Accidental Gods

26/08/2024

Had fun on the Midnight, on Earth podcast…. Here:

In this episode, I speak with the host of the 'Accidental Gods Podcast' and Author of the recent book 'Any Human Power'.. Manda Scott.. Manda and I first discus

21/08/2024

We’re being sold many lies in our collective failure adequately to respond to the , but one of the most egregious is the idea that cutting down old growth forest, turning it into pellets and shipping it across the world to burn in former-coal power stations is somehow contributing to ’Net Zero’ emissions. It isn’t.

Mary Stuart Booth, founder and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, spends her life in the corridors of power explaining why this is a scam. And now she’s talking to us.

We live in a burning world. As we record, there are record wildfires across the Americas, record temperatures around the world, falling oxygen levels in the oceans and however much supposedly renewable energy we produce, Jevons’ Paradox means we keep on burning fossil fuels. This is not a great combination, but even the so called renewables have more under the hood than appears on the surface. Burning wood – or grasses – for ‘Green’ Energy is both a massive accounting scam and one of the ways that the predatory industrial complex sucks in eye-watering quantities of public money – while selling us the lie that this is somehow net zero. It isn’t, but sometimes we need someone who really knows what they’re talking about to spell out the details for us and this week, our guest is one of those people.

Dr. Mary Booth is the founder and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a Massachusetts-based think tank that uses science, communications, and strategic advocacy to protect forests and our climate future. Mary worked as Senior Scientist in the Environmental Working Group in the US, working on water quality. Now, she directs the PFPI’s science and advocacy work on greenhouse gas, air pollutant, and forest impacts of biomass energy and has provided science and policy support to hundreds of activists, researchers, and policy makers across the US and EU – and now that the UK is no longer in the EU (sigh) in the UK as well.

I heard Mary on the Economics for Rebels podcast back in February and was blown away by her grasp of the essential science, and also by the sheer mendacity of the companies involved: the lies they tell, the false accounting they use and the extent to which they are destroying the biosphere to give us – or at least, those who set our policies and spend public money – an illusion of somehow being more ‘green’, more sustainable, more ethical.
I wanted to give listeners to Accidental Gods the chance to hear Mary in action, so here we are: people of the podcast, please welcome Dr Mary Booth of the Partnership for Policy Integrity.

https://accidentalgods.life/when-is-a-tree-not-a-tree-the-net-zero-wood-burning-scam-with-dr-mary-booth-of-partnership-for-policy-integrity/

We’re being sold many lies, but one of the most egregious is the idea that cutting down old growth forest, turning it into pellets and shipping it across the world to burn in former-coal power stations is somehow contributing to ’Net Zero’ emissions. It isn’t. Mary Booth, founder and directo...

14/08/2024

We know that being kind to our gut biome is crucial to our health, but what about the trillion happy helpers (or not) on our skin, in our lungs, our ears, our mouths… the things we slaughter daily with the ‘cleaning products’ we splash around our homes that not only impact our biomes directly, but leach out into our waterways, soil and the air that we breathe so we end up adding to ecosphere annihilation.
Human health and the health of our planet are intimately interwoven and while we're all getting to grips with the need to keep our gut biomes (and those of the animals who share our lives) healthy, we're woefully behind on the need to look after the rest of our biome: skin, lungs, teeth, eyes, ears..
I listened to Joe Flanagan of Ingenious Probiotics months ago on Viki French’s brilliant ‘PupTalk’ podcast and knew we needed to talk here, too.
Joe is a font of information and this was a unique opportunity to explore ideas with someone right at the cutting edge of transformation. We talked everything from canine aural surgery to human behaviour and the corruption endemic in our health systems. Above all, we got to grips with the fact that if each of us changes our behaviour – if we actively choose to stop poisoning the planet that is our home – and stop poisoning ourselves and those we care most about at the same time – we can make radical improvements in the way our system works.
https://accidentalgods.life/a-trillion-willing-helpers.../

We know that being kind to our gut biome is crucial to our health, but what about the trillion happy helpers (or not) on our skin, in our lungs, our ears, our mouths… the things we slaughter daily with the ‘cleaning products’ we splash around our homes. What if there was a better way to keep t...

