Accidental Gods

03/12/2025

We all know by now that plants grown in living, thriving, life-filled soil, give us living, thriving, life-filled food… but the steps to getting there in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive – and highly profitable – ultra-processed ‘food-like substances’ are harder to see. This week’s guest, , spends her life deep in the mycelial networks of food and farming systems, bringing both into genuinely regenerative balance.

Daphne is a food policy researcher, educator, and farmer. She holds a PhD in Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City St. George’s University of London, and a Master’s in Environmental Science and Management from Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. She is Director and Coordinator at Shropshire Good Food Partnership; Director at Light Foot Enterprises; Project Lead at Food Forward BC (where BC stands for Bishop’s Castle, not British Columbia or any of the other potential options) – and she’s co-owner of Little Woodbatch CIC, a farm just outside BC that hosts the Bishop’s Castle Community Seed Bank. She is the author of the town’s Community Food Resilience Strategy – the only such policy in .

Daphne and I are relatively near neighbours, we have swapped seeds – her more than me – and share ideas about systems thinking and how we might evolve our world. She’s deeply involved at every level from actual growing up to governmental meetings trying to get those in power to find some wisdom when it comes to food resilience, food security and all the other things we say as we try to get them to move away from the corruption innate in our system towards something that actually works in service to life.

https://accidentalgods.life/roots-to-health-building-food-resilience-with-daphne-du-cros-of-the-shropshire-good-food-partnership/

We all know by now that plants grown in living, thriving, life-filled soil, give us living, thriving, life-filled food... but the steps to getting there in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive - and highly profitable - ultra-processed 'food-like subst...

26/11/2025

What does it mean to (re)orient our entire culture around the power of love? To answer this, we have to understand the nature of love and of power and how both of these have many meanings in our culture, some of them essential to moving forward – and some of them so toxic they turn the entire concept into a poisoned cue.

This week’s guest is friend of the podcast, Jamie Bristow. We spoke to him back in episode #274, recorded at the start of this year, and there, we consider what it was to be a Spiritual Warrior in our times – a concept to which Jamie has given the past 16 years of his life.

Jamie is someone who lives and breathes at the intersection between spirituality – specifically Buddhism – and international policy in the realm of what is still called sustainability but which must, now, be shifting towards systemic change. For eight years, he was clerk to the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness and director of the associated policy institute, the Mindfulness Initiative, where he helped to introduce mindfulness to a number of other parliaments around the world.

There are many ways these conversations go. Often, I’m exploring a particular body of work and am asking questions to which, broadly, I have a sense of the answer – ‘tell me about [x] that is squarely in your field’. Sometimes, though, I’m talking with someone I know well enough, and where we share enough of a common grounding, that I can ask questions to which I don’t know the answer. Where we can find the places where our Theories of Change meet but perhaps don’t overlap, and explore the fertile, liminal spaces of uncertainty. Jamie is one of these people and this was one of those conversations – where we explored love and power and game theory and how we get from where we are, through a nexus of power that is arrayed firmly around the Dark Triad of Narcissism, Psychopathy and Sa**sm (and I know that’s slightly different to other Dark Triads that have Raw Cunning as the third one and sa**sm as an afterthought, but I think the cunning is in there with Psychopathy and the Sa**sm is, as we’re seeing around the world, an essential part of the performative power-over that the wounded egos need to tell themselves they’re safe). Anyway – we explored all the things that matter – and still only scratched the surface. So Jamie will definitely be coming back for another conversation, but in the meantime, here we are, delving deep into what it is to be human, and to be striving for emergence into a new, generative, kin-centric and flourishing system at this moment of total transformation.

https://accidentalgods.life/dance-of-the-spiritual-warrior-balancing-love-and-power-with-jamie-bristow/

What does it mean to (re)orient our entire culture around the power of love? To answer this, we have to understand the nature of love and of power and how both of these have many meanings in our culture, some of them essential to moving forward - and some of them so toxic they turn the entire concep...

19/11/2025

Do you love the dark? Do you yearn for sunset and the amber glow of a fire with the night growing deeper, more inspiring all around you? Most of us don’t – though our ancestors through all of history have lived by firelight, moonlight, starlight… until the modern era of light at the flick of a switch. But there’s a world out there of sheer, unadulterated magic that is only revealed when we put aside the lights and the phones and the torches and step out into the night – as this week’s guest has done.

