In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast, where we still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to turn the bus from the edge of the cliff, to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host on this podcast, your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. Your fellow griever at the turning of the world. 2025 was not good. 2026, as I record, is 13 days into existence and it’s not looking great, eh? I am well aware that all around the world atrocities are happening, have been happening, will continue to happen. And yet there have been times in the last couple of weeks where team death seemed to have an ascendancy over team life. I don’t believe this is the case in the long term, but it has been hard sometimes to hold on to that sense of belief, to connect to the web of life open heartedly through the grief and the horror. And if that’s the case for you, I want to let you know that our next gathering within Accidental Gods is Honouring Fear as your Mentor. It’s on Sunday the 8th of February from 4:00 till 8:00 UK time. We’re in GMT at the moment. I realise that for some of you (hello Laurel!) it is 3 a.m. when you get up to come to these gatherings. I wish that that were not the case, but we have to fit with the time zones we’re in, and I am beyond grateful for those of you who get up at stupid o’clock to come and join us.

Manda: So whatever time it is in your world, I am of the belief that the inner work is the most important, as we move forward towards the future that we would be proud to leave behind. No problem is solved from the mindset that created it and the only way to change our mindset is to really do the inner work. And I am also aware, watching the horror happening around the world, that when I am triggered, it’s not about the trigger. It’s never about the trigger. The part of me that is triggered, that is grieving, that is terrified, is teaching me the places that are frozen inside. Is showing me the places where I still need to do the inner work. And so I am endeavouring to take fear and grief as my mentor. As Ally Pimor says, later in the podcast you’re about to hear, to take life and death as my witness, and to do the work. And that work is done better, I believe, with other people. So that’s what the gatherings are for; to give us each the tools to begin to freeze the frozen parts. Thomas Huebl tells us that trauma is a moment frozen in time, and we need to do the unfreezing. We need to thaw. We need to free up the ossified places so that we can become fluid in our connection to the web of life. So we’re looking for the tools, we’re looking for connection. We’re looking to give each other help so that we may also receive the help. So if that sings to your heart, there are details in the show notes. Or just go to accidentalgods.life and click the gatherings tab and you’ll find it there.

And then on to this week’s podcast. Because across the world, our legal systems are crumbling. People with guns are defining what they think the law is, while honest, decent people are pushing back with connection and love and compassion. And while in some places the rule of sane law is being dismantled in real time, at the same time rivers and mountains and bees are being granted legal rights in ways that we would have thought impossible even a few years ago. And in boardrooms around the planet, C-suites, directors and others in business are increasingly looking to the natural world for guidance on how to be. On how to heal the web of life, on how to do business differently. So how do we make this work? How do we ensure that it’s not just yet another layer of corporate greenwash? And that’s how we got to our guest this week. Alexandra Pimor is director of the Nature Governance Agency within the Earth Law Centre. Increasingly, she is acting as a proxy for the voice of nature in corporations and organisations, in professional practice, project management and the cultural evolution of organisations. Ally was born in Madagascar, brought up in France and educated, and then worked in the UK, where for many years she was a legal scholar and an academic.

Manda: Her practice, studies and research were and are anchored in a quantum based ecology of law paradigms; espousing a critical, reflective and multidisciplinary approach. She has a deep passion for people and planet, and as you’ll hear, she now sees it as her mission to promote the facilitation of conscious governance and leadership at individual, collective and organisational levels, to advance the emergence of an anthropogenic eco-logical system of harmonious living. And yes, she has ecological as a hyphenated word; the logic of being ecocentric. Which I love and which goes very much to the heart of the podcast. In our conversation, she lays out what it means to take death and life as our witness, to evolve a sacred no and a sacred yes. To speak as the web of life, not for it or to it. She walks the fine line between two eyed seeing, from a Western trauma culture viewpoint, and from the perspective of an indigenous initiation culture. And using this, we explore how boardrooms can see ripples of change as we strive to turn the bus that is humanity away from the cliff edge of the sixth mass extinction. So with all of that ringing in your ears, people of the podcast, please do welcome Ally Pimor of Lawyers for Nature and the Earth Law Centre.

Manda: Alexandra Pimor, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this, certainly here, slightly muggy January afternoon?

Ally: I am very well, actually. It’s a beautiful day. I’m very cosy at home. I am in Paris or the Parisian region.

Manda: Yeah, yeah, I have France envy. And it’s worth saying we just spent a good half hour talking about our respective puppies, and we might see yours in the background, so we’ll wave at your puppy when she turns up. Mine is fast asleep and probably won’t turn up. Anyway, we also, I think it’s worth saying, because we’re going to be talking about the law and we are recording this a few days after Renée Good was shot in the US. And law and the application of law and what it means, I think, is becoming an increasingly important thing. David Allen Green, who is an amazing UK constitutional lawyer, says constitutional law should be very, very boring, dull in the extreme. And he’s writing a lot at the moment, going, okay, this is not dull. It’s confusing. And we are discovering that the law can be what somebody says it is, in any given moment, if that person holds a gun. But then it doesn’t necessarily get to be that in the long run. So we are discussing the rights of nature, of the natural world, of the web of life, of which we are an integral part. And you are the director of the Nature Governance Agency, the NGA within the Earth Law Centre, which has been going as far as I can tell, since 2009, which is good and amazing. So tell us how you came to be that and what it means for you.

Ally: Mm. My adventure with the Earth Centre started about three years ago and I was parachuted in that experience, shall we say. So about four years ago, the Earth Law Centre partnered with Lawyers for Nature and Faith in Nature, to give nature a voice on the board of Faith in Nature. And the question was, can we make nature the CEO?

Manda: I think just for a second, we need to say that Faith In Nature is a business. So for people who aren’t familiar with it, just tell us a little bit about Faith In Nature, before we go anywhere else.

Ally: Okay, so Faith in Nature is an eco beauty company based in Manchester. And they, well Simeon and Anne in particular, the creative directors, they were really keen to give nature rights within their organisation. The business is called Faith in Nature, right. So we have faith in nature and every product, everything that they are creating, is in partnership with nature.

Manda: Which is pretty amazing actually.

