Roz Savage's Blog, page 9

It was such an honour to speak with Kim Stanley Robinson for this final episode of Season One of Sowing the Seeds of Change.

Stan is described by the New Yorker as “generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers.” He has many fans, including at least two of my guests from this first season of Sowing the Seeds of Change, Rich Bartlett and Bill McKibben. His highly entertaining novels tend to revolve around ecological, cultural, economic and political themes, always handled with lightness, ease and elegance. He has a PhD from UC San Diego, and lives in Davis, California.

Stan has published twenty-two novels and numerous short stories, and is about to publish his first memoir, but is probably best known for his Mars trilogy, which is how I first came to his work, when a friend, tech podcaster Leo Laporte, gave me an ipod fully loaded with audiobooks, including the Mars books. I became a confirmed fan, and was introduced to Stan by a mutual friend in 2012, although we have yet to meet in person – but we’re working on it.

In this conversation we talk about the art of writing, technology, oceans, mountains, Buddhism, mental health and the search for meaning, environmental economics, equality, leverage points and the fractal nature of change, and, of course, the future.

Stan’s favourite quote:

Walter Benjamin: “Overcome difficulties by multiplying them.”

Quotes:

Finding the little leverage points that an ordinary person might bring to bear, they have their moment of agency. And it can be decisive in a fractal way, up or down the system.

I used to lose a lot of sleep over not knowing what I’m doing in this story. That’s okay. You just keep weaving. And at the end of it, the reader is going to be generous. And that’s the beautiful thing – a novel only exists when the reader has read it, and brought their own experiences to it. In their head, they’re imagining these things. And the beautiful part about that is that the generosity of the reader can lift the various inadequacies of your sentences by their own creative efforts.  

[Fellow science fiction writer, Iain Banks] said, you are making the very common mistake of thinking that a science fiction writer knows something about the future. And this got a big laugh, because of course, we think of science fiction writers as being specialists in the future. But nobody can know the future. And what I do now is remind people that everybody is a science fiction writer, and they do it for their own life. And it has to do with imagination and planning.  

In human affairs, there’s a lot of chance and accident, luck, contingency, and you do what you can to ride that wave. But the wave is filled with unexpected breaks, reefs, problems.  

The other part of science fiction that’s very powerful is a lot of these images out of the future are metaphors for the way that we feel right now. So there’s a combined effect in science fiction. On the one hand, yeah, it’s a future that could happen. Let’s think about it. On the other hand, I feel like I’m turning into a robot, I already am a cyborg. Time is accelerating. There’s a conspiracy of time travellers from the future that are messing with me. These are all metaphors for the way that we feel already.  

I think of my novels as my political action in the world.  

I’m relatively transparent as American leftist, trying to describe more solidarity, more collective futures, public over private. It’s obvious that the dice are loaded in my stories, but they still need to entertain.  

Every novel has a political message in it, some of them are just saying, the status quo is eternal, don’t question the system, etc. And I don’t like those kind of novels.  

Go ahead 100 years, and look back at now. And they are going to be saying, we were idiots. We were self-absorbed, narcissistic fools that were casting the world into an emergency mass extinction event, and they didn’t change their behaviours fast enough. The judgment on us will be very heavy… Here’s where science fiction can be a very useful mental operation. Just imagine what we’re going to look like to the generations to come. And that might be a little spur in the butt to change behaviours now,  

[If I was king of the world] I would choose to immediately set a floor and a ceiling on human wealth, like one to 10 ratio. This is sometimes called the wage ratio. So the one has to be adequacy. Everybody is at adequacy. And you can define them very simply: food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, electricity, all there in adequate amounts, so you’re not living in fear, nor in misery. So that’s the floor, then the ceiling is 10 times that.

If your enterprise makes more than a million dollars, then you get to designate which public service that gets paid to or whatever. It’s taxes, it’s not yours, it’s society’s. One to 10. It’s simple, it’s easy to remember, and 10 times adequacy is extraordinary luxury.  

We’re very good at imagining that [natural disaster] won’t happen to us, it will happen to someone else. This is useful in an evolutionary sense, because we have enough dangers, and you need to be able to function. And so part of the way that you allow yourself to function is to say, well, that won’t happen to me. And clearly, that’s very imaginative because eventually something’s going to get you. For society imagining how to deal with climate change, it might be that we’re more powerful at imagining than we are at good risk assessment.  

I love this concept of cognitive errors. And it’s very important to remind ourselves and everybody that we’re talking about errors that are like optical illusions. In other words, they’re endemic and even when you know they’re happening to you, you can’t escape them.  

You need the emotions. So then what emotions do you choose? Well, charity. Solidarity with other people, imagining that the other is just like you. These are imaginative emotional gestures, that person’s feeling the same way I am.  

I like Zen Buddhism, because it has that same impulse: chop wood, carry water, remember the world is sacred. I find it so useful.  

I am also very impressed by existentialism as a philosophy. There’s no meaning. The universe happened. We’re in it. We’re conscious. Wow.  

So then how do you create meaning? Well, you make up the stories, you create it yourself by making a project for yourself.  

People without projects are in trouble, just as people without meaning in their life are in trouble. And in the United States, they’re talking about this despair as different from depression, deaths of despair. It’s one of the leading causes of death in young people in the United States. And of course fentanyl and the other opioids have been part of that. Sometimes it happens by accident. But deaths of despair are real all across this world. People are not only emiserated physically and their prospects are terrible, but also they have no meaning.  

Capitalism only goes for the highest rate of return. That’s its law. That’s an algorithm that it follows. Irrespective of the consequences of that. So highest rate of return, if we follow that law only, we are doomed to fail in our fight for dealing with climate change. And in our fight for justice. Capitalism is bad at both of those. But it’s the world system right now.  

It’s a problem of getting paid to do the right things rather than the wrong things and therefore, finessing or overwhelming the law of the highest rate of return, the love of profit, a lot of shareholder value, to go for good carbon work is more valuable.

Even just the view of the night sky, being out in wilderness, you shrink to a dot and the consciousness of that is interesting, and indeed, a beautiful experience. I think is a good orientation to the real.

Links:

Wikipedia

Fan site

TED Talk

Featured Photo by Bruno on Unsplash

Richard Bartlett describes himself as “one of those people with a lot of websites”, and he’s right. He’s the co-founder of Loomio, a platform for small-scale digital democracy inspired by the 2011 Occupy Movement. He’s also co-leader of The Hum, a training & consulting company that supports decentralised organisations to work without domination hierarchies. And he’s also the co-director of the Enspiral Foundation, which is a professional network of friends supporting each other to do more meaningful work in the world. And he’s the author of a community-building methodology called Microsolidarity.

Rich is a fanatical Twitterer, and tells me he is a halfway decent blues guitarist. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian community in New Zealand and now lives literally as far away as you possibly can, in Lucca, Italy, for reasons that become clearer in our conversation.

I haven’t met Rich in person yet, although I know him from some work he did earlier this year with SEEDS, the complementary currency. I was impressed with his very practical wisdom, so I was inspired by that interaction to take a course with The Hum, hosted by Rich and his partner, Nati, which was excellent.