Leigh Ann Henion is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Backpacker, The American Scholar, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.

Wall Street Journal says of this book. “Lovely…truly inspired…and very clever…An appreciation of nature’s nocturnal organisms can help us reset our relationship with the night…That’s the gift of Night Magic: It may make you think differently about the night.”

https://accidentalgods.life/the-magic-of-darkness-learning-to-love-life-in-the-night-with-author-leigh-ann-henion/

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Do you love the dark? Do you yearn for sunset and the amber glow of a fire with the night growing deeper, more inspiring all around you? There's a world out there of sheer, unadulterated magic that is only revealed when we put aside the lights and the phones and the torches and step out into the nig...

12/11/2025

This week’s guest, Andrea Leiter is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but astonishing depth to the work of bridging the worlds of technology, biodiversity and international law bringing them together in service of a new way of being built from the ruins of collapse.

Andrea works at the intersection of law, digital transformation, and economic innovation. Director of Amsterdam Center for International Law, she’s deeply aware of, and involved in, Transnational Law, Digital Economies & Institutional Innovation, all things crypto – as well as being a Social Justice Entrepreneur.

I came across her when she was a guest on the Blockchain Socialist podcast – one of my must-listens – and heard that she was co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI), a venture which aimed to ‘merge nature with digital ecosystems and introduce online communities to ecological stewardship whilst developing novel funding mechanisms for vital biodiversity protection and restoration’. you’ll hear more about this in the conversation that follows, but I want to emphasise that the SNI team designed and implemented the Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP), which demonstrated how blockchain infrastructure can serve biodiversity goals.

Currently, Andrea leads a Dutch Research Council-funded VENI project on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and their potential to reshape economic governance from below. She also serves as Acting Director of Research at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, where she guides strategic research planning and foster interdisciplinary collaboration.

One of Andrea’s superpowers is the ability to take complex concepts and make them comprehensible to ordinary people: blockchain, cryptocurrency, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the potential for technology to be used to heal as well as the many ways it is already being used to harm, so we spent the first half of our conversation exploring the baselines of where we are and what’s happening in the world. I refer to Andrea’s blog post, ‘Who gets to bet on the future?’ which first appeared on her Transformative Private Law Blog and is linked in the show notes. She mentioned several books and I’ve linked those in the show notes too, because they were new to me, and completely mind blowing. I found ExoCapitalism as a pdf where you decide what you pay – this is the value of small presses that actually get what their books are discussing – and Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression is open source – you can read it and engage in the process with others in the Economic Space Agency.

https://accidentalgods.life/starting-in-the-ruins-of-lions-and-games-with-crypto-advocate-and-changemaker-andrea-leiter/

This week's guest, Andrea Leiter is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but astonishing depth to the work of bridging the worlds of technology, biodiversity and international law bringing them together in service of a new way of being built from the ruins of collapse.

06/11/2025

Indeed.

05/11/2025

What is the true vow of your life, the one it would kill you to break? This phrase comes from the poem ‘All The True Vows’ by David Whyte, but there can be no better introduction to this week’s guest, who knows how to help people – ordinary, every-day people from our culture – build true, heart-felt connections with the web of life such that we come to know what we are here for, our unique gift to the world, the promise is would kill us to break, what it feels like to be so heart-explodingly in love with the sheer wonder of being alive that we can step out of the world we thought we knew, into the world as it really is, alive with connection to all parts of ourselves, each other and the whole of the more than human world.

Bill Plotkin is one of those who has found what he’s here for. He’s been a Thrutopian activist and cultural catalyst since long before those were buzzwords in our firmament. Over the years, he has been a research psychologist, professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide. Now, I would say he is a visionary, a mystic and an elder. More importantly, he’s a map-maker, a way-breaker, a trail-leader of the routes we will have to take to walk out of this moment of dissolution, into a world of remembering and creating anew.
Back in the early 80s, Bill founded the Animas Valley Institute, whose central purpose is to assist people through the initiatory process that leads to visionary leadership and cultural artistry. Its primary work is with those ready to undergo the joys and challenges of the underworld descent to soul, which flowers into a life of meaningful service and abundant fulfilment — or a deepening for those already on the journey.

