This week sees the launch of the Climate Popularism Report written for the Climate Majority Project by friend of the podcast Professor Rupert Read, co-director of the Climate Majority Project, and Caroline Lucas, former Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and for a long time, the sole Green party member of the UK’s Parliament.
What happens when someone who has trained for years in the Cartesian model of science, of medicine in particular – who has been trained to look at bodies the way a mechanic looks at a car, to take them apart and fix one thing and put it back together and get it back on the road… what happens when that person begins to question everything?
We talk a lot on this podcast about the need for a new system: politically, culturally, in business, media and art…in everything we do. And yet, we don’t often have the opportunity to talk with someone who has set up a new political party – still less one explicitly predicated on the core values of courage, generosity, transparency, humility, humour and empathy. You’d think it would be hard to argue against these, but, as Uffe Elbaek discovered when he entered the Danish Parliament…the system doesn’t always want to be courageous, or transparent, or generous, or to embody humility, humour and empathy.
“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary
If we can build communities of place, purpose and passion, how do we find other communities to link with so we can scale from community to region, keep one another accountable, scale behaviour change beyond a closed or Dunbar-number community to multiple communities, scale actions and collaborations to regional levels without a hierarchical coordination structure and coordinate actions and behaviors based on the commons we share, whether or not we share “values”.
“The Possitopian approach to future thinking expands the cone of the possible future, draws on geophysical realities and data, and also applies imagination to help you imagine future scenarios which are potentially worse or better than you might allow yourself to think.” So says this week’s guest, Bridget McKenzi, an artist and regenerative thought leader working to engage people with what she calls the Earth Crisis.
But what if you knew you were not alone in caring about the crises our planet faces? What if you knew that almost everyone in our culture cares about this, they just don’t know what to do about it? They don’t have what this week’s guest, Dr Liam Kavanagh, calls the ‘Victory Stories’ to show how we made it through.
How do we create healthy people, intimately enmeshed in a healthy biosphere so that, together, we can co-create routes to a healthy future?
Health is such an astonishingly polarised and polarising field, but there are some truly astonishing people out there who are fully on board with the concept that late stage capitalism is at the heart of our ills and that regeneration of our connections is the key to building health in all its senses.
When we talk about building community, we often get stuck trying to bridge tribal divides, particularly in a media landscape designed to monetise division, amplify hatred, and draw us into cycles of righteous anger. But what if there was a different approach? One that creates a sense of individual and collective agency, that centres the gifts and strengths of everyone in the room in a way that lets everyone feel heard and so sweeps beneath the tribal divisions to the heart of things?
Empathy lets us do more than just step into another’s shoes, it opens the doors for us to step into their heart and soul with the vast generosity of spirit we’d like others to bring to us, so that we can see through their eyes as the best of who they are. Obviously, we can do this with other people, but we can do it too, with whales, with elephants, with horses, and red kites and moles and spiders – and mountains and trees and landscapes… empathy is the spark that connects us to the More than Human world.
Jeremy Lent is a long time friend of the podcast. His new book, ‘Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All’ is coming out at the end of April 2026 and so we got together to discuss what an Ecocivilisation is, why we so badly need to become one, and how we might get there.
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.