In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do 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. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And if you’ve been listening for any length of time, or have read the single Substack that I have put up, you will know that we consider that water is our lifeblood and that clean water, along with clean air and clean soil, is one of the three core asks. The non-negotiable baselines that will and must underpin a flourishing future for the human and beyond human worlds. So the question, then, is how do we get there? Because everybody will have to really care about this at a bone deep level, way beneath our conscious minds. We have to feel ourselves to be an integral part of the web of life. And this is a catch 22 or a classic feedback loop; until we feel ourselves slightly connected, we won’t feel more connected. But how do we feel connected when we don’t currently feel connected? So those of us who have an inkling that this is where we need to go, we need a sense of how we might get there. And then we need more feedback loops to give us a sense of what’s working in terms of our connectedness and what isn’t, so that we can grow positive feedback loops within a whole large and growing community that is dedicated to rebuilding the connections between the human and beyond human worlds, even if that’s not what we’re calling it.

Manda: And one of the groups that is absolutely living this inter being, that gets all the many layers and levels of this emergence into inter becoming. That gets that there are a lot of questions to which we do not and can never have answers, and yet we can iterate towards things that feel right, is the River Don project, which is a subset of Opus Independents in Sheffield. We already talked to James Locke of Opus back in episode 279, and then to Debs Grayson in 283. And now today we’re talking to Jonny Douglas, who is lead on the River Don project. I met Jonny last summer at the Social Enterprise Network summer conference in Sheffield, and we were in a group who went out for dinner later, and he described the River Don project. And genuinely, it felt like one of the most inspiring, mind blowingly brilliant things I had ever heard. So I knew then that I wanted to get Jonny onto the podcast.

Manda: So for a bit of background, Jonny is one of those people who imagines a world where the vast majority of people have the means and opportunity to find and fulfil their true potential. In his past, he has worked as a designer, a trainer, educator and facilitator in human skills and creativity, in universities, colleges, schools and businesses. At Opus, he is co-founder and network coordinator of the UBI Lab Network, and I definitely want to have another podcast about that. And technology lead for the River Don project, amongst a whole load of other roles. And as you’ll hear, he believes our only path forward is one of mutually assured flourishing and that now is the time to build those alternative realities together. So here we go, exploring how we could build those alternative realities and our routes through to mutually assured flourishing. People of the podcast, please do welcome Jonny Douglas of Opus Independents.

Manda: Jonny Douglas, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this amazing, it’s the day in July where Uranus goes into Gemini. And I’m sure you’re not into astrology particularly, but for those of us who are, this is actually the start of some quite dramatic change. So this feels like a good day to be exploring something that is both based in the land and based in AI and computers and tech, which is the whole Uranus thing. So how are you and where are you today?

Jonny: Hi Manda. I am in a gradually awaking, trying to be sunny Sheffield in South Yorkshire in the UK, the wonderful city where I’m from, on the edge of our glorious Peak District. And it’s the start of the week and I don’t officially kind of start my normal hours until lunchtime on a Monday. So I always like to take the first half of the day of the week to gather thoughts and gear up to jump back on the roller coaster, ready for the twists and turns that this week’s circus has to bring. So this conversation is, yeah, a perfect fit for that.

Manda: And we’re sneaking in ahead of work time. I had no idea. And you were woken up very early this morning by cat that you are cat sitting. So we have complete sympathy for that, because small furry alarm clocks are a good thing when they’re on time at the right time, and not so good when it’s 3:00 or whatever time it was. So thank you for coming on to here. You and I spoke a year ago, more or less, at a conference in Sheffield. And you explored with me or explained to me the evolution of the River Don project, and it was and remains one of the most exciting things I have heard, in terms of the capacity to build community and build community within the context of reconnecting with the web of life. So we’re going to explore this today. Tell us to begin with, how you became involved in it, particularly how you became involved in Opus, which is we’ve now talked to James and Deb and now you. So tell us about that.

Jonny: I will do my best. It’s a fun, interesting story, with a lot of the work that we do at Opus kind of fairly nebulous. So I guess all of this is kind of centred in terms that the listeners will be well versed with in terms of the problem frame of the meta, poly and perma crisis. So kind of just acknowledging that it sits in all of that. And how, I guess, nature and our relationship with nature is entangled with those different types of crises that are kind of complex and inter- affecting, which makes them difficult to understand. Especially when we’re kind of looking at how the desire to make an intervention might actually move from A to B or further. And I think, whether you’re kind of lucky enough to have the time to spend engaged with this work and think about it or not, I think we’re noticing a lot more now that these crises are making people feel very disconnected and isolated and often a bit kind of helpless. And we’ve been told about this stuff for years, so it’s kind of built up over a long time, and it kind of shows up in people as concern or anger and frustration sometimes, a lot of confusion.

Jonny: And it kind of leaves us asking those questions of how we have come so disconnected to everything and how we’ve lost maybe some of our purpose or our sense of self or belonging, and how we’ve ended up with this kind of situation of the natural world on life support, basically. And I guess that kind of unravels in a number of different ways in the context of the systems that we have, in that we kind of have a world that is only valued in our economy by an ability to extract from it. Where, as Indy would say, kind of a dead tree is currently worth more than a live tree in the way that it’s thought about and valued. And where any sort of impacts on the natural world that we do have and the living systems that support us and we’re a part of, aren’t directly sort of accounted for. They’re externalised and excluded if they don’t kind of need to go on the balance sheet.

Manda: Yeah. If they’re not part of the market economy, they don’t count. And and the fact that we’re poisoning things as well as, it’s not just that they don’t give us something, it’s that we can poison with impunity. I understand that we’ve just crossed the seventh of nine planetary boundaries in the recent months. So there’s only ozone and aerosol left to go, which is extremely frightening. Because it’s not even on life support; life support suggests something active is being done to to perpetuate the health of whatever it is that’s on life support, however bad that might be. And we’re not. We’re actually accelerating the harm. Except in areas like Sheffield where you have a project that hopefully can at least balance out some of that, if not, push it back a bit.

Jonny: Yeah, I unfortunately had to update the website recently from when we’d first set it up, because it originally said we have crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries, and now we’ve crossed seven of them. And people often joke about this idea of Doncaster or Sheffield-on-Sea, because in a UK context it’s probably the furthest you can get away from it. But we’re all intimately connected to the oceans in a way that some people know, but we don’t always consider, which is that every second breath you or I take comes from the ocean, because it’s where 50% of the world’s oxygen is created.  And as incomprehensibly terrifying and overwhelming that is, we’re kind of all inextricably linked to that and interwoven with it. So, yeah, we kind of have to engage. And I think that’s part of where I think people end up with all of that narrative of that, of that overwhelm, because you kind of realise, oh, okay, I’ve got kids, nieces, nephews, family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and I don’t really want them to suffer. If you truly sort of believe that there is no hope, then what you actually have to do is kind of shut the hell up, never speak another single word of complaint at any point ever about anything. And who’s going to give up that? Because surely it’s one of the top five favourite pastimes of most people is to complain about stuff.

Manda: Yeah, but we don’t give people options. It’s not just that not complaining is an option. It’s until we’ve given people motivation, agency, direction, empowerment, until they have a sense of where we could go and how they could get there, what can you do except denial, deflection, despair in that order? Nothing’s happening. Okay, something’s happening, but it’s China’s fault. Oh my God, we’re all going to die. That’s the sequence because nobody is offering hey, guys, here’s a bunch of things we could all do together, and our lives would feel better while we’re doing them, and the outcome would be a world where our future generations might actually thrive or even survive. But the River Don project seems to be doing this. It’s creating community around a bioregion, while hopefully improving the overall ecosphere within the bioregion, human and more than human. So tell us a bit about how it arose.

Jonny: Yes, I think that is kind of where you get to, is kind of tell me what to do or where can we possibly start? And I think the project is centred in this idea that water and rivers connect us all and connection is why we’re all here. Like we’re biochemically wired through billions of years of evolution because we all come from the same place. Even before we were..

Jonny: Hydrogen boiling in the sun. Yes.

Manda: And I think what we’re trying to do is a kind of, for want of a better, sort of a headline description, is we’re trying to build some civic infrastructure that helps people maybe get to some of that doing. Which sounds a little bit fancy, but we’re not really doing anything new, new here. Like we’re not selling anything really. And and Joe spoke so eloquently a few episodes ago, about how we’ve lived in a bio regional context for 99 point something percentage of history, basically like nearly all of humanity. And where we’ve recently, let’s politely say lost some of that connection, and now things are suboptimal, perhaps a little bit worse than that.