In this conversation we talk about complex systems, chaos and coherence, nouns and verbs, cultural innoculation, methodologies rather than mission statements, trust, partnership and domination, Riane Eisler and Kim Stanley Robinson, heaven and hell and Christianity, LSD, fear of death, polarisation and harmonisation.

What I took away from this conversation was a greater understanding of, well, understanding. In our world it often feels like many people are talking, and not so many are listening. When we really listen, it becomes easier to focus on our similarities rather than our differences, and to tune into the shades of grey between the black and white extremes of polarised discourse. I love the work Rich is doing. It makes me feel hopeful.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Benefits for patrons include live zoom calls with me, and access to the video version of the conversation. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And our archive of conversations – with Charles Eisenstein, Tim Jackson, Jude Currivan, Bill McKibben, Sharon Blackie, Ted Rau, Paul Hawken, Peggy Liu, John Buck and Monika Megyesi, and Kimberly Carter Gamble are available for free on Spotify, and now also on Apple Podcasts!

Rich’s Favourite Quote:

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” (Ilya Prigogine)

Rich’s Quotes:

We live in a sea of chaos. We create things like civilization and norms and society to try and manage the chaos. And by chaos, I mean this infinitely unfolding uncertainty, the huge multiplicity of possibilities that keeps flourishing in front of us, because it’s just the way that life works. We live in chaos, and a lot of people would prefer not to look at it – we try and make things predictable and safe. And so we have institutions and rules and governance, and so on, to try and make things predictable…  

For me, the island of coherence is a small group of mutual aid and shared understanding, trust and care. If I’m in that little island, at the very least, I’m going to be taken care of. And at best, there’s the possibility that we might have the capacity to shift the entire system.

If you’re making a loaf of bread, you have a really intensely inoculated piece of dough. And then you mix it in with some new ingredients, and you put it in a warm, dark place for a few hours, and then it rises, as the culture spreads through the whole loaf. I really think that’s a useful metaphor for how you spread culture in a group. You need a mother [culture], there needs to be a source, it needs to come from somewhere.

We’re currently fermenting a particular kind of culture within these voluntary employee networks. And our aspiration is that’s going to affect the rest of the organization, and eventually the leadership. And then eventually, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the leadership would affect the leaders of countries and that some of this culture of respect and vulnerability and authenticity could leak out a little?

I devalue the nouns and I and I value the verbs. [Reminiscent of my conversation with Paul Hawken about goals – where he prefers nouns, not verbs]

You’ll notice I don’t usually use the word sovereignty, because sovereign to me implies a disconnected individual with an impermeable boundary. And I don’t really think of individuals in that way.

I don’t have to spend a lot of time talking about the purpose, or the values, or getting an agreement on this very abstract layer [of an organisation]. It’s more about what’s the what are the qualities of the encounter? How do we want to feel when we’re working together? What kind of dynamics do we want to experience between us? And if we focus on that… it’s worked for us so far.

It’s so attractive to talk about abstractions, like, what’s wrong with capitalism? Or what about patriarchy? And we need to have theory, we need to step into that big picture space to get some understanding of what’s going on in the world. But there’s not much that I can do about patriarchy. I can do something about how specific behaviours show up in a patriarchal context. I can do something about how I share the microphone with women, for example, that’s a very specific verb.

People always come up with these very lovely vision statements. But they’re often quite distant from the verbs, from the practical. What am I supposed to do today? And how are we going to measure our progress next week?

I don’t think agreement is about everyone saying yes… I think agreement is operating at a lower level down the down the biological stack. It’s something that happens in our body when we feel trust, when we feel we’ve been heard, when we feel that our position is respected. And when we have that sense of trust with the other person, then we’re willing to go along with what’s happening.

I’ve got the option to go towards partnership or towards domination. And the domination is always a dyad, where you’ve got this this awful duet between domination and submission where one person is over-exerting and the other person is shrinking. And that that domination/submission relationship is part of my inheritance as a human being. It’s definitely in our cultural inheritance. And I’ve always got opportunities to choose, over and over again, am I going to play this one more like a partnership or more like a dictatorship? And so my anarchism is about noticing where there are these opportunities for coercion and oppression, and seeking ways to flip them into liberation, freedom, passion, and exchange, coming out of this extraction thing, and into this abundance thing.

I’m not trying to enrol millions of people into a project, my scale tops out around 20,000 people or 30,000 people. My view of the world is not linear. I don’t believe that any of us are going to come up with a program that’s good enough to enrol everyone into. We’ve got to rely on the emergence. we’ve got to rely on all of these different coalitions and factions, pulling in different directions, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes undermining each other. And that the dynamic tension between all those things, producing something that that continues to affirm and spread life. And that’s the game that I’m playing. It’s not about trying to come up with a one true plan that everyone can agree with.

We’ve still got the Christian grammar, and this idea of Heaven and Hell, and of the afterlife. And this kind of threshold where either everything goes incredibly well, or it goes incredibly badly, either we have annihilation, or we have bliss. That’s really deeply imprinted on us… I’ve been noticing that tendency in myself and letting go of these massive stories about how we’re either gonna have a utopia or a dystopia. I’m just trying to release that, and assume that the future is unpredictable. There’s some terrifying possibilities. There’s some inspiring possibilities. And whatever I guess, it’s probably not going to be that.

I was raised within a fundamentalist Christian community. And in my early 20s, I was excommunicated as an apostate. I was given the boot. And that was because of this process of thinking [I have]. I literally had a day where I said to myself, imagine if this is not true. Imagine if everything that you’ve been taught by your family and your school and in your entire community, is just a story that got out of hand? It’s just a myth that someone misinterpreted as fact. Imagine if God is not actually this human-like creature who has a personal interest in my life. Imagine that is not true. How would life be different? And once I allowed myself to fully occupy that imaginary space, my faith completely evaporated. So that’s the first [way I am able to see clearly] is noticing that the consensus around me is not the only possibility and then really occupying that imaginary space.

A lot of things changed about my way of seeing the world after I took a lot of LSD. It’s as if many of the abstractions dissolved. And I got to reconstruct them more intentionally.

I think it was the fear of death that keeps people from changing their mind a lot of time. If your identity is so strongly fused to your ideas, of course you’re not going to change your ideas, because it feels like dying.

[On “good neighbourhoods”]: I’m just saying that the kind of change that’s required, I think a lot of it is about undoing the damage that’s been done over the last while. As Adam Curtis says, the century of the self has been a very intentional project to turn us into individuals. And that’s just not the full story of what humanity is. [See YouTube to watch The Century of the Self for free]

Which one’s the right one, which one’s the wrong one? It’s sometimes necessary, sometimes you need to draw a boundary and say, this is right and this is wrong. But it’s not always the right thing to do when a polarity comes along. Sometimes there’s a lot of insight to be gained from considering from really visiting each side of the polarity and really inquiring with open hearted compassion, what value is there? what have I got to learn? And usually what you find is there’s value on both sides.

Something that I’ve tried to practice is noticing whenever there’s a polarity and going, is this a really clear black and white distinction? Or is it actually a spectrum? And what do I get to gain if I go and visit both sides, and really empathize and try and understand what they have to offer? And usually there’s something good there, usually group conflict comes down to an overly simplified polarization. And actually, what you need is happening in between those two poles. But you’re not going to get there unless the people that are occupying those poles feel like they’ve genuinely been heard and understood and their perspective is valued. And then suddenly, the space opens up for a more subtle kind of harmony.

