What happens when we realise we're trying to be something we're not?  For Roz Savage, this led to a transformation that took her from Management Consultant to the first woman to row solo across the world's 3 big oceans. Now she devotes her life to the healing of the planet.Dr Roz Savage MBE is an Ocean Rower, Author, Speaker, Lecturer, Sustainability Advocate. Her feats have been described by Sir Richard Branson as “Heroic, epic, inspiring, historic.” Best known as the first (and so far only) woman to row solo across the world’s “Big Three” oceans - the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian - Roz inspires us to think again about what is possible, and encourages us to step up fully into the potential of our highest selves.She combines her self-taught life skills with principles from neuroscience, psychology, personal development and leadership theory, to inspire people around the world. In 2010 she was named Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic. In 2012 she was a World Fellow at Yale. In 2013 she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to fundraising and the environment. In 2017 she took up a position at Yale, lecturing on Courage in Theory and Practice.She's author of four books, the most recent of which, The Ocean in a Drop, is published in November 2022.  She's a committed and vibrant speaker whose experiences have reached audiences across the world with her example of the potential for transformation that lies within all of us.  In our conversation, we delved into her experience of the oceans - what led her to throw in her job and take instead to the high seas - and then how she is using the self-knowledge she gained then, the emotional, mental and spiritual transformation that arose, to bring change to the world around us.  We explore politics and economics and theories of change that bring us to the cutting edge of what is possible. Roz's website https://www.rozsavage.com/about/Ross book  https://www.rozsavage.com/author/Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-shock-doctrine-the-rise-of-disaster-capitalism/9780141024530Elinor Ostrom https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=elinor+ostrom+governing+the+commonsRebecca Solnit http://www.rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/Three Horizons Framework for Future Thinking: https://h3uni.org/tutorial/three-horizons/Daniel Schmachtenberger 'strange attractors' https://civilizationemerging.com/about/Fediverse https://www.fediverse.to/

What if businesses existed not to price-gouge consumers and destroy the planet, but to be part of a pathway to a flourishing future?  What if the end-of-year reports were not expensive exercises in greenwash, but were actually truthful - and useful.  With B.Lorraine Smith, creator of Matereality.B. Lorraine Smith is a writer, speaker, corporate mischievist, and generally curious student of life. She changes minds (most often her own), casting a dubious eye on the line between work and play. She holds a vision of a future where all industry is a force for healing and any exceptions compost themselves into history. She has been working towards this vision with global companies since 2004, bringing together activists, executives and thought-leaders.  she shares what she finds as she goes along, telling as much truth as she can figure out how to spell. (Or, in the case of Matereality, how to respell.)Originally from Toronto, Canada, she spent a decade based in New York City and recently relocated to Montreal, all the better to explore the banks of the St. Lawrence River (whom she calls Lia).She runs ultra-long distances on urban trails, spins and knits her own original designs, and holds doggedly to the belief that our senses of connectedness and curiosity are our best assets. She is an independent consultant whose purpose is to contribute to the shift to a regenerative economy, one where society thrives within a healthy biosphere. Her areas of expertise inform each other – as a writer, consultant, ultramarathoner, textile artisan and sojourner.  She describes her approach as “spore-based,” taking a cue from nature about how to evolve and spread important ideas. Lorraine has consulted for leading change-agents and large companies, informing strategy and stakeholder dialogue to shift us to a regenerative economy. She is also a frequent speaker at conferences on sustainability and corporate innovation.She speaks fluent French and Portuguese, as well as conversational German and Spanish. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Lorraine has lived in Australia, Brazil, Germany, New Zealand and New York City. She currently calls Montréal home.In this episode, following on from our conversation with Jennifer Hinton 2 episodes ago, we delve deeply into the concepts that underpin Lorraine's idea of 'Matereality' - what it is, and how her experience as a 'sustainability consultant' to some of the world's largest companies has led her to a new way of assessing the impact a business actually has on the planet and people it is, in theory, designed to serve. What would the world be like if corporations actually decided to benefit people and planet?  Actually. Not their share holders or the vulture capitalists? With grace, humility and endless humour, Lorraine describes her journey and her conclusions of how we could re-shape the business world in time to change the trajectory towards global melt-down.  This is an episode full of ideas at the corporate level, that we can nonetheless bring into our own lives. We all live in the corporate world. Even if we don't talk at C-Suite level, we are the glue that holds everything together - and we can change the ways we interact with the corporate Masters of the Universe.  Lorraine's website https://www.blorrainesmith.com/materealityWebsite    https://www.blorrainesmith.comYouTube  Lorraine's Channel Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/BLorraineSmith/ Twitter   @BLorraineSmithInstagram blorrainesmithLinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-lorraine-smith-155a875/Medium https://blorrainesmith.medium.com/dear-mr-hagedorn-b9e5e1c7672d