Manda: You are being so kind.

Jonny: It’s a little bit worse than that.

Manda: We are hurtling the bus towards the edge of a cliff from which there is no return and the sixth mass extinction could happen. There have been five. There’s nothing to say that there’s something special about us. I did have someone on the podcast who said there were no billionaire dinosaurs, which is true, but they didn’t need to be because they had a perfectly valid and viable ecosystem in which they all thrived. They didn’t need to be billionaires. And I don’t think it matters how many tins of beans you’ve got in your amazing bunker in New Zealand, if the oxygen falls below 50% you’re going to struggle. It’s not going to be a fun world. And total collapse of all complex life does not really allow for people in their bunkers, I don’t think. So yes, I think we can state this really clearly.

Jonny: Absolutely not. It’s horrific. And I think that’s part of what we’re trying to do with this, is you kind of have really no option other to go all in, but where do you start? Because the idea that even if you kind of look back and say ‘well, I just didn’t know what to do’, is not an excuse. But that decision needs a starting point and that starting point, in having made that decision, is going to be different for everyone. And I think the work we’re trying to do is create enough breadth and depth in those sort of stepping on points, so that we can meet people where they are. So in building some things to help create the conditions for change, because it’s very hard to orchestrate change but you can you can create the conditions for it. And you can create some experiences, and opportunities around them, that allow people to start their journeys and begin to navigate their way through it. With some sort of hopefully increasing alignment along a trajectory, that moves us from that mutually assured destruction, which is absolutely where we’re heading, careering towards at an accelerating pace; to one of mutually assured flourishing. And start to get their heads around the fact that although we don’t deal in solutions or binaries, they are the only two options, because anything in between those is just a delay of where we’re currently headed towards.

Manda: Yep. Kicking the can down the road. And it won’t work very well. I think you’re right. We don’t want binaries, but actually this one is not a bad binary to look at; we either go over the cliff or we don’t. And if we don’t, it’s because we’ve got a world that is better for everything that is alive. So yeah.

Jonny: Absolutely.

Manda: So what are your principles in aiming for that? If you’re trying to say we can’t make people change, but we can hold a space in which change can become visible and possible and desirable. What are the baselines that you work from? You, Johnny, and you opus, as you’re beginning to curate the River Don project and where it’s going.

Manda: I think everything that we do is underpinned by some foundational sort of principles, of acknowledging the fact that we maybe don’t know the answers. And unless we understand the problem better, we’re never going to have a chance of mitigating the worst effects of where we’re already on a journey to. And that in trying to think through that, we have to accept that we almost have to take the next step, because we’re confident enough that it’s in the right direction, and we have trust and faith in the people that we’re working with on that next step. And then deal with the ambiguity of not knowing fully what comes after it. And that’s not a blind step, but each step ahead when you’re looking forward is less visible, the further away you go from that. And that you have to adapt and change really quite quickly. And if you come to a point that something’s not working, you have to let it go and sort of compost it. Very much like everyone at Opus has kind of read probably multiple times Hospicing Modernity, so it’s always, always thinking through. And we’ve had we’ve had Vanessa at some of the events at the festival.

Manda: Brilliant. Her new book, Outgrowing Modernity is coming out in August, which takes it even further. I talked to her last week about it. So yeah, it’s exciting.

Jonny: Brilliant. Yeah, she’s absolutely amazing. And I guess the other thing which makes this quite hard, is kind of acknowledging the fact that anything that is going to make an impact or hopefully get some change is going to be at least as complicated as the problem.

Manda: Or complex.

Jonny: Yeah, Complex and complicated and interwoven. And therefore we need to try to find channels and threads to move things, but actually you need to move lots of things forward because they are so interconnected. And it’s not just coming across a kind of bump in the road on one thing, it’s how that interconnection can affect all of those things. And I think on reflection, that’s probably why part of my journey in arriving here has happened. So you had it as a special edition on the podcast, the event that we had with Kate Raworth and Indy Johar and James Blocke from opus. And at the start of the event, they all described themselves as a recovering something. So economist, architect and poet. And I was reflecting on that, and I think I would describe myself as a recovering product designer. So I started in the world of design, because I was always fascinated by how things worked from a very young age. And not just how they worked, how they were made, how they were brought into being. Like how you understood people’s relationships with things and stuff and how those bonds were formed. And then that branched out into wanting to learn more about people and I got into some teaching and training. But it never kind of felt enough. And the idea of moving into sort of fast moving consumer goods and spending ages designing a washing machine, what the hell is the point in any of that going to be?

Manda: Yes. Thank you.

Jonny: Yes. And I’ve done some fun things along the way. So in learning how those kind of experiences affected and connected and engaged people, I’ve helped others try to understand that. I’ve taught at universities, I’ve compered events and been part of event series. I’ve leant into some of the design work and sort of built custom offices where you’re trying to tangibly sort of build the environment that affects people, and how they connect to it. And seeing how that brings people together and the need to thread narratives, even when you’re kind of making the sofa connect with the coffee table or the kind of elements of that, how all of it is underpinned by these narratives and threads and stories. I got involved in running some kind of event series, so the Pechakucha global series, if you’ve ever heard of that. It’s a kind of 20-20 presentation format that started in Japan. We ran that for ten years in Sheffield, and that was all about curating experiences and showcasing platforming what other people were doing. My business partner, a good friend, started something called Sheffield Soup, which is like a live crowdfunding platform. So how do you bring people together so that citizens and kind of communities of people are funding by sort of putting their own little stake into other projects. And we’ve got wonderful things like The Food Works in Sheffield, that started from collecting a couple of boxes in a hatchback into having an army of 600 volunteers and three pay-as-you-feel cafes and six electric vans, and intercepting I don’t know what the current stat is, like, 25 tons of food that would otherwise end up as waste. But that was funded by people thinking, telling other people that their idea was good. And some kind of music festival stuff as well, because I think music is such a powerful way of bringing people together. Oh, and we also did a really big sort of community multi-million-pound, sort of trying to buy a grade two listed Georgian mansion, which was a 6 or 7 year project and wonderful and a nightmare at the same time.

Manda: And did it work? Hang on a minute; glancing over that; did you get the Georgian mansion?

Jonny: We got down to the final two in the count. It’s a public asset because it was council owned and they decided it would be better off as a care home, rather than something that was supporting a community of 3 or 400 people and making sure that people didn’t have to go into care. So yeah, fun experience.

Manda: That’s a whole other conversation. Okay.

Jonny: It is indeed. But all of that kind of led me to Opus, and it kind of all makes perfect sense. And there was this kind of idea of bringing people together in alignment, like while doing all of that work in Sheffield, like the opus team were doing some of the early stuff, and we were kind of connected and made connections and friendships, and they were doing sort of different and similar events and stuff. And I guess sort of leaping forward a few projects and years, acknowledging that the pandemic changed a lot of things, especially for us. I mean, in terms of sort of business speak of pivoting. Like the entire organisation changed from two weeks before the pandemic. And I think a lot of this stuff that we’re now a little more versed in, had come up as interesting questions and discussions at the festival of debate, and we were sort of becoming more aware of the work in New Zealand and increasingly the work in Ecuador.

Manda: Tell us about the work in New Zealand. Why it’s relevant.

Jonny: So in New Zealand I suppose there’s a connection there with sort of common law. But indigenous rights, where they had representatives kind of engaging in getting the river recognised in terms of the systems within the country.

Manda: Getting legal personhood to be a thing.

Jonny: Moving towards that, yeah. Kind of rights for the river and legal personhood. And I think that’s where some of our thinking started, and we’ve not left that behind but I think we think a lot more in terms of what that enables and facilitates as the next steps, rather than how do we get this? Because, I mean, who do we trust with that kind of stewardship in our sort of global North UK context? Because that indigenous rights framework isn’t really there.

Manda: But also we live in a world where human personhood is being demolished. If you’re the wrong colour or speak the wrong language in a large part of the Western world, namely America at the moment, you you are likely to end up in a concentration camp in Florida. And so how likely is it that had rivers been given personhood in the US, that would still be a thing? Whereas what I’m feeling with the River Don project is the legal status of the river doesn’t matter, if people are engaging with it as an integral part of their community, then it has personhood by default. Which struck me as an extraordinarily exciting potential, particularly if it could scale up around the world. Just before we go there, I noticed on your bio on Opus that when you wrote your bio, your main focus was UBI; Universal Basic Income. Is that a thing? I don’t necessarily wanna talk about it now because I really want to talk about the River Don project, but is that still something you’re focussed on? Because I would really like to talk to you about that sometime.