13/08/2024

Had a truly lovely conversation with the amazing Natalie Nahai - it went in directions neither of us were expecting, but it feels really important

Do enjoy

‎Show In Conversation with Nathalie Nahai, Ep 138. Dispelling Wetiko: On Initiation, Interbecoming & Collective Transformation / Manda Scott - 10 Aug 2024

31/07/2024

Cities: most of us live in them and most of them are geared around the old values of the last century. But what if our core question was: what does it take to have pride in the place I live? How can we completely rethink the way cities act and are shaped to put a flourishing future at the heart of all they do? Georgia Cameron of Dark Matter Labs lays out the visions of NetZeroCitiesEU that goes way beyond just the carbon.

Of the 8 billion (ish) people on the planet, over half now live in cities. If we’re going to create a just, equitable, enduring transition to that more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, how we live, work, play and connect with each other in urban centres is going to be key. Which is why we’re talking today to Georgia Cameron, who is a policy strategist and innovator at Dark Matter Labs who is currently working with the 112 cities involved in the EU Climate Neutral and Smart Cities Mission helping navigate the legal, regulatory, economic and social barriers they face in advancing transition pathways.
For over a decade, Georgia studies, researches and works at the intersection of law, public policy, organisational strategy, and community organisation. She practised as an urban planning and environment lawyer at a top four law firm in New Zealand before completing a Masters in Regenerative Economics (with Distinction) from Schumacher College, UK in 2021, and now, as we said, she’s working with the Net Zero Cities Mission which aims to achieve ‘climate neutrality’ in those cities taking part, although, as you’ll hear, those at the heart of this are really clear that it’s not just about the carbon, and that everything we do must enhance our connections with ourselves, each other and the wider web of human and More than Human life.

This Mission is one of five within the EU – and miraculously, wonderfully, totally encouragingly, the plan is that all of these will be integrated: that each Mission will feed into the others. So this conversation roamed wide and deep through the theory and practice of this relatively new initiative, exploring the changes in political, inter-personal (and intra-personal) and regulatory thinking that will allow a complete phase-shift in how we work, play, live, commute and engage with the world. At heart, the question boils down to, What does it mean to live well in any given city – or indeed, anywhere? What does it take to feel pride in your neighbourhood? How can those in charge removed obstacles as much as putting new ideas in place? How can all of us work from the ground up to make changes – and what are the stories of change, of being and belonging, that will make this feel like a just, equitable – and desirable – transition?

https://accidentalgods.life/net-zero-cities-with-georgia-cameron-of-dark-matter-labs/

Cities: most of us live in them and most of them are geared around the old values of the last century. But what if our core question was: what does it take to have pride in the place I live? How can we completely rethink the way cities act and are shaped to put a flourishing future at the heart of a...

19/07/2024

Had a really grand conversation about life, the universe, Thrutopia and the book on the Earthbound podcast - enjoy!

Why we need Thrutopias.

10/07/2024

We’re in late stage capitalism, surrounded by interconnected systems that are crumbling under our feet. IF we’re going to birth something new, we need concrete, real-world tools: actual practical bridges that will work *now* to bridge from the old to the new. ‘Resilience Strategist’ is building these tools and shares them with us.

We know by now that the old system is crumbling, that the old paradigms are no longer fit for purpose and we need to take part in the birth of something new: this is what this podcast is for. But what are the tools and how can we begin actually to build something relevant and useful within the strictures of a system that is still trying to cling onto legitimacy and power?

Michael Haupt was a key figure in the widespread introduction of mobile telephones to South Africa ahead of the first all-race elections in 1994. He was head-hunted soon after and the next decade saw him working around the globe in 16 cities on 6 continents. He was in Thailand, taking a year out when he had a vision – an actual not-expected, not-planned, not-drug-or-meditation-mediated set of visions – that showed him how the world could look and feel like if we manage to craft a route through to what he calls the Transition Phase of our evolution.