Links:

Loomio: a workspace for conversation, sharing information and opinions, making proposals, deciding actions and achieving outcomes

The Hum: online courses and practical advice on self-organisation

Enspiral: a collective of individuals who not only believe in, but practice a new way of organising

Microsolidarity: central hub to collect resources for the co-development of multiple communities for people to do a kind of personal development, in good company, for social benefit

Featured Image: Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

On the show this week I am in conversation with Kimberly Carter Gamble, who produced, directed and co-wrote THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take? and THRIVE II: This Is What It Takes. Kimberly came from a background in journalism and film. Currently she is focused on helping to empower grassroots movements around the world to reclaim our freedom and develop tools and practices for spiritual awakening and averting medical tyranny.

Kimberly tells me she eats mostly from her own garden where she grows food and also cultivates a habitat for native bees as her response to bee colony collapse. She currently has over 78 species of native bees.

She and her husband, Foster Gamble, live in Santa Cruz, California. They have children and grandchildren living nearby and she helps care for her 94-year-old mother, who has Alzheimers.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet Kimberly in person a couple of times for great conversations about our shared passion for the thriving of people and planet. This is another fabulous conversation – whether or not you agree with Kimberly’s views, I am sure you will find it fascinating.

We talk about health freedom, transhumanism, Big Data, learning to disagree respectfully, courage, purpose and passion, life, death, consciousness and spirituality…. And, of course, thriving.

I really enjoyed this conversation enormously. I really appreciate Kimberly’s philosophy of freedom and non-violation, and I’m going to steal her saying: “I am a friend of your soul and an enemy of your project”. I couldn’t agree more that we have to remember how to listen to each other, and to disagree respectfully. Especially as we approach the holidays, when we might well spend time with family members who have a different view from us, this was a really timely reminder.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Benefits for patrons include live zoom calls with me, and access to the video version of the conversation. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And our archive of conversations – with Charles Eisenstein, Tim Jackson, Jude Currivan, Bill McKibben, Sharon Blackie, Ted Rau, Paul Hawken, Peggy Liu, John Buck and Monika Megyesi are available for free on Spotify, and now also on Apple Podcasts!

Links:

Kimberly’s Health Freedom series of videos

Thrive movies and movement

Kimberly also mentions Superhumans: stories about people transcending biology, expanding consciousness, and pushing the limits of what it means to be human

Favourite Quotes:

Kimberly’s favourite quote, from Audra Lord: “When I use my strength in service of my vision, it matters less and less whether I am afraid.”

For those of us who are clear about our purpose and our passion, then to not honour it, is its own death.

I have a lot of confidence that I am living the life that I’m here to live. And just that joy and energy and alignment gives me such a good feeling that at least I know I won’t die regretting that I didn’t live because I was afraid of something that may or may not have happened.

One of those things that we need to unpack is our relationship with authority. How is it that some people have the authority to tell us what to do with something so basic as our own bodies? If we don’t own our bodies, and our thoughts and our speech, that is a fascist world. So to be able to take responsibility for that, and proceed fearlessly, despite what you know, rumbles and flutters in my heart. It’s like it’s not as if the fear doesn’t run through my body, it’s that it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to act from fear.

The courage that I want to have most of all, is the courage to consider possibilities and understand that I’m relying on my own discernment. And I want to hear people who disagree, discuss something so that I can discern for myself. Which part of this do I think do I agree with? And which part goes in the category of I don’t know, but I’ll keep my eye on it?

If something can happen once, then by definition, it’s not impossible. So can somebody experience spontaneous healing? Yes, that has happened. So therefore, it’s not impossible.

Learning to hold conflicting ideas at one time is an essential part of critical thinking. So if  I don’t know something’s right, I’m going to listen to somebody’s perspective. And I have to suspend my own judgment for a moment to actually consider it all of the way.

Let’s look at the different sources, and also I’ll say what I think you believe, you say what you think I believe, so at least we can articulate each other’s perspectives and understand why we might think what we think, and then take it from there, instead of making each other wrong, and separate and divide, which are really dangerous things.

I’m a friend of your soul and an enemy of your project.

My fundamental orientation in life is spiritual, I relate to myself as a spiritual, eternal being who’s here for life, for some amount of time with a purpose. And so because that’s my belief, my spiritual orientation is of a sense of oneness, that we are all connected. I meditate, and really have a committed meditation practice. I’ve had benefit of plant medicine and other tools that have really facilitated my understanding of the inner connection in all life.

I don’t believe that anyone should be able to violate anyone against their will. That’s a fundamental guiding principle that defines freedom, so because of that, I’m gonna work hard to stop it (violation). I just do it with an open heart. And a little less of an attachment to the outcome.

I’m most proud of my family relations, which cross all kinds of worldview divides. Where I have vaccinated kids, unvaccinated kids, kids who believe this, kids who believe that, and we are really committed to finding a way to keeping our love and closeness alive and robust. I’m watching other families just get torn apart. And we’re really having to have a common commitment to that. And I’m very grateful that we do.

I actually don’t believe that we will survive as a species until we get beyond the notion that we’re going to all agree. We’re not going to agree. The fundamental agreement needs to be that we don’t violate each other. So that means you can believe and do whatever you do, so long as it doesn’t violate my ability to do the same.

What we need to do is figure out how are we going to coexist here, and what will be the fundamental principle and ethic and strategy by which we can coexist. That’s not agreement. That’s how to come up with a way to disagree in a way that doesn’t violate anybody against their will. And to me, that’s the challenge that we really face here.

I would definitely take out the stranglehold of corporations in the financial system to control the government because right now, we can’t even make new policies, so long as the those who are supposedly elected are actually answering to the corporate interests.

To me, (selling our personal data is) an alternative to universal basic income, where if people actually own their data, they can choose to sell it, where they want to, they can align their financial world with their values in a way that’s really important and which hasn’t happened yet on the planet.

There are people who fundamentally disagree at such a core level, that now the job is to come up with a guiding principle that allows us to live together because changing each other’s minds has also historically proven to be impossible.

This idea of “I’m going to force you to go along with my belief” – we won’t make it if that’s the strategy we choose. Instead, enough of us get that and are rising to the occasion to have these difficult, uncomfortable conversations, which comes back to something about the notion of our oneness, which is who are we, who am I? And what is my belief system? What is my worldview? I’m more than my opinion, I’m more than my beliefs. I’m more than my worldview. Love is more important to me. Love, I believe, is a subset of freedom. So we’re free to actually express ourselves in this way, as long as we’re not violating one another.

A thriving future for me is one where we actually have mastered disagreeing enough to live in harmony based on a non-violation principle with people who have completely different worldviews than we have.

The great work that is available to help us all now to expand our consciousness. And by that I mean to be able to expand who we think we are, so that when we’re riled by somebody else’s opinion, we actually know what it feels like to take a deep breath, and redefine ourselves for a moment as interconnected beings, probably both trying our best to make a better world, but have different ideas about how to do that.

Featured Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

Following on from my conversation with Ted Rau a few weeks ago, when I promised you more on sociocracy, I’m delighted to introduce you to the work of John Buck and Monika Megyesi from Governance Alive.