Ally: Yeah. So the point is, in their minds, like, well, if everything that we are creating is co-creation with nature, then should nature have a voice on the board? So their first question to the Earth Law Centre and to Lawyers For Nature is can we make nature a CEO? And what I was told, because I wasn’t there in the very, very beginning, what I was told was that the idea of making nature CEO was a little bit… Not tricky, but more why should nature be the CEO? If a CEO is involved in the day to day, bogged down with executive decisions? What’s the intention behind bringing nature on the board? And Simeon and Anne both wanted the board to be better informed. The idea is like, how can we make better informed decisions with nature for nature? So let’s bring nature to have a say in our decision making. And with that in mind, then it was decided that nature as a non-executive director might be a better position, because it’s at the strategic level, you know. So when the legal, structural, constitutional, when the boring stuff happened; it’s not so boring, it’s actually the most amazing thing really.

Manda: It sounds exciting. But anyway, okay, when the all the ink had dried on the paper, yes.

Ally: That’s when I was parachuted in.

Manda: Okay.

Ally: And because I live in Paris, the idea was that I could come back and forth. Then I was invited to step in and I was sent all the documentation and I read everything. And intellectually I understood. I understood the English, I understood what it meant. But I was like, huh? Until the first board, and then on the first board I was like, oh, got it.

Manda: And what was the difference between reading it and the first board? What was the penny that dropped?

Ally: It was, on paper at first for me, and it’s also about how my brain works, I only saw words: give nature a voice. Okay. What I had was a lot of questions, because I didn’t quite understand what it meant in practice. It didn’t have flesh. It wasn’t warm to me yet. It was on paper we’re doing all of this, and maybe the the paper that I read was your typical, you know, legal documents.

Manda: Right, right. It’s not designed to be very alive.

Ally: Yes.

Manda: Can I ask a question before we go any further? You were parachuted in, presumably because you already had experience in this field.

Ally: Ah, yes. So I had joined the Earth Law Centre about a year before that. So my background is as a senior law lecturer. I was teaching at Liverpool John Moores University and before that at Liverpool Uni, and I lived in the UK for 25 years, and I was in higher education as a facilitator of learning for 20 odd years. And my main specialism was in public law. So constitutional administrative law, human rights and with a focus on the European Union. So that was my main area of expertise and passion. And I also taught UK public law, French public law, some elements of international public law as well.

Manda: Because you were not born in France, but you were raised in France, I think that’s worth saying. And then you came to the UK?

Ally: Yes, I was born in Madagascar, I was raised in France. My father is Franco French, my mother was Malagasy French. And in my early 20s I moved to the UK, studied in the UK, stayed in the UK. My children were born in the UK. I became an adult in the UK. So born in Madagascar, raised in France and became an adult in the UK. And my main research, my doctoral research was focussed on law, governance and spirituality in the European Union.

Manda: Wow. Is there a lot of spirituality in law and governance in the EU?

Ally: Well, more than you can think of, to her.

Manda: Okay, that might be a rabbit hole that we go down another day and we’ll get to it, but okay. All right.

Ally: Yeah. Well this research, so when you look at the European Union, it is the first instance of Conscious Governance in action at the supranational level. So through my research I developed a theory of governance for European integration. And it’s not very well known, but when the European Union was created, it was not just supposed to be an economic community or entity. There were four pillars: security, economy, political and spiritual and cultural.

Manda: Oh, interesting. Right.

Ally: And I have come across in the archives, the notes from a round table that was 1951, I think, or 53, I have to go back and check. But it’s the round table on the spiritual and cultural unity of the European Union, with notes from Robert Schuman as well. And it lays out the whole plan of the spiritual foundations of European integration.

Manda: Wow.

Ally: And so the when we talk about spirit, we are not talking about dogma and we’re not talking about religion, we are talking about the mind. In the in French, l’esprit means the mind, consciousness. And that’s how I was able to really dive deeper into the psychology of consciousness and the psychology of spirituality, when I was looking at law and governance and spiritual integration within the European Union. So this theory of conscious governance is what led me to be invited as a voice of nature at Faith in Nature as well. My background in public law, my background in this relationship between law, governance and spirituality is what led me there. When I joined Faith in Nature, it wasn’t about the corporate rights elements per se. It was about what happens once nature is on the board. Because we had proven in that moment that we can onboard nature. We can legally, formally give corporate rights to nature. Great. And then what?

Manda: And then what does it mean? Okay. And that was the difference for you between the paperwork and the lived reality when you stepped into the room and you were then expected, presumably, to be the voice of nature, which is an interesting concept. So let’s let’s go from there. So you walk into the room and you discover what?

Ally: In the end it was online.

Manda: Okay. All right. But even so.

Ally: Yeah, well, what surprised me was actually listening to people. Listening to Brontie, listening to Simeon, listening to everybody on the board and their own perception of what it meant. It made it real. It made it alive, here in the room with people. And the conversation that we had was really potent, because there was a genuine inquiry in how nature’s voice was to be articulated, represented, heard, listened to and how nature would vote, how nature would participate in those conversations. How nature would participate in the decision making process, in the protocols, and so on. So there was a real deep dive from the get go, really. And for me, I cannot speak for everybody else on the board, but for me in that moment, I realised that I wasn’t here to speak for nature, can’t speak for nature. Because the first question that was really glaring me in the face, is like, okay, what nature? What do we mean by nature? And what does anybody mean by nature here?

Manda: Exactly.

Ally: And why would I speak for nature, when I, this is my own personal belief, I am nature. So I can only speak as nature. And so I also have to understand what is my nature as a human being, what is my nature as a voice of nature? What is my nature and the nature of my mandate, the nature of my role. So then it’s like a bouquet of questions started coming out. And that led me to, I mean, with Brontie we decided that we would go into wintering first, meaning we would observe.

Manda: You need to tell us who Brontie is. We’re going to be talking to her later on the podcast. Not today, but another day. But just fill in for people listening.

Ally: So Brontie Ansell is co-founder of Lawyers For Nature, co-director for Lawyers for Nature. And Lawyers for Nature is the organisation that works in collaboration with the Earth Law Centre to create this nature on the board initiative. And so Brontie was the voice of nature on behalf of Lawyers for Nature, and I was the voice of nature on behalf of the Earth Law Centre. So together we became a binome as one singular voice for nature on the board of Faith in Nature. And so we had to learn as well to work with each other in that space. We are coming from different perspectives, different backgrounds, different legal specialities as well, or expertise and interests. So diversity in that space already.

Manda: You just have two people and already it’s stopped being complicated and become complex.