This moment was pivotal in his life. Now he’s a ‘Resilience Strategist’ bridging between those businesses that are switched on enough to know that corporate greenwashing is no longer useful, and agile enough to find what is. He’s building mycelial links to others who are working in this area and he’s thinking deeply – so deeply – about where we could go and the actual logistics of how we might get there. I’ve been holding a lot of conversations on the back of launching Any Human Power about how we could build a future that is fit for purpose, where the human and More-Than-Human worlds flourish on a thriving planet.

Thanks to Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl, we can see some of the routes through to political and technological change. Thanks to the Gaia Foundation, the Sustainable Food Trust, the million and one permaculture organisations around the world, we can see a way to mending our totally broken food and farming system. We can see ways to shift transport and power generation and city design. What we have lacked, until now, is the ideas that might bring the great behemoth that is the corporate world on board in a way that’s useful.

And this is what Michael is doing. As ever, this was a wide, deep conversation and it pushed the edge of my thinking, but it brought me to a place where I can more clearly see a few more steps forward. I hope it does the same for you.

https://accidentalgods.life/the-tools-we-need-raising-the-collaborative-commons-with-resilience-strategist-michael-haupt/

We’re in late stage capitalism, surrounded by interconnected systems that are crumbling under our feet. IF we’re going to birth something new, we need concrete, real-world tools: actual practical bridges that will work *now* to bridge from the old to the new. 'Resilience Strategist’ Michael Ha...

03/07/2024

How does our increasing destruction of the earth’s biosphere also impact our health? What diseases are we seeing in almost pandemic proportions and how much younger are the people in whom we’re seeing them? Above all, what can we do to step away from the system that’s extracting everything from us – our health, our futures and our potential to be good ancestors?

Our guest this week is Dr Jenny Goodman a medical doctor who is also an author. Her first book, ‘Staying Alive in Toxic Times: A seasonal guide to lifelong health’ is a fascinating look at how we can stay well, but it’s her second that we’re going to explore today, partly because at the time of recording, it’s just about to be launched. ‘Getting Healthy in Toxic Times: an ecological doctor’s prescription for healing your body and the planet’ is a genuinely mind-bending, mind-blowing read.

I really did think I knew this stuff, but there are large parts of this book that have blown all my fuses, not just for the health impacts – particularly on children and young people (did you know we’re seeing Alzheimer’s now in teenagers?) but for the cold-blooded way it’s been allowed to happen. Every part of this book is essential reading – not just because it shows us how we’re being poisoned by our food, our water, the air that we breath, the things around us that we can’t even see – but more importantly because it details how we can get healthy again and help restore the integrity of our soils, our water, our air…the whole world we live in.

https://accidentalgods.life/how-the-system-is-slaying-us-and-what-to-do-about-it-getting-healthy-in-toxic-times-with-dr-jenny-goodman/

How does our increasing destruction of the earth's biosphere also impact our health? What diseases are we seeing in almost pandemic proportions and how much younger are the people in whom we're seeing them? Above all, what can we do to step away from the system that's extracting everything from us -...

26/06/2024

The question of how we reshape democracy, walking the fine line between stagnation and populist rage – is the defining problem of our time – with a coherent strategy, we can shape anything. In its absence, we’re going to end up spinning in pointless circles, arguing about trivia while the world burns.

Indra Adnan is the author of The Politics of Waking up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age and is a musician, writer, curator, consultant, activist and futurist and his Substack is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the ideas in our eco-system. The reason we’re here, they’re, Co-Initiators of Alternative, which is a socio-political platform hosting : new ground to stand on for a flourishing future – and a daily blog and a forum, or perhaps a melting pot – for new ideas and new ways being. Acknowledging that the systems we are embedded in – media, economic, political – take our power away.

The Alternative and Planet A ask us how we achieve the world we know deep down is possible.

