are not happy. And what most people actually literally hunger for is community. Is things like sitting around a fire with other people, singing and telling stories and having a drink.

Manda: Connecting, feeling held.

Rupert: Being close to each other. This is not anything kind of mysterious or weird, right? This is what most people actually want. And that kind of positive dimension to transformative adaptation is one of the things that really gives me a great deal of hope. The kind of direction that we’re pointing in here is a direction which actually goes with the grain of human nature, once you get a lot of other stuff out of the way.

Manda: Yeah. So if there are any friendly billionaires listening, then we have lots of people who are absolutely ready to step up.

Rupert: Or even just millionaires.

Manda: Yeah, but billionaires tend to have a couple of million to give away, whereas the millionaires think they’ve got to still build it. Just before we move back to Morgan, I would like to go back to, let’s say, Aberaeron. Anywhere that’s just spent 30 million on a wall, which just boggles my mind. Because that’s downstream reactive, not responsive. We’ll start with Rupert, but come back to Morgan. Are you finding that local communities are no longer in denial? I have to say, I’m surrounded by people who will still look me in the eye and tell me that climate change is not happening, and it’s a Chinese myth. But getting enough people in any given geographic place to acknowledge that climate change is here and then for them to work on what we might loosely call upstream responses, rather than building a (expletive deleted) wall. Which is not going to work, guys. I hate to break this to anybody, but it’s not going to work. So how are you finding that playing out?

Rupert: So that’s obviously a huge open piece. I guess my key point on it would be things ARE changing. It’s quite clear that things are shifting and in some ways quite fast, in my experience. I think things are different now from the way they were a year ago. They’re different now, even from the way they were three months ago, frankly. The US presidential election result has woken up a bunch more people as well. You know, if Harris had won, the downside of that would have been the risk of complacency.

Manda: We all chilled out.

Rupert: Yeah. And you can’t be complacent when you’ve got that complete lunatic in the white House. So it’s complicated. But what I see in my own community, for example, is that there is some willingness and that there is more willingness than there used to be. My wife and I are among those who are trying to build some resilience, trying to do some transformative adaptation here on the ground in this little part of of Norfolk. And we’re absolutely not alone. And the key thing about transformative adaptation is that it is a framework for thinking about how to do this kind of thing, which does what you said Manda – it goes upstream. It asks questions like, can we really be safe from the greater terrible flooding events, the deluges that are going to come, if we don’t do anything about upland water management, if we don’t do anything about agricultural runoff, etc., etc., right? We all know that we have to ask these questions and that we have to get somewhat more systemic than we have been. That’s the direction of travel. Will we get there fast enough? Probably not. But we’ve got to try. And on the way, as we do try, going back to the previous question, we will also have all these amazing co-benefits of community and greater security and more of a sense of meaning, which is missing from so many people’s lives. So that’s the way in which this really is a kind of win win win approach. There are so many ways in which it ticks all the different kinds of boxes that we actually need.

Thank you. Morgan, you looked like you were wanting to leap in several times there. Over to you.

Morgan: Well, the point I was going to make was, you could probably cut this really now, at this point, but when Rupert was talking about our need for connection and community and the intimacy of conversations around fires, I think. The rise in popularity of podcasts is kind of a symptom of this. Because I’m an avid podcast listener, and I think part of the reason why is because of the intimacy, you feel like you’re part of the conversation, even though you’re just listening to one. But I think that it is yet another pseudo satisfier of our inherent human needs, that we’re sort of using podcasts, I guess, as a way to feel connected to people who have similar worldviews to us. But we don’t assume that they are actually in the communities around us, but again it’s just something which is packaged up and sold to us as a satisfier of that need for connection. 

Manda: Speaking as a podcaster, though, I think there’s quite a lot of a community built around the podcast. And I genuinely met some people in Cambridge who meet up to discuss the episodes.

Morgan: Which is fantastic.

Rupert: Well, Manda, honestly, I’m just being truthful when I say that within the TrAd collective, within our little community, your podcast is one of the closest things there is to that kind of unifying factor. There’s a lot of love for Accidental Gods amidst the people of the TrAd tribe 

Manda: Thank you guys. So I would hope that we could create something of communities of place and passion and purpose through sharing of ideas, through opening of doors. I’m hoping that it’s not all just pseudo kind of community, Morgan.

Morgan: No, I think you’re definitely right. Even around sports podcasts and things, you see communities developing. There’s a very popular one in Wales called Socially Distant Sports Bar, which was set up during the pandemic to replace conversations down the pub about sport. And the community around that has grown, it’s fantastic because they are constantly reinforcing activating compassionate values through it. And people then form a community around it. So yeah, I think it’s certainly existing, and I love the medium. It’s probably my favourite medium now of all media. But it was just a short point really, about the rise of the popularity of it. I think it reflects on our inherent need to connect.

Rupert: I think it is worth just adding on this point about communities of place. I think we would say, coming from the transformative adaptation perspective, that something that is non-negotiable, is you have to take those seriously. That anyone who’s kind of thinking, oh, well, maybe the future is all about podcasts and associations at a distance, that is a complete lack of understanding of where we’re headed.

Manda: Okay. So we’re nearly at the top of the hour. Let’s go to Morgan and then to Rupert. If people are listening and obviously they’re going to buy the book and read it, we hope. And Rupert’s going to tell us where to buy it, which isn’t Amazon, because we are never again touching the giant vampire squid with its tentacles wrapped around the face of humanity, since Bezos decided to close down democracy in the US. What actions, what connections? How would you ideally, if everybody listening to this were to take on board a bunch of ideas, what would you like those ideas to be 

Morgan: For me, it would be that kind of reflection, or building of your own self-awareness around how you already are adapting and actually coming to accept that we are all adaptors now. We’re all adapting to climate change. And it’s not just climate change, it’s nature’s decline as well.

