Coconut Thinking

In this episode, I speak with Paula DiPerna. Paula is a strategic advisor and consultant, who draws upon a diverse leadership background, having served as the president of the Chicago Climate Exchange International, which pioneered global emissions trading, as well as the president of the Joyce Foundation, a leading US private philanthropy. Prior to these positions, she was vice president of the Cousteau Society for nearly 20 years, and worked with governmental organizations across the globe to establish sustainable business and governmental policies. As a noted public policy analyst, she served as a consultant to the World Bank, LEAD International, The Urban Justice Center, and is currently a Special Advisor to the Carbon Disclosure Project. She is also a widely published author of non-fiction books, a novel and is currently working on a memoir addressed to emerging leaders. We discuss: 🥥 How responding to ecological breakdown will require being able to live with and through ambiguity;🥥 How we can work within existing financial systems to incentivize the non-exploitation of Nature;🥥 How we can work with value to understand the interconnectedness of all living things. Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com for articles, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Alexandra Pimor. Alexandra leads on the Nature On The Board project, a pioneering endeavour to expand the scope of Rights of Nature across legal systems, corporate boards, and any decision-making body to foster a global Nature/Earth-based governance praxis. A published scholar with over 20 years’ experience in pedagogical engineering, Ally started her career as a senior law lecturer in the UK. We discuss:🥥 Nature governance as a way to bring back nature consciousness in our decision-making, our ways of doing things, our lives as a collective;🥥 How understanding that we are relational, that we are Nature, would lead us to make different decisions and connect in ways that lead to thriving;🥥 How Nature governance is the cultivation of happiness.Check out our website: www.coconut-thinking.com. You'll find articles and resources there about Emergent LearningThis work is inspired by Nature on the Board, Faith in Nature and Lawyers For Nature.Nature on the School Board: www.natureontheschoolboard.com where we propose to put a proxy for Nature on schools' boards or senior leadership teams.

How can neurodiversity (and ADHD in particular) allow us to cultivate and become attuned to the potential for creativity, courage, connection, and compassion—the ecological 4Cs?In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Lennart Hennig. This is part II of our conversation a few weeks ago. Lennart is a founder, teacher, and facilitator. He explores the edges of individual and collective development through the angles of consciousness, embodiment, safety, trauma, metaphysics, philosophy, and deep ecology, using an integral framework of the whole, undivided cosmos. This is a conversation where ADHD is an entry point into understanding our individual and collective selves in different ways. We discuss:🥥 How neurodiversity contributes to the whole society like biodiversity contributes to the whole ecology;🥥 How our civilization is showing the signs that are typically associated with ADHD, through its inability to grapple with and respond to ecological issues;🥥 How cultivating effort is a way to embrace life, to affirm it in all its possibilities.Check us out on www.coconut-thinking.comLennart's website is www.theinstitute.one and his course can be found on www.theinstitute.one/attention

How might we create regenerative learning experiences through healthy soils?Founder of Fearless Farmers, Amy Milliron creates online and onsite regenerative farming curricula for kids of all ages. Amy advocates for regenerative agriculture as a path to reverse climate change, heal the soil and improve health. She also works to promote regenerative food sources of all kinds, from the rights of breastfeeding mothers to feed in public to teaching people to grow their own foods, to creating curriculum that opens up communities around teh world to different ways of connecting with the earth and each other. We discuss:🥥 The need to be connected to the land and know where your food comes from;🥥 Opening up spaces so that we can learn from each other, not impose our views—this is regenerative;🥥 Creating networks of that work on shared principles, but adapted to their local contexts. You can find Fearless Farmers here: https://www.fearlessfarmers.org/Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com for articles, episodes, resources, and lots of other things.

How might we embrace complexity to open more to life?In this episode, I speak with Michelle Holliday. Michelle is a consultant, facilitator, author and researcher. Her work centers around “thrivability” — a set of perspectives and practices based on a view of organizations and communities as dynamic, self-organizing living systems. Her research, perspectives and practical experience are brought together in the highly acclaimed book, The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, as well as in a popular TEDx talk and an online slideshow with close to 65,000 views. We discuss:🥥 How a life-aligned worldview requires us to be ok to engage with complexity;🥥 How wherever there is life, it is worthy of our reverence, and we can design with life, as life, opening us up to a differnet consciousness;🥥 Culivating a learning ecology, where everyone is changed through the process entangling living and non-living things.Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you will find articles, resources, links, and more.