Jonny: Yeah, yeah. So my rough split of my hours of four days a week are sort of two ish River Don and two ish UBI lab network.

Manda: Oh, okay. Let’s not go there now. But sometime.

Jonny: No. I mean, it is a component on this story. So yeah, let’s not go there, but it’s probably just worth acknowledging that in the work building and campaigning and trying to make change in that space by having a decentralised autonomous network, and finding ways to meet people where they are, engage them about what matters. And how that explores the way we value things and our relationships with each other. And basic income obviously provides a particular type of response, but it’s centred in this idea of everybody’s time being valued and everyone’s contributions being valued. And how the market doesn’t value those things, despite the fact that the entire market sits on this foundation of unpaid care work, that’s somewhere in the region between, even if you paid a standard minimum wage, one and £3 trillion a year. And then the market doesn’t value it, but it can’t exist without it. And I think it seems separate, but it’s been part of the journey here and some of our experiences have how you do that work. But also how it comes from this place of care, and acknowledging the value in that care, and putting people in a position to give them the means to have the time to care.

Manda: To care. Right. Brilliantl. To care for themselves, each other, and the web of life, which are the three fundamental kind of brackets of of living and being. Okay, that would be really interesting, particularly if we get onto the river coin, which is, of course, something extremely exciting for those of us who are totally geeky. But long before we get to that, let’s go back to the River Don project; what it is and what it aims to do. Just the highlights of the technology really. Because this is technically based, I think it’s worth saying. I know I am a total geek, but even so, I think it’s really exciting that what we’re doing is creating technology which is evolving by the minute because AI is a thing and is evolving exponentially. And Daniel Schmachtenberger says the thing that will destroy humanity is our incapacity to embrace the concept of exponential growth, because our brains are wired to linear growth. However, exponential growth in the capacity to connect with this river, strikes me as a really, really interesting and good thing. And so if the AI that is connected into this is growing exponentially, which it is, then the project, the depth and breadth and capacity of engagement will also grow exponentially. So just before we get there, one thing that I will otherwise forget; the River Don has a circumflex over the o. I know of no other word in the English language that has a circumflex anywhere, actually, never mind over the o. And I don’t actually know many European languages that have circumflexes over o’s instead of i’s. Why does it do that? Do you know?

Jonny: I know a bit of this story, but it’s not my specialist area.

Manda: Can you give us an edited highlight? It’s obviously not an English word.

Jonny: It’s a nod to the river gods of Danu. There’s a really good explanation of it on a slow radio podcast that we were a part of called Wild Medicine, which we can share the link for. But yeah, there is a whole story behind it, but it’s to do with the river God Danu, I think.

Manda: Okay, so are we going back to the the ancient kind of proto Gaelic of the UK to get  the o?

Jonny: I guess so.

Manda: Okay, not your thing. That’s fine. I’ll look it up. I’ll Google it. It’ll be there.

Manda: I mean, it’s one of the interesting things about, and we will absolutely get to the technology because I will geek off over it as well. Like my role in this is kind of like, how do we build stuff and how do we engage people within it? Like, I love the theory. Like I love listening to Daniel, I love listening to Indy, and then I’m just like, cool: and now we build. Quick and dirty prototypes and get it out there and start engaging people. But yeah, the Don connections. I’m very aware that most people won’t necessarily know what the Don is or where it is. And there’s more than one of them. There’s one in Scotland, there’s one in Russia, there’s a number of them.

Manda: Okay. Go with that.

Jonny: The Don flows through all four parts of South Yorkshire, which is the region that Sheffield is in. So there’s four local authorities of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. We’re very fortunate in that we sit on famously seven hills.

Manda: Like Rome.

Jonny: The interesting thing about that for me, yeah, there’s the Rome connection, but it also means that people are seeing things from a constantly changing perspective in the place that they reside. So they’re getting these alternative ways of looking at things. So I think the idea of engaging with something or looking at something differently is built into our DNA.

Manda: Is integral to the geography.

Jonny: Yeah, from the topography and the geography. And Sheffield has a very strong connection to rivers, which I know a lot of places do. But it’s particularly strong in Sheffield because that topography and those assets leant itself to providing the power that the industry was born out of. And the cooling for that. And yeah, I mean, for better or worse, Sheffield has kind of shaped a lot of the world. But we do also have a lot of green spaces. We’ve got a lot of trees. So we’re one of those places that claims to be the greenest city in Europe, but our metric is the number of trees per capita head. There’s lots of different ways. I think there’s 37 cities across Europe that also claim, for one way or another.

Manda: Okay, each measuring their statistics slightly differently to put themselves at the top of the pile. Woe lies and statistics, I love it, but it is good. And you’re right on the edge of the Peak District, which is God’s own rock. I used to come and climb, in the days when I was a climber and living in East Anglia, we used to just drive up and spend all day climbing in the Peak District, get back in time for work on Monday morning. It was gorgeous. It was beautiful, beautiful rocks. So yes, you’re right in the middle of beautiful countryside with a lot of reasons to love it. And listening to you, Sheffield clearly has already, before the River Don project, got huge numbers of highly intelligent people really working on how do we build community in this space. And then you’ve got the River Don, which at one point I heard somebody say was the longest river in England. And the people on the Severn, on which I now currently reside, go no, no, the Severn is longer. So there’s probably lots of different stats on how you measure the length of a river, too, that we won’t go into. But it’s long. It’s 146km, which for the UK is a big river. You know, I realise for North America that’s a stream. But for us that’s a big river with a big catchment that covers the whole of a politically relevant geographic area.

Jonny: Yeah, absolutely. And like you say, there’s brilliant work being done by people on the ground, like the Don Catchment Rivers Trust who are working helping and supporting the salmon. Removing weirs from some of that industrial context and building ecological interventions, doing the river fly tracing, liaising with those kind of stakeholders that they’ve probably described. And the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust, getting sections of the river de-culverted, holding developers to account, so that when they’re submitting their planning permission people can have access to the river and cleaning it up and running all this stuff around that. And then River stewardship company Riverlution actually doing the work on the ground, cleaning and maintaining the waterways. So I guess we kind of have all those jigsaw pieces and  we’ve got the Sheaf, the Rivelin, the Loxley and the Porter all flowing into the Don. And that connects, like you say, South Yorkshire and about 1.4 million people. So Opus, with its experience, moved into this area and sort of saw that we weren’t doing that much ecological stuff, but it was increasingly obvious that we should contribute to this space. We’d got the networks that sat in that space, sort of well thought and found and and worked with.

Jonny: So it was probably about 2022, at the end of 2022, Alban, James and myself thought it’d be a good idea to sort of pull a small band of rebels together for a little adventure. And I guess just sort of calling back to the the context for this, at the most grounded level this work is to do with that reconnection with the living systems that are currently on life support in the region. And our rivers, food systems and landscapes and those living systems of the environment and nature aren’t separate from us; they are our civic life. They are what we’re a part of. Hence the sort of civic infrastructure headline. And I guess what we’re seeking to do with the project is to reframe that relationship with the river, from one of separation and control to one of interdependence, and hopefully inter-becoming. And foster that culture of stewardship, where acts of care are distributed and coordinated across civil society, by citizens and everyone else. Rather than being some sort of this is what you should be doing and you’re going to be told off if you’re doing it wrong.

Manda: Yeah, you’re doing it because you care. It’s fostering care again. And that sense of falling in love with the world and feeling that sense of being and belonging and meaning and purpose related to the world that we live in.

Jonny: And also, I suppose, acknowledging the digital tools that are useful to lean into, to facilitate that. But never making it about the technology, using the technology as a medium to get us to places. And thinking about the governance models, and as you would imagine, this is a lot where we’re fortunate in working with dark matter labs and their amazing thinking. But also then the cultural narratives that sit within that and how we address this complexity at a bio regional scale. Human beings can only intellectualise so much, so I think personally, a big part of this is the only way you can connect with this, truly is to feel into it, because that’s using all your subconscious systems to process this stuff, how you would do naturally. But we’ve got to build almost the bridging part that helps people reconnect with them, because they are so often overwhelmed by the technology and the things that are stealing and hijacking.

