Planet: Critical

But What Can I Do?That’s the title of Alastair Campbell’s latest book, a passionate treatise on how broken politics is and what to do about it. His answer? Teaching the youth to oust the old.Alastair’s message is simple: Learn how to campaign and don’t stop til you win. The original spin doctor, Alastair has decades of experience campaigning as a strategist for Tony Blair’s New Labour government, and then as a mental health campaigner. He’s a prolific writer, co-host of the UK’s top podcast, The Rest is Politics, and remains one of the UK’s most sought-after strategists.We discuss what the climate campaign needs. Alastair emphasises the importance of getting both power and people onboard, stressing the importance of a unified and simply message to inspire action. He addresses the levers and systems which need to be utilised in Power and Politics, and details the roadblocks of Populism and Polarisation. Finally, we discuss the reality of politicking vs the urgency of the crisis before I ask:Will you help?“If enough people get engaged and enough people get involved, don't underestimate the power and the agency that we all have as individuals and, obviously, working together with other people.”© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

What if the answer is all of us?We need to change the system. But if the system is made up of individuals, should we start there? On this week’s episode, Colombian changemaker Isabel Cavalier negates the binary of systems vs individuals, explaining that while cultural change starts from within, its impact and progress can be non-linear—much like climate change. Isabel effortlessly weaves political strategy with spiritual knowledge to explain how culture is the solution to the polycrisis, emphasising that we must re-embed individuals within communities to embody a politics of a better world.Isabel is a former diplomat who held advisory roles on environmental issues at the Colombian Mission to the United Nations in New York and at the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bogotá. After leaving international politics, Isabel co-founded Transforma, a prominent Bogota-based environmental think tank. She is a writer, story-teller and potter, who trained as a lawyer and in socio-cultural studies at the University of Los Andes. She has a Master of Laws from the University of Cambridge. She has worked and published in diverse fields including human rights, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change.“We are able to reinvent ourselves infinitely. That's the capacity of life on earth. Reality is fractal. What we see in a city is a reflection of its inhabitants. What we see in a community is a reflection of people who are part of that community. This means that. It's not that you need to forget the systemic vision; the cultural shift we are looking at is not a cultural shift of becoming more individualistic and autonomous. It’s the opposite. It's understanding that we are interdependent, that we live in systems and not in isolation. Nobody can survive in a bubble by themselves. Not an individual, not a local community, not a municipality, not a city, not a country. Nobody.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

How can we know so much and yet continue to live so dangerously?Gregg Henriques has been working on this problem for over 20 years. He believes the problem lies with our knowledge systems, which arise from the Enlightenment but fail to make sense of the fundamental system through which we understand the world—ourselves, our own psychology. He says we need a second enlightenment, enlightenment in order to repair our relationship with ourselves, the world, one another, and with knowledge so we can respond to the climate crisis and build a better world for all.“Science afforded us a partial understanding of the world which emerged in the enlightenment. What I'm saying is they gave us physics and chemistry and biology pretty nicely. But it broke at the level of psychology, the social sciences and, in particular, how to connect sciences to the humanities.“As a function of that breakdown we built this entire institutional structure—but we don't have the wisdom to coordinate ourselves. We're flying blind with an enormous amount of power, but not wisdom. Part of the reason we don't have wisdom is because our knowledge systems are inadequate and broken.”Gregg Henriques is a a Full Professor and a core faculty member in James Madison University's Combined-Integrated Clinical and School Psychology Doctoral Program. He’s the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology, and writes the Theory of Knowledge blog on Psychology Today. He’s a leader in the Unified Psychotherapy Movement, which attempts to  use meta-theory to achieve an effective integrative scheme for the various psychotherapy paradigms. He’s also interested in synthetic approaches to philosophy, and leads a group called the Theory of Knowledge Society, which hosted its first conference in April (2018), titled: Toward a Big Theory of Knowledge. He is currently developing a systematic evaluation of character functioning and well-being (called the Well-being Checkup), examining an approach to psychological mindfulness called "CALM MO" (which stands for developing a Curious, Accepting, Loving-compassionate, and Motivated toward valued states of being Metacognitive-Observer) and researching the college student mental health crisis and what might be done about it. Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