Ally: Yeah. And it was really fun, I must admit. And I’m not saying it was easy. It wasn’t. It was fun because it’s the kind of thing when you’re like, you know, the way I was looking at this for me was like when I was a young child playing with my friends, and you’re sort of imagining. You’re using your imagination to create something and you’re making it real by talking to each other and by creating, okay, we should do this and we should say that. There’s a lot of learning that goes on into that play. And we also took it very seriously as children. That’s how I felt when we stepped into that place, because to me it felt like we were changing the rules, creating a brand new game. And because nothing had been written about it before and because of who I am, I need to feel like everything is opening up like a horizon of possibilities. And that’s what this was about. I strongly believe that every single one of us has a role to play in not just changing the world. We keep on talking about change.

Ally: I mean about caring for the world that we live in, to embody the change that we want to experience, and the transformation that we want to manifest. I want to live in a beautiful world. I want to live in a world where common good is common sense. I want to live in a world where the baseline is kindness and caring and compassion, where we are seeking balance with each other. That’s how I felt, and that’s how I’ve been feeling ever since I stepped into that role. This initiative, bringing nature on the board, this isn’t just another structure that we’re trying to impose on something that is there. It’s not just another layer of what’s gone before. It’s genuinely the opportunity to play and through that play, through that sense of happiness and innocence and literally bright, starry eyes. You know, believing that the world can be this amazing, beautiful place, we can do something about it rather than being led constantly by a sense of doom. I feel for me that I’ve been led by a sense of hope and faith ever since Faith in Nature. That was so not intended, by the way, that pun!

Manda: But it works. And you were making it real by talking about it. You said you did this when you were a child and you were doing it with Brontie. So can we unpick a little bit? Because this feels to me, this is at the heart of the transformation. We’re in a systemic crisis, we need systemic change. But the market economy is the engine that drives the death cult of predatory capitalism. And if we are to change that, then the market economy needs to shift its focus and its sense of why it exists. And it is my assumption, which you can correct if it’s wrong, that if we can begin to be part – I really don’t feel comfortable with this Nature as an external thing, so I’m going to call it the Web of Life, but I guess we’re probably talking about the same thing. That each of us is an integral part of the web of life. Each business could be, although I think a lot of businesses, in the end, have to cease to exist. What they do is not actually compatible with leaning into life, but faith in nature is trying. They produce hand soap and shampoo and things that probably people need, and they’re trying to do it in a way that really listens to the rest of the web of life. Presumably so that every person involved with the process can be more alive, can lean more into life, and that the entire system of the business is more focussed towards life and less towards extractive profiteering. And yet it still has to stay afloat within the capitalist system. How does that work? Alliy, I want to know how it works, if it works, how it works just now, and how it could work better.

Ally: So I can only speak for myself. I’m not even speaking for the Earth Law Centre, because we have different people who will step in that role and will have different approaches. So I can really only speak to my own experience and my own vision. So in all honesty, I thought about this, I hurt my head about this. I thought, nah, I ain’t gonna think about it in that way. I begin at the very beginning for me. So it’s like, what is the root? So one of the things that matters to me is life, the meaning of life. I look at nature Conscious governance or nature Conscious leadership as well as the art of living well, the art of living in balance. So it’s an art. It’s the art of living, the art of making decisions and the art of living in community. The art of, you know, having a business and making sure that the business thrives. If I think about all of this, and I do, when I think about all of this as an element of life, life in that sense an element of nature. Nature is life, and life is nature. Everything that we’re doing is nature. Capitalism is an expression of nature. What kind of expression is it? The focus of capitalism is on capital. Focus on capitalism is on individual dividends. It’s on individual benefits primarily, or it’s on corporate benefits for, I’m going to use words that are not necessarily the most accurate, but there is a sense of greed and hoarding. But for me these are symptoms of a behaviour that denote a particular condition, and that’s lack of love and that’s lack of security.

Manda: Yep.

Ally: So why do we have businesses in the first place? Businesses are created to answer and to provide a service. Businesses are supposed to be in service to society. When a business is not a service anymore, it disappears. There is a natural death to businesses. Capitalism has led us to believe that there is no end to anything. It’s almost like we are afraid of death. I understand what matters when I look at death as my witness. If today is my last day on earth, with death as my witness, what matters? I know what my sacred No is and I therefore know exactly what is essential to me.

Manda: What is your sacred No?

Ally: My sacred No? Well, when my mother passed away over six years ago, my sister and I spent an entire week with her, her very last week on earth. We were lucky to have that time, that space. We were 24 seven with her. We were her doulas. We did not see our mother as passing, as dying. We saw her as being birthed into the next life. That’s how it felt. And we invited everyone, everyone that ever mattered in her life or for whom she ever mattered, to come and say their goodbyes and everybody came, or called. Literally everything stopped. Our children were there, they came and said goodbye to their grandmother. The entire tribe held and supported us, and all I saw during that week was nothing else mattered but that. She had lived her entire life with a lot of regrets about not having gone to school or studied further, or achieved this or achieved that. But at the end of the day, everything that was happening during that week was pure love. People were right there. That’s her legacy. That’s what she has achieved. That’s what she taught us. So I knew that in those final hours, you don’t care about the money. You don’t care about how many hours you spent at work.

Ally: My job, everybody at work was just beautiful. I was still at university back in the days, and I was held so beautifully during that time. So I knew that it wasn’t about the classes that I was taking or not taking. It wasn’t about the papers that I was grading or not grading. It was about the moment of connection. Love. That’s all that happened during that week. So I knew in that moment that all that matters are my relationships. My relationships with myself, with my children, with my family, with my mother, with my sister, with the world around us. Covid the pandemic made this, because my mother passed away just before the pandemic, and during the pandemic this is the only thing that I was aware of and that everybody around me was aware of. We weren’t thinking about, oh my God, I should work. No, we were all thinking in those moments about, are you okay? Are you safe? You’re not alone, I’m right here. It was about connection and relationality and kinship. Love and community. That’s it. And making sure that everybody was fed or sheltered, safe and healthy in as much as possible. These are the essential bits. So my sacred No’s are I’m not spending my time worrying about things that do not really genuinely matter.

Manda: Okay. Right.

Ally: But then it goes into my sacred Yes. And my sacred Yes is with life as my witness. What pulls me forward with joy? And that’s from my eldest, because I trying to guide her a little bit, like, you know, with death as your witness. She said, yeah, it’s all very well, but what about life, mom? Oh, wow. All right.

Manda: There we go!