What will it take to restore balance in our world? How can we repair our devastated environments, and secure future generations' survival? And what's they key to unlock the mindset shift to enable truly regenerative transformation?   With Sarah Ichioka, co-author of 'Flourish: Design Paradigms for our Planetary Emergency'.Sarah Ichioka is co-author with Michael Pawlyn of 'Flourish' a rich, inspiring book that outlines key paradigm shifts for this time of planetary emergency.  Looking deeply into the web of life, Flourish proposes a bold, imaginative - and do-able - set of regenerative principles to transform how we design, make and manage our buildings and our communities. Sarah is an urbanist, curator, writer and podcast host.  Connecting cities, culture and ecology, she has been recognised as a World Cities Summit Young Leader, and one of the Global Public Interest Design 100.  She is founding director of the Singapore-based strategic consultancy 'Desire Lines' and is co-author, with Michael Pawlyn, of the book 'Flourish' and co-host with Michael of the Flourish podcast. In this expansive, incisive conversation, Sarah expands on the five paradigms she and Michael identified that are holding us back in the old 'business as usual' frame and the ways we can shift our world-view to new ways of thinking, being - and designing our lives.  Drawing on the work of foundational thinkers like Freya Matthews, Donella Meadows, Janine Benyus and Ronan Krznaric, plus existing communities such as the Los Angeles Eco Village, Sarah shows us that the ideas and actions are already in place, we just need to build them bigger, proving that, as Willam Gibson has said, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. Flourish book: https://www.flourish-book.comFlourish podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/flourish-systems-change/id1602779076Donella Meadows Leverage Points: https://donellameadows.org/a-visual-approach-to-leverage-points/Freya Matthews: http://www.freyamathews.netJay Griffiths 'Pip Pip': http://jaygriffiths.com/books/pip-pip/Ronan Krznaric 'The Good Ancestor' :https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-good-ancestor-how-to-think-long-term-in-a-short-term-world/9780753554517Deep Time Walk App: https://www.deeptimewalk.org/kit/app/Los Angeles Eco-Village: https://laecovillage.orgBuilt Environment Declares: https://builtenvironmentdeclares.comArchitects Climate Action Network: https://www.architectscan.org

