Today, we’re talking about water, that utterly essential part of our biological and spiritual lives. It should be clean. It should be safe to drink, to swim in, for us and all the species with whom we share our beautiful blue pearl of a watery planet. As we all know… it’s not.
We live in an ever-changing world, but it is not always obvious what kinds of evolutionary change we are seeing in the broader web of life: in physiology, behaviour, language – and human responses to these. How plastic is the natural world? How resilient? How capable – or not – of adapting to the chaos of the climate emergency, the cascade of toxins in our air, soil and water, to the plastics, heavy metals and other detritus we throw out into the world as if the entire planet were one vast sewer for waste we forget about as soon as we’ve had the dopamine drip that acquiring it evoked?
What is humanity for? What happens if we rethink not just the way we plan buildings, but our entire role as beings on a living planet? These are the central questions driving Michael Pawlyn’s third edition of the life-changing book, Biomimcry in Architecture.
We are honoured to bring to Accidental Gods, a recording of three of our generation’s leading thinkers in conversation at the Festival of Debate in Sheffield, hosted by Opus.
This is an unflinching conversation, but it’s absolutely at the cutting edge of imagineering: this lays out where we’re at and what we need to do, but it also gives us roadmaps to get there: It’s genuinely Thrutopian, not only in the ideas as laid out, but the emotional literacy of the approach to the wicked problems of our time.
Now we have to make it happen.
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?
Cities: most of us live in them and most of them are geared around the old values of the last century. But what if our core question was: what does it take to have pride in the place I live? How can we completely rethink the way cities act and are shaped to put a flourishing future at the heart of all they do? Georgia Cameron of Dark Matter Labs lays out the visions of Net Zero Cities that goes way beyond just the carbon.
We’re in late stage capitalism, surrounded by interconnected systems that are crumbling under our feet. IF we’re going to birth something new, we need concrete, real-world tools: actual practical bridges that will work *now* to bridge from the old to the new. ‘Resilience Strategist’ Michael Haupt is building these tools and shares them with us.
Today we’re blowing open a route towards energy security, reduced carbon footprint and saving money – all in the way we make, distribute and use power. If each of us could minimise our own power use, we’d be a step on the way to reducing our overall carbon footprint: more, we’d be changing the ways we think of ourselves as separate from the web of life.
Emily unveils the bold concept of life-enabling economics and the radical aspiration of establishing bioregional banks — a system where money is no longer a mere transactional tool but a means to foster a thriving web of life. From the Findhorn watershed initiative to the Sheffield River Don project, Emily details practical steps towards making these ideas a reality, including the creation of relationship registers and multivalent currencies like ‘river coins’.
If we’re to survive the looming tipping points, we have to bring regenerative thinking together with material reality – so what do the cities of the future look like and how do they work?
We are so used to moving around. How will we manage our personal transport when our fossil fuel addiction ends? One company is addressing personal transportation AND creating a genuinely transformative model for a whole different way of doing Business.
This is the fourth of our ongoing series with Dr Simon Michaux. As ever, we ranged far and wide, but this time within the remit of ‘what does the world look like in 2050 if we make good choices now?