Ally: What would you do with life as your witness? Like, what a clever question, dude. So sacred No, sacred Yeah. With that in mind, sometimes this is what I like to bring to the table as well, in different conversations on the boards. Because at the end of the day, every single one of the people sat on the boards are human beings with human connections. And other than human connections. These are people who love and who are loved. These are people who are cherished and who cherish all kinds of relationships and beings. So that’s what I call to, the nature of being. The nature of being nature, the nature of being human. When we understand that, everything else then is put into its own place in the right way. So when we look then at the decisions that we have to make at the economic level, let’s understand that economy, the real economy, is the relationality between all of us, and it is about how we take care of each other. We are in a system, though, that is now making us feel as though we have to work for the system. We’ve created the system and we’re constantly saying, oh, we can’t do anything because it’s a system. Oh dude, we created that system.

Manda: Yeah, any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Yes. Right. But how does that go down in a boardroom where people feel that their jobs depend on making a certain amount of profit?

Ally: Well, that’s the thing. It’s not a straightforward one. Nature on the board is not just turning up on the board and expecting that change will happen. That’s at least not what I do, what I expect. I am aware that we are going at different levels, different layers. So I go on those boards as a voice of nature. And there are four, in what I actually put into practice, four roles for being a voice of nature. You have the guardianship model. So it’s the voice of guardianship. It’s the voice of rights of nature when you protect the rights of nature with the shield and the sword.

Manda: Okay. This far and no further.

Ally: Yeah. So that’s when you tend to go, you can do this or you can’t do that. And in those moments, to my mind, there  maybe a little bit of a distance that might actually occur with the rest of the board, because then you have one voice of nature speaking on that board. I don’t feel comfortable with that. So I like to be an agent of nature. So that’s the voice of regeneration. And when I step in as an agent of nature, I come in as a facilitator of a space within which the whole board can remember that they are also nature. And my job is to facilitate nature consciousness in that space. So you may have the finance director, the marketing director, the sustainability director or the supply chain director. And it’s like, okay, you are nature as supply chain director, but how does that feel? As an element of nature, where can we go from there? And we use different tools and different frameworks that can help us to put ourselves in that frame. So that the role models are not just human role models, but they are other than human role models. So you could look at, I don’t know, what would elephants do in that instance? What would Bees do in that instance? And it’s not to say that everything they do is absolutely correct. What it means is no, these are different models. Different examples. What can we learn from them as well.

Manda: This is so radical. And I know nothing about business. This is not my field. But I’m imagining a bunch of suits whose heads are basically spreadsheets. And they might go home and be nice to their kids at evenings and weekends, but they’re probably spending the majority of their waking life working out how to make a profit. And you come along and go, okay, shall we role play being a bee or an elephant or an alligator or whatever? And I am reflecting on a lot of spaces that I spend time in, where we get a lot of very stressed business people who come out of their businesses and they come to us because they genuinely want to, let’s say, connect with the web of life at a deeper level. And it’s very, very hard for them to manage the interface between their experiences connected to the web of life and their experience at work. And they either burn out and leave, or they’re sacked because they say things that are unacceptable, or they go back to being what they were before because the new version of them doesn’t fit. And yet you’re still here. Faith in Nature still exists. We have a refillable aluminium bottle from faith in nature that we very carefully take up to our local organic shop, where they refill it with the soap and we bring it back, and they’re no longer just selling us plastic bottles with stuff in. And so clearly this works. And it seems to me that you have a model here that could be exported to every other business on the planet and could make a significant difference. I still maintain that Monsanto would have to put itself out of business. And those companies selling us brown carbonated sugar water would have to start selling us something else. But, you know, they could sell us water kefir. There are things they could do. And yet, at the moment, that’s not happening. So I’m really curious to know, without breaking confidences and without necessarily talking about this one particular company, but in general. It feels really brave. You’re walking in and going, okay, I know you guys are all based around profit, but I’m going to ask you to listen to me as if I and you were all speaking from the natural world. And I want you to integrate your sense of the natural world and the fact that some of what your business does is probably killing large portions of the natural world, is going to suddenly become really painful. What happens then, Ally?

Ally: I’m not a saviour, so I don’t step into those spaces thinking that I’m going to affect change.

Manda: That’s probably safer.

Ally: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I know I want to affect change, don’t get me wrong, I want to affect change. But I don’t pretend that I have a magic wand that can make other people want the same thing or do that. All I have is my ability to connect with people, and to be invited in spaces by people who want to look beyond what they’ve known up until now. And so what I really want to say is this: bringing nature on the board isn’t going to solve everything. It’s not going to make you change things within a year. And oh my God, that’s it, we’re on track with our sustainability targets and we’re on track with this and that. And look at look at us, we’re brilliant. It isn’t that at all.

Manda: Why not?

Ally: Because it’s a deeper, much, much deeper transformation. The people on the board are not the only ones within that organisation, and that organisation does not operate in a silo either. It operates within a sector that operates within a whole industry, it operates within the whole economic sector. So when we are saying, oh, you’ve got nature on the board, but you’re not doing this. And look, you haven’t actually moved the needle enough. It’s like systemic, dude.

Manda: Yeah. We need total systemic change.

Ally: Exactly. It’s like looking at your body being very sick. If you’ve got a cough and you’ve got a headache and all that, it’s like, well, I gave you a medicine to treat your headache, but you’re not feeling well. Well, I still have a cough and I still have achy joints. It’s a whole systemic approach. So there are other things that need to happen and you need to come into alignment. And if what we do is purely point fingers, we’re not going to do very much positive things in that space.

Manda: Clearly. No, no, I get that.

Ally: What we have to do is figure out, okay, how do I help you change at that level? Because within all of these organisations, we talk about Monsanto, for instance, ExxonMobil or anything like that. These are massive organisations. But who runs these organisations? People. I don’t go in to work with organisations per se. I go in to work with people. And it might sound like sometimes it’s one person at a time, but sometimes it’s just that one person at the right time, with the right idea, with the right vibe. That’s what I trust in. It’s not about control. And it’s not about saying things have to happen a certain way. It’s about trusting. I have faith in the human ability to do the right thing for common good. And what I am doing as a voice of nature is stepping into spaces and providing people with as much support as I can. There’s a lot of invisible work that is happening there, right?

Ally: It’s like raising children, right? I’m raising two children who are amazing. There is nothing that guarantees that my children will turn out all right. Some of the stuff that I’ve said, and the structures that I’ve put in place did not guarantee that they would. I don’t know that it would be great at school, or that they would be great at sports, or that they would be… I don’t know.

Manda: Turn into pianists. Yeah. You can’t. Okay, yes. Yes.