We live in a world run by profiteers: the rush to make money destroys people and planet with equal disregard. But how would the world look if all businesses existed to promote wellbeing in all its forms? How could we make this work? Re-imagining our relationship to profit with Dr Jennifer Hinton of Lund University, Sweden.Dr. Jennifer Hinton is a systems researcher and activist in the field of sustainable economy. Her work focuses on how societies relate to profit and how this relationship affects global sustainability challenges. Her relationship-to-profit theory uses systems thinking and institutional economics to explain how key aspects of business and markets drive social and ecological sustainability outcomes. She started developing this theory in the book How on Earth, which outlines a conceptual model of a not-for-profit market economy – the Not-for-Profit World model. She holds a double PhD in Economics and Sustainability Science. As an activist, she collaborates with civil society organizations, businesses, and policy makers to transform the economy so that it can work for everyone within the ecological limits of the planet. She is a researcher at Lund University and a senior research fellow at the Schumacher Institute.In this episode, we explore the natuer of the various Growth vs Degrowth/postgrowth paradigms and how the shift to not-for-profit businesses worldwide could signal a shift to the end of profiteering and a change in the focus of humanity. If we're not simply driving for more profit for shareholders and bigger bonuses for the C-suite, then what can we be for? Can businesses pivot to a world where they actually exist to further the welfare of people and planet?  What would that look like and how would it work? This is one of the keys to a flourishing future. If businesses continue to push for sales growth/profits growth at all costs, then we're finished.  If they can begin to turn the extraordinary creativity that has seen their profits soar, to something worthwhile…then anything is possible.Envisioning a not for profit future: Paper https://nonprofitquarterly.org/envisioning-a-not-for-profit-world-for-a-sustainable-future/Jennifer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-hinton-758a544/Paper: Fit for Purpose: https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/2231/Paper: A Not for Profit Economy for a Regenerative Sustainable World: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359043036_A_Not-For-Profit_Economy_for_a_Regenerative_Sustainable_WorldPaper: Five Key Dimensions of Post Growth Business: Putting the Pieces Together: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351610225_Five_Key_Dimensions_of_Post-Growth_Business_Putting_the_Pieces_TogetherPaper: Relationship to Profit A Theory of Business Markets and Profit for Social Ecological Economics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348742711_Relationship-to-Profit_A_Theory_of_Business_Markets_and_Profit_for_Social_Ecological_EconomicsGlas Cymru: https://corporate.dwrcymru.com/en/about-us/company-structure/glas-cymruBRAC: http://www.brac.netMyuma: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-myuma-group/about/Book: How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not for Profit World: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01398Jennifer on Twitter: @HintojenTim Jackson Prosperity without Growth: https://timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/pwg/Patagonia going Not For Profit: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/14/patagonias-billionaire-owner-gives-away-company-to-fight-climate-crisis-yvon-chouinard

What do we do when we feel disempowered, disconnected, alone and afraid?  We can throw ourselves more deeply into social media, drink, drugs and deeper disconnection…or we can build rituals with intention, creativity, gratitude and kindness that re-connect us with the web of life.  With Isla McLeod, ritualist and shamanic healer.Isla McLeod is a creator of ceremonies, ritual designer, transformational healer and companion at the thresholds.  She has dedicated her life to bridging the gap between humanity and the soul of the earth.  In her new book, 'Rituals for Life: A guide to creating meaningful rituals inspired by nature', she brings decades of experience in creating ritual and ceremony to the exploration of what ritual is and how it can enhance our lives, returning our sense of engagement, of being part of something greater, of 'turning up the dial on the beautiful'. In this, our second conversation on the podcast, we explore the origins of the book in Isla's own childhood in Nigeria and Japan, and the sense she had of being surrounded by rituals that held real power to connect.  From there, we explore her sense of devotion to the Earth as a living being as she encountered it in Dartmoor and the sense of ritual as a doorway to the sacred.  We delve deeply into what ritual is and how we can each create our own rituals for the thresholds that matter: what the key ingredients are and what we can play with and make our own.  And finally, we explore a ritual for each season, that touch on different aspects of our lives, different thresholds and doorways. Isla McLeod website: https://islamacleod.com/Isla on Accidental Gods podcast #111 https://accidentalgods.life/earth-alchemy/Martin Prétchel Book 'Long Life, Honey in the Heart' : https://wordery.com/long-life-honey-in-the-heart-martin-prechtel-9781556435386