Bill offers maps and models for his work in depth and detail. He has four books to date and I encourage you to read them all in order from Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, through Nature and the Human Soul, to Wild Mind and finally, The Journey of Soul Initiation. He writes a blog, Soulcraft Musings, which I also recommend, because we could have explored the basics of Bill’s models of human evolution and what it means for people of our culture, who have been subject to what he calls ‘systemic human developmental oppression’ for many hundreds of generations… and in the long conversation that follows, we did explore the basics of this, but in the days before recording, Bill shared the early draft of a paper called ‘A Map to the Next World’ and this lit all kinds of fires in my heart and mind and soul—because Bill’s capacity to write lucidly the things this podcast is all about is beautiful and sharp and perfect.

https://accidentalgods.life/walking-the-wild-mythic-edge-of-being-with-visionary-elder-and-soul-initiator-bill-plotkin/

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What is the true vow of your life, the one it would kill you to break? This phrase comes from the poem 'All The True Vows' by David Whyte, but there can be no better introduction to this week's guest, who knows how to help people - ordinary, every-day people from our culture - build true, heart-felt...

29/10/2025

What is an eco-civilisation? What are its values and what are the frames within which it works? Why do we need it in the first place and what will the Establishment do to maintain business as usual? Most importantly, what can each of us do to live an eco-civilisation into being?

This week’s guest, Jeremy Lent explores these ideas in depth in his forthcoming book, Ecocivlization: Making a World that Works, which is due out in May of 2026.

We’ve talked to Jeremy twice before, first in episode #38 about his award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and then in #102 about his second book in the series, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe.
Ecocivlisation is the third book in this trifecta and I was privileged to read the pre-proof draft, so I can tell you that it’s one of the few genuinely Thrutopian books I’ve read. It that lays out the iniquities and downright horror of the imperial/colonial system of the Trauma culture – termed Wendigo Inc. in the book – and then brings Jeremy’s trademark meticulous research and fluent prose to bear on the ways through to a system in which we all live and thrive and work towards the wellbeing of the entire ecosphere.
Given that there is such detail, I wanted to talk to Jeremy now, so that we could explore some of the foundations – the nature of the existing narratives of Business as Usual, of TINA: There is No Alternative – and why this is so ubiquitous in spite of being self-evidently untrue. Then I wanted to look at the broader frame of the Theory of Change proposed here so that next spring we can go into more detail ahead of the book’s publication.
For those of you who don’t yet know him, Jeremy was born in London, has a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. Now, he is an author, speaker and founder of the Deep Transformation Network, a global community exploring pathways to an ecological civilization. He is also founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth.

https://accidentalgods.life/eco-civilisation-the-future-we-deserve-and-how-we-will-get-there-with-jeremy-lent/

What is an eco-civilisation? What are its values and what are the frames within which it works? Why do we need it in the first place and what will the Establishment do to maintain business as usual? Most importantly, what can each of us do to live an eco-civilisation into being?

22/10/2025

There are so many great people putting their shoulder to the endeavour of dreaming into and creating a future that is generative, connected and in the flow of life’s longing. It feels important to remember that among the dessolation of our daily news feeds.

Manda Scott has been chipping away at this work for years, through her brilliant books, teaching and her Accidental Gods podcast. She gathers some of the greatest thinkers, activists, writers, artists and teachers of our time to share their thoughts on the podcast. It’s been fuelling my travels recently and I thought you might value it too.

Manda will be joining me as a guest tutor on Feather, Fire, Stone and Bone again this year, and also offers her own brilliant programmes.

Enjoy!

Nature Podcast · Updated weekly · Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back. We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance…

22/10/2025

How do we heal ourselves from the ‘lost-ness’ that afflicts our culture? How do we move on from the strange—and wholly untrue— belief our culture holds that we are separate from the natural world, that our cycles of exploitation, extraction, destruction, pollution are the way the world is, that this is the natural order and there’s nothing we can do to change it, individually or collectively?

Knowing that our sense of separation is an illusion is one thing, but genuinely feeling it deep in the marrow of our bones is quite another. Which is where this week’s guest comes in.

