Accidental Gods

How can we begin to shift away from the old hierarchical dominance structures of our past 2,000 years, towards something where everyone brings the best of themselves and embraces and celebrates the best in other people?It was in hunting for answers to this, that I came across this week's guest: someone who is opening doors all round the world in the creation of a regenerative, emotionally literate future.  Zahra Davidson was Co-founder of and is now the Chief Executive and Design Director at Huddlecraft, an organisation that promotes and supports peer to peer learning. With a background spanning social entrepreneurship, service design, system change, sustainability and visual communication. she describes herself now as a purpose-led designer and strategist, working for a post-growth future for our finite planet.  As you'll hear, Zahra and Huddlecraft have evolved a system of peer to peer learning that absolutely helps those involved to grow the emotional literacy - to exercise their conceptual and psychological muscles - as a way of shifting our culture's centre of gravity in a more generative direction. As part of this, she is Strategic Advisor to Money Movers (formerly called OwnIt), a movement designed to empower women to take Climate Action by moving their personal finances - and they are aiming to move £1billion by 2030. She and Huddlecraft are also involved in the newly formed Collective Imagination Practice Community - and any of you who have listened to more than a couple of podcasts will know that I'm fairly firmly of the belief that if we're going to get to that flourishing future we'd be proud to leave behind, we'll need a massed act of collective re-imagining of our trajectory. Huddlecraft https://www.huddlecraft.com/Huddlecraft 'Huddles' (peer learning groups) currently open for sign-up https://www.huddlecraft.com/huddlesHuddlecraft 101 training (learn to apply the power of peer-led approach) https://www.huddlecraft.com/101 Money Movers: women moving money for the planet https://www.wearemoneymovers.com/Collective Imagination Practice Community https://medium.com/imagination-practice/collective-imagination-practice-community-2023-24-1c1405d33662Joseph Rowntree Emerging Futures https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/emerging-futures-updateDoughnut Economics Action Lab https://doughnuteconomics.org/CIVIC SQUARE https://civicsquare.cc/Medium post on creating 'microclimates' for learning and change inside organisations https://medium.com/huddlecraft/how-can-we-create-microclimates-for-learning-and-change-inside-organisations-70aae0266d9dMedium post on creating a 'surge' of peer to peer learning over the next decade https://medium.com/huddlecraft/a-surge-of-peer-to-peer-learning-through-multiple-intertwining-movements-55a101b5db5aZahra on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zahra-davidson-84710920/Huddlecraft on Twitter https://twitter.com/HuddlecraftHuddlecraft on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/huddle.craft/

We know that the future is based on Community. What we lack are practical routes to creating communities of community on a worldwide scale - ones that can form and will be resilient enough to survive.  In this week's podcast, therefore, I'm genuinely thrilled to introduce you to one of the women who is breaking new ground in the creation of communities at scale and across wide geographic areas.  In quite specific order, Grace Rachmany is a mother, a tech industry trouble shooter, author of over a hundred White Papers, creator of Voice of Humanity, Gangly Sister and - crucial to the trajectory we're taking just now - co-creator of Priceless DAO.  If you've heard our podcast with Cory Feco back in episode #170, you'll know we invited Cory to tell us about DAOs specifically because we knew we were going to talk to Grace and wanted you to have at least a grounding in the nature of Disseminated Autonomous Organisations and the nature of the Web 3 revolution so that we could head straight into Grace's ideas and work in this podcast.  And here we are: Grace is one of those people who has thought outside the boundaries of our current system, about the nature of the current system, about economics and governance and politics and decision making and the creation of viable communities as we head out of the old paradigm into something new and different.  The result is Priceless , which is a cause-based DAO in the form of a networked nation, which says it is dedicated to creating a true alternative economy and alternative citizenship for its members.In pursuit of this, Priceless funds economic experiments that are designed to replace the current monetary system. The holders of PricelessDAO tokens can create whatever they want with the DAO, while the founders of Priceless Economics develop decentralized economic models that support life on earth.At Priceless, we are convinced that the existing financial system is crumbling and at the end of life. While many projects seek to salvage what we’ve got, Priceless is looking forward to creating a completely new system that will be a destination for those trying to escape the collapse of everything.I mean, you know everything’s collapsing, right? What can you do about it? At the very least you can give your sh*tcoins to PricelessDAO. Any funds we have will be used to research, design, prototype, and deploy economic models that respect humans and the planet.Which is just what we're here for.  Truly.   If you want to know more, or to be part of her thinking, follow the links below - and then stay tuned for the bonus podcast, in which we recorded the follow-up conversation on the nature of cryptocurrency and Ponzi schemes and the global financial crash(es). Grace's website https://gracerachmany.com/Priceless website https://pricelessdao.io/Grace's Medium posts https://rebeccarachmany.medium.com/group-currency-what-if-you-could-only-transact-as-a-community-38f4234f72cGrace on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccarachmany/recent-activity/Drea Burbank and the Savimbo project: https://www.savimbo.com/  