John and his partners have introduced hundreds of businesses to the power of sociocracy, bringing new levels of efficiencies, engagement, connectedness, and satisfaction. An expert in the synthesis of social technologies like Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile, John has co-authored books such as “We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy,” and “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy”.

Monika Megyesi started out studying human anatomy and training as a nurse. She was struck by the ability of human bodies to heal themselves, and saw how self-healing functions could be brought to the human systems surrounding her. She has a business degree from the University of Maryland, she co-founded the Entrepreneurial Partnership of Greater Washington, and she has a Masters in Negotiations and Conflict Management at the University of Baltimore. Her motto and driving inspiration is summed up in the words “Awaken to Life: You matter! You belong!”

In this conversation, we talk about sociocracy, structures, feedback loops, vulnerability, conversations in rounds, consent and consensus, embodied decision-making, eyeballs, yin and yang, circles and lines, and – something that was a very alien concept to me in my corporate career – meetings that people look forward to.

I feel so encouraged that there are these powerful social technologies that can really help people to thrive in their work. I absolutely believe that we need all hands on deck if we’re going to ride the waves of change, and sociocracy can make sure we’re all crew, no passengers, while creating more resilient, robust organisations better suited to the uncharted waters ahead.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Benefits for patrons include live zoom calls with me, and access to the video version of the conversation. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And our archive of conversations – with Charles Eisenstein, Tim Jackson, Jude Currivan, Bill McKibben, Sharon Blackie, Ted Rau and Paul Hawken are available for free on Spotify, and now also on Apple Podcasts!

Favourite Quotes:

John: In any typical company, you can escape the feedback. You can be a manager that says, I will listen to your opinion. And then of course, you turn around and make whatever decision you want. Because you’re only getting input, you’re not getting feedback.

John: I did a Master’s thesis in which I studied Dutch companies that were using sociocracy and was able to provide solid data that that the level of organizational commitment of a worker in a Dutch sociocratic organization was statistically significantly higher than the average Dutch worker commitment to the organization they were working in.

Monika: I happened to be born in a quite oppressive dictatorship in Romania, as an ethnic minority. So I had experienced the jaws and claws of oppressive regimes. Because of that experience, my journey has become about finding building structures that can be steered by the voices from within.

Monika: We have been conditioned in “power over” structures, and our behaviours have to be playing it safe, in order to survive in the structures. What sociocracy brings in is a “power with” environment, and “power with” environments can be only maintained when you participate with authentic truth. And to do that, you need to be vulnerable.

Monika: When we talk about individuals and structures, there is this beautiful interaction and dance and synergy. The structure affects the individual and the individual affects the structure. And what we have learned in Governance Alive is that the more we practice sociocracy, and the more we did what we say, practiced what we preached, the more we changed, we transformed, we developed.

John: Structure very much trains you to behave the way is optimal for that structure. And so people find as they operate in a structure that promotes openness and transparency, that they become more that way.

John: We’re not trained that way (sociocratically). In school, we sit in rows, not in circles, and you’re raising your hand to get attention, or trying to avoid attention or whatever. And so just that simple change is a change in structure.

Monika: Consensus is you’re asking people to agree, to say yes. In consent, we are asking people to say that No, I don’t see anything wrong with this proposal. So I’m not looking for your agreement. I’m looking for whether you see anything that doesn’t quite sit well with you. And if you don’t, then we are moving forward.

Monika: An objection improves a proposal. It helps you move forward in the way that the group wants. A personal preference is simply liking one alternative more than the other. And when people present personal preferences as objections, the group often feels held hostage by that one person. And so using objections that are reasoned, and connected to the aim, not only ensures equivalence in the group – that everybody has the same chance to have an input in the process – but it also focuses the group into the direction that they want to go.

John:  If I’m going around saying, does anybody have an objection, and somebody says, no, no objection. I say, okay, that’s an objection. And I go back to that person. And I say, wait a minute, why was your mouth and your body disagreeing with each other? what’s going on? And that, that allows us to connect way down to the base of our brain where there’s this old lizard brain back there that actually has maintained control of decision making, despite all this cerebral cortex stuff.

John: A lot of consent decisions are training people to just check people’s eyeballs. Ask, anybody have a problem with this? And if you see the eyeballs, you’ll know immediately whether they have an objection.

Monika: We use what we call semi-autonomous circles… Each circle has an aim. And within accomplishing that aim, they have full autonomy – on who does the work, how they do the work, when they do the work. As long as what the circle offers to its environment, to its customers, to other areas of the organization is delivered, the team or the circle itself decides how they go about delivering it.

John: The best way to measure whether a circle-building was run well, was that the people feel more energized at the end of it than they did the beginning of it.

Monika: We have linear structures in nature. And we also have circular structures. They each play a role. Where we as humans went wrong with the linear structures is trying to decide the fate of others in linear structures. Linear structures are good for progress, movement forward, getting things done, but not for decision making. That’s why you need to shift into a circle structure to make decisions.

Monika: So in sociocracy, we use both structures, like yin and yang. So coordination is happening not only through the double links in the circle structure, but operationally in the linear structure. And this beautiful kind of dance and shift and knowing in which structure we are, and for what purpose, is the learning curve, the paradigm shift that both individuals and organizations need to go through.

Monika: The interesting place that we are finding ourselves is in transition. And transitions are these liminal spaces where the rules are not clear. Anything can happen. We are still, in many ways anchored and dependent on the old world. At the same time, we are starting to create this new world. So I think social technologies like sociocracy, agile, open space are to me definitely the ways to go.

John: The basis for running a company is no longer the golden rule, ie who has the gold makes the rules. It ends up being consent, which is fairly revolutionary.

John: In some ways, what we’re talking about is not new. The idea of electing your boss in the US was commonplace until the 1850s – men used to elect the officers in the army. That was the frontier way of doing it. And that disappeared with the Civil War and the rise of corporations and all that those were based on the golden rule. But that’s the authentic US way of doing things, is to elect our leaders, and so we’re trying to in some sense to bring that back.

John: You should start organizing society at the very basic neighborhood level. And that doesn’t mean 50 or 100 houses, it means maximum 30 families. And they get together and they make decisions together. And I’m writing a book right now called Governance From Below. Can children lead the way? It’s about how actually, we should be training children to do this, because they get it a lot quicker than adults do. And so, then you have 30 families, or 30 Children’s Parliaments, then they all elect representatives to a next level Children’s Parliament. And then you get 30 of those and you elect the next level, and so forth up.

Monika: Bruce Lipton is a cell biologist. And he came up with this concept of fractal evolution, of how organisms start as individuals, then they form communities until the community learns how to function as one unit. They build a membrane around it, like for example, bacteria builds biofilm. And then when many of these communities come together, they form a higher level organism, which becomes again many communities able to function as a single unit and that’s an amoeba. So if we look at humanity and humans, I feel that we have pretty much completed the evolution of the human being. We’ve been experimenting with communities, like families, tribes, villages, kingdoms, countries. More and more, we are becoming globalized. So what I see is for us to be able to function together, coexist, think, decide, feel together as one humanity that is synchronized with our resources and with the Earth that we live in.

Monika: If you ignore that you’re low on oil, the car is going to break down, you’re not going to get to the grocery store after a while. So we can ignore the flashing oil light. And we will pay the price in similar ways with our Earth, we can continue ignoring the signs and we will definitely pay the price. And we can learn to pay attention to the signs and build that feedback into the decisions that we make.