Ally: Or even just be happy in themselves. My only ambition for them is to be happy. And the past couple of weeks, that’s literally what they’ve said to me. That they are happy. They said I’m feeling a lot of happiness. Like I can’t tell you this or that has happened. But what I can tell you is that there’s been years in the making on teaching myself as a parent with my own habits and traumas and experiences. And there’s been like decades of working on how to be the best person I can be to parent these children. So how can I be the best human being to offer support for the voice of nature, to have agency in these spaces? That’s my mission, and that’s what I hope to bring with the different board members, because then the change might not just happen on the board. It will happen at different layers, different levels, different dimensions, different degrees that I may not even see. It’s the lollipop effect.

Manda: Oh, hang on a second. I have a question, but I don’t know what the lollipop effect is.

Ally: I think it was a Ted talk that I saw on YouTube once, and this guy was talking about the first day of students being on campus. They didn’t even know each other. And so he was a lecturer, I think, and he was going around handing out lollipops on induction day, and he saw this young man with his parents and this young girl with her parents, and he gave the lollipop to the young man and he said, right, you know, give her the lollipop and just say hello. And the young man was like, oh, red in the face and went and gave the lollipop to the girl. And everybody laughed. And it was all da da da da. But then three years later, both the students, the young man and young woman went to see this guy in class and said, do you remember that day? Yeah well, we’re about to get engaged or something like that. And so the lollipop effect is.

Manda: The ripple effect that you don’t see coming. Okay, I get it.

Ally: Exactly.

Manda: Okay. All right. So you said that there’s a lot of invisible work happening. And it is axiomatic of this podcast and I think of the work that you’re doing, that no problem is solved from the mindset that created it, and that we are all integral nodes in the web of life, and that our job is to ask, what do you want of me and respond to the answers in real time. I think I probably said that often enough to bore every single listener on the podcast. There’s always someone new, though. And so it seems to me that in order for the web of life to have a place within a business that is an integral part, but might be a little bit like an abscess walled off from the rest, that the invisible work is what matters. The setting intent, the taking leadership from the rest of the web and simply embodying what comes. And that of all the people I’ve spoken to in this particular field of legal governance in business, you seem to be very switched in to the possibility of being a voice for the web of life in a way that is not head based, but is energetically based. First of all, am I projecting, or is that right? And second, can you speak to that in a way that you feel comfortable with?

Ally: You’re not projecting. That’s true.

Manda: Good.

Ally: It’s true. I don’t come at it from a head space first. For me, the mind is in service to the heart. And the body embodies the action. And that’s the meaning of integrity for me. You know, a lot of people use the word integrity like it’s coloured. As in it’s got a flavour and a specific colour and we should all say, you know, I am someone with integrity and all of us are like, oh, yes. No, no. Integrity means the quality of being whole, the quality of being integrated. What is the quality of being whole for you? It is based on your values. So what are your values? When you lead with integrity, that means you lead by, you know, acknowledging your values and embodying your values and turning them into action. And for me, integrity is the alignment of what I think or what I believe, what I speak, what I espouse in terms of principles, and what I do. My actions, my deeds. That’s integrity. That’s when I’m in alignment and I’m operating from that system of values. So my system of values is eco-logical; the logic of the Earth. And I use ecological as two separate words, you know, with a hyphen. Eco-logical. And I was accused of being a hippie or of dancing around with fairies.

Manda: Oh, really? By whom? And when?

Ally: Oh, by different people. At different times.

Manda: Dancing around with fairies sounds like a really cool thing to be able to do, though.

Ally: I remember for about four years I was a union representative and I was a deputy secretary of the union and it was a hard four years. When I finally handed my resignation over that particular role, I said, look, I need to put my rose tinted glasses back on. I am not good with the grey. I don’t like the grey. What I mean is, what animates me is what makes me happy. It’s the joy. That’s my magic. That’s my superpower. It’s the joy and the love I feel, the fascination that I have for the world. And I believe that we have the ability to be anything that we set our minds to. And that’s the power of imagination and creation. And when we have people telling us that we can’t change the capitalist system; you know, on some boards, like some decisions that have to be made, it’s like, well, we can’t because between protecting nature and making that economic decision, we have to survive. And I’m like, right. So you’re literally specifically doing either/or. But it’s not either/or, it’s one. That’s my job. My job is to to to show people that it’s one. That choice is not the real choice, and it’s not the only choice to make. If you go at it from a capitalist perspective, that’s your choice. But if you want to go at it from an eco-logical perspective, then your choice is much rounder than that, because it’s about balance, about life. What promotes life? What supports life? What sustains life? What fosters life in that space? So where I’m coming from is I’m not religious, I don’t adhere to a particular dogma. I am fascinated by all the different faiths around the world for sure. I am a spiritual being, as we all are, because we are spirits. You know, we’re not just bone and flesh, and quantum physics actually tells us that we are not just bone and flesh anyways. So we are spiritual beings and we are one consciousness because we are of the earth.

Ally: That’s as simple as that. And for me, that’s what eco-logical consciousness means. So anything else that comes with it, in how you bring this to the table, is a question of language. I will not speak a language that people will not understand or will not want to understand. I will use the words that feel right for me, and I will explain those words. And then we will have a back and forth, where we’ll have a conversation, a dialogue, and I will understand then oh, that’s what you mean. I mean the same thing, we just use different words and we’re coming at it from different perspectives. Okay. That’s cool. Because my aim is always to find what brings us together.

Ally: One of my one of my key inspirations is Professor Julia Hausermann. She was the founder of Rights and Humanity International. And I learned such a great deal with her. She taught me that particular framework that she would use when she brought human rights in policy conversations. Like what is the highest common vision? Not the lowest common denominator, but what is the highest common vision? What do we all want? And at the end of the day, what everybody wants are the same thing. We want to feel love and to love. We want to be safe. We want security. We want to be healthy. When we talk about wealth, let’s redefine wealth. It’s not about money. Because what money? You know, are we talking about paper money? Are we talking about digital money? Are we talking about coins? These are just artefacts. Wealth is the ability to provide for our basic needs and to live in comfort with each other. To me, that’s what wealth is.

Manda: Yeah.For sure.

Ally: Wealth is watching my children grow and be happy and healthy. Wealth is is being able to be with my friends and go to museums or just go for walks in the woods with my dog. Wealth is the ability to live at peace and free, in that sense of freedom. That’s wealth. Everything else, that capitalist system that we’ve created, if the human species were extinct, that system would not even exist.

Manda: Oh, yes.