Following our podcast with Grace Rachmany, we stayed online and talked about the banking crash. At the time of recording, we only knew about Silicon Valley Bank - Credit Suisse hadn't gone down yet - but we talked about the nature of finance, of cryptocurrencies, of the totally unsustainable nature of the economy.  This is the kind of conversation that I often have with guests after the podcast is over. Usually it happens off-air and I wish we'd captured it. And this time, we did.  So if you're interested in the two of us riffing in a rather less structured way than the usual podcast, this is it. 

How much actual stuff do we have in the world compared to what we need to make the 'Green Revolution' happen?  This week's guest is another of those recently elevated to my pantheon of people I Must Listen To whatever they say and however they say it and I am genuinely thrilled to welcome him onto the podcast.  Dr Simon Michaux has been a physicist and geologist. His PhD is in mining engineering and he worked for years in the mining industries in Australia. In 2015, he moved to Europe and became involved in urban mining, or reverse metallurgy, which is to say the recovery of essential minerals from existing waste - what we would call the beginnings of the circular economy - and from there, he moved to Scandinavia where he now works in the Geological Survey of Finland and is a regular advisor to the Finnish parliament. From all of which you will gather that Simon is deeply embedded in the actual physicality of the world we inhabit - and, because he's also committed to creating the future we want and need, he is growing ideas of the future we could inhabit. Of all the people I've encountered as I roam the digital web for ways we can shift our relationship with the living web, Simon is the one who has his finger on the actual logistics of what's going on - he can list the reasons why most of the targets for our transition away from fossil fuels are simply logistically impossible. It's not until you hear his crunching of the numbers that you begin to realise how much arm waving is going on in the corridors of power. How much raw self-delusion is being practice by the people who we still, at some deep subconscious level, trust to keep the show on the road.  And I think we need to know this. It's hard. It's sobering. It's shocking, on many levels, but if we aren't grounded in reality then we're not going to build forward So hold onto your seats - this isn't easy, but we do need to know it. And then we need to plan our responses.  Fast. (NB - the accompanying image is of a copper mine and the pollution from it is destroying an entire water system) Simon's website: https://www.simonmichaux.com/Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdfAnswers to Hot Topics around the above report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdJH3tKjvzMWhat are the Raw Material Supply Bottlenecks to the Green Transition? The Need for a New Plan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o0xzCa2fLQInterview with Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute https://www.manhattan-institute.org/presidents-update-2021/interview-mark-mills

