The Other Others

An unlikely group of allies get together to resolve the housing crisis, Airbnb's bourgeois morality issues, and biodiversity loss all in one audacious action involving lots of tiny homes. Jeff Yeo https://www.bigtiny.com.sg/ Mallika Robinson https://www.guardiansofearth.io/ Johny Mair https://www.ethic.com/

Yau! JD, Chels, JMB, Josh and Tyson from the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, live yarn at the Human Kind Festival in Sydney as we work through and develop a Ko-design methodology in which Aboriginal and non-Aborginal people can work better in complexity through nature-informed processes.

Ahmed Buasallay is working on a place-based dialogue process grounded in Arab customary logics, but is struggling in communities on the peninsula where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access nature. He is also finding it challenging to access communities of practice in the Systems Thinking space, and so we also yarn about those often invisible obstacles to change makers and sense makers far removed from the center of the Anglosphere.

David Finnigan is an actor, playwright and game designer raised by climate scientists, here to tell us the story of that time Alex Jones and a million maniacs came after him about a play he wrote about the assassination of climate deniers.

Chaura Chigovanyika is doing his thesis on sustainable development, and we yarn on the question "Are Indigenous People Really the Best Conservationists?"

Enough is enough. I've had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane. (Samuel Jackson)  Parul Punjabi Jagdish, a CEO at AIME Inc, is one of the most accomplished and wise young people I've ever met. We connected last year over serpent Lore from our respective cultures, and in a big yarn by a camp fire in New York, came to agree that snakes may be the foundation of living spirit across the earth, and probably the universe. We yarn about the way they set in motion the phenomenon of regenerative disruption (often mistaken for destruction) in our creation stories, and try to understand pathways to healing and understanding death through the metaphors and learnings that can be found in snake Lore. 

Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam and We'll Play Til We Die, brings a friend to dinner - Lucia Sorbera, chair of Arabic studies at The University of Sydney. I don't know either of them, but that's what yarns are for. Some unlikely connections here, finding common cause around developing better methodologies for co-design. A weird and wonderful yarn that kind of dropped out of the sky on us at the last minute. Opening music is Ankh by Egyptian death metal band Scarab.

Great yarn across the drink with proper deadly Irish thinker Manchan Magan, as we continue the Irish-Aboriginal Australian tradition of yarning together about Lore and other important things. I am advised perfectly on my one-off shilalagh-making effort (and how to avoid cultural appropriation in the process). We end up agreeing on a mechanism for keeping bastards away from our business - you know, those ones who come sniffing around because they want to find some bronze-age or neolithic ancestral precedents for their muscular Christianity or blood and soil madness. Really good yarn, made me feel like I got some mojo back.  

Arlo Davis, regular on the pod and my Coriolis Effect brother, talks  through his misgivings about his new job, and what it's like for a Native Alaskan to be the diversity and inclusion officer in a US  university, in an open-carry state. But brother Arlo got rope, he'll be  okay! Arlo's hot tip for Land Acknowledgements: never go higher in a building than the length of rope you have in your backpack in case you have to climb down again. We also talk about the content minorities secretly prefer to consume, and his new book Snow Talk, which mostly only settlers will ever read. Arlo asserts that Indigenous knowledge probably will not save the world, but it will certainly save him, and he's fine with that.

Triple A rated change-maker guru Carol Sanford delivers parting shots at the machinery of mass coercion, via good yarns and a final (probably best-selling again) book "No More Gold Stars". ALS well that ends well, and Aunty seems to be riding the terminal horse of her mortality better than most. I'm struggling with it more than she is, it seems, so try to distract myself with Val Kilmer stories. But still, she insists that there is work for us to do.