Manda: So just a second before you go on, if I’ve understood what you just said is people need to feel their connection with the web of life, and in this case, particularly through the vehicle of the river. And what you’re doing is, without telling their heads that this is what they’re doing, is creating the space in which that feeling into connection both is possible and is desirable. Is that more or less what you just said?

Jonny: Yes.

Manda: Okay. Sounding good.

Jonny: And also the experiences that go with that. Because if you go on a journey with someone to do that, it’s a lot more meaningful.

Manda: Right. Everything is better collectively.

Jonny: And it kind of leans into this idea of what we mentioned before about, I mean, just the language of personhood is problematic, right? Because it’s us with the nature and dominion of our existence that’s causing harm. So we’re trying to move past the personhood. We might use it for what it facilitates, but actually it’s how do you connect with this thing? And we talk of it in terms of complexity and all this other stuff. But it’s the stuff you feel when you just stand and the breeze blows past you, like that’s you feeling into a complex web of life system.

Manda: Yes. Or even just go on the website and look at the picture of someone who’s put up a heron. You know, there was a heron at this weir, and it’s got levels of certainty and it’s absolutely certain because I can see the heron on the picture, 100% certainty there is a heron here. Oh, yes, if there’s a heron, that means there are fish and that means the water is clean. And my head does all that, but my soul responds to the heron and the magic of that. And everything that 300,000 years of evolution, of connecting to hunter and hunted, and seeing the heron as a part of my lineage and my being. Anyway. Go on. Right, we need to talk about technology, I’m aware our time is moving on and we haven’t even begun to move to the tech. Let’s geek out a bit. Tell us what the actual project, what the tech does.

Jonny: So the technology tries to bring lots of things together and hold it in a space that allows people to engage. So like you say, if you’ve got, what do they call themselves, twitchers that love to go and watch the herons. Like they are intimately connected to the river, and they have a parallel intimacy and bond with the river that a third generation angler does, or someone that goes canoeing on the river, or someone who lives on a houseboat. So as well as trying to kind of make everything visible and use the technology to surface what’s there, we’re also trying to create the synergy between people that already exist. Because that enables us to get to the sort of 13 to 15% of your tipping point of your population that’s engaged, that gets you to the early majority, and then you can move through your curve of change. So we’ve got a number of strands of technology and that sits within a wider range of threads of work. So we’ve got a sort of legal and policy kind of area because we need to look at those governance systems. And we’ve got the arts and culture kind of strands that we work closely with Amy and her team and Lauren at Sheffield Hallam, because that’s the stepping on point. That’s the engagement piece. You don’t want to be told information, because if information was the way that we fixed things, then we wouldn’t have a climate crisis in the first place. And then how we use the technology to interweave those things together and bring those communities together and make those connections. So the first big piece that we’ve built is the engagement platform, which we can put in the show notes so people can share. And that’s kind of the first phase of a way of surfacing and visualising what’s happening. So we’re pulling some hard data sets that are publicly available. So flow rates and water levels from the air and rainfall monitors.

Manda: Rainfall in the catchment area.

Jonny: Yeah. And then all the water companies in the UK are obligated to bring live monitoring of their assets online. So we will be hopefully able to draw, because they’ve got to be publicly available, they’ll be adding kind of turbidity, PH, temperature; things that would be very, very expensive that we originally thought we might have to try and fund, they will be being brought online.

Manda: And these are relevant because they’re indices of the health of the water. So you can get oxygen levels or contaminant levels presumably will be in there.

Jonny: Yeah. So I think they’re going to be in the region of kind of 5 to 8 sensors per array. And I think for the Sheffield South Yorkshire context, they’re probably going to have to put around 2000 sensors in the water because a lot of them, they have to monitor them upstream and downstream from wherever the asset is, to test the difference between what might be.

Manda: And an asset is a fancy word for ‘this is where we pour sewage into the river’, right?

Jonny: Yeah. Or outflow pipes, CSOs, as they’re called, or treatment plants and other elements of where rivers join and connect and stuff like that. So we have the potential, we built it in a way that we can add layers, but it’s designed as a map. So an interpretation of the world that you experience. And people can have a play with this, but you can zoom all the way down to the street level. And when we’ve had this out on the exhibition stand, when we’ve done some of the engagement, 50% of people who try it go, can I find my house on here? Like they need to connect with the bit that means something to them?

Manda: Yes, exactly. And it’s basically using Google Maps, so you can look at people’s houses because Google Maps does that, right?

Jonny: Yeah, I think we use a system, so Hive IT our technology partners have built this on something called Mapbox. So it’s not quite satellite, but it’s scaled and you can see the boxes and the buildings and they’re all done at the different heights. And you can twist it through three dimensions. So you can really look at it from different perspectives. And we’ve built all this in terms of geolocation. So you can put on the map the bit that you contribute, the bit that you value, the bit that you see that you want other people to see.

Manda: So your picture of a heron is where you saw the heron.

Jonny: Exactly. And when you pin it, that pin then has its own URL so you can share that with someone, and all they have to do is click on it and it will take them onto the platform all the way down to the bit that you want them to see. So it creates this kind of feedback loop. And that’s the kind of base layer of starting it out. And we’ve created the opportunity for people to share appreciation of nature on there. We’ve created the opportunity in categories for them to report harm of dumping or sewage or pollution. We’ve created the ability to report invasive species.

Manda: Okay, so here’s the Japanese knotweed. Okay. And can people then sign up to be I’m very good at clearing Japanese knotweed, I would like to come and help. Is that a thing?

Jonny: Yes. So the river stewardship company and Riverlution that’s kind of what they do. So we’re in conversation with them about applying for some funding to build the back end that allows them to put their maps of where it is and where they monitor it. Because actually, in pulling people together to do that, it’s more effective for someone to go in, make an intervention, and then six months later, go back in and cut it back down again, because that does the best for holding it back. Whereas what happens a lot of the time is people go, oh, where has it not been done? And they go out and make an intervention where it’s not been done. So again, connecting people with the doing that results in something and it creates a feedback loop that hopefully means they’ll come back and do more.

Manda: Okay. But as soon as the AI knows that, I mean GPT at the moment, you could say this is the case, please highlight for us the places where it’s already been done, and tell us in six months time when we need to come back. For AI at the moment, that would be a trivial bit of programming. You just tell the AI and it would do it.

Jonny: Yes. So the way that we’re looking at kind of using the artificial intelligence side of things, and I think it’s really important to just sort of acknowledge that we are worried about the water and energy that that uses.

Manda: Okay. You could use Deep Seek instead of Chat. Yes? Okay.

Jonny: And the privilege and the bias in the dominant narratives that usually surfaces within that. But we’re at a phase of kind of testing and learning these systems and then and basing them on existing systems. And then our ambition is to move to a system that we built ourselves, that we’ve probably positively biased intentionally with inputs and our data sets.

Manda: Okay, so given that I’ve just been talking to Vanessa, who has got Aiden, which is a subset of ChatGPT, and she is looking at indigenous people in the Yukon who are building their own servers and endeavouring to have the servers be part of a regenerative system. So are you looking at that level of it being our own? That we have, I don’t know, hydro units on the Don that are going to be powering our own servers to our own AI. And are you starting from scratch with AI, or are you taking an offshoot of an existing AI and training it with our values?

Jonny: So that is our ambition. The storyteller, as we call it, the river storyteller, which sits alongside the platform. So at the moment we’re working out the relationship between those two things. So as we’ve workshopped through this and we’ve built the platform, which took us about 18 months and significant investment, and that’s all been built to be usable by others eventually. But we’ve got lots of layers to add in, and we want to create those layers so you can switch them on and off. But it’s also been time coded, so that in a future iteration of the platform, you will have a slider and you will be able to move backwards and forwards through time, so you can see how things are changing and things are being affected. So we’re using the technology to give you an insight of the interventions that are being made, to see whether they’re getting better or worse. So without getting too technical, the way we hold that data as a data set, lots of people can contribute to that. And the platform visualises and surfaces that, that encourages others to submit more data. You can do that in a way of contributing pictures, but you can also contribute memories and heritage and stories and poems. So all of that data will be held in a way that others can experience it and discover it by direct invitation because they’ve been sent the link to the pin, or because they’re looking at where their pin is and they can see what other people have pinned, so they get the cross-fertilisation.