Ally: Right.

Manda: Yes.

Ally: So that’s not real real. That is an expression of the nature of being human. So we can change the nature of capitalism so that the purpose of capitalism would not be to hoard money in the hands of the few, but to ensure that all of us are provided with the basics. That’s the vision that I have. I think you asked me, what am I seeing moving forward? For me, having nature on the board is a transient artefact, in the sense that right now we have to have a nature representative on those boards. In the future, everybody will be integrated in their ecological being and their ecological thinking, their ecological doing, so we would not need to have a specific representative.

Manda: We don’t need a person who is nominated because everybody is integral to nature, to the natural world.

Ally: Exactly. What you might have is just somebody who holds the conscience. I like to think of the nature proxy as Jiminy Cricket in that sense. But the idea would be that we would operate in a way that is with ecological integrity. Yeah, and that’s it.

Manda: Okay.

Ally: And that means that the kind of future that I imagine is that everybody is fed, everybody has shelter. All the four elements are flowing freely and no one owns them. And we are all holding this for the flourishing of ourselves, so that the only purpose in life is not to make money and to work in order to make money, but to live. And to create with the world in ways that are ecologically balanced. What’s interesting is that when you say these things, people are very quick to say, you’re a hippie or you’re a dreamer or you’re an idealist.

Manda: Are they? That was my question.

Ally: What is that? This isn’t real. And I’m like, what else is real?

Manda: Genuinely, yes. Because the ‘real’ stuff is heading us towards extinction very fast. So your definition of real becomes quite strange quite quickly.

Ally: Exactly.

Manda: So can I ask, because this is so in alignment with what the podcast is about. And I wonder, I wonder so many things Ally. But to begin with, you said right at the top of the show that you don’t speak for nature, you speak as nature. So you’re speaking, giving voice to the web of life through you. You’re effectively becoming a hollow bone to speak for the web of life, with integrity, leaning into life and taking life as your witness, as well as taking death as your witness, and walking that fine line between. Again, my assumption is that when you speak with integrity, when you give voice to the web of life, the bits of life within the people listening will respond in an alive way, regardless of the inequities or otherwise of the headlines that are attached to them. And yet, if that wonderful vision were the case, we would not be living in the world we’re living in at the moment, because that would spread. And so I’m wondering, first of all, what is your actual experience of going into big businesses other than the fact that they tell you you’re a hippie?  Are you seeing the lollipop effect? And how could we scale this in time? Because it seems to me we don’t have a lot of time, and that may be an unanswerable question, I get that. If we knew the answers, we would be doing it, but you must have visions of the steps we could take between where we are and where you just expressed we could be. In a legal sense, let’s stay with your field of legality and corporate governance.

Ally: Okay. Well, the people that I have been working with, first of all, no one in that field has called me a hippie.

Manda: Okay. That’s good.

Ally: No, it’s more that I’m upfront about where I’m coming from. When I step into those places, onto those boards, what I make very clear is the intent… Well, it depends on what the mandate is within each of these organisations. So that’s why we have first a conversation with the organisations we work with. We have to understand what is their vision, what do they think their vision is for onboarding nature? So we ask them why? Why do you wish to onboard nature? And we’ve had organisations who’ve gone we want nature on the board and we want nature as director. And then when you have those conversations you realise, oh, but we’re not quite sure what we would be doing actually with nature on the board. But then with nature as director, it’s like, yeah, why would you want to have nature as director? What do you have in mind? How do you think that’s going to happen? And this is our due diligence process. Asking the why allows us to understand where they’re coming from and what they wish to achieve together. So how are they looking forward, what difference is it going to make with nature on the board? And then we understand what the meaning of nature is for them, right, because nature will mean different things to different people. I like to use Nielson’s Nature of Nature framework. And then you have four different themes for what nature might mean: 1. nature as the environment and the elements, 2. nature has other than human, more than human or not human made. 3. Nature as the essence of the world or the universe, and 4. nature as the essence of being.

Ally: And I ask organisations or people within the organisations when they speak about nature, if you if you imagine these as a flower of life,  each of them is a circle interlocking with each other, every one of them means nature. But when you say nature, which one are you stepping into? And therefore I see where I’m stepping into. So then we see where we’re talking. It’s the theory of relativity, right? It’s like, okay, then I see where you are and I see where I’m at, because if we’re not in the same circle, or if we have no understanding of what the other person’s meaning of nature is, we’re not having a conversation. So once we understand that, then I tell them I may or may not be able to help, because this is where I stand and if this is what you want, I can help. If it’s not what you want, I’m not sure I can stand in those places so other people can step into those places instead. If they say, well, this is where we’re coming from and what we want is ….,then okay, so then if we have an understanding, we can work with each other, with that. So once we have an understanding, like if we are roughly standing in the same 1 or 2 circles and we understand each other, then my next question is what would be the role of the voice of nature then, in that space? If you want nature so that you want to achieve this particular difference in the long term, then what kind of role would be relevant for nature? So do you even want nature on The Board or do you want nature onboard? So we have different points of entry: nature in governance, nature in leadership, nature in organisational practice or nature in cultural evolution. These are entry points.

Ally: And then if you want a voice of nature, then there are the four different voices of nature: Nature as the voice of protection, guardianship. The voice of agency or regeneration. Nature as an agent. But you also have the voice of transformation, which is nature as designer, right?

Manda: Okay. I did wonder what the other two were.

Ally: Right. Or the voice of accountability? Which is nature’s auditor. Because I would not necessarily be the best qualified to step in as nature’s auditor. And I have some idea of what I can do as nature’s designer, but really, maybe you actually want a designer, you know, an ecological designer to help you make your system a living organism. So what is it that you want to achieve, that you want to manifest? What is the level of transformation that you want to be working on? And once we’ve actually identified all of this, then we’re looking at what would be the mandate of the voice of nature. So if you’ve got nature as auditor, to my mind, this is when you will be seeking the kind of mandate or roles where maybe nature is pointing fingers. Same with nature’s garden. Nature may be pointing fingers, like you haven’t done this and you haven’t done that, or you can’t do this, you can’t do that.