John: My favourite animal for that is the octopus, because it’s a multi-brain entity that has a multi-brain mind. I think we’re heading there. But it’s not clear how it’ll all come out. And it’s a time of great experimentation that we should all be having fun with.

Links:

https://www.governancealive.com/

John’s books: https://www.amazon.com/John-Buck/e/B07BF2R672/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Also known as the Green Goddess of China, Peggy Liu is Chairperson of Joint US-China Collaboration for Clean Energy (JUCCCE), and a leading environmentalist. Named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time, she has successfully catalyzed change for over a billion people, seven times over. Peggy’s superpower is bringing people together to bring in a better future faster. Her latest project, the “Tornado Leadership” methodology, draws from her work across policy, economic, technical, and spiritual realms to lead societal-scale changes. She lives in Shanghai.

I’ve known Peggy since 2017, when I was lucky enough to spend some time in China – first teaching at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and then staying with Peggy in central Shanghai. There are many wonderful things I could say about Peggy, but the main thing I admire her for is her ability to get stuff done. This could be connected to the fact that, as far as I can tell, she appears to never sleep.

In this conversation, we talk about how our perceptions shape our world, yin-yang polarities and energetics, alignment and resonance, bridges, wanting to be a robot, avatars, algorithms, and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. And, of course, Tornado Leadership.

I really appreciated Peggy’s image of the tornado of change – how we get it spinning, help it gather momentum, and draw people in. It’s a perfect metaphor for change, and in fact, quite a perfect metaphor for the whirlwind that is Peggy Liu.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Benefits for patrons include live zoom calls with me, and access to the video version of the conversation. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And our archive of conversations – with Charles Eisenstein, Tim Jackson, Jude Currivan, Bill McKibben, Sharon Blackie, Ted Rau and Paul Hawken are available for free on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts!

Favourite Quotes:

Marina Jacobi: “Emotions are simply your perception of reality.”

My fundamental belief is that all realities are possible for us. It’s just that some may be more probable at this moment. But through shaping our emotions, mastering our emotions, we can shape the way that we perceive the world, and that becomes our world.

If we’re all aligned, we’re all going the same direction, we’re all going in the same frequency, the same resonance, we’re feeling each other, we’re sensing each other so that we don’t cause friction, then we’re all in flow. And to me, that is the definition of peace.

All infinite realities, not only are possible, but they exist right now. It is just that some are more possible. What I mean is that a lot of them are just sitting in potential energy form. And then when you put your energy, your thought, your intention, your directional energy into something, then you can actually make that transform into kinetic energy.

Now I realize that you can be really smart and learn how to have incremental progress, right? One plus one equals two. You can work and live in Silicon Valley, and you can do the whole Moore’s Law, you can talk about exponential growth, and for a long time I lived that one plus one equals three. But now what I’m teaching people is if you want to move whole societies to a different reality, you need to do that at quantum speed, and that takes one plus one equals 11.

You need to have the internal inner work, the internal journey of moving from speaking from your head to other people’s heads, to speaking with your heart, to other people’s hearts. And you need to be able to let go of spreadsheets and plans completely.

The tornado really is about energetics momentum, angular momentum. It’s a life force. And that’s why spreadsheets will never get you quantum speed manifestation change, because they are static. They have no momentum in them. So the first thing in creating the future you want, to be able to bring forth that better future faster, is to see that future in every little detail.

Everything in the universe is simply energy waves working in harmony.

This is different from linear momentum, which is just pushing something, push, push, push something forward, using my adrenaline. I’m going to use my hard work my willpower to just keep pushing through a problem. That’s linear momentum, and that’s only going to get you incremental, maybe exponential change. But to really jump through a wormhole, it looks like a vortex the shape of a tornado. And so you need to spin the tornado, you need to expand the size of the tornado, right? And one way to do that, in a practical way, the way that I was able to achieve a lot of catalytic success in China across the country is learning how to do micro asks. And so that means drawing people into the tornado by making micro asks that they can say yes to.

Now, how do you draw people in at the same vibration, this same angular momentum, into this tornado? It’s through this frequency that we talked about – this ecstasy, this sense of marvel that you describe, this reality. And what happens is, from a neuroscience point of view, from a behavioural point of view, 95% of all of people’s actions are actually subconscious. They do what they do, because they love to do that, in that they feel a sense of love, the sense of loving connection.

You’d never see a stream of water just constantly hitting their head, so to speak, their drop against an existing boulder in the middle of the stream. So that is a really good analogy for flow versus friction. Again, the secret to everything is flow versus friction. It’s alignment versus misalignment, it’s harmony versus dissonance.

How do you create with your future self, to be able to be a creator? Part of the algorithm is to create with your whole self and your true self. Your whole self is your inner child, the now and the future self… How much are you really creating from your own karma, versus being polluted by other people’s karma?

Links:

Peggy’s website

The Facebook group Peggy referenced: My Limitless Imagination

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

This week’s guest is a legend of American environmentalism, Paul Hawken. Paul starts ecological businesses, writes about nature and commerce, and consults with governments and CEOs on climatic, economic and ecological regeneration. He lives in Cascade Canyon in Northern California with nuthatches, grey fox, coyotes, pileated woodpeckers, and a red-shouldered hawk who visits regularly on field mouse patrol.  He has written eight books, is published in 30 languages, and his books are available in over 90 countries. His book Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming debuted as a NYT bestseller in 2017. He just completed his latest work in September, Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Paul will send a free copy to the first person who can guess his favorite food (hint: it is a plant).

I’ve known Paul since we met at Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado, in May 2007. It was a real joy to catch up with him, and talk about regeneration, apocalypse, fear, joy and courage, behaviour change, climate communication, COP26, male vertebrates, plant intelligence, and being a piss poor Buddhist.

It was such a joy for me to spend time with Paul again. He has this wonderful mix of serenity and spark, positivity and practicality, and a determination to make the world a better place while also a Buddhist acceptance of what is. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

My favourite quotes from this conversation:

Paul’s chosen quote, from Wendell Berry: “Be joyous though you know all the facts.”

The question is, do we go into anxiety? Do we go into fear? Do we go into a sense of doom? Do we go into apocalyptic scenarios? Do we want to lead our life that way? You’re only here for a short time, so who you want to be while you are here? To me, global warming and all the ancillary outcomes and effects and impacts that has, is that we’re really being homeschooled by the planet. It’s a teaching, we’re the students, we all live here, we’re the inhabitants of the biosphere. And so we can be grateful. We can honour suffering and feel a sense of compassion, we can act out of kindness, we can think of ourselves as human beings who are innately generous, as opposed to fear-based and selfish.

Hope is the pretty mask of fear. And what we need to be now is fearful and courageous, courage is heart, full of heart. And the rest of it is simply a dalliance.

Science does not change people. Data does not change people. Numbers do not change behaviour. Acronyms do not change behaviour. Fear does not change, threat does not change… shaming, blaming, guilt – this is what the climate communication has been about for decades, frankly. And it doesn’t work. It’s not that it isn’t true, factually. It’s just in terms of human beings, we don’t respond that way.