Jonny: So that will contribute as a layer of data that whatever form we take the AI in, will draw on as one of its data sets. So as the platform visualises and surfaces the information that is put into a data coming. So it’s owned by the people and potentially with legal personhood and a trust and bank account; maybe a self-sovereign river. And this leads to, as you kind of alluded to earlier, the work with The Riverbank and Emily Harris and brilliant work at DML. You’ve got to hold the data somewhere and you’ve got to create that reciprocal feedback loop, so that it’s building those things. And then you can start to create that pool. And if the AI looks on that, what we’d like to do is yes, draw on some of the technology, but if we can build something that works as a prototype, we can then work out how we positively bias and influence and shape some sort of model. And then we can work out how we energise that model in a way that means that it’s not causing harm to the thing that we’re trying to use it to help and facilitate.

Jonny: But it unlocks this ability, I think, in a future iteration, where you can take the barriers to interacting with this complex and complicated system out of the way. So if you’re walking along and you’ve got your earphones in, with the river you can be experiencing nature while having a conversation with something that’s maybe been kind of set up to respond to you, like you’re having a discussion with a philosopher or an elder or something like that. But it’s drawing on the hard data sets that have been fed in, so it can tell you about the health of the river. And the river is the litmus paper of the health of the entire Bioregion or river catchment. But it can also go, oh, we’re just walking past the point where someone submitted a poem about this section of the river. Would you like me to read it to you? So you can interact in lots of different ways. And then the third element that starts to make things even more interesting is DML have created this kind of prototype of a brilliant living stewardship agreement kind of system that’s all about sensemaking around these relationships.

Jonny: Because it’s not just about surfacing these relationships, it’s about acknowledging what they are and then being able to make commitments to them, and then sharing those commitments so that we’re getting these reciprocal natures of how we work together to steward ourselves onto a better path. So they’ve built a system where it’s kind of prototype form, and it was actually funded because Qiang and Fang used to work with Audrey Tang in Taiwan. So they got a chunk of money from the Taiwanese government and they’ve built this system that allows you to look at the relationships with more than human actors within a system. And you walk around with your phone and you look at it and you start to think about things from different perspectives.

Manda: Why do you do that? Why are you thinking about things from different perspectives? Because the AI is responding and telling you here’s a poem, or here’s the heron? That’s helping you think about things from different perspectives? Otherwise, why are you doing that?

Jonny: Well, it’s really important to try and get to a point of stewarding and being in a position of responsibility for stewarding the natural world. So part of that way in is to think about things from different perspectives. And to play this forward, again future iteration phased the project. But we’re holding these kind of data sets and technologies separately so that we can create the interaction between them and constantly keep evolving and developing them without them being dependencies. But let’s say that you are a third generation angler, and you’ve been stood in the same section of the river for years and years and years. And you’re really interested in a certain fish. You’re offered this opportunity to think about the world through the perspective of the interface for care and this living stewardship agreement, because you care about fish. And you’re thinking about, well, how does the fish live and breathe and breed and travel through this river system? And then we’ve got these hard data sets that are feeding in all sorts of information, but you elect the bit that you’re interested in, is from the salmon’s perspective. So the temperature of the water or the turbidity in it or the dissolved oxygen, might not affect you as a human being, but you connect as an angler to caring about how that might affect the salmon.

Manda: Yes, absolutely.

Jonny: So you’re starting to think from things from a different perspective. And as we move into the commitment making and you caring about the bit that you’re already connected to, which is why I say we’re not selling people anything. We’re just allowing them to reconnect in a more meaningful way, that helps them branch out into doing more things with it, and connecting with other people that might be doing similar things, but for a different reason. So you say I want to be pinged alerts on the system when the temperature spikes and it affects the salmon.

Manda: Right. So let me just unpick this a bit because I think we’re heading into language that is not immediately obvious. So ‘visualise and surface’ means nothing to me except I already know what it does. So people can go to a website and at the moment there’s a bounded area which is the catchment area of the River Don, and they can explore the website and there’s little icons for natural things that people have seen, like a heron. Or invasive things that people have seen like knotweed. Or here’s a poem about the river, or here’s a story about the river. Or if I’m an angler, here’s the place where I have been fishing and my granddad was fishing and his granddad before him. And here perhaps I could look in and see the salmon population 100 years ago was big, and the salmon population now is tiny. And could I then talk into my phone and say, okay, River Don, tell me why the salmon are not swimming past here so much? Or would I have to know that in advance? Tell me a little bit about the actual practical application of me as an angler; my granddad taught me to fish, and I’m standing there and I’ve got my fishing rod and I’m not catching anything. And I want to know why. What do I do to get to that? What’s the actual logistical? Do I type it? Do I speak it? What can I ask? What will it tell me?

Jonny: I mean, I think our ambition would be almost like you know when you get that annoying chat bot that appears on a website, when you’re trying to get to speak to someone in customer services, and you can’t get there? It would almost be like that.

Manda: But it’s not annoying anyone. But it’s lovely.

Jonny: If you’re on the platform or the interface for care, it would almost sit over the top. And that’s why we’re keeping these kind of things separate so that we can integrate them into a meaningful experience to people.

Manda: Because I as an angler, I don’t care that it’s a data set and an AI, I just want to know why the salmon are not there. So let me just also unpick. There’s basically a very, very large spreadsheet; complex and highly complex spreadsheet that can be accessed, depending on what the queries are. And there’s an AI. And these two at the moment, the AI can access the spreadsheet and put in its own queries and extract its own information, but currently they are two separate units coded separately. Is that what we’re saying? 

Jonny: Yes. And the engagement platform is built and out there and people can play with it. And the storyteller is work in progress, starting getting it up to a point where we can prove it, where we can get the funding to bring in.

Manda: Okay. And the storyteller is the AI.

Jonny: Yes.

Manda: Okay. Well, I just need to make it clear for people for whom this is not immediately obvious.

Jonny: Absolutely. Yeah. The further we go in, the more complicated it gets.

Manda: So at the moment, you can access the database. It’s out there, we will definitely put a link in the show notes. I totally encourage people to do it, because the point for me is this is the River Don at the moment, but at the point when this becomes available, it could be anywhere in the world where you can get a map. It could be the hill here, and I could talk to the hill about the trees. And presumably at some point we can get soil samples. Anything where you can get the data. If I were to take a thousand soil samples on my hill and put them in, that would be available to people who are interested in the hill and the number of red kites and the number of worms in the soil. So it could be any ecosystem, it doesn’t just have to be a river. But it definitely could be any river in the world, once this becomes available. And then whatever data you have; oxygen levels, fat levels, sewage outflow becomes available to anybody for their living ecosystem. So Joe Brewer was talking a couple of weeks ago about the fact that there’s a river in Colombia where there’s a coal mine and an oil well, and they’re both pumping crap into the river that’s poisoning everybody. At the point when this becomes available, everybody who lives on that river could access the fact that, say, the gold mine has just opened its sluice doors and chucked a bunch of highly toxic material into the river. And at the point when you know that and know when it’s happened and who’s done it, you have agency, I think. Yes? Am I making sense and is this true?

Jonny: Yes, I think absolutely it is. And also you could sign up for alerts when that was happening. So if the river needed you to go and gather evidence of it, then you could go out and you could take photos. And there’s also further evolutions of this. One of the things we’re pursuing at the moment, we have a lot of partners in this, which I’ll mention in a bit because they’ve been fundamental in getting us to this point. But we’ve got access to this precipitation radar. So high resolution precipitation radar that looks up at the sky and we can see where all the rain is falling.  And it’s in the care of the University of Sheffield at the moment, so we work with the Sheffield Urban Fellows Observatory and we work with, engage with the Grantham Centre. And what we’re trying to do there is we’ve got a site and it’s already signed off, it’s got its permission. So if we can put a precipitation radar with I think it’s got 50km radius, so it will look over the whole of the catchment area. We will get real time information of every single drop of rain that falls on the catchment. Then if we can go in a further phase of the project to include saturation sensors in the catchment; because it’s how the water flows through the catchment before it gets to the river, especially when we’re talking about the permacrisis reoccurring kind of ten year flood every six months or however it is.

Manda: And industrial farming creates concrete soil, whereas regenerative farming is like a sponge. And that would be visible immediately.

Jonny: In real time.

Manda: Yes.

