“When we build, we first remove the soil and replace it with rubble, concrete and tarmac. When we grow, we exclude all life from the land bar the one crop we want. Where we belatedly recognise our ultimate dependence on nature, we confine it to intensive ‘nature only’ areas such as rewilding zones, field margins and beetle banks.” Michael Taite 2026
How do we shift the dial on the future when so many of those whose fortunes are sunk into Tech, and AI in particular, seem to be steeped in the Dark Triad of psychopathy, sadism and narcissism? Is there any sign of hope amidst all the chaos and the frozen despair that narratives of inevitability foster in us?
If each of us were able to discover what’s ours to do, we’d be well on the way to the transformation we need to get us through the pinch points of the climate, cultural and technological apocalypses that are heading our way. So today we’re talking with someone who crosses many disciplines in search of human flourishing.
How can we bring the insights of Biomimicry to the field of human inter-being? How can we shift our sense of self and other, our communities of place, purpose and passion, our businesses, our governance structures…everything that we are and do onto a different trajectory using the web of life as our template?
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.