We are in the midst of the Great Derangement (thank you Amitav Ghosh) – so what tools will help us shape a system that is actually fit for purpose? Who are our elders and what can they teach us? How do we learn to listen to our heart’s (and hearts’) desire and shape the communities of place, passion and purpose that will allow us to emerge into a different culture?
Young people are facing a world where the only certainty is uncertainty. where the only known is the unknown. So what can we do to offer them the best grounding to move forward into the transition to come?
How do we recover our birthright as awake, aware nodes in the greater Web of Life? How do we find the compassion and courage to be the best of ourselves? Cynthia Jurs is a Buddhist who has spent the past 34 years carrying out sacred pilgrimages all around the world, burying a network of ’Treasure Vases’ to build a web of compassion and care – and more people are joining her all the time. We can all be part of this.
How do we offer secure, safe, dry, affordable homes to all the people who want them while not breaching our planetary boundaries more than we have already?
How do we move beyond our myopic focus on carbon/CO2 as the index of our harms to the world? What can we do to heal the whole biosphere? And what role is played by water-as-verb, forest-as-verb, ocean-as-verb?
How do we build the local futures we all know we need? What does it actually take to become a good enough ancestor? Or even the best ancestor we can be? Our guest this week, Helena Norberg-Hodge, has given her life to exploring the answers, and helping birth them into being.
Humanity is a storied species – everything we do from forming partnerships, to buying stuff, to moving house, to getting a new job… arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. If we’re going to shift to a new way of being, the route will be led by the stories we can build of how it will look and feel, how we’ll be more alive, more connected, have a deeper sense of being, belonging, becoming…
Deborah Benham is a trained Biomimicry Educator and with a background in Jon Young’s Deep Nature Connection work. She shares a practical, experiential lived and living toolkit to help us build thriving human societies, cultures, communities and businesses, designing with and as nature, creating mutual benefit for all life, using tech in life affirming ways, and uplifting justice, kindness and cooperation.
This week the tables are turned and Maddy Harland, editor of Permaculture Magazine interviews Manda about her new ‘seismic’ Mytho-Political thriller, Any Human Power, which will be available from 30th May.
“From a bestselling storyteller who brings together myths and speculative futures with a radical compassion, comes the story of a family at the heart of a political crisis and the ensuing uprising of a disenfranchised generation. A family that harnesses the skills and stories needed for real change, if they can choose the right path, before it is too late …”
This podcast exists to open doors, to let the world know some of the many, many things that are happening around the world to bring us closer towards that just, equitable and regenerative future we’d be proud to leave behind. And this week’s guest is someone who lives, works and acts at the cutting edge of possibility.
If Money is commodified grief, and fiat currencies are imposed by implicit violence, how can we create forms of value exchange that are healing and regenerative and that form part of the solution?
If our leaders are engaging in ever more pointless greenwashing, what do we need to know to affect change? And how best do we make it happen?
We talk to Rachel Donald, host of Planet: Critical and one of the world’s top-rated podcasts on the poly-crisis and systems change.