Jonny: And it would also mean that you can be, a bit like how you don’t feel connected to the ocean, you could be miles away from the river, and you could put a saturation sensor in your garden or in your local park, and it feeds into the system, which creates a real time model. So we’ve got to think about how how we kind of tap into different funding, because as you’re aware, the capital and funding and investment into demonstration of alternative futures is starting to flow, but it’s not quite there yet. So if we could tap into some flood defence money, and you’ve got a real time model of how water flows through the catchment, it’s not only your ability to understand where they normally go, it’s knowing the saturation in the soil. So you know the point at which it’s going to get to 100%, it’s going to start flowing over. Which means you can start to model how quickly the water is going to end up in different places, which means you can respond with whatever resources that you have. What that also does, and Alban loves this kind of example. When you used to study from textbooks and you used to look at the water cycle of how it falls from the air and it goes to the ground, it evaporates and it goes back up. That envelope that’s not just the bioregion this way, it’s the bioregion that way, encompasses everyone, and they realise that they’re all intimately connected with everything in this space.

Manda: So for those not watching the video this way and that way, were horizontally and vertically.

Jonny: Sorry. Yes I forget.

Manda: So you’re getting a three dimensional, actually a four dimensional because you’ve got time involved. You’re getting a capacity for wherever you are to understand this at a visceral level. This is back to what you were saying of it’s not intellectual, it’s how it seeps into the marrow of our bones, and then our brains make sense of it. And we’re going to feel the connectedness, because a lot of people, they may have seen the water cycle when they were at school, but it didn’t go in and they don’t care. But they’ll care when there is or is not flooding happening. And where there is action that can be taken, and particularly long term action of okay, let’s do lots more regenerative farming because then the water will sink in and it’ll take a lot longer to reach 100% saturation and start flooding. That’s a no brainer once you can see it happening around you. And particularly if you’ve got your little friendly chat bot AI that’s talking to you going ‘well, we’re now at 98% saturation in your garden. But because you’ve been doing all these changes that you and I have been talking about’ (AI chatbot with you, the person with the garden) ‘it soaked up considerably more than it would have done this time last year. And if we do these other changes, it’ll soak up even more, and then there will be less flooding. And then your friend who lives in the valley will not have to move out of their house and be rescued by a rowing boat because it’s flooded again’. And that kind of narrative, you can set up a chat bot, an AI, that will talk to people in those terms. Which should be easy. If Elon Musk can tell grok that it needs to start referencing the Heritage Foundation as if it were a good thing and not a bunch of white supremacists, then we can create an AI that actually understands that the way that you garden or farm is making a difference to whether the valley floods or not. That’s straightforward.

Jonny: Exactly. And you can take that to the point of helping people understand how if they put a little insect house or they grow these kind of wildflowers, that helps with the soil. And so it connects that in as well. It’s not just I’m going to dig a hole and put some gravel in it and try and create a soak away, because I don’t want to do that to my garden.

Manda: Yeah. Or I’m going to compost.

Jonny: It’s how the insects and the birds and everything is connected too. So when we were talking about this idea of how do people get into this? You meet them where they are. What incentivises you to put a saturation sensor in your garden? I’m not sure. You might want to know whether you have to water the garden or not, because you can never tell because you’re not experienced enough, but you’re trying to get into gardening. Maybe we can incentivise an insurance company who has commercial assets and domestic assets to incentivise, like you if you put a monitor on your car or you take the gym membership, you get reductions in your insurance premiums. If you put a saturation sensor in the domestic context, you get a reduction in your premium, because actually the insurance company is helping protect their commercial assets, which are in the valley at the bottom of the water catchment. There’s incentivising all sorts of different ways in people can connect into this.

Manda: Yes. Right. And it gets the insurance company then knowing that it’s got an influence on things, which is huge. Because insurance companies have been factoring in climate change for a lot longer than politicians, because they have the capacity to realise that they’re going to go bankrupt if they don’t. So you’re beginning to create functional change in actual human beings. Because one of the things I’m realising is that people who have to wear suits to work, often they don’t intend to have very linear, narrow thinking, but the way that their job reinforces their thinking means that it’s linear and narrow. And actually, they would quite like to be able to have open wide boundary thinking, but their job doesn’t allow it. And now we’re allowing business and markets to begin to have more wide boundary thinking, which feels also quite useful, hopefully.

Jonny: Yeah. No, you’re entirely right. And I’m not praising the system or trying to do the kind of tweaking to the system, but the bit that really interests me is how do we find ways for people to engage with this, rather than feeling resistant to it? And if you’ve got the insurance company on board, you get to engage with the business. And rather than the business doing some kind of half arsed attempt to engage with this, or just straight out greenwashing, then they go, ah, I get a reduction on my insurance premium, therefore I want to engage with this. And actually we are going to send some people genuinely out into the community higher up the catchment of where people are, and we’re going to help them do this stuff, because it protects us getting flooded and losing the ability to take money off people for four months while we have to do the renovation. And then they’re engaged with it at a personal level, because people have gone out and talked to other people in the community. So you remove the kind of systems and the structures of the things that make stuff go bad, and you connect people with people, and those people are making a change and they can tell people that it makes a difference. And they tell other people and hopefully that’s where we get some of that engagement growth that means it becomes a self-perpetuating system.

Jonny: Because we don’t want to be at the centre of this. We want to facilitate this work and enable other people to do this work. And then that takes us on a really interesting journey of, okay, we’ve modelled the flooding here. Isn’t that really interesting? Everybody gets it. Right now we’re bringing in the citizen science stuff. We’re looking at the kind of chemicals that are going in the water. We’re starting to connect all these hard data sets, and we’re starting to dial in some of the kind of brilliant work that they do at the Cynefin Institute with the sense maker stuff, where they’re taking people’s stories and bringing people’s narratives and keeping the efficacy over them. And the AI creates in a positive way, because we’ve got this commons owned, this is something that’s helping and supporting me, not extracting from me, storying data set that sits alongside the other data sets, which starts to feed into this incredible body of work that allows people to engage in richer and more interesting ways. That contextualises the citizen science that makes everything transparent. So if the water companies bring online all these sensors that they are obligated to make publicly available, we get these really rich, hard data sets and the warm data sets and the soft data sets, and you’ve got this incredible system. 

Jonny: It doesn’t need to be a huge language model. It doesn’t need to know everything because we’re actually trying to use the AI to engage people and get them to doing. We don’t want the AI to provide the answers, we want the AI to facilitate, based on the commons owned data that people are contributing. They see the benefit from it to reintegrate that. And that gets us to some really interesting models where you could make a digital twin of the Don. So you’ve got something that exists online that seeks in real time, that you can just go I want to look at the entire catchment in real time for what’s happening, with oxygen and pH and all these different data sets that are held elsewhere, that people can bring on as a discrete layer. That you can switch them on and off if you want to look at them, or you can just sense and speak into them by going ‘tell me about this’. But you’ve got this real time model that means that you get to a system that’s so effective, when you’re getting to the, I suppose, higher levels of the traditional hierarchies of how we decide what things are going to be and not be in our environment, you have to consult with that. So the planning department of developers who have got lawyers consulting and then going, oh, we can’t really litigate against this, we don’t really have to. Let’s sit down. Let’s put your thing here and let’s see what it does.

Manda: Okay. Let’s put another hypothetical chicken farm and watch the disaster that’s going to happen. And then everybody can go, okay, that would be a really, really bad idea, let’s not do that. Oh, I want this.

Jonny: Hahaha we’re working on it.

Manda: Because otherwise it’s a bunch of people going chicken farms are bad, and the people who have huge amounts of money lobbying, going no chicken farms, no harm at all. Trust us. And they win because they have huge amounts of money to do the lobbying. And I can imagine people trying to contaminate their data sets, actually. But that’s because I’m a fiction writer, and that’s what I would write in the fiction of this, is the people with huge amounts of money do not want this to happen. And how do you maintain a distributed, autonomous data set? That’s a whole other podcast, and I’m aware of the time.

Manda: We’re now over an hour, but I really want to look at something that you suggested last year, which was that the river might have the capacity to issue a river coin, which would be blockchain based, and we would need again to look at blockchain. And presumably that’s Ethereum and not Bitcoin blockchain. Let’s not go too deep on that because we’ll lose people, but you have the capacity to issue a coin which has a floating and independent value and is therefore not linked to the fiat currency, which in this country would be the pound, and therefore is not within the taxation system, and becomes a signifier of stewardship and another incentive to do things. First of all, am I right? And second, can we discuss it if I am.