Manda: Exactly. The whole meta crisis.

Morgan: Yeah. We’re adapting. And so I think becoming conscious of our own adaptation so that we can then think more smartly about how we’re adapting, in the same way we think about how we travel, how we eat, how we holiday. We need to be conscious of it as something that we do as human beings. So I think for me, it would be a bit of internal work first to think, right, what are the ways that I am adapting already? Or is my family adapting? My business adapting? My charity is adapting? The school? And to go from there to think, how can I do it better and how can I do it transformatively.

Manda: Okay. Right. Fantastic. Beautiful. Thank you. Rupert…

Rupert: Amen to that. And what I would add is, while it’s absolutely essential that we think and act adaptively at every level, including the global level, including the inner level in terms of psychological and spiritual shifts, the level which is the most non-negotiable of all is the level of community. And what I would say to anyone listening is, if you are still not sure what your place is in response to this great challenge and crisis of our times, then the place that you can find, that everybody can find a place in, is literally place. That transformative adaptation at the level of building community resilience is something that we need huge numbers of us to do. In some of the ways we’ve described it can be hugely rewarding. If we aim at that. The great thing about transformative adaptation is that it’s about aiming for the best, and it just so happens that aiming for the best has a really good overlap with preparing for the worst, right. You can do the two simultaneously. And that is precisely what we need to do. And the great thing about it is everyone can do it!

Manda: Brilliant, fantastic. That’s a very, very good note to end on. So the book is out. And we’re going to end on where’s the best place to get the book, Rupert?

Rupert: Well, I would say if you can’t get it from your local independent bookstore, first ask them why they haven’t got it in yet. But secondly, you can order it online, for example, from the publisher, permanent press. Who, of course, are the excellent people who produce Permaculture Magazine and who have made this book possible. So, yeah, go to the Permanent Press website.

Manda: I will put a link in the show notes. And to remind everybody, when you go out to your local independent bookstore, Transformative Adaptation. And the subtitle is, Rupert?

Rupert: Another world is still just possible.

Manda: Fantastic. Which has slight resonances with the podcast. I’m extremely happy about that. Okay, so Morgan Phillips and Rupert Read and all of the team that made this book possible. Thank you for coming on to Accidental Gods. And we look forward to celebrating many, many, many copies being shared around the world.Thank you.

Rupert: Manda, thank you too. Because of course, we have to return to a really important point about this book: you’ve authored quite a bit of it yourself, so thank you for making this all possible in more than one way.

Manda: You’re so welcome. Thank you. And Morgan, thank you very much.

Morgan: Thank you very much, Manda. Great to meet you.

Manda: Well, there we go. That’s it for this week. Thank you to Morgan and to Rupert for taking the time to come and talk. And more, for putting this book together. It took a lot of work, clearly, a lot of thinking, a lot of talking to a lot of people. And we hope that it will spread out in the world and help to spark the kinds of conversations that this podcast sparks, but in different ways with different people. There’s a difference between listening and reading. We absorb things differently. Our neurophysiology is different. We retain different bits of information. The two are not mutually exclusive. So give it a go, see where you get to.

Manda: As ever, we will be back next week with another conversation. I will give the credits in a moment, but this is the time to say that just ahead of recording the podcast, I had a conversation with my editor, as a result of which I am going to start writing the new book. Yay! I do have 15,000 words there already, but now I’m going to really go into what I call book lockdown, which means I am no longer going to spend between 3 and 4 hours every single day I’m at my desk, managing my email. I have no idea how anybody else manages their email, and if anyone wants to tell me, don’t do it by email.

Manda: Do it in person. Because I went to Cambridge last week. Hello people in Cambridge. It was really lovely to meet you all. And I got back and there were several hundred unopened emails, most of which required a little bit of attention. And that meant two days sorting through everything. And I can’t do that and write a book. So when I finish recording this, I’m going to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and wipe out my inbox and start again. I will put an out-of-office response that basically says, if your email is essential to the survival of complex life on earth, then I will read it. Otherwise I probably won’t. And if you’re expecting a response from me and you haven’t had one, I’m really sorry. I would say I’ll get to it, but I probably won’t. I think at the moment that the best thing I can usefully do is continue with the podcast, continue with Accidental Gods. We are also setting up Thrutopia Masterclass again next summer. There’s basic managing of the farm to be done, and I want to write the new book. I can’t do all of that and manage email. So it’s going. Ctrl alt delete. It’s fun. It’s not as scary as I think it is. Anyway, that was a very broad apology to anyone who listens to the podcast and thinks they’re due a response. Next year, maybe. Possibly the one after.

Manda: In the meantime, I will be back next week with another conversation because it’s already in the can, and I’m booked into next April and I have no intention of stopping. This does feel really useful. So it too will continue. With Caro C giving us the music at the head and foot and this week, the production. Lou Mayor sorting out the YouTube, because there are still people who use YouTube as a podcast. Please guys, that’s a lot of bandwidth, that’s a lot of power. We’re trying to minimise our power use. Anyway, thanks to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the constant juggling that manages all of the tech, and for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to all of you for listening. It genuinely was really exciting to meet a group of listeners who get together and talk about the podcast. I am so impressed and so pleased that you are there. Thank you. And if you know of anybody else who’s going to be interested in the concepts of transformative adaptation, of the ways we can step forward into a world that is consistently going to be changing, 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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