We hear these terms – we’re gonna fight climate change, combat this, we’re going to mitigate it. These are verbs, and verbs are not goals. Nouns are goals. So what’s our goal? Is our goal to combat? I don’t think so.  

People will talk about, well, we need to fix it. Interesting. Two words, a verb and an object, right? “Fix it,” really? What is it? Can somebody tell me what it is? As soon as you speak in that kind of lingo, and you think that way, basically, you are entirely separating yourself from where you live, and from the biosphere and from others.  

The Ashwar people in the Amazon have no word for nature. They don’t even understand what you’re talking about. They don’t have a language in which they can understand that kind of separation.

The thing about regeneration, which is so beautiful about the word, to my way of thinking is, it’s innate to us as human beings. That is to say, we do it every day, our 30 trillion cells do it every nanosecond. But we also do it with our friends, with our family, with our pets, we do with our plants, our garden. We are constantly attending to things in our life, to ensure that there’s more life, that they grow, that they prosper, that they thrive, that they’re nurtured, and this is innate to be human being. So the paradigm of combating, fighting, tackling, mitigating climate change, like, really? Do you think that’s gonna work? It’s not gonna work, because people don’t think that way. They don’t act that way. But regeneration is something we already do. So that’s what the book [Regeneration] is trying to do – it’s trying to enlarge that sense of the scope and the possibility of what’s possible, to put life at the centre of every act and decision, to restore life as we know it, wherever we can, with whomever we wish to, or whoever wants to work with us, and so forth. And if we do that, if enough of us do that, we reverse global warming. There’s no other way to do it.

Act, just act. Do whatever you can and act and continue to act. And that changes you more profoundly than any book or any podcast, because the love of self is to act, and to have faith that it will take you to a better, newer life within oneself, and for others as well.

Choose what lights you up, where you go, man, I love that, or I want to know more about that. Or Wow, I had no idea that that even existed. That’s what you should go and choose and that is the regeneration of the world.

Paul’s website: https://paulhawken.com/

Project Drawdown: https://drawdown.org/

Regeneration: https://regeneration.org/home

Photo by Leio McLaren on Unsplash

My guest this week is Ted Rau, operational leader of Sociocracy For All. If you’re not familiar with sociocracy, Ted does a great job of explaining it during our conversation, but I’ll just say briefly here that it’s a fantastic way that people can organise themselves to get things done in an inclusive and democratic way – whether that’s in intentional communities, for profit or non-profit organisations, neighbourhoods – or who knows, maybe one day, even governments.

Ted spends most of his time training and consulting in sociocracy and leading SoFA as an organisation. He is co-author of the sociocracy handbook Many Voices, One Song. When he’s not busy sociocratising, he writes articles, and teaches meeting facilitation, and also takes an active interest the co-housing movement, transgender rights, and non-violent communication. His background is in linguistics, which taught him to find patterns that work well for the human mind, and break things down so they can be easily understood.

One of the reasons I get excited about sociocracy is that research shows that something like 85% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, but that figure improves dramatically when people work for themselves, meaning they have more power of self-determination. And yet we often need to work with others in order to get stuff done. So sociocracy seems to be the best of both worlds – it gives us a way to collaborate in ways that create trust, respect, autonomy, and engagement.

We have another conversation on sociocracy coming up in three weeks, with John Buck and Monika Megyesi, when you’ll have a chance to find out more about these important ideas.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Benefits for patrons include live zoom calls with me, and access to the video version of the conversation. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And our archive of conversations – with Charles Eisenstein, Tim Jackson, Jude Currivan, Bill McKibben and Sharon Blackie are available for free on Spotify, and now also on Apple Podcasts!

Favourite Quotes:

[Sociocracy is] very much peer oriented, in that teams make decisions by consensus, so they only move forward on decisions if everybody on the team can say, yes, that’s something I can get behind.

You have a lot of coherence in the system, because people are connected and talking to each other and have that sense of alignment with each other.

Instead of having a boss that aligns us, because we’re all equals under this boss, instead we’re all there for that shared purpose.

Let’s say six people in the room speak one by one. And that sounds slow and tedious. But really, what happens is that it slows down to what I would call a human pace, so that you actually start to listen to each other. Instead of sitting at the edge of your seat, waiting to jump in with that cool idea that you have, you actually listen to what is being said. You’re not in the future in the past, you’re actually in the moment. So you listen to each other. And that’s where things can really happen.

Sometimes I just want to walk around and raise people’s expectations, to say that meetings can actually be connecting and productive and fun and all of that. You can have the expectation that you will be heard at the meeting.

Hierarchy is typically something that we know, hierarchy is something that we’ve seen in schools, that we’ve seen in university if we went there, that we’ve seen in our families and everywhere around us. Hierarchy is something that we are accustomed to. If we’re in the middle of a hierarchical chain, then basically, it’s fairly obvious what we need to do. Yet in a sociocratic system, everybody needs to understand how it works, because it’s decentralized.

What I like and also find tricky about sociocracy is that both sides have to learn. Those who are in power have to let go of power, and accept that other people are making decisions about things. But on the other side, people who like to defer to other people, and who don’t want to step up, or who don’t want to use systems, because they just want to be in a structure, they also need to change their behaviours, right. So really, both sides have to get to this middle place of balance. And that’s not trivial, it actually changes a lot about how people think about themselves. So there’s a lot of personal transformation that typically happens for people that comes along with us.

My belief is that if we teach people how to self organize, they’re going to be able to make a difference wherever they are. So it is teaching governance and self governance in particular. It’s a decentralized solution that can actually make a difference on a systemic level. That’s what excites me.

One of the strengths of decentralized systems is that they tend to be more resilient. So instead of this slightly rigid and somewhat slow system, you have a system where many different entities can make changes wherever they needed. So that’s pretty powerful. And it also helps in navigating uncertainty because you can make more small changes, closer to where the action is and respond faster.

Now people are noticing more and more the downsides of the systems we have, and how vulnerable we are, and these somewhat rigid structures. And that we simply can’t afford to continue. This current system is basically maxed out, we’re coming towards a place where structures simply break down, and we need new systems. And I know that that many people are aware of that, and they are looking for these decentralized systems and trying to make that work. So that’s literally what gets me out of bed.

[After first experience of sociocratic meeting] I heard myself say, Wow, I’m leaving this meeting feeling more connected, and more refreshed than when I came, and I thought, hmm, that’s not typically what happens in meetings! What was different here? And I noticed it was, for example, the rounds and the whole vibe of it, and the ease with which we flowed together. I was like, wow, this is cool.

It’s the transformative nature that I find really fascinating, of giving people the gift of being able to manage their own things, and having that level of autonomy for people, and ultimately creating spaces that are more inclusive for everybody, because in our current systems, so many people fall through the cracks. And it’s both not not fair, and it’s also not sustainable, right, because you can just ignore whole parts of the population and think that you’re going to get away with it forever. That’s just not going to happen. Plus, we don’t want it to happen. So it’s really the social change aspect that that got me to where I am.