Jonny: Yes! Acknowledging that I’m not an expert, I would highly recommend  as we’ve mentioned, Emily’s podcast on this. And other people we could bring in, we’re having some really interesting conversations with the Region Foundation in the US. So Austin and the team, they’re building some of the tech stacks that do the representation of this. I’ll happily introduce you to them. They’ve got some really interesting thinking.

Manda: But for most people listening, the depths of that would fascinate me but we will lose people very fast. So let’s just talk in hypothetical terms of I am a person who has signed up to be a river steward, so the database and the AI know that I am a steward, and the AI has my phone number and can access my phone. And so my hypothetical is the water company yet again opens a sluice gate and floods a huge amount of sewage into the river. And there may be cameras or sensors or something that are going, ah, this is not good, but they need to have an actual human being check. So they ping everyone who’s within a certain radius going ‘panic! River not good!’ and I go, okay, I’m here, it’s okay, you guys can all stand down. I’m going to cycle over to the row and I’m going to look and go, yes, that doesn’t look very good. Okay. Yes, you were right. And as a result of that, leaving aside the political, legal and community implications of the fact that the River company has yet again flooded sewage into the river, I get a river coin for being a good river steward. And then I can go to the local community, and I’ve got a river coin, which is worth precisely nothing unless people decide that it is. But the local tea shop might go okay, our scones, by the end of the day we haven’t necessarily sold them all. We can’t sell them tomorrow because health and safety says they are stale. You could come in at 4:30 in the evening and have a scone and a cup of tea for your river coin, because we like you and we would like to support the river.

Manda: Or somebody else says nobody swims much at 11.30 on a Wednesday morning, so you could come in at 11.30 and come and swim in our pool for an hour for a river coin. Or somebody else says when the gates close for the football match, the tickets are worth basically nothing. But if you’ve got a River coin, you can come in at five minutes after that for your river coin and you can watch the match. And so a river coin becomes worth what the community wants it to be worth. And you have a unit of currency that has status value. And assuming that the people who are into cryptocurrencies don’t decide to bid up its value because it just exists, and we can keep it out of the currency markets, you have a local currency that has local value that then becomes I would like to earn a river coin. So I want to do good stuff for the river. What can I do? Maybe I can go and cut down some Japanese knotweed that the AI is telling us six months ago was cut down, and now we need to cut it again. And I earn another river coin. So we have something that begins to create engagement. First of all, is my narrative accurate? And second is it likely to happen?

Jonny: I definitely think it’s accurate as a component part, as the more traditional kind of, from what I understand about it, kind of transactional nature between the individual and the system. But I think because we’re able to sense into the complexity and get these commitments, there’s actually a collective element to this. So how you make collective interventions. So not just my transaction for getting the coin for the thing that we did or the token or whatever it represents. But how, and this is, again, probably another podcast for the work that citizen network who we work with are doing, in terms of the decentralised nature of neighbourhoods and how you flow capital and investment into neighbourhoods. And the financing facility that I’m sure when you have James back on, he will tell you all about. We bring that in. How does that potentially connect with people coming together to make interventions through this kind of philosophy of care? And therefore, can you bring communities of people that might be geographically together to make those interventions? Can you bring communities of kind of lived experience or interest together to go, well, I just don’t want to pop in and get my coffee or whatever it might be at the local cafe near where I fish. But if I come together with other people who fish, how do we make interventions on this? Because once we start to hold this data and everybody understands that it’s theirs, you can look at it, interpret it, and sense into it in lots of different ways.

Jonny: And this is partly what the sensemaker Cynefin institute does. You can gather the stories and then you’ve got a multifaceted ball and you can look at them from different perspectives and understand different things about them. They’re not just this sort of get what you measure thing, you’re building the richness and complexity of the data. And I think with some of the text acts that the Regen Foundation are building, that they’re kind of exploring, that was the initial sort of decentralised blockchain thing. What else can we do with this stuff? And it’s not my area of expertise. I do geek out about it, but it’s kind of how do we build the models that lead to that? And with all of this, sometimes it can seem a bit far fetched, but the sequencing is there step by step, and we’re working on the first component parts and prototyping the second component parts, and we’re workshopping this all the time to bring in how this fits together. And we’re working with the kind of knowledge bases at Sheffield Hallam University, more the arts and culture side for the University of Sheffield. DML obviously are kind of always so generous with their thinking and knowledge and resources to feed into this. And they donated the code for the storyteller.

Manda: Oh did they? I thought it came from Audrey Tang.

Jonny: Yeah. So they built the original The Storyteller for a river in Taiwan. We were exploring it, but obviously it was in a different language, and we actually just prompted it in English and it spat out a pretty good English response. And they were just like, oh, kind of does work in English as well then.

Manda: It was doing its own Google Translate in real time. Everything you just said sounds hypothetically brilliant, and I didn’t understand what most of it means in actual terms of what real people might actually do. Can you give us a kind of story of, however far fetched, of maybe ten years down the line of what it is you’re aiming for? Because I actually can’t picture this in my head.

Jonny: So it’s kind of to create a lattice or framework that people can engage with, meeting them where they are. And building the systems that create the conditions and facilitate them engaging with that, to do this distributed commitment making. And then building the systems that can influence the other component parts that almost need to come together to meet the people that want things to change where they are, and facilitate all of that happening. So the technology allows you to engage for your personal, individual, area of interest or story. And that contribution hopefully offers a route into engaging more and coming into this work and listening to brilliant podcasts like this, and reading the stuff that DML put out on medium. And kind of going, ah, I want to understand the bigger picture, because I now see my place in it where I am. And therefore I have a starting point to take this journey with you, rather than standing back and going how the hell do we do something about this? But all of that is to work through to getting to not just swimmable rivers, but drinkable rivers. Like that seems such an alien concept right now. But it’s possible if we make everything transparent.

Manda: It wasn’t impossible 200 years ago, was it? Every river was drinkable.

Jonny: But I think it seems incomprehensible now because we seem so far from it. So we almost have to decentralise and distribute this onto the ground where people are, and in engagement with the institutions that are doing this great work. We work with so many kind of researchers and scientists that are fascinated by this idea, because they’re like, ‘I can take my little thing that exists in a silo, and I can make it relevant and contribute to the world. That would be amazing. I’ve dreamt of doing that my entire career. Tell me more how to do this’.  And you’re getting citizens and citizen scientists who are going I walk my dog by the canal every single day, I can help with this. And you’re giving people a way to connect with this kind of seemingly impossible, ludicrous thing. And that’s what I think we’re trying to do, if that is kind of enough of a sort of through thread of the story. And we’re drawing the technology in, to facilitate progress towards that mutually assured destruction steering to mutually assured flourishing. But everybody’s getting their own little benefit. I think so much is lost where people contribute something and then they’re just like, well, what happened to the bit I contributed? I signed this thing. Did it change? And this is designing in those feedback loops that hopefully engage people to engage with that.

Manda: Okay. All righty. And in terms of the river coin and my model of a person who’s been a good steward and got something, I’m really trying to get my head around because it sounded like what you were saying was that there is a much, much bigger picture than simply earning a river coin, and it being a similar transactional relationship to ordinary fiat currency. That we’re looking for something more dynamic than that. And I’m wondering, so I’m a third generation fisher who also walks my dog by the river, who also lives halfway up the catchment area. Maybe I’ve got a smallholding and maybe I can change the nature of the way that I’m farming, and I can put some sensors in the soil. So this is a genuine question, because what I heard you say was yes. My Manda’s understanding was limited and there is a bigger picture and I’m trying to get my head around the bigger picture. So what is the implication for a person living in the catchment area who can do perhaps some citizen science, and perhaps their partner is also a scientist at Sheffield Hallam, and their daughter is a single mother living in a high rise somewhere. How does it interact? What is the bit that I was missing from the picture, really, that we could add in?