"Here we are at a crossroads of human history. There's never been this historical confluence of war, political instability, economic vulnerability, on top of the impending ecological apocalypse.Here we are, just marinated in death reminders. And what we know from our research is that that turns us into depressed, demoralized, proto fascists plundering the planet in our insatiable desire for dollars and dross in an alcohol-oxycodone-TikTok-twittering stupor.This is not a great position to be in."Are you afraid of dying?Sheldon Solomon has been researching death anxiety and its impact on our behaviour for decades, finding that unmitigated death awareness drives mindless consumption, political polarisation and more disordered behaviour. In short, our fear of death could be driving the climate crisis.We discuss the link between death awareness and self-awareness, how cultural beliefs are used to anesthetize death anxiety, how Western culture has the ironic effect of exacerbating that very anxiety that it's trying to solve, and why the solutions lie with imagination and creativity.Sheldon Solomon is Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College.  His studies of the effects of the uniquely human awareness of death on behaviour were featured in the award winning documentary film Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality.  He is co-author of In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror and The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

The climate fight is a fight for children’s rights.When Carter Dillard began researching family planning systems he found a fallacy in international policy: The Children’s Rights Convention, ratified by the UN, entitles children to health, education, well-being and fulfilled potential—but no country implements family planning systems around these rights. Family planning systems are based around what parents want, not what children need. Every country, in effect, is breaking the Children’s Rights Convention.Why? For economic growth.Carter’s research shows a series of policy interventions in the 20th century made family planning a private matter. This absolved states of the responsibility to invest in children and redistribute wealth, whilst guaranteeing a boom in population to feed the economic machine.“If we'd had to invest in children to give them everything they need to ensure that children are born in what, in the conditions that comply with the convention, we would not have had growth.”Carter is the author of the Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children, and the Policy Director of the Fair Start Movement, an organisation committed to raising awareness of the Children’s Rights Convention. They are currently petitioning the UN Human Rights Council claiming the UN has misinterpreted the right to have children, and have forthcoming constitutional litigation in the USA. He joins me to discuss this work, his research into the history of family planning, and the impact of climate change on children. He also provides a vision for reframing family planning reform as an active climate policy which could advocate systemic change through one simple message: that everybody deserves a fair start in life.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Which papers are telling the truth? And which are giving inches to climate skeptics?In this episode, Lucy McAllister, Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at Denison University, explains how journalism's obsession with "balance" causes bias in climate reporting. She walks us through new research which shows how climate coverage accuracy has improved since the initial findings in 2004, but that there is still a significant divide between left-leaning and right-wing papers, specifically those owned by Rupert Murdoch.She also reveals how the tactics of muddling the discourse has become more sophisticated, with column inches now being given to climate skeptics or discourses of delays. Combatting this is critical, Lucy says, pointing to solutions journalism as critical in the fight to "reframe" narratives to empower communities around the world.“We're seeing media more accurately representing the science on climate change—climate change is happening, it's caused by humans. Now we're seeing in terms of climate action that climate skeptics, deniers, or discourses of delay, are being given more space in the news article, more power than like a relevant climate expert or policymaker.“So they're getting the science right but then when they're talking about the actual solution and action moving forward, we're still seeing this problematic balance issue where one side is being favored.”Referenced Papers/Articles:* Balance as Bias: global warming and the US prestige press* Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years* Positive, global, and health or environment framing bolsters public support for climate policies* Tactical framing around the Green New Deal* Discourses of Climate Delay* Media Representations of Climate Change: A Meta-Analysis of the Research Field* The International Reporting of Climate Scepticism* The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy futureLucy McAllister is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Denison University. Prior to this position, she worked at the Technical University of Munich, Babson College, and Boston College. Lucy's interdisciplinary research focuses on the framing of overlapping global environmental injustices—climate change and hazardous waste—and the disproportionate impact on minorities, women, children, future generations, and other stigmatized groups. Broadly, her research explores how we communicate and perceive social harms and environmental injustices, and therefore informs work on inclusive, interdisciplinary solutions. She has published research in several outlets, such as Environmental Research Letters, The Lancet, The Lancet Planetary Health, Health and Human Rights, Science and Engineering Ethics, and the Sociology of Development. Lucy is a part of the research group at the Media and Climate Change Observatory, University of Colorado Boulder.  Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