We are human because for most of our evolutionary history, we have eaten meat whilst treating animals as relations and giving thanks to them. We held these the two sides of this paradox in tension. But in the past decades, we have created hells on earth in our industrialised farming and abattoirs so that eating from them is no longer remotely ethical.  How do we resolve the paradox? Is global veganism the answer or are there other ways to create a generative relationship with our humanity and the food we eat? With Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox.For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as forager-hunters, our lives intimately entwined with the lives - and then deaths - of the animals that we ate.  And then we cut that link and now we eat meat in plastic packages with cute pictures on the front to remove our awareness of the death that has arisen. And yet at our deepest levels, we know that meat is murder.  How do we resolve this paradox?Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert. 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 it's one of the best, deepest, and most genuinely engaging that I've read of the many that seek to address the huge cultural divide that surrounds our consumption of meat.   This is a book that delves into neuroscience (denial, cognitive dissonance and the lies we tell ourselves), indigenous spiritual/shamanic practice, ancient ancestral practice as depicted in cave paintings that were created over a span of 30,000 years (that's a long time for an art form) and the actual experience of what it is to stand in an abbatoir and make eye contact with a cow as she walks into the stun cage. Reading this book will change your life.  Talking to Rob on the podcast was a joy and an inspiration and we ranged across all of these subjects and more.  We didn't get to the last-line dedication to Odin, which I had thought would be the core of the podcast, but then I discovered in the pre-recording conversations that Odin is a rescue dog (which is wonderful, but not quite the backbone of a shamanic/spiritual podcast that I'd imagined). Nonetheless, this is a deeply felt, deeply touching podcast that delves deep into the very meat of our identities in the modern world. The Meat Paradox: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9781408713815Web: rob-percival.com https://rob-percival.com/Twitter: @rob_percival_ https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_IPES report: The Politics of Protein: http://ipes-food.org/pages/politicsofproteinSustainable Food Trust Report: 'Feeding Britain': https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/our-work/feeding-britain/LRB: A Million Shades of Red by Adam Mars-Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/adam-mars-jones/a-million-shades-of-red

"As elders, our job is to die, as eventually we come to live —always in service to life."  How do we do this? How can we pass into our elder years with grace and rage and depth and honouring of who we are, and emerge wiser, and more attuned to our soul's calling.  With Dr Sharon Blackie, author of Hagitude.Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist. Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of myth, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, social and environmental problems we face today. As well as writing five books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted, her writing has appeared in several international media outlets, among them the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Scotsman. Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise.In today's episode, we explore the writing of Sharon's latest book, HAGITUDE: what it is, how it came about, how the powerful old women of  the European folk tales provide a model for what it is to live in the second half of life: we explore alchemy, the magic of the land, the Cailleach, death, dying...and Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax as the ultimate role model for older age!HAGITUDE website: https://hagitude.orgSharon Blackie personal website: https://sharonblackie.netSharon's podcasts dedicated to Hagitude: https://hagitude.org/podcast/Accidental Gods Episode 90: https://accidentalgods.life/thresholds-of-being/Sunday Times Review of Hagitude: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hagitude-by-sharon-blackie-review-busting-the-menopause-myth-dl0n6bbjx

We know that tribalism is destroying us, that the need for 'us' to be right and 'them' to be wrong and to become enraged when we're challenged…is what's destroying us. But how do we change? How do we connect across our differences and hear pain without attributing blame? Exploring all this and more with Sophie Docker of The Restorative Engagement Forum and Open Edge.Sophie Docker is a highly experienced workshop leader, facilitator and mediator working in organisations, education and community. She is Level 3 trained in restorative Justice and CNVC Certified Nonviolent Communication trainer with a number of other decision-making, dialogue communication and conflict engagement tools up her sleeve. She has a degree in Politics and Economics and a Postgraduate diploma in Law but most of her learning came from meditation, and wide and wild experiments in living, being in community, collaborating and organising in economic, social and environmental justice campaigns and movements. Sophie's approach is underpinned by Nonviolent Communication and Restorative Practice, which she has been working with since 2012. She is a Restorative Justice practitioner registered with the Restorative Justice council and a Certified Trainer with the Centre for Nonviolent Communication and brings a systemic lens to these approaches using them personally and professionally to engage with presenting issues.Sophie's work focuses on transforming internal and external domination systems and experiencing ourselves as essential to life, and as part of a complex adaptive living system.  Her work is influenced by relational neuroscience, transactional analysis, meditation, multiple conflict engagement modalities and a deep exploration into the dynamics of personal and structural power, privilege, violence and its impacts. In this episode, we explore the nature of our binary tribalism, our tendency to 'other' that which we don't understand and to become triggered when challenged.  And then, with Sophie's guidance and experience, we talk of the ways we can move beyond that - how she has learned and is learning to step beyond our age-old tools of domination and power-over, into something where we allow our own pain but don't feel the need to project it out - and by being different, allow different outcomes. Links: Restorative Engagement Forum: https://restorativeengagementforum.comOpen Edge: https://www.openedge.org.ukSophie's page on the Nonviolent Communication Training portal: https://nvctraining.com/nvc-trainer/sophie-docker