What would it take for us to embrace decay as means to creating new life?In this episode of the Coconut Thinking podcast, I speak with Lennart Hennig. Lennart is a founder, teacher, and facilitator. He explores the edges of individual and collective development through the angles of consciousness, embodiment, safety, trauma, metaphysics, philosophy, and deep ecology, using an integral framework of the whole, undivided cosmos. This is a conversation about regeneration, about appreciating that there can be no white without black, no life without death, no change without composting. We discuss:🥥 How spaces are opening up in our collective consciousness to bring forth Western Science and ancient wisdoms;🥥 How life and death are the same and lead to composting for new living systems to emerge;🥥 That success might just be obsolescence because that would signify that something/one has reached their purpose and can become something/one else.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.com where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

What would it take to bring about a world that weaves modernity and ancient wisdoms?In this episode, I speak with Joe Brewer. Joe is the co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. He has a background in physics, math, philosophy, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. Joe was the co-founder and research director of Culture2 Inc., a culture design lab for social good. He is a former fellow of the Rockridge Institute, a think tank founded by George Lakoff. We discuss:🥥 The indigenous notion of Third World, which brings together the best of Western science and indigenous knowledge;🥥 How everything happens somewhere, and that somewhere is connected to somewhere else, creating a fabric of time and space and opening up spaces for bringing about the futures we imagine;🥥 How composting the current dominant system allows for new life and new ways of being to emerge and grow.Check out our website www.coconut-thinking.com, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, presenations, as well as resources.

What would it take for us to respond to the planetary Crisis with our collective imagination(s)?This is a special episode: a conversation between three thinker-doers around this question. Their complementary backgrounds augment the importance of the message.Penny Hay is an artist and educator, Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning, Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at Bath Spa University and Director of Research for House of Imagination, an arts research charity.Andy Middleton brings over 30 years of experience as Managing Director and Chief Exploration Officer at the TYF Group, which creates experiences that help people connect deeply to nature and purpose to trigger transformative shifts in life and at work. He is also a Partner at NOW Partners and one of the most versatile people I know.Joanna Choukeir is the Director of Design and Innovation at the RSA. She is a life-centric designer with serveal hats: practitioner, entrepreneur, thought leader, and educator. Previously, Joanna was Health Director at FutureGov and had spent 10 years leading Uscreates – a service design agency for health and wellbeing.We discuss:🥥 The connectedness and interdependence of all things, including the crises we face as a civilization and alongside all other life forms—there is but one Crisis;🥥 The importance of creating safe spaces for imagination if we are to respond to the Crisis as connected to ourselves and all life;🥥 How values underpin learning rather than curriculum and thus should be cared for ecologically.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with D'Arcy Lunn and Kenny Peavy.D'Arcy is the Group Head of Sustainability & Global Citizenship at Education in Motion. For the past 20 years, D'Arcy has experienced more than 90 countries, given over 1300 presentations to 120,000+ people, and worked with leading development, environmental, social justice, and global education organizations and people. His self-initiated concept and organization, Teaspoons of Change, focuses on the personal choices, decisions, and actions that have a positive impact on people and the planet.Kenny holds several roles at Green School Bali. He's been teaching in the region for 20+ years as a science teacher and expedition leader in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Kenny speaks, writes, and supports teachers to create experiences that take learners outside in order to love nature and feel connected with nature. He's ridden a bamboo bicycle from Thailand to Bali to raise awareness for sustainability and paddled a kayak while circumnavigating Phuket, Thailand to spotlight marine conservation issues in Southeast Asia.We discuss:🥥 How can we cultivate our connections with nature by finding opportunities to go outside;🥥 How the reality is that we are nature and the rest is make-believe;🥥 Exploring how we are global citizens without getting caught up in the "hairy spider's" web of what that means.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.

In this episode, I speak with Michelle Blanchet. Michelle is the founder of the Educators’ Lab, which supports teacher-driven solutions to educational challenges. Michelle is the co-author of The Startup Teacher Playbook, and  Preventing Polarization: 50 Strategies for Teaching Kids About Empathy, Politics, and Civic Responsibility. She has worked with organizations like PBS Education, the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and Ashoka. We discuss: 🥥 Social entrepreneurship as purpose that changes our understanding of process and outcome;🥥 The important of students learning the skills they will need, which depend on the students, but also on the coherence with the world we want to bring about;🥥 How critical it is to engage in civic society in order to shape policy, the most effective means of change on a larger scale.Check out the Coconut Thinking website https://coconut-thinking.design, where you'll find our articles, podcasts, conference presentations, resources, and more.