Being German, of course, I reckoned with the legacy of Holocaust in my country. And as a teenager, I had a really profound insight. Obviously, the vast majority of people had colluded with the system. And I remember sitting there as a teenager and thinking, Hold on… If the vast majority of people colluded, I would have to. Because I’m not a better human being than 98% of the population. And I realised that we tell ourselves that we have a lot of choice, but really we’re so dependent on the system around us. And that’s a really humbling thought to realise, wow, I can really be in out of integrity if the system bends me out of shape every day. And that’s what people experience right? So one doesn’t even have to go to fascism to get there. It’s already in the current system that people have bent out of shape every day of their lives. That’s what systems do. So for me, it was it was Nazi Germany that got me to this realization of just how much power systems have – the ecosystem that we grow up in and that we operate in.

Featured image by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Dr. Sharon Blackie is probably best known as the best-selling author of If Women Rose Rooted, which weaves together Celtic mythology, stories of modern day ecological heroines, and her personal story of escape from the Wasteland of so-called civilisation into the wild and wonderful edges of Ireland and Scotland. Her work explores the relevance of myth, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, social and environmental problems we face today.

She now lives in Wales, in an old house which began life in the 1700s as a tiny nonconformist chapel, on a small farm in the Cambrian mountains. She and her husband live there with their hens, a flock of pedigree sheep, four border collies and Maeve, a tabby kitten also known as The Kitten of the Apocalypse.

Sadly, we didn’t get around to discussing the Kitten of the Apocalypse – although the kitten did come up in conversation before we started recording, as she had just irreparably destroyed Sharon’s headset – but we do talk about Celtic mythology, connection with land, talking to crows, the hero’s and heroine’s journeys, the Soul of the World, community, social media, the patriarchy, and Sharon’s forthcoming book on the joys and role of the older woman, Hagitude.

Sharon tells me her favourite fictional character is Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax, a not-to-be-messed-with old mountain witch in whose image she plans to model her old age. When in doubt, she asks myself, ‘What would Granny do?’ Granny seems to be doing a great job so far of being a guiding star for Sharon, having recently helped her navigate a major international relocation, a global pandemic, a bout of rheumatoid arthritis, and lymphoma.

I know you will enjoy this conversation. I really appreciate how Sharon emphasises the importance of our own place – not trying to save the planet as an abstract idea, but really cherishing the land beneath our feet, the birds and animals we encounter in our everyday lives, the very real reality of right here – and also this idea of touching the natural world, and allowing it to touch us, feel the rain on our face, the wind in our hair. And trust me – if you can grow to love and appreciate the weather in the north of Scotland, or the west of Ireland, you can love it anywhere.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And our archive of conversations – with Charles Eisenstein, Tim Jackson, Jude Currivan, and Bill McKibben are available for free on Spotify, and now also on Apple Podcasts!

Favourite Quotes:

Recovery from the wasteland really began when I moved from America to a croft in the northwest Highlands of Scotland. And really began to think very carefully about that my roots both in the land and in the myths and stories of the land, our inheritance, our folk and mythical tradition. That really revolutionized everything. It opened up all kinds of new possibilities – writing, teaching, all of the work that I do now was founded on that experience of going back to the land and really learning how to belong to it.

I would be walking the land with the dogs, and there were no people to talk to. So I talked to the land, and completely immersed myself in all that weather. And that really was a radical way of connecting, of actually making a proper relationship with the land, because I was talking to the land, to rocks, to all of the things that were in the landscape, living or rocklike. I was talking to them as if they were people, as if they were my friends, because there was nobody else there. And to me, that is how you really build a sense of relationship and belonging to a place.

[Women in the old stories] are literally guardians and protectors of the land, forbidding humans to take too much, to go too far, because we are very embodied creatures, women, by nature of all the things that we’re able to do, from giving birth through to all kinds of other biological phenomena. And I think that’s the nature of female wisdom.

I love consequences. And I like a good consequence in a story. There are consequences if you mess it up, the land becomes a wasteland or there is an inundation, a flood… Either wastelands or floods happen constantly in Celtic mythology as a response to humans messing up the balance between them and the natural world and also disrespecting the Otherworld.

The Otherworld in our tradition is not some transcendental kind of “out there” or “up there” place. It’s not a place at all. It’s entangled with this world, it overlaps it, envelops it, surrounds it. It’s another layer, if you like, through which you can sometimes pierce the veil and see. And if you don’t respect the other world, which in lots of ways is kind of similar to the very old concept of the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, then again, bad stuff happens and that and all of this stuff is presided over by women. The Otherworldly women are the ones that understand when enough is enough, and when too much has been taken.

In the old tradition, love is fierce, love is protective. Just as any mother would feel very protective towards her child if it were threatened, and be fairly fierce, that is the kind of love we have to have for the earth… the idea that we can love people into not committing atrocities is crazy. It’s that fierce love that we see time and time again in our old stories. It’s a bit of tough love. But it is love, it comes out of a love for the world and an unwillingness to see it break.

I find it very sad when people are constantly looking to the east or, or further west, even to the very beautiful Native American tradition, for stories of living in balance and harmony with the Earth, when we’ve got them here. And it’s not just that we’ve got them here, it’s that they are tied to our land and to our places. They’re in this country. They’re part of our lineage. And I think that if we don’t have a sense that we too have that tradition, we too have a whole lineage of stories about living in balance and harmony with the earth and all kinds of other good stuff, then we never really feel ownership of the problem that we’ve created.

We hear so many bad things about the West, and what we have inflicted upon the world. And of course, we have, but before that happened, we had some really good stuff. And it’s not all that long ago. And I don’t see why we can’t reclaim those stories, and reclaim some of the wisdom, and particularly the women’s wisdom that is so lost from the world.

The same kinds of acts that are perpetrated against us, as women, against our daughters and our mothers, are perpetrated against the planet, the earth which gives us life, the earth with which women have for so long been identified. Our patriarchal warmongering, growth and domination based culture has caused runaway climate change, the mass extinction of species and the ongoing destruction of wild and natural landscapes in the unstoppable pursuit of progress.

There are many ways to change the world. And there are people who go out there who are activists, like the very wonderful Extinction Rebellion, and so on, who come at this from a very necessary level of political change, or social and cultural change. I was trained and still see myself as a psychologist. And to me, that kind of action is useless if you can’t change the way that people perceive the world and their relationship with it. So you need both.

Just a simple act like that, of walking outside your house, turning the screens off, walking outside, talking to a crow, talking to a tree, just addressing it like you would address a neighbour in the street makes all of the difference. It undermines that separation that we have fallen into. And it makes you see yourself as a part of everything else around you rather than something that is standing above it.

Older women are really trivialized at best. We’re required to be invisible, we’re not supposed to have a voice, we’re supposed to go away quietly and die. And again, all of these older stories show us a very, very different world, in which older women were profoundly respected and had a particular kind of wisdom. So [in Hagitude] I wanted to really begin with those stories. And to see what those stories told us about the various ways in which we could grow into a more meaningful elderhood and a more contributory elderhood.

A lot of people see that as having things taken away from us, because we’re menopausal, whereas I really genuinely do see it as a wonderful opportunity to focus on different things. And so yes, it ends. It’s a journey, inevitably, that ends with death. And I have inevitably drawn on my own experience of befriending death, I suppose, and walking hand in hand with death for a little while in talking about the later stages of elderhood. But now that we’re living longer in the West, we often have many decades of what we might think of as elderhood in which to do meaningful and useful work.