Ally: But if that’s not what you’re looking for first, because you want to also have an in-depth cultural transformation, one of the examples that really inspired me to think so much deeper has been working with organisations who are very, very far advanced already in their sustainability, on their sustainability journey. Because their question has been like, well, why should we then have nature on the board? It’s like, hey, I’m not saying that you should. I’m not saying that you should, but why would you want to have nature on the board? And we have two examples where these organisations were more thinking about legacy, embedding a particular way of being and thinking and doing. So what they wanted was not so much to have nature on the board so that they could become more ecological, but they want nature on the board so that we can embed that ecological integrity within the whole organisation. So one particular founder was saying, well, what if tomorrow I’m hit by a bus? I don’t want my organisation to fall apart with that, simply because I’m gone. So that’s where we would integrate nature in terms of the wisdom of nature. So that’s when you have nature as agent and you support everybody to create this particular cultural structure.

Ally: And for the others it’s like, well, we’ve got all of this also set together. It seems to be there, culturally speaking, so we’re not quite sure why we would have nature on the board. Well, that’s absolutely fine. But if it’s a company that then is going to become rich, it’s going to float, you want to create some kind of legal mission lock.

Manda: Safeguarding, yeah.

Ally: And that’s when you may be integrating nature. But again, we’re using the word nature but for other people, nature might not even be the right word. It could be Earth. It could be the web of life. It could be nature consciousness, it could be anything. And I am not personally attached to the form at all. I’m not attached to shape. I’m attached to the essence. Because the essence is what matters here.

Ally: So to give you an example of an organisation who came to see us to say, yeah, we want nature on the board. And when we went through this process, first we look at the why, then we look at the how, and then we look at what needs to happen for this to be manifested. They said we want nature on the board, nature as director, boom! By the end of the process, they brought in nature as advisor, because they realised oh, we’re at this stage on our journey. What they wanted was to change from within, but they didn’t necessarily have the right infrastructure in place. The other example that I have, which for me is the best, is Purpose Disruptors.

Manda: We talked to them. Yes.

Ally: Purpose Disruptors are like my maah thing. I love them. They’re just amazing.

Manda: That was another Ally. We talked to Ally Kingston just before Christmas. Yes.

Ally: Well, there you go. And so I’m nature as advisor on their board, and I love working with Purpose Disruptors, because from the get go they have been entirely about authentically integrating nature consciousness. So we’ve talked about the different ways that nature could be onboarded, the different entry points. The choice of nature as advisor first is because the co-founders Lisa, Rob and John really want to be embodying eco-logical thinking, eco-logical seeing, eco-logical being in everything that they are doing. And so nature as advisor for them has been the way to step into that practice. I am not there. You know, if you watch us, I’m not doing anything. I spent the first few months literally sitting, listening, observing, which is the first thing that I would advise anyone who wants to be a voice of nature to do first: observe.

Manda: Right. Like permaculture. And you were saying at the beginning, you and Brontie, you did the winter first, which was just watch.

Ally: Just watch, observe, pay attention, ask questions. Ask beautiful questions too. Ask questions, see what happens. Listen. Get a feel, get a sense. Because we come in as gardeners or co-gardeners. This is a garden that we have to tend together. And things are not just happening because we arrive. There’s a whole life that has happened even before the voice of nature as a proxy has entered the scene. So it is about entering into a relationship, into partnership, into reciprocity. And so once we’re in that space, what I’ve done after a while is I’ve made some observations. Like, all right, this is what I have observed. What do you think?

Ally: And with Purpose Disruptors, beautifully received. And we’ve had so many very interesting conversations back and forth, of exploring from  the mind frame, from heart frame, from the embodied frame. And we’ve looked at all of these elements and one of the last experiment or experience that we’ve had on the board, was to step into two eyed seeing. The two eyes seeing framework, where you can look at things from an indigenous perspective and from a Western perspective. From the indigenous perspective, we’re being broad, in that it’s from a consciousness perspective, from a nature, from an ecological perspective. So we’re drawing on different kinds of wisdom, the kind of wisdom that are non-traditional in a westernised or corporate kind of setting. And that two eyed seeing has led some very interesting conversations. And so the decisions then are not either/or, they are how do we integrate? How do we come in that integration. And the thing with Purpose Disruptors is that they have onboarded nature as advisor. They would like to see nature as director, or they would like to see nature as chair, but they’re they’re taking it step by step based on where they are, what is their vision, what is their need? It’s a responsibility based and it’s a needs based approach.

Ally: You have a vision and then you figure out what the right steps are. It’s not about running. It’s not a destination; it’s a journey. Because the win here is that we can step into a genuine, authentic practice of ecological responsibility in our decision making. That’s it. So the bigger corporations that on board nature, it takes a little bit longer when you have to work with different people at different levels. That’s why the result is not straight there. And I would say that what is required is imagination, because there’s a huge crisis of imagination. It’s very easy to say, oh, this can’t happen, this can’t happen. And I’m like, okay, so what’s the plan then? Because we’re coming in with a plan, but you have to play fair, right?

Manda: Yes. Narrow boundary to wide boundary is a big transformation for a lot of people.

Ally: So imagination, courage and leadership. Because there’s so many people and so many corporations that like to say we’re leaders in the market and we’re leading in that space. And I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re just doing what everybody else has done. You’re managing the known. You’re managing what you know, and you’re managing in that space. Leading to my mind is leading in the unknown. It’s when you are able to really move through. And we are definitely stepping into the unknown, not as something that we should be afraid of, but this is the mystery of life and this is down to our choices. So Conscious governance, nature conscious governance is to understand that we are nature, a full part of nature, an integral nuance of nature. Being aware of that, when we step into consciousness, that means we step into an understanding of the choices that reveal themselves to us. We choose what value we assign to what we interpret. We are conscious of the meaning that we make of the situations that we find ourselves in and our ability to make that decision. That’s what makes it nature conscious, as a system of governance.

Manda: Brilliant. Yay! I have so many questions and yet we are pretty much out of time. One last question and we’ll keep it short, because apart from anything else, it’s getting dark here and I have to go out and shut up the chickens or the fox eats them all. We are in 2026, this feels like the year where nobody is going to be able to pretend anymore that business as usual is continuing. So the unknown is a given. And it seems to me that that will force people to be more imaginative, because they can’t just rely on next year being the same as last year, but with slightly different profit numbers. And people’s courage will rise, because that actually is often how people meet what’s coming, is they bring the best of themselves to the table. And the year is very young, but I’m wondering, are you seeing that rippling through? The understanding that uncertainty is now the only given, and people rising up to do things differently. Are you seeing this at all, or any cracks in what feels to me like the ossified hide of capitalism, that I think needs to crack open, and that it feels to me is beginning to crack open. But again, this is not the water I swim in and it is the water you swim in.