You can’t go green without going small.Our fossil-fuelled economy is destabilising the planet. But a renewable economy might not be much better. Simon Michaux and his team at the Geological Survey of Finland have been researching how much minerals and materials we have on earth to build our renewable energy. They’ve found that we simply do not have enough—and mining for those materials would bears a huge environmental cost.On this episode, Simon walks us through the research, the possible outcomes from calculated energy contraction to collapse, what policymakers are doing with this information, and how the geopolitics of the US-China proxy war could make the green transition impossible for the West.“Renewables get cheaper when it's still a small system. But if it can be shown that we don't have enough minerals in the ground to make a replacement system, we will hit an asymptote in the market where all of a sudden there's now scarcity of metal supply, and the systems you want to use are no longer available on the market…“So when I say s**t's gonna get real, it’s when the mining industry now has to run in a situation where it is on non-fossil fuel systems only; the manufacturing supply chain at the moment is only conceptual and we just haven't thought it through. Fossil fuels are a hidden subsidy for everything. Take that away and you've now got a hidden penalty.“I think a lot of mining and a lot of manufacturing will just simply stop.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

When institutions fail—communities take back control.Community organising has never been more important in a world where people are increasingly isolated from one another, competing in a deliberately precarious market, dislocated from their culture, their land, their history. We experienced the power of community resilience during the pandemic, and the deep desire to help and rebuild. Humankind has a long history of doggedly overcoming the odds when facing a crisis. But we don’t have to rely on a crisis to push us over the edge—and the coming crisis will be much worse than anything we’ve ever experienced.CIVIC SQUARE in Birmingham is infrastructure for the public good, embedded in the local community’s needs, dreams and desires. Launched by the team who ran Impact Hub for five years, CIVIC SQUARE is reimagining the public space as a neighbourhood that fosters the convening of ideas in a participatory ecosystem.Immy Kaur is the co-founder of CIVIC SQUARE. She explains the history of community organising which led to this immense project, detailing how to leverage systemic change and nurture imagination. She explains the history between public good, government and industry, the importance of knowledge, and the role communities will face in the upcoming crisis.See also WeCanMake in Bristol.“You get to a stage where those systems are crumbling. You start to see a resilience, an organising, a healing, a coming together, that cannot be organised by the conglomerates, that cannot be manipulated by the mainstream media.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

How can we change an economic system that has a life of its own?10,000 years ago, homo sapiens began farming a grain surplus. This surplus led to the creation of societal and cultural hierarchies which divorced our species from our long relationship with the natural world.This week’s guest, Lisi Krall, argues that our current economic system of fossil-fuelled capitalism is an interpretation of that same system—and we must repair our relationship to the more-than-human world if we are to change the system. But it is a momentous challenge. One, she argues, we must not think culture alone can overcome.Lisi Krall is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York Cortland where she researches political economy, human ecology, and the evolution of economic systems. She's also the author of Bitter Harvest: An Inquiry into the War Between Economy and Earth.“Agriculture severs the ties of humans to the more-than-human world. We're no longer embedded in the rhythm and dynamic of the more-than-human world.“But the development of capitalism is a particular institutional and energetic interpretation of what began with agriculture. You get this expansive, dynamic, interdependent system, growth system that functions unto itself as if it isn't connected to its biophysical roots.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Our scientific model of the universe is changing.From the mechanistic, rational ideas of the 20th century, physics is now understanding that the universe itself is conscious—that we are all expressions of consciousness. Looks like those indigenous teachers were right.On this episode, Jude Currivan, cosmologist and author of The Story of Gaia, walks us through all of the evidence we have to suggest that the universe is conscious, from the latest Nobel Prize Award in physics to thousands of years of spiritual wisdom. Jude then explains the necessity of a new worldview of unity and wholeness to help mitigate the crises that we are seeing, whether these are human crises or the climate crisis, and become the next stage in this evolution of universal consciousness.“Our universe, we're now discovering, is innately intelligent, and its innate intelligence is meaningfully informed in a way through the laws of physics and through their relationships to enable it to not just exist, but to evolve from that first moment 13.8 billion years ago—from its initial simplicity to ever greater levels of complexity and diversity.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.© Rachel Donald Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe