The Accidental Gods podcast exists to set the conditions for emergence into a new system: to bring a critical mass of us to a place where emergence into a new system is a rewarding reality.  To get there, we bring to you some of the many astonishingly creative, compassionate, switched-on people who are working at the leading edge of change. Alan Lane is one of these people. He's the artistic director of the theatre company Slung Low, which in turn is one of the most innovative theatre companies in the UK, if not in the world. Absolutely embedded in the neighbourhood in which they work, Slung Low are committed to their core principles of 'Be Kind, Be Useful, Everyone gets to do what they want. Nobody gets to tell anyone else what they can't do.' (within obvious limits - as you'll hear). Alan is also the author of the book 'The Club on the Edge of Town' which is subtitled 'A Pandemic Memoir' but is so, so much more - this is the story of how Slung Low arose, how it came to be entered in the oldest Working Mens' Club in England (unable to change the name), and ultimately became a Food Bank during the pandemic. It's the story of standing in the rain, of keeping promises, of integrity and grit and sheer bloody-minded tenacity. Most of all, it's a story of how a small group of committed people made a huge difference to the lives of their neighbours and community. It is also the story of the culture clash that you'll hear more about in the podcast, and that led, ultimately, to Slung Low moving elsewhere in Leeds. Since then, their transformation to being part of the team that put on the utterly magical opening event of the Leeds Year of Culture 2023, where the city's most famous pop star spoke to a god - is the stuff of legend. In their new world, their core purpose is to make Awe and Wonder happen - and they are doing it with commitment, integrity, enthusiasm and raw inspiration. In this episode, Alan tells the story that led from standing in the rain in Nottinghill to creating technical magic on a stage in Leeds. We explore the power of story to change people's lives and the value of commitment to the things we believe in.  We dig deep into Alan's absolute moral imperatives and his compassion for the people around him, people he values, people he teaches to value themselves in a world that, in his words, 'teaches us we're cogs in a machine and we're scum' is heartbreakingly wonderful.  Truly, if the whole world was inspired as Leeds is being inspired, we'd be in a different place. (And the god that rose out of the river was a world first: made with drones, everyone said it was impossible. And Alan and the team made it happen anyway.  How good of a metaphor is that for what we have to do now in our emerging new system?)Bio: Alan Lane is Artistic Director of Slung Low directing most of their work over the last decade including projects with the Barbican, the RSC, The Almeida, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Liverpool Everyman, Sheffield Theatres, Singapore Arts Festival and the Lowry. Slung Low make large scale people’s theatre work on stages, trains, castles, swimming pools, fishing boats and town centres.In 2017 Slung Low headlined Hull UK City of Culture 2017 with Flood by James Phillips: a 4 Part epic performed online, live and on the BBC. Over half a million people saw a part of Flood. It won a Royal Televisual Award Yorkshire for innovation in drama.In 2019 the company took over management of the oldest working men’s club in Britain, The Holbeck in South Leeds. Initially, they ran this venue as a Pay What You Decide creative and community space, but during lockdown, they transformed into one of the only non-means-tested Food Banks in the country.  Their work there was transformative and Alan wrote the book 'The Club on the Edge of Town' out of their experiences there. Late last year, the company moved venues to a warehouse next to their favourite primary school and began to help organise the astonishing, miraculous, technologically outstanding (and magically wonderful) opening event to Leeds Year of Culture 2023, which culminated in Corrine Bailey Rae talking to a god in front of a rugby stadium filled with 10,000 artists.  Slung Low https://www.slunglow.org/Arts Together Leeds https://artstogetherleeds.co.uk/partner/slung-low/Leeds 2023 https://leeds2023.co.uk/Buy 'The Club on the Edge of Town' https://salamanderstreet.com/product/the-club-on-the-edge-of-town-paperback/The Club on the Edge of Town audio version https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Club-on-the-Edge-of-Town-Audiobook/B0B8TKMXWQ

It is our mission on this podcast - and the wider membership community from which it arose -  to open doors and break down barriers, to bring forward the ideas and the actions of, and give voice to, the absolutely amazingly creative people who get that business is not usual, that the reality we have created for ourselves is misguided at best - and dangerously toxic at worst - and are doing their best to bring about change in a timescale that matters. This week, we spoke with Pooran Desai, whose scope and scale and grasp of the nature of the problem is unmatched. Pooran is a serial environmental entrepreneur and it felt like a breath of fresh air, to connect with someone who sees the bigger picture and is working to affect change at all levels. We explored topics that ranged from the building of Britain's first sustainable community at BedZED in London, to the nature of the meta-crisis and why measurement of single indices is one of the key factors in the emergency. On the way, we discusses the different natures of left and right brain thinking and how they apply to databases (and why databases are so critical to the way that business and so politics works in the world), the evolution of sustainable development goals (and why those started out well but have become yet another way of greenwashing business in its endless drive for profit), the nature of reality and how Daoist meditation can give us insights into our own delusions…and ways we could save the NHS 80% of its costs. This was a  hard-hitting conversation. We didn't mince words or step around ideas. I found it exhilarating, enlightening and inspiring and hope you do to.  Bio: Pooran Desai has been a neuroscientist, a property developer, and a technology entrepreneur, but all of it has been in service to a regenerative future. In 1994, he co-founded one of the world’s first sustainability organisations, Bioregional which is responsible for setting-up enterprises in sustainable forestry, organic farming, recycling and real estate development.He assembled a wealth of environmental and sustainable talent to create the UK’s first zero-carbon urban eco-village, BedZED, which was completed in 2002. In 2004, he was awarded an OBE for services to sustainability - in the days when the word still meant something seriously worthwhile. Pooran led Bioregional’s One Planet Living®  initiative for 18 years, leading teams that created sustainability strategies in 30 countries creating a set of principles that served as inspiration for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). Pooran is author of  OnePlanet Communities: A Real-Life Guide for Sustainable Living, and is a trustee of the Design Council, supporting their 'Design for Planet' mission.In 2019, Pooran founded OnePlanet, to create a software suite that helps people, companies, policy makers shift to networked thinking - to let go of the constraints of consensus reality and the linear thinking that got us into this mess, and move towards systemic thinking that might get us out of it. LinksAlan Watts recordings https://alanwatts.org/audio/Sharon Blackie Post-Heroic Journey https://open.substack.com/pub/sharonblackie/p/the-post-heroic-journeyKnepp https://knepp.co.uk/

Accidental Gods podcast exists to open doors and break down barriers, to bring forward the ideas and the actions of and give voice to the gloriously creative people who give their lives to the idea and realisation of a regenerative future.   In this wide-ranging conversation with Solutionist and film-maker, Nicola Peel, we learned of the horrors of oil spills in the Amazon and the ways fungi could clear them if only the oil companies would let the work begin. We explored the nature of regenerative farming in the global north and - particularly - in Ecuador where agro-forestry is rebuilding soil on land that had previously been devastated by beef farming - and how the polycultures might save the cacao industry. We contemplated death and burial, whether carbon offsetting can be useful, the concept of air as a global commons and how to integrate localism into the map of a flourishing future. At the end - as often happens - I stopped recording but we carried on speaking and it seemed that Nicola was saying things that definitely should have been in the podcast. So I hit record again. Twice. We've stitched those bits on at the end for you. BioNicola Peel is a Solutionist, environmentalist, film maker and host of the Solutions podcast. For over 20 years her work has been focussed on environmental solutions. As a filmmaker, she has made documentaries to raise awareness, built rainwater systems for those drinking contaminated water and brought together scientists to use fungi to clean up oil spills. She has built buildings made of thousands of plastic bottles filled with rubbish and taught agroforestry to regenerate the soil and prevent further deforestation of the Amazon. She believes that around the world, people are waking up to the climate and ecological breakdown we are facing. For many they think it is up to governments or big business or someone else to fix the problems and feel disempowered to be a part of the change themselves. Believing, too, that every one of us have different strengths and different areas of expertise, Nicola's focus is to identify the issues we face and see what opportunities and solutions there are to address these issues. Nicola's website https://www.nicolapeel.com/Nicola's Solutions podcast https://www.patreon.com/solutionistNicola's annual newsletter https://mailchi.mp/3bb712bfc940/a-year-in-the-life-of-a-solutionist-nicolas-news-and-views-2022Film 'Blood of the Amazon'  https://youtu.be/Y5b--eRsX9oFilm 'A Solution to Pollution' https://youtu.be/KO1WjFRL_XAResearch into Taro and its impacts https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5610413/taro-market-analysis-report-industry-size

Chris Smaje is a social scientist by training and a small-scale farmer by occupation. For the past 19 years, he has co-worked a small farm in Somerset, in southwest England.  Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surry and the Dept of Anthropology at Goldsmith's College. HIs focus was aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agro-ecology, he's written for various publications, such as The Land, Dark Mountain and Permaculture Magazine, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food systems. He blogs at Small Farm Futures and has previously been a director of the Ecological Land Co-op.  His latest book, A Small Farm Future, forms the basis of this conversation - in it, he lays out Ten Crises of our times, which, put together, create the Wicked Problem of this moment in history. From there, the remaining three parts of the book explore the ways in which rural localism can offer a way for humanity to see itself through the numerous crises we currently face both in the richer and poorer countries. In the podcast, we take the book as our starting point (really, you should read it) and look less at the why, of rural localism and more at the ways it might happen and how it might work.   We delve into the ways humanity has organised in the past (with deep passing references to Graeber and Wengrow's brilliant book, The Dawn of Everything') and how we might self-organise in the future.  We look at the future of energy, at our conceptions of prosperity, the ways small farms can feed the world - and the absolute insanity of the 'precision fermentation' model of feeding eight billion people while enabling them to flourish free of corporate capture. Chris's blog https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/Chris's book https://uk.bookshop.org/books/a-small-farm-future-making-the-case-for-a-society-built-around-local-economies-self-provisioning-agricultural-diversity-and-a/9781603589024Chris's response to Monbiot's Regenesis https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/?p=1978Article on The Land updating the book https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/commons-and-households-small-farm-futureChris on Twitter https://twitter.com/csmajeGraeber and Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/9780141991061Simon Michaux https://www.simonmichaux.com/Rebecca Solnit - A Paradise Built in Hell http://www.rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/What your food Qte https://uk.bookshop.org/books/what-your-food-ate-how-to-heal-our-land-and-reclaim-our-health/9781324004530The Agricultural Dilemma https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-agricultural-dilemma-how-not-to-feed-the-world/9781032260457

Jo Chidley is one of those forces of nature, unconstrained by the way things are usually done.  As the co-founders of Beauty Kitchen, she and her partner refused venture capital, keeping their business free to become a B-Corp and to put people and planet ahead of profit.  She's dedicated to producing the best outcome for the people who work for her as well as for the people who buy her products.  And in the process of finding the best ways forward, she came across the horror of single use packaging and the devastation it's causing both in terms of the extraction and the post-use pollution.  So Jo founded 'Re' to find ways to bring 'reuse' back into the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' triad. Now, she's invited to Davos to speak about the way this could transform the vast global packaging industry. So in this week's podcast, we talked about why this is essential to transforming our world, and how it could work.  Jo has ideas that seem (and are) innovative now, but ten years from now, will be the way things are done. With enthusiasm, integrity and a great deal of humour, she offers solutions to the meta-crisis that rely on each one of us changing behaviour - and she's devoting her life to making it possible - indeed inevitable - that we do. Bio: Jo Chidley is a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of Beauty Kitchen and Re.  Founded in 2014, Beauty Kitchen is the highest scoring B Corp in the UK beauty industry and it's changing the face of the beauty industry with its aim to create the most effective, natural, and sustainable beauty products in the world. Jo went on to found Re, a company devoted to reducing the mountains of waste from our global $1tr annual single use packaging industry.  As one of the pioneers of sustainable beauty, Jo and her company have accelerated the transition to Reuse through sustainable innovation by implementing Cradle to Cradle design into Beauty Kitchen’s circular approach. Jo's been instrumental in developing the world’s first closed-loop solution for beauty packaging and powered the service behind the ground-breaking Re programme which is resuable packaging for personal care brands & retailers. Beauty Kitchen is recognised on the UK’s 50 Most Disruptive Companies list and has won numerous industry awards, including ‘Who’s Who in Natural Beauty’.Jo has won multiple industry awards, including the Natwest Everywoman Award in the Brand of the Future Category and was recognised as one of the 10 most influential people in Natural Beauty in the UK. She’s been featured in the likes of ELLE, Woman & Home magazine and BBC News and is a founding member of the Global Advisory Board for Sustainable & Natural Cosmetics. Jo was voted Nr 2 in the 2018 Who’s Who of Natural Beauty.The Beauty Kitchen https://beautykitchen.co.uk/Re https://www.rereworld.com/Jo on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/jochidley/wet uplink https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/The Ethical Consumer https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/

Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert with The Soil Association. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian’s International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association.The Meat Paradox is his first book, and goodness, it's been a world changer - since its hardback publication, Rob's become a global superstar: invited to speak to groups across the spectrum of industry and culture about the nature of our relationship with the food that we eat. We left our first conversation each feeling that we'd just begun to scrape the surface of possibility and it would be good to talk again. We had scheduled another podcast for later this year, but I saw that the book had just come out in paperback and that coincided with our having a total technological crash in this week's interview. So Rob really kindly agreed to fill in at super short notice so that we could talk more about life and death and food and the nature of the meta-crisis. There's so much to this that really cuts to the core of who we are and where we're heading as a species, and we ended - again, feeling that there was more to say. But in the meantime, we explored the nature of the food system, the concept of precision fermentation, what makes 'whole' foods and how we might feed the world without industrial agriculture.  Rob gave his one big suggestion for moving things forward - stop eating chicken. At the end, we opened another huge topic and began to explore the nature of death, and who our fear of the unknown leads us to denial of the meta-crisis and, in the end, denial of death itself. So we'll be back when Rob's next book comes out, but in the meantime, here are more thoughts on the social, political, practical and moral aspects of how we take in the building blocks of life. Radio 4 Book of the Week https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hf27Rob's website https://rob-percival.com/about/The Meat Paradox in paperback https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9780349144573Rob on Twitter https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_Previous Episode https://accidentalgods.life/the-meat-paradox/Green Alliance https://green-alliance.org.uk/GA Report  https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/shaping-uk-land-use-priorities-for-food-nature-and-climate/Bionutrient Food Association https://www.bionutrient.org/Global Governance Futures podcast that refers to how we cope (or don't) with the inevitability of our own mortality https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-governance-futures-imperfect-utopias-or-bust/id1548522280?i=1000590656384

This week's conversation ranges over an astonishingly wide range of topics from ways to facilitate interspecies communication through play and ways to play 3-person pacifist chess (and thereby change the world), to the nature of democracy and how the use of quadratic voting on the blockchain to inspire artistic endeavours in north London might be expanded nationally and internationally on the scale of global governance to shift the cultural dominance away from capital hegemony to a more fluid, genuinely inclusive democracy. All this in conversation with Ruth Catlow.  Ruth is co-founder (with Marc Garrett) and co-director (with Charlotte Frost) of Furtherfield, a project based in Finsbury Park in London which organises for inclusivity and equity in art and technology and advocates for their use in imagining and building real social change and positive environmental impact.Background and Bio: Furtherfield's mission is to open up the tools and debates of the exclusionary realms of art and technology for collective action for collective good. Ruth and her colleagues invest time and energy in decentralised and distributed p2p practices, fostering new creative collaborations between artists and communities, as well as challenging debates about the role of art and technology in society.With this, Ruth's work advances critical discussions of emergent technologies and their implications and she has, for example, led the way in terms of understanding what blockchain technologies mean for the arts and beyond. She directs the Furtherfield decentralised arts lab, DECAL and is also key to the development of live action role play (LARP) games for research, partnering with researchers to craft imagined/futuristic scenarios in which a group of players explore a complex socio-digital issue. Since late 2020, Ruth has been immersed in the massive Interspecies Treaty LARP as  part of her participation in the EU Horizon 2020 funded CreaTures project. All participants advance more-than-human justice by playing the game as other species, representing them in Assemblies to discuss and plan an Interspecies Festival that will celebrate the signing of 'an Interspecies Treaty of Cooperation (known as 'The Treaty of Finsbury Park') in 2025. Ruth is also one of the organisers of the 'Radical Friends' conference in 2022 and co-author/editor of the book that arose from it called 'Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts' and co--PI of the Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab.Furtherfield https://www.furtherfield.orgDECAL https://decal.furtherfield.org/ Ruth's website  https://ruthcatlow.net/CultureStake app https://www.furtherfield.org/culturestake/More on the XDai blockchain https://medium.com/mycrypto/what-is-the-xdai-chain-and-why-should-i-try-it-40f539732fb4Radical Friends https://torquetorque.net/publications/radical-friends/Serpentine Galleries Blockchain Lab. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/blockchain-lab/The Treaty of Finsbury Park  https://www.furtherfield.org/the-treaty-of-finsbury-park-2025/Cade Diehm - paper co-written with Ruth https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/finsbury-park-2025 Finsbury Park https://www.parksandgardens.org/places/finsbury-parkPBES Report https://ipbes.net/global-assessment

This week's guest is a friend of the podcast, Dr Gail Bradbrook.  Best known for her role in co-founding Extinction Rebellion, Gail is one of our nation's (and our world's) deepest thinkers on radical change: what will it take to shift the juggernaut of predatory capitalism from the orgy of extraction, consumption and destruction that has brought us to the edge of crisis, and instead turn it towards a celebration of life in all its forms? Gail is also a leading beacon of practical activism - how can we bring the collective conversation to bear on the existential crises of our time? In our conversation, Gail honours the teachers that have helped her to find balance and insight, and to find practical, clear-eyed hope amidst all the potential for despair.  We go on to explore her work in BCAN (see below) and, particularly, to explore the nature of horizontal organising.  In a world where half the (western) population is wedded to the old hierarchical, patriarchal structures of top-down dominance, what happens in the other half when we experiment with other, less culturally familiar ways of being? Extinction Rebellion was one of the biggest, and most public expressions of horizontal organising in the modern contemporary world. A great deal of theory was put into practice and the results were often visible in newspaper headlines.  Recorded a mere handful of days after the 'We Quit" press release from XR, we look at some of the lessons learned, and how we might do things differently next time. BIO:Dr Gail Bradbrook has been researching, planning, and training for mass civil disobedience since 2010 and is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR). Since its launch in October 2018, XR has spread around the world so that now, there are more than 1150 XR groups in 75 countries. Gail has trained in molecular biophysics, and her talk on the science of the ecological crisis, the psychology of active participation, and the need for civil disobedience has gone viral and been inspired many to join XR. She is from Yorkshire, the mother of two boys, the daughter of a coal miner, and was named by GQ as one of the top 50 influencers in the UK, and honoured in the 2020 Women’s Hour Power list for her part in instigating a rebellion against the British Government.More recently, she is one of the cofounders of the Be the Change Affinity Network of XR activists exploring ways to shift our cultural rigidity into something regenerative and distributive by design.  Gail is a genuine visionary leader - one of one of the deepest, most enlightened thinkers we know; living at the leading edge of change and exploring radical answers to the questions of our time. She's also deeply spiritual and emotionally thoughtful, and it's always an enormous joy to explore with her the big questions of our time: what are we here for and how can we shift the entire nature of our culture in practical ways? TED Talk - My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor https://youtu.be/UyyjU8fzEYUGail's Telegram link: https://t.me/+i4zNgXH_oDc4YjM0Amanita Dreamer https://www.amanitadreamer.net/Seed Sistas - https://seedsistas.co.uk/3 Horizons model - https://www.boardofinnovation.com/blog/what-is-the-3-horizons-model-how-can-you-use-it/Netflix How To Change Your Mind - https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80229847 

Eva is a climate activist, process designer and facilitator. She has co-convened the Transformative Conflict for Transition Network summit, supports sociocratic system development, decision-making and facilitation in many contexts including Extinction Rebellion Scotland.Justin is an anthropologist and activist from Edinburgh. He is a member of Extinction Rebellion Scotland. Since 2009, has worked with the Forest Peoples Programme, supporting communities to secure their community lands and determine their own futures.Long term friends of the podcast, Eva and Justin live and work right at the leading edge of change, exploring and testing ways to help people move into the flowing, more vulnerable, less triggered spaces that allow for genuine inner change, and therefore change in our outer relationships.  The spaces this work creates are essential to the move to a future where people and planet flourish. In this first Accidental Gods podcast of 2023, we explore the things that make our hearts sing, and the ways Eva and Justin's work is transforming communities around the world, with a particular emphasis on their homeland of Scotland, where Independence feels a breath away. Politics, Trauma and Empathy paper https://www.globalassembly.net/news/politicstraumaempathyRewording https://www.globalassembly.net/reworlding-2022-programmeRewording on Medium https://medium.com/experiental-space-research-lab/reworlding-the-art-of-living-systems-d6fef0deeb11Previously on Accidental Gods - Episode #44 https://accidentalgods.life/re-democratising-democracy/Previously on Accidental Gods - Episode #73 https://accidentalgods.life/reworlding-co-creating-a-politics-of-wholeness/The film on the Ogiek of Mount Elgon that Justin mentioned is hereDeep Decolonisation Resource is here

As we move from our third to our fourth year, it seemed like a good time to look back on the origins of the whole Accidental Gods project - why and how we started and what our original aims were - and then to look forward to the coming year and what we're focussing on both on the podcast and within the membership.   So much has changed even in such a short time. We're all more aware than ever of the tipping points around us, but also more aware of what we can do, of the many, many roles that are here to be filled by people who have time and energy and commitment to give to transforming the future.  So this is a paean to possibility and a thank you to all who have been part of the journey this far.  Upstream podcast with Della Duncan https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/upstream/id1082594532The Hive podcast with Nathalie Nahai https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-hive-podcast/id1387510537Richard Bartlett's blog: http://richdecibels.com/Simon MIchaux https://www.simonmichaux.com/Accidental Gods Gatherings https://accidentalgods.life/gatherings-2022/Accidental Gods Membership: https://accidentalgods.life/