You have to experience The Alternative really to understand what it is to explore ideas at the leading edge of our emergent inter-becoming, to think through the lens of cosmo-localism, to hold new truths of who and how we are and to frame radical new political options in this age of cardboard cut-out politicians spouting ever more stale lines that were out of date in the 80s and are certainly not fit for purpose in the third decade of the twenty first century.
So this conversation takes us deep into this territory.

Recorded on the day after the EU elections, as France heads to the polls and the UK’s general election descends ever further into infantile name-calling and political posturing that no longer even pretends to be the adults in the room, it was – and is – really refreshing to explore ideas of what’s possible with people whose entire lives revolve around the concepts of emergent change.

https://lnkd.in/gk5p2gWN

23/06/2024

What are we being offered by the incoming Labour Government? What’s good in their Manifesto (spoiler alert, not very much)? What’s not good? What could be improved upon and how do we go about pushing them to a place where they actually do something useful that isn’t simply a repeat of the same-old, same-old we’ve had for the past decade and a half?

Our third Special Guest is Dr Jeremy Gilbert, professor of culture and political theory at the University of East London. He’s the author of several books including Twenty First Century Socialism and Hegemony Now: How Wall Street and Big Tech won the world – and how we can win it back which was written with Alex Wiliams.

Jeremy’s been on the podcast before back in Episode #95 – and he’s always my go-to person for insight into progressive thinking within the current Labour party, and for a broader, more political scientific view of where we’re at.
As chance would have it the Labour party published their manifesto about thirty six hours before we were due to record, so I took the chance to ask Jeremy what he thought of it: what’s good, what could be better, what can we who care about people and planet do to help shift us onto a trajectory where we’re not barrelling towards the edge of the biophysical cliff. It’s not the most upbeat of conversations – because the answers to all three are ‘not a lot, but joining a union is probably one of the most useful things you can do’ – but it gave us a chance to look into a bit of the ideological, conceptual and pragmatic views of the current Labour party – and how we can shape things for a world that will work.

https://accidentalgods.life/election-special-3-labour-party-manifesto-anything-worthwhile-with-jeremy-gilbert/

What are we being offered by the incoming Labour Government? What's good in their Manifesto (spoiler alert, not very much)? What's not good? What could be improved upon and how do we go about pushing them to a place where they actually do something useful that isn't simply a repeat of the same-old,....

21/06/2024

Hey people.... I'll be live on at 8pm tonight on YouTube

If you've got time, do come along, we'd love to see you.

https://www.youtube.com/live/HeX4AopcTzw

Join us this Friday for a special live interview with renowned author Manda Scott on The Writing Community Chat Show! We will explore her fascinating life an...

19/06/2024

Today we’re blowing open a route towards energy security, reduced carbon footprint and saving money – all in the way we make, distribute and use power. If each of us could minimise our own power use, we’d be a step on the way to reducing our overall carbon footprint: more, we’d be changing the ways we think of ourselves as separate from the web of life.

This week’s guest is long time friend of the podcast Howard Johns of Onezero.

Howard is an activist, author, and serial entrepreneur in the field of energy generation – of how we power our lives, keep the lights on and keep ourselves warm. Howard is now CEO of OneZero energy, a team of energy experts and digital nerds with a shared passion for getting homes off fossil fuels. One of the biggest climate actions anyone can take is to retrofit their home with four components: Solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and insulation The combination of these makes homes more comfortable, but more importantly, it saves significant amounts of money and massively reduces the carbon footprint – weaning us off fossil fuels.

Howard himself has founded and led an award winning solar business, a pioneering community-owned energy company, and written a guide book to help others to do the same. He’s given a TED Talk, occupied a coal mine and campaigned on energy and climate issues from inside parliament and atop treehouses, and until recently ran a large fleet of solar projects across the EU and UK.

https://lnkd.in/e7WdZ842

29/05/2024

This week’s guest, Jessica Bockler, PhD is one of those people who sparks every fibre of my being – and I hope in yours, too.

Jessica is an applied theatre practitioner and transpersonal psychologist who co-founded the Alef Trust a globally-conscious non-profit organisation offering online graduate education programmes, and open learning courses for people who want really to step into what Indy Johar so beautifully calls the emergent edge of Inter-Becoming. Jessica is integral to the Nurturing the Fields of Change Programme that brings people together from diverse walks of life to create an emerging community of practice around change – and she’s Programme Director for the Trust’s academic programmes in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology.
She teaches on a range of topics, bringing spiritual perspectives to activism and social change – so you can begin to see why I find her work so enthralling. She stands at that nexus where transpersonal psychology meets shamanic practice, where being and becoming are an art and a practice in themselves, grounded in modern science – not the reductive, Head Mind science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but twentyfirst century science where complexity and systems thinking lie at the heart of all we do, where we recognise that only by becoming fully present in the moment, can we access the whole, vast intelligence of the All That Is and find what is ours to do.
Jessica brings all this into being in social prescribing programmes, in theatre, in change facilitation, in the MSc at Liverpool John Moores University and in her daily life and she shares it in the conversation you’re about to hear – including a clip of one of her own practices, that is solid podcasting gold. If you’re interested in finding out how we can access our own inner intelligence and build with others to co-create the foundations of that more flourishing future we’d be proud to leave behind, then this is the podcast for you.

https://lnkd.in/e_SNbMkQ

22/05/2024

Once in a while, a book comes along that changes how we see the world, that re-sets something fundamental in who we are and our capacity to engage with the Web of Life.

Osprey Orielle Lake has written just such a book - The Story is in our Bones: How Worldview and Climate Justice can Remake a World in Crisis. This is a genuinely beautiful book on every level: full of living mythology, opening doors to how the bones of our language make the world around us, offering other perspective, other ways of being, living stories of where we came from and who we are and who we could be. It’s deeply honouring of Indigenous wisdom from around the world, and of the struggle of all those who suffer most and have done least to unleash the poly crisis that is so obviously impacting our world.

Osprey is an extraordinary person, founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) which was created to accelerate a global women’s movement for the protection and defense of the Earth’s diverse ecosystems and communities. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature whose goal is to ‘transform our human relationship with our planet’ and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is modelled on the Nuclear non-proliferation treaties of the last millennium, and seeks to manage a global transition to safe, renewable and affordable energy for all. In short, she works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future.

This is one of those conversations that dived deep into the heart of what really matters – how we bring ourselves to a place of genuine connection with the Web of Life – in time – and in ways that will create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We could have talked for hours, and I have no doubt we’ll come back again, but in the meantime, please enjoy the many layers of being and belonging that Osprey brings to all her work.

https://accidentalgods.life/the-story-is-in-our-bones-rewilding-ourselves-with-author-and-activist-osprey-orielle-lake/

This is a genuinely beautiful book on every level: full of living mythology, opening doors to how the bones of our language make the world around us, offering other perspective, other ways of being, living stories of where we came from and who we are and who we could be.

08/05/2024

This week’s guest is one of those at the forefront of regenerative change, both on the ground and as an educator.
Nicky Grady Scott is a Master , author of several books on composting, a YouTuber with some fascinating videos on composting, host of composting masterclasses in person and online around the world – and he’s set up community organisations to make Proper Jobs out of work that is so often done by volunteers who verge ever on the brink of burn-out.

In short, he knows a serious amount about the how, why, where and what of this key part of the regenerative cycles that link or living soil with our living food. We all eat. We all want the soil on which our food is grown to be as alive as possible. We will all do best if we eat locally.

https://accidentalgods.life/composting-our-way-out-of-the-meta-crisis-with-nicky-grady-scott/

Our guest this week knows a serious amount about the how, why, where and what of this key part of the regenerative cycles that link or living soil with our living food. We all eat. We all want the soil on which our food is grown to be as alive as possible. We will all do best if we eat locally.

05/05/2024

This is the fifth of what was once a 3-part series...

getting to the heart of how we can build the foundations for a world we'd be proud to leave to future generations.