Kelly Wendorf is an executive and personal coach, spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur. As you’ll hear, her book ‘Flying Lead Change: 56 million years of Wisdom for living and leading’ offers a unique answer to these questions. Kelly is founder and CEO of EQUUS whose central question is, ‘What are you Yearning for?’ and whose central offer is: ‘We create conditions for your transformation’.
As the name suggests, she and her team do this, by engaging the generous spirits of a herd of horses as mirrors to the people who come to EQUUS for coaching – and, although this is often not why they think they’re coming, for healing. Kelly’s childhood experience with a whole-hearted man in Ethiopia, and later, with one of the First Nations people in Australia, taught her a way of listening, of being fully present, fully in her heart mind and body mind, in the present moment, and this is what she helps others to find with the help of the horses who often just don’t engage if we’re not congruent, not present, not fully embodied.

She has been called a ‘corporate shaman’ and a ‘CEO whisperer’, but as we crash through the boundaries of the Great Transformation, it seems to me that Kelly’s work opens doors for us all. We may not have access to a herd of free-living, re-wilding horses, but even reading about the experiences of her clients can melt some of the concrete around our hearts. And with this, we can always step outside, stand still, let the living world teach us.

This was a deeply moving read, and a fascinating conversation, at the end of which, Kelly offered our community coupons for two of her forthcoming online courses – the first ‘Breaking the Loop, Transforming Habits that hold you back’ is on Saturday 1st November at 10-11:30 am Mountain Time. The second is nearly a year from now: How to lead a Transformative Life’ takes place over two Saturdays, for two hours each at 10am – 12 noon Mountain Time and Kelly is offering it to our Accidental Gods community for free. So please do go and check out the show notes for the links and the coupon codes.

https://accidentalgods.life/rewilding-our-horses-rewilding-our-souls-with-kelly-wendorf-of-equus/

How do we heal ourselves from the 'lost-ness' that afflicts our culture? How do we move on from the strange—and wholly untrue— belief our culture holds that we are separate from the natural world, that our cycles of exploitation, extraction, destruction, pollution are the way the world is, that ...

15/10/2025

“Each of us was put on this earth at this time to personally determine the fate of humankind. Do you think you were put here for something less?”
Chief Arvol Looking Horse

We exist in a world where the ultra-rich are getting richer, powered by a system we call ‘the economy’ which is serving to funnel power and value up to an ever-shrinking core of wounded individuals who then project their trauma out on the rest of the world in a doomed attempt to feel better about being caught in a system that doesn’t promote human wellbeing.

So far, so very obvious. The system is clearly dysfunctional and the cost of failure is the 6th mass extinction. So how do we create the unity and clarity we need to coalesce around a common cause? Explicitly, how do we create a system that aims for the longterm wellbeing for all – where ‘all’ is not just all of humanity now and for generations to come in perpetuity, but all of the web of life, the human and the more than human worlds?
How, in fact, do we persuade at least a critical mass of our existing system, that we as humans exist to transform our selves and our world for the flourishing of all?
This weeks’ guest has wrestled with these questions for all her adult life. Dr Victoria Hurth is an Independent Pracademic who works at the cutting edge of theory and practice to help the world clarify its consensus on foundational issues. As you’ll hear, she firmly believes that we need to agree that our goal is the longterm wellbeing of all, and then co-create the governance system to frame the strategies that will take us there. We don’t need everyone to sign up, but we do need a critical mass of people at all levels of our organisations from government, to NGOs to industry and beyond.
She is a Fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership (CISL), Director at the Soil Association Certification Ltd and advises Planet Mark, UnaTerra Venture Capital, and formerly Creatives for Climate Collective and SACE – Italy’s national export credit agency. She advised the UN on the SDG methodology for the business reporting target 12.6.1 and has over 25 years’ global experience in business transformation and as a full time Associate Professor of Marketing and Sustainable Business.

Alongside all this, she is a practicing Stoic. How inspiring is that? She is also co-author of a new book called ‘Beyond Profit’ which is one of those potentially world-changing books that lays out in explicit detail why the old system is dead, how slight tweaks to make it ‘more sustainable’ are never – were never – going to work – and how instead we might craft a new system of governance that allows us to step forward into a world that does prioritise the longterm wellbeing of all life.

https://accidentalgods.life/building-the-roots-of-a-world-that-will-work-with-victoria-hurth-co-author-of-beyond-profit/

We exist in a world where the ultra-rich are getting richer, powered by a system we call 'the economy' which is serving to funnel power and value up to an ever-shrinking core of wounded individuals who then project their trauma out on the rest of the world in a doomed attempt to feel better about be...

08/10/2025

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 3rd edition of the life-changing book, 'Biomimcry in Architecture'.

Michael Pawlyn is an architect, the founding director of Exploration Architecture Ltd and is a ground-breaking pioneer, not just of biomimicry as the design foundation of architecture and the built environment, but of the ways we might redesign humanity.

Before setting up his own practice, Michael was central to the team that radically re-invented horticultural architecture for the Eden Project. In 2018 he jointly initiated Architects Declare a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency which has since spread to 28 countries with over 8,000 companies signed up to a declaration of action. He lectures widely and his and his TED talk has been viewed over 2 million times.

With Sarah Ichioka, he co-wrote, ‘Flourish’ and now Michael is back with the third edition of Biomimicry in Architecture, which came out on 1st September, and my goodness, this book has the capacity to change our world. If every key decision-maker on the planet had a copy of this book, and was given time to read it, our world would be a different place, because over and over again, Michael shows the ways that the natural world has designed things that are more efficient, stronger, more resilient than anything humanity has created – but that we can make things with them that the natural world has not imagined. More than anything this book re-iterates the fact that we are an integral part of the web of life and that by using our astonishing creativity, our capacity to see the design of an abalone shell, or the way a mussel roots in the seabed, or the ways palm leaves roll up in a hurricane or any of a thousand other almost-miraculous things—and then applying them in different contexts, we can create everything from surgical drills that can bend round corners to whole tidal lagoons that create and store power and offer whole new biomes. If we set the flourishing of all life as our goal, we can co-create miracles.
As will be obvious in the conversation you’re about to hear, this book lit up so many parts of my heart and my mind – there is so much we can do if we bring the best of ourselves to the table and Michael Pawlyn is one of those thought-leaders who has ranged right to the edge of what we know and what we can do and brought the results to the rest of us in a way that’s intriguing, inspiring and invigorating. Whatever else you do this year, you need to read this book. Buy it, share it, tell your friends. This is how we change the world.

https://accidentalgods.life/of-beetles-wings-and-brittlestars-using-biomimicry-to-co-create-a-flourishing-future-with-michael-pawlyn/

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.

24/09/2025

How do the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other and our place in the web of life shape our world?

How can we craft narratives that can shift the way we see and experience the world? Is this even the best leverage point to start off with or is there a deeper/wider/more effective acupuncture point we could explore as we evolve to become…what?

What are we aiming for? What—who—do we want to be and how might we reach places we can't even express - and do it in the face of a world where narratives are becoming more black-and-white, more constrained by circumstances, more held by those with power?

In a week that's seen our world become both more complex, more ugly and more beautiful, we're talking to story-crafter and narrative-explorer, Paddy Loughman.

Paddy's work explores the role of narrative and communications in navigating beyond our predicament. He is curious about how we might come together to appreciate what science and wisdom traditions reveal about entangled, relational reality, and the potential of more viable, beautiful worlds. He works independently, collaborating with activists, academics, philanthropists, creatives, community organisers and more, orienting towards just, transformational change. He has also co-initiated a number of efforts, including Inter-Narratives with Ella Saltmarshe. Earlier in his career he worked as a strategist in commercial and political communications, before jumping into climate campaigning with a wide range of organisations, from the UNFCCC to grassroots activists, and once upon a time he trained as an actor.

This is my first conversation after a life-changing time away from my desk and it was a genuinely generative, consciousness-expanding conversation. I'm in the space where reality, dream and experience are overlapping seamlessly and Paddy felt like one of those people who can stand on the edge of all our spaces and look into what we might become and how we might get there. So…with this as your baseline, please do join us in our exploration of possibility.

How do the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other and our place in the web of life shape our world? How can we craft narratives that shift the way we see and experience the world? Is this even the best leverage point to start off with or is there a deeper/wider/more eff...