Stephan Harding, a pioneering scientist focused on earth sciences, deep ecology, and the theory of Gaia, discusses the origins of Gaia theory and its challenges to the conventional view of Earth. He explores the relationship between alchemy and science, the connection with the psyche of nature through Jungian psychology, and the importance of reconnecting science with spirituality. The need for a re-conceptualization of science and the role of art in climate communication are also addressed. Collaboration, holistic science, and uncovering new stories and images are key themes throughout the podcast.

It takes a lot of hard work to get small-scale commons started, especially with complications of managing money, budgets, and tax and legal compliance. These challenges have gotten easier since the rise of Open Collective, a nonprofit platform that acts a kind of commons-enabling infrastructure. In this episode, Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Officer of Open Collective, explains the challenge of "hacking organizational structures with our values," the benefits of distributed leadership, and the confidence that comes from managing risk together.

Open access is a term used to describe academic books, journals, and other research that can be freely copied and shared rather than tightly controlled by large commercial publishers as expensive, proprietary product. Over the past 20 years, this vision has fallen far short of its original ambitions, however, as large publishers have developed new regimes to control the circulation of scientific and scholarly knowledge and charge dearly for it. Since 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective has been championing experimental, noncommercial and commons-based alternatives. In this interview, Sam Moore, an organizer of the Collective, takes stock of the state of open access publishing.

Ruth Catlow is an artist, curator, and co-leader of Furtherfield, a London-based arts collective that has been convening playful, participatory art projects for more than 25 years. The group's artistic experiments -- deeply rooted in open source technologies and philosophies -- use digital platforms and its green space and gallery in Finsbury Park to invite people to imagine new shared futures. The aim, in Furtherfield's words, is to "disrupt and democratize existing hegemonies" and "re-landscape the terrain."

British activist Sara Arnold and Dutch fashion scholar/activist Sandra Niessen explain their vision for "a radical defashion future" driven by degrowth, decolonization, and commoning. As two leaders of Fashion Act Now, they are part of a growing network of dissident fashionistas trying to make the global clothing industry more ecologically responsible, relocalized, and responsive to climate change. They argue that the fashion industry needs a serious economic and cultural makeover to curb its colossal waste and energy use, and allow a rich pluriverse of clothing cultures to flourish.

Why is there so much hunger in the world today when the global food system produces, and wastes, amazing quantities of food? Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist and PhD Research Fellow at the Universite catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, points to our treatment of food as commodities, as traded in heavily subsidized markets dominated by large corporations. In this podcast, Vivero explains how growing and distributing food through commons (instead of globally consolidated, extractivist markets) can help make food far more accessible, affordable, and nutritious for everyone.

David Cayley has written a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his late friend and colleague, Ivan Illich (1926-2002), 'Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey', which reveals the ongoing relevance of Illich's searing social critiques. Illich was a radical Christian, cultural historian and itinerant scholar who soared to international fame in the 1970s with such books as 'Medical Nemesis,' 'Deschooling Society' and 'Tools for Conviviality,' which criticized professional institutions for diminishing our humanity. Illich helped lay the intellectual foundations for the world of commoning by validating the power of “vernacular domains” in which we self-organize ourselves – the informal spaces where we perform the “shadow work” of commoning and caring that the mainstream economy and political culture ignores.

When he died in 2012, David Fleming -- a polymath thinker among the earliest to address Peak Oil -- left behind an unusual book manuscript about climate change, the fragility of capitalism, and the likely nature of our post-capitalist future. Fortunately, Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist who was Fleming's associate, shepherded the manuscript to publication as 'Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It' and a companion volume, 'Surviving the Future.' In this podcast, Chamberlin reflects on Fleming's brilliant, visionary writings and his own ongoing activism and initiatives.

Can property law be used to reclaim our common wealth and transform capitalism in the process? In his new book 'Ours', Peter Barnes, a socially minded entrepreneur and commoner, proposes inventing a new class of property rights -- "universal property" -- to protect land, watersheds and the atmosphere as well as co-inherited civic infrastructures such as our financial and communications systems. The point is to stop investors from privatizing the benefits of this wealth by instead instituting trusts (and other forms) to manage it as universal property. These alternatives can both protect common assets and generate reliable revenue streams shared by everyone.

Among millions of Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, ROSCAs, or 'rotating savings and credit associations', are trusted alternatives to racialized, exclusionary systems of formal banking. The self-organized, informal pooling of money among friends and neighbors offer a way to help people amass the money to buy a used car, pay for school, and meet other household expenses. Professor Hossein of the University of Toronto at Scarborough, in Ontario, Canada, discusses the resourcefulness and resilience of the Black social economy despite attacks by many state authorities and mainstream banks.