Ally: Personally, yes, I am seeing changes. What I find difficult to share is how those changes are actually occurring. I am seeing changes in people through conversations in particular. So individual conversations with different people. When you step on a board, you’re bound to have conversations with people. You’re weaving relationships, you’re braiding different kinds of ideas together. And whilst it might not always be fully reflected in decisions straight away, but here’s the thing; it’s not because there’s this really big question that says, do we do this? Or is this how it’s going to be? No. Even those big decisions do not happen on their own. Anyone who actually has worked in a decision making process knows that there are all kinds of conversations that are taking place beforehand, because there’s all kinds of reflections as well that are happening beforehand. And what I have noticed are the changes in the conversations, the changes in the views, even, when the goalpost seems to have moved inside someone. Where somebody instead of being very clear, like, nature on the board, really? And then all of a sudden it’s like, well, not in every space, but in some of them I will invite people maybe to step into a meditation, I will invite people to step into a contemplation as an opening.

Manda: Wow, that’s brave.

Ally: And I can invite people to imagine that we are talking to a tree, or to imagine, to sense what the earth is telling us. And it sounds woo woo for some people, but the truth is that’s also part of play and imagination and creation. Like opening this up. And see what comes through, see what happens, right? That’s also literally opening up and going past those boundaries, those limitations that we have. And what’s interesting has been talking with people who are not necessarily into that. And then they’re the first one, like 2 or 3 meetings later, like, can we have a landing?

Manda: Oh, fantastic. That is so cool.

Ally: Right. After I’ve done the landing a few times,asking anybody want to lead this? And you’ve got people who haven’t said anything and then now they want to lead the meditation for you.

Manda: Okay. That. That is such an inspiring end point, actually, I think we could leave it at that. One final thing. If people want to, if they’re listening and perhaps have a business that could want to have nature on board or the web of life on the board or whatever we want to say, what are the ways that would be best for them to explore the idea?

Ally: Well, first, they can definitely go on our website, the Earth Law Centre, and there will be information.

Manda: We will link that in the show notes.

Ally: And then there are so many different places and different fellowships and different groups that people can explore. I went through the bio leadership fellowship, for instance, which has been absolutely brilliant at meeting people who are willing to explore and step into inquiries in that space. That’s definitely one of the big things.

Manda: Can you send me a link to that and I’ll put it in the show notes?

Ally: Yes, I definitely can can do that. And so we’re partnering with Exeter University to develop a legal executive program, which is about onboarding nature. So the first iteration will be open to legal professionals and consultants first, but the idea is to open it up.

Manda: Yay!

Ally: So there will be information provided there. And there are a couple of other projects as well with one of our partners, and we’re developing a toolkit for board members and independent directors. Right now it’s being tested in the Mena region. So you have some of the frameworks that we use, The Council of all beings, for instance, in that space. But also you’ve got nature in relation to risk management, or nature in relation to embodiment, or nature in relation to governance. So you have plenty of information and it’s going to be available within the next couple of months online as a dynamic toolkit. And obviously you also have the onboarding nature toolkit that we developed with Nijenrode Business University and B-lab Benelux. And there’s a whole website dedicated to it.

Manda: You’re going to have to send me lots of links.

Ally: Okay. I’ll send you the links.

Manda: Super. Thank you so much, Ally, this has been utterly amazing. We will put lots of links in the show notes. I would love to come back to you sometime. It’ll be at least six months away because that’s how long I’m booked ahead. But just to explore where this is going, because the world feels like it’s changing so fast. And this has to be, it seems to me, one of the core things. If we’re going to get total systemic change, the nature of business has to be different and it has to connect to the web of life, if we’re going to make it through. So I am very excited by what you’re doing and very grateful that you’re there doing it. So thank you very much, and thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Ally: Oh, thank you for inviting me. It’s like, oh my God, really it feels like such a such a blessing and such a privilege, honestly. And I would absolutely love to have a further conversation. Because there are quite a few other things that are going to happen between now and then. And to me, it feels like this was more of an introduction. I know that a lot of people feel yes, but how does it happen in those meetings? And that’s what this year is about, right? It’s about collating the information so that we can bring a little bit more concrete examples to people. And so I’m already talking to a few organisations that we’re working with, like can we use this as case studies that we can share with the world, you know. Yes.

Manda: We will book something soon. Thank you.

Manda: Well, there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Ally for all that she is and does. And definitely we will have another conversation later in the year, when she will have more case studies beyond Faith in Nature, that she can bring to us. Of businesses that are actually making change. We need total systemic change, that’s beyond doubt, but we need to shift there in a way that takes people with us. And if we could get every business on the planet to have the web of life as an active principle within what they’re doing, then I genuinely think we would begin to see steps in the right direction. So if you work for a business, if you know anybody who works for a business and wants to begin to do this, then there are links in the show notes to how you can contact Ally. I’m also going to put a link to Riversimple and to the conversation that I had with Hugo Powers of that company, because they are already running a system where the web of life or the natural world, or whatever you want to call it, is one part of their board. I meant to mention them in the podcast and my ideas leaked out of my head.

Manda: So I’m going to put a link here now. So as our world appears to become more fragile, the old system is breaking down, there is a way of seeing the horror around us as the extinction burst of the death cult, the last flailing around of an old system that can see it’s dying and is terrified. And again, if we can see fear as our mentor, we can move in the world in a more fluid way. And moving laws, moving practice, moving the way we see ourselves in the world towards something that is more aligned with team life, feels to me like a really good idea. So whatever you can do, please do it.

Manda: So that’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot. To Alan Lowell’s of Airtight Studios for this week’s production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website, and for all of the conversations that help us to thaw the frozen parts. This feels so important at the moment, and I promise you the work is never done. But it does become easier as our systems see and feel what it is to be more fluid and can recognise the frozen parts and step back a little bit from the stories that they tell and see that they are stories and they’re not necessarily the truth and there are other ways of seeing the world. So Faith, thank you for helping me see the other ways of being.

Manda: And thank you, if you’re listening, for that too. Because if we were not doing this podcast every week, I don’t think we’d be doing the work as deeply as we are. There used to be a poster on the wall of the Esalen Institute, it may still be there, and it said, you teach best what you most need to learn. And I would say now that we speak on the podcast to the people we most need to hear from, and this helps us to do the work that we most need to do. And if you weren’t listening, the podcast would not exist. So genuinely thank you. And if you know of anybody else who wants to understand the ways that business can be part of the solution, instead of accelerating the bus towards the edge of the cliff, 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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