Zineb Mouhyi is the co-founder of two charitable organizations, YouthxYouth & the Weaving Lab. YouthxYouth is a movement to radically reimagine the future of education with the goal of accelerating the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their education. The Weaving Lab is a global community of practice with the mission of advancing the field of weaving, understood as the practice of interconnecting ideas, people, projects, organizations, places, and ecologies to support systems change. Zineb is also a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) where she collaboratively explores the question: How might we facilitate a planetary transition toward systems that serve all life? In this episode, we explore the death of the old system and the birth of the new: how can the older generations become the allies the younger generations need? How can we explore together what it is to live in the wreckage of a dying system and how can we be part of the emergence of something new, generative and flourishing? Because Zineb is deeply involved in education systems and how they might change, we explore how current education is often designed to facilitate control, to deliver workers who follow rules and orders, not lively activists who think for themselves. From here, we delve into the ways young people can reclaim their own education and mould it to serve the world that could be woven into being, not the one that is dying; how they can shift from One Truth thinking to the understanding of many truths; from linear concepts to systemic thinking, to the ways we might create toolkits to untangle ourselves from the depradations of capitalism. We explore ways to leapfrog change, to put people, project and places at the heart of a global community of practice, to move out of the logic of separation into the logic of connection.This is a conversation grounded in living practice of the ideals Accidental Gods endeavours to promote: finding ways to be the change, so that we might birth a new future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us... but really talking to those younger than us and finding what they need and how we can help them. Links: https://www.youthxyouth.com/https://weavinglab.org/https://www.ciis.edu/https://curriculumforlife.com/

Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer met while working as rangers for the National Trust and soon realised that they shared a dream to live closer to the land.  They bought Lynbreck Croft at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park in the Highlands of Scotland in March 2016  - 150 acres of pure Scottishness - with no experience farming but a huge passion for nature and the outdoors.  Now, they raise their own animals and sell the produce, grow their own fruit and vegetables, and are as self-sufficient as they can be, alongside producing food for their local community and hosting educational tours and running courses. Hailed as Best Crofting Newcomers in 2018, they were given the Food and Farming Award by the RSPB in Nature of Scotland Awards in 2019 and were nominated for Nature Champions of the Decade as part of teh Nature of Scotland 10th anniversary. They have appeared in the series This Farming Life on BBC2 and have written the book, 'Our Wild Farming Life', linked below. Lynn and Sandra were newcomers to farming and to regenerative concepts, but in the past 6 years, as they have faced success and (some) failures and learned from both, they have seen regenerative farming becoming a far more widely held concept.  In this heart-felt episode, we begin by exploring the writing process, and how Lynn, a new writer, came to write such a fluent book.  From there, we delve deeply into the practicalities of farming in a relatively inhospitable landscape, but also explore the spiritual nature of land-connection, the ways we can give the animals with which we share our lives the fullest capacity to be all that they can be, so that we can become all that we can be: so that we can feel safe, and held in connection to the land and the tribes of the more than human world that surround us. Lynbreck Croft: https://www.lynbreckcroft.co.ukLynbreck on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lynbreckcroft/Our Wild Farming Life: book: https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/our-wild-farming-life/