Our crisis, our challenge, our opportunity is complex. More than ever, it matters now that we not get caught in separate silos where we focus just on atmospheric carbon, or just on plastic pollution, or just on our cultural addiction to fossil fuels. We need responses that cover all of these fields, new stories that let us move into a future we can barely imagine. So, that's what this podcast is for: to give a platform to people whose perspectives are new or different or challenging or inspiring in ways that will help us all to weave new stories of how we could do things differently -  and this week, we're talking to Yuli Summe of Bellacouche, whose work has taken her from weaving to felt making to the creation of burial shrouds. Yuli is a maker, someone deeply grounded in our connection to the ancestry of the land and the ways we have sustained ourselves from it. She's been working with wool since childhood and is embedded in the rich lore of shepherd, farm and land, of the fullers and spinners and weavers that were so much a core of our history - and will be again as we move to a more localised, simpler economy and way of living. This conversation moved from the courage of one man in the second world war, to the courage of his daughter in laying to rest her fear of death, through fields and high tors and the rhythms of feltmaking. It felt to me like a song to our future and I hope it leads you forward in the same way. BioYuli was born in Norway and although she has lived most of her life in Devon, the traditional weaving and knitting heritage of Norway has deeply influenced her since she was old enough to hold needles to knit with.  She is a member of Make SouthWest and through this organisation, has been an active teacher of felt making and textile understanding in schools, and is part of the Green Maker Initiative.At the turn of the millennium, an Arts Council grant allowed Yuli to travel to Turkey to work with traditional master feltmakers, and it was there that she started thinking about a “lifetime” garment made of felt, inspired by witnessing the making of a ‘kepenek’, a felt cloak traditional to Kurdish shepherds.  Yuli is a member of the South West FibreShed – a growing community of fibre and dye growers, processors, makers and manufacturers across the South West whose aim is to produce home-grown textiles and garments in a more healthy, resilient and regenerative textile ecosystem. This group is affiliated to the international FibreShed group.Another Man's Shoes https://www.waterstones.com/book/another-mans-shoes/sven-somme/9780954913731Yuli Somme Bellacouche https://www.bellacouche.com/yuli-somme/Human Composting  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LJSEZ_pl3YGood Funeral Guide https://goodfuneralguild.co.uk/Natural Death Centre http://naturaldeath.org.uk/

The one big question that this podcast exists to answer is - what does our future look like when it works? When we endeavour to answer this, there seems quite a clear divide between those us born in the twentieth century who grew up in a world before broadband, and those born in the nineties and later who never got to know the strange weeble of the dial up tone, but instead grew in a world where their every move was dissected by their peers on social media. We can look some other time at the emotional and spiritual impact of that but today I wanted to look at the people who are determined to use the rapidly evolving technology for good. I'm going to interview someone called Grace Rachmany in a couple of weeks time. She's setting up a DAO, a disseminated autonomous organisation, to create not just a community, but a network of communities that - she says - could be free of the need to use dollars, or pounds or the currency of their nation, in 10 years.Which sounds pretty exciting. But I to understand how it works and what it is she's planning to do, we needed to know what a DAO actually is. And to get to that, we have to unpick Blockchain a bit, because the one thing I learned when we invited Reiki Cordon to speak on blockchain last summer, was that it went over a lot of people's heads. So this is the first time I've actually sought out someone on the basis that they could tell me what I wanted to hear. I wanted an idiot's guide to blockchain, to DAOs, to web 3.0 and the web 3 revolution because that seemed like something this podcast ought to know about. All of which leads me to introduce this week's guest. Cory Feco is a member of the DOI foundation which describes itself as 'an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure.' Cory himself is a podcaster at the DOICast - which is one of my must-listen podcasts - I've put a link in the show notes. Beyond that, he describes himself as a web 3 impactivist, and a recovering workaholic. He started as an entrepreneur at 9 selling products from catalogs door to door and ever since have been the most satisfied when walking the path less tread. He has founded and failed, founded and sold, trained hundreds, consulted dozens, lead teams of many, lead only himself, won some awards, and made countless mistakes - and through this the one constant has been growth. He is completely plugged in to a world about which I only have a transient and shallow understanding, but I know enough to know that it could make or break our chances of a flourishing future. Advaya https://advaya.co (soon to be advaya.life) Advaya course with Nathali Nahai https://www.digitalage-course.com/DOI Foundation https://www.doi.org/DOICast podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-doicast/id1618462106CryptoWorld https://shopcryptoworld.com/DOA HQ https://www.daohq.co/EarthSong Seeds https://earthsongseeds.co.uk/

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