Jonny: I’m not sure it’s missing. We have to take certain steps forward and we don’t want to predict too far. So I think there is definitely the element that you described, but there’s also kind of other adjacent possibilities within that, that I think it’s important to have the conversation about this idea of transaction and value sets and the way that we value things and interactions and acts of care. And I think that goes all the way from something like the blockchain, decentralised distributed ledger of acts of care, and the tokenization of that or representation of the importance of that. How that might scale together for people ‘coming together to do things’ around different kind of more than human perspectives, because those more than human perspectives are going to kind of come into interaction. But on the other end of maybe that continuum of this idea of transaction, and this maybe links back to where the personhood comes in; if the river as a complex system is recognised within the eyes of the law and you can interact with it, then can we use that to set a trust up? Because if it’s got a trust, it can have a bank account. The idea that it has a bank account gives it the ability to transact on this side from maybe the blockchain style stuff, but it also allows it to transact with the current systems in the ways that people recognise it. So you could donate to the river. Or if the river was having harm caused to it, like you or I drive past the speed camera and a letter arrives on the doorstep, could the river issue the fine to the entity causing it harm, and could the entity causing it harm have to pay the river directly, without any humans in between? I don’t know, but it seems possible in my head. And also if rather than, as good an organisation as they can be with the kind of people leaving stuff to the National Trust or kind of endowment…

Manda: Yeah. Or the donkey sanctuary. You could leave it to the river.

Jonny: You could leave it to the river. Because there’s a kind of vehicle recognised within the current systems that we have that can hold it. And that’s maybe the barrier to it being done right now.

Manda: So developing an interface between predatory capitalism and a different way of being. This feels really important; this is the emergent edge of inter becoming. This is how we transform the extractive nature of capitalism that is predicated on the commodification of suffering, into a different way of value transacting, that is instead not even a commodification, but an integration with flourishing, which is what we need. I mean, everybody’s asking, how do we get away from capitalism in a way that doesn’t just crash it to the point where everybody starves? And this is a step on the way, and that feels really, really important.

Jonny: I hope so. And I think as you’ve just described there, such things that we understand. What does it mean if the river is self-sovereign? Is it this abstract concept? Or if you can see it living and breathing, and you can see the complexity of the interwoven nature of all the more than human actions in real time, you can feel into it in the way that you want to feel into it. So your decision to donate to a Stewardship Solidarity Fund or a river litigation fund, or be involved in the conversations of how that money could be spent in order to help move us towards the flourishing and away from the destruction, you’ve got a reason to engage. Because the river being self-sovereign becomes meaningful again.

Jonny: And you never know, I might throw this idea out into the world as a possibility. The current kind of chief hat wearer of this country has a lot of interest in the environment before he took his most recent role. And the Crown Estate actually has a huge connection and ownership of a lot of the riverbeds or the river banks in this country. They’re never going to sign it over to some one, but would they consider gifting it into a self-sovereign system? Because then that is the higher power, however you might want to interpret it, than them. And that creates an incredible opportunity. And it’s kind of my little sort of theory of change cycle, if you meet people where they are from this idea of owning something, you can move them to responsibility. And then if you move them from responsibility, you can get them into stewardship. If you get them into stewardship, you get them thinking further ahead to that indigenous framework of seven generations. And the only conclusion from that is that the river needs to be self-sovereign, because I won’t be here to do the stewarding. And that takes you from ownership to self-sovereign, but you can’t go the back way around the circle.

Manda: Oh, that’s very exciting. Because until halfway through that sentence, I’m thinking Starmer? Starmer had an interest in things? No, Starmer is an automaton, he doesn’t exist as a separate entity from the people pulling his strings. But you didn’t.

Jonny: I think Charlie could be enticed in.

Manda: You meant our current king. Yes. And possibly whoever follows him because they all get it up to a point. That’s an extremely exciting idea. I think that’s probably a very, very good place to end. I’m just going to check the concepts that you suggested. Yes. And the end was where this gets us to now and some possible alternative realities. Do you want to throw us an alternative reality, Jonny? Or was that your alternative reality? Because that was pretty good.

Jonny: I think they are the things that are possible, and many other things I think. It’s not for us to dictate where this work is going. We’re building the systems and utilising the technology to create the conditions for change and hopefully biasing that in a trajectory that is beneficial, that gets us towards that flourishing. But we’ve built this in a way to bring people into this. Like we’ve got the institutions, we’ve got DML, we’ve got the great people on the ground. But the work we’re doing with them and the kind of rights of nature, we’re part of an interdisciplinary network of study of the rights of nature, and we’re bringing this. We hosted one of their sessions. But it’s the kind of exhibitions and events that we’re doing to create the conditions to bring people into this. And we do it at the Festival of Debate. But we did a brilliant exhibition that was curated by Amy and Lauren at Sheffield Hallam called Fathom, that was looking at the Wild Medicine podcast. It was looking at artefacts that we brought from River walks that artists Joanne and Joanne created and then people had engaged with. There’s a brilliant story which we won’t go into, but the fig trees that grow by the side of the river because of the heat that was pushed out from the factories during the industrial times. Rose did this amazing piece where she went and gathered the figs and turned them into a development fluid, to then develop the photographs that she’d taken of the area, and just creating all these wonderful little feedback loops that people can engage with.

Manda: Yay!

Jonny: And then no bounds, which is a really interesting kind of thing that happens every year in Sheffield. The Flow State exhibition, where Danny and Aaron took all these data feeds from different parts of the river and did some mapping of the surface of the water. And then in a basement where the Don was flowing the other side of the wall, in an art gallery created this projection mapped, fully immersive system. So you come and look at it as a piece of art, and you stand in the darkened basement with all this cool stuff flying around, and you’ve got the sounds of the station because the Don flows under the station. And you’re in the thing experiencing it. And for me, that’s some of the most exciting stuff. Is not only where it tends to, it’s engaging people on a journey where they get this thing where they’re not being sold anything, they’re not being educated about something, they just experience it. And they go, cool, I’m super curious now tell me more. And then you’ve got thousands of people on this journey and where it might go in terms of the imagined futures or the possibilities….

Manda: Yeah, that’s the point of emergent futures. If we could tell where it was going, it wouldn’t be emergent.

Jonny: Exactly.

Manda: So that’s so exciting. Sheffield sounds such an alive place. But then what we discover when we go anywhere is that everywhere is alive, right under the surface, with all this astonishing stuff that somehow doesn’t quite break through to the mainstream media, so it doesn’t feel mainstream yet. I am working on that. We’ll talk about that when we’re not recording, because I have some ideas. I think we need to stop there because we’re way over time. Jonny, this has been so exciting and I’m so impressed with all you’re doing. So definitely we’re going to come back and talk again at some point. But in the meantime, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Jonny: Well thank you. It’s been an absolute privilege and a pleasure. And yeah, I’m very glad that we met at the conference and got the chance to chat.

Manda: It was grand, wasn’t it?

Jonny: And it’s come back around full circle. So thank you so much.

Manda: Thank you. And there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Johnny for all that he is and does, and for giving so generously of his time and his ideas. I said at the start, and I will say it again now, I think this is one of the single most exciting projects I have ever explored with this podcast. And that is not to downgrade any of the others, but to come across a group who really understand the breadth and the depth of systemic thinking, of complexity, of what it is to be stepping into an inter-becoming future, and to be actually building the roots by which we may do this, this feels really good. And it’s about rivers. It’s about really getting feedback on whether the ideas of regenerative farming, regenerative building, regenerative living actually work. Imagine all of our rivers in the UK and everywhere around the world, being not just fit to swim in, but to drink from. And then remember that until very recently, in the history of humanity, that was a given. A river was going to be fit to drink from, this is not radical stuff. The radical stuff is that this is almost unimaginable in our current world. But we have to get back to that. Clean air, clean water, clean soil. These are non-negotiable. So if you want to be part of this, if you want to explore how it works. Head off to the explore.theriverdon.org, The link is in the show notes. And have a look, work your way around the map, see the potential for it. This is the very early stages and we’re still working towards the AI that can connect with this and talk to it.

Manda: And then the potential for issuing river coins, which I do still think is one of the bridges between the death cult of predatory capitalism and something that is not predicated on the commodification of suffering. How exciting is that? We need the bridges that take us out of the current system towards something that we could all enjoy, where we would all wake up in the morning and think that the world was a really good place. Where you’re not waking up and going to jobs that we hate, or having to do stuff that wears us down and leaves us wrecked before we got through half of the day. All these things are possible. This is the world we could build. And here with this project, we have some of the stepping stones to get us on the way. So the shownotes today are packed with links. Please go off and explore the ones that speak to you, and we will see you next week with another conversation.

Manda: In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the tech and the websites and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to explore the ways that we could move towards a generative world, who wants to get a feel on how we could get clean water, how we could let our rivers run clear again, 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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