01/05/2024

Author Stephen Markley opens the doors to The Deluge, his ground-breaking, world-changing Climate/MetaCrisis thriller- 900 pages that absolutely squarely rips into the current system in all its deficiencies – and offers a route through to a future that might work.

This week’s guest is someone who has mapped out a possible future in a depth and detail that leaves me awestruck. Stephen Markley’s first published novel Ohio, was described as a wild, angry, and devastating masterpiece of a book. Stephen King called it this generation’s Grapes of Wrath and there is no doubt that it’s a beautifully written, lyrical, devastating debut.

But it turns out Ohio was the book he wrote in the midst of writing the novel we’re going to talk about today. The Deluge is nine hundred pages of astonishing depth and breadth that takes as its topic the meta-crisis. It’s an excoriating evisceration of neoliberalism and the thousands of small acts of mendacity or cowardice or sheer self-absorption that have got us to the edge of the cliff. It’s an examination of just how close we are, and a portrayal of how utterly catastrophic will be the impacts if we step over.

It’s a deeply political book, but at heart it’s also incredibly humane, with a cast of characters that spreads across contemporary American life in ways that I have rarely, if ever, encountered. I read the book and connected with Stephen because Rupert Read, who was with us last week, called me up and said ‘This is a glorious Thrutopian novel, you have to read it.’ And there were times when I completely did not believe him. But he’s right. it’s big. It requires huge dedication. But it’s well worth the investment in terms of the doors it opens – and the many ways it shows us how we might fail before we finally succeed.

https://accidentalgods.life/writing-the-deluge-dark-nights-apocalypse-and-hope-with-author-stephen-markley/

Author Stephen Markley opens the doors to The Deluge, his ground-breaking, world-changing Climate/MetaCrisis thriller- 900 pages that absolutely squarely rips into the current system in all its deficiencies - and offers a route through to a future that might work.

24/04/2024

In this deep, thoughtful conversation, and , two of the men at the heart of the Climate Majority Project discuss their own journeys into – what they believe it to be and why it’s a core, foundational bedrock of their lives.

If you follow anything else that Faith and I do together, you’ll know that we believe heart-felt connection to the All That Is forms the bedrock of human existence and is the pathway to human flourishing, to our being good ancestors, to laying that foundation on which future generations can build a world where we are an integral part of the web of life.
The whole of the Accidental Gods membership program exists to help people find ways to make this heartfelt connection and the Dreaming Awake contemporary shamanic training takes it more deeply.

We don’t often get to unpick this in depth here on the podcast. But long term friend of the podcast, the author, philosopher and academic, Rupert Read, suggested a while ago that we might like to have a three way conversation with him and Woodford Roberts who is an integral part of the Climate Majority Project of which they are both founder members. Both have been active in Extinction Rebellion. Both have moved on to believing that change happens in other ways, and both have at the core of their actions and activism a heartfelt connection to the All That Is, however we define it.

We have regular guest appearances by people who work deeply in shamanic traditions, or other aspects of contemporary spirituality, but this is the first time we’ve had a chance to explore what we might call western ‘eco-spirituality’ in a way that is practiced distinctly from contemporary – or indigenous – shamanic practice.

Rupert is a philosopher who has studied both Quaker and Buddhist traditions, naming Joanna Macey and Thich Nhat Hahn as his teachers. Woodford Roberts – who is called Rob within the movement – comes from a more meta-cognitive stance, but still deeply embedded within western psycho-spiritual philosophy, albeit with personal experience in the shamanic realities. So this was a deep, wide ranging, thoughtful episode and I hope it helps you to navigate your own routes to thinking, feeling and being in these turbulent times. So please welcome back Rupert Read and welcome for the first time, Woodford Roberts, both of the Climate Majority Project.

https://accidentalgods.life/eco-spirituality-exploring-deep-in-the-woods-of-the-divine-with-woodford-roberts-and-rupert-read/

In this deep, thoughtful conversation, two of the men at the heart of the Climate Majority Project discuss their own journeys into eco-spirituality - what they believe it to be and why it's a core, foundational bedrock of their lives.