Links:

About Sharon

[Featured image by Kevin Mueller on Unsplash]

My guest this week, Bill McKibben, is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, and the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. He was a 2014 recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, and the Gandhi Peace Award. He has written over a dozen books about the environment. His first, The End of Nature, was published 30 years ago. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honour.

As I mention in our conversation, the first time I first met Bill was at the Blue Vision Summit in Washington DC back in 2009, and he blew my socks off with his combination of solid science and electrifying passion. Then we marched together in Copenhagen in December of that year during the COP15 UN climate change conference, under the banner of 350.org.

Bill is one of the most tenacious eco-warriors I know, and a great inspiration to me. In this conversation we talk about climate change – of course – but also oil companies, denial and disinformation, the Koch brothers, Greta Thunberg, solar power, the work of science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, New York, Washington, COP26, the book of Job, nuclear bombs, the role of over 60s in climate activism, and bush-whacking (and I don’t mean the former president).

I hope you enjoy our conversation. You might be interested to know that we also publish the VIDEO of these conversations to our Patreon page, at Patreon.com/sowingtheseedsofchange.

Bill’s favourite quote was: “There are no lost causes, only causes not yet won.” –Norman Thomas. Well worth holding as a mantra, when all seems hopeless.

Here are my favourite quotes from Bill himself:

The fact that we failed to do it [implement free healthcare in the US] for all those years won’t make it harder to do – it will still be there to work on. And climate change really isn’t like that. If you don’t solve it fairly quickly, in fact, very quickly, then you don’t solve it at all, because you pass a series of tipping points that are irreversible.

They [the oil companies] embarked across the industry on a multi-billion dollar campaign to build this kind of architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation, that would keep people engaged in a completely sterile debate about whether or not climate change was real. A debate, remember, that both sides knew the answer to – it’s just that one of them was willing to lie about it. And it turns out to have been the most consequential lie in human history, because it cost us 30 years when we could have been at work.

[On conscious acts of civil disobedience, which has seen Bill put in handcuffs and jailed multiple times] People have to go to jail over and over and over again, to make our institutions pay attention to basic physics. But we do apparently have to do that over and over again.

The kind of analysis deepened among people building movements, and we began to have very particular lines of attack, taking on fossil fuel expansion, things like the Keystone XL pipeline. That turned into huge movements that helped more people understand what was going on, maybe most effectively this vast fossil fuel divestment movement, that’s now become the largest anti-corporate campaign of its kind in history, about $15 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have divested from fossil fuel, including Oxford, Cambridge, as of last week, Harvard.

[On the woodland gnat, Megophthalmidia mckibbeni] It seemed appropriate that they would name a pesky insect in my honour, and I was very grateful to the biologists for having done so.

At this point, we’re not playing to stop global warming anymore. That’s not on the list of options. We’re playing to stop it short of the point where it cuts civilizations off at the knees. And it’s a very open question whether we’ll be able to do that or not. The momentum of these physical systems is enormous and scary, and against it, we still have a relatively puny band of people who are willing to devote all of themselves to making change as best they can.

Exxon is not ever going to change. It knows how to do one thing, which is dig up stuff and set it on fire.

If you’re JPMorgan Chase, yes, you make a lot of money lending to the fossil fuel industry, but it’s still only six or 7% of your deal book, so maybe, maybe you can figure out how to sacrifice that much in favour of the planet surviving.

It was Oppenheimer watching that [first atomic bomb] explosion who quoted from the Hindu scripture, from the Bhagavad Gita: We are become as Gods, destroyers of worlds. So far, we haven’t managed to blow the world up with nuclear weapons, thank heaven, because I think we could imagine the damage that would result. But we’ve had a harder time imagining that the explosion of a billion cylinders inside a billion pistons every second of every day, could accomplish the same kind of damage.

One of our jobs is to figure out how to make ourselves so much smaller, and fit back into the world around us.

Physics and biology don’t negotiate, they don’t compromise, they don’t meet you in the middle, they just do what they do. And if you insist on believing that they will, then you will end up living on a world where the temperature gets so high that, if it’s not exactly hell, it’s roughly the same temperature.

We’re past the point where your individual action can actually solve climate change, we’re not going to deal with the math of climate change one Tesla at a time, one vegan dinner at a time. The most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual, and join together with others in movements large enough to make some kind of difference.

Links:

350.org

Bill’s latest book is called Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? which Naomi Klein described as “A love letter, a plea, a eulogy, and a prayer. This is Bill McKibben at his glorious best. Wise and warning, with everything on the line. Do not miss it.”

Bill’s website is billmckibben.com

Our Patreon page: Patreon.com/sowingtheseedsofchange

Featured image by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

My guest for this week’s podcast is the wonderful Dr Jude Currivan, who I’ve known for several years now through her work with the Whole World View community. Jude is hard to categorise, as she combines and transcends many diverse worlds. She is a mystic, a successful international businesswoman, has a Masters in Physics from Oxford, specialising in cosmology and quantum physics, a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Reading. But above all, I would say she is a powerful agent for conscious change and evolution, as well as one of the warmest, most delightful and delight-filled human beings that I know.

She and her husband, Tony, live near Avebury – Avebury is famous as the site of the largest stone circle in the world, which is about 5,000 years old, and is one of the most significant pagan locations in the UK.

We touch on divinity and humanity, science and spirituality, mysticism, complex systems, intuition, coalitions of the willing, The Celestine Prophecy, Gaia, internet bullying, Buddha babies, the year 2067, the Big Bang (although Jude contends that it wasn’t Big and it wasn’t a Bang), forest bathing, kohlrabi and brassica massacres – and literally the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you will too. My main takeaway was this beautiful perspective that we live in a participatory universe, that our apparently individual consciousness is a fractal of the one cosmic mind, so we are connected in ways that we can’t see. It seems there is growing evidence – both from science and from anecdotal evidence – that even though they’re invisible, these connections are very real. We’re in this volatile state between the old, materialist worldview, and the new paradigm in which consciousness is key – maybe even the ground out of which all else arises.

Patreons can enjoy this podcast from today. If you’re not yet a supporter on Patreon, do please consider signing up. Else you can enjoy this podcast from next week for free on the usual podcast platforms.

And don’t forget – last week’s conversation with Tim Jackson: Happiness and Wellbeing in a Post-Growth World, is now available to everybody, for free, on Spotify!

My favourite quotes:

Often children do have these [mystical] experiences, but we live in a society where the entire society is based on a worldview of materialism and separation. And those experiences, whilst many people have them, and they’re natural to us, are just denigrated, or peripheralized, or told they’re imaginary, or they’re not important. So for many people they get squished out early. And what I’m finding now is that people are waking up to realize how enriching these communications and adventures can be. 

This emergent new science is radically different from the old science of materialism and separation, a radical new view of reality of multidimensionality, ultimately a unified cosmos, a cosmos where mind and consciousness aren’t something we have, but literally what we and the whole world are, an evolutionary cosmology, a universe that doesn’t just exist and evolve in this profoundly interconnected and unified way, but has this impulse to evolve from simplicity to complexity.  

Collectively, we’ve had a worldview that’s really based been based on the old science. And it’s the old 19th century science, a science of materialism and separation. And sure enough, when we look out, our world does appear to be made up of separate things. And so we’ve behaved accordingly, whether that’s the way our governance, our education, our organizations, our health care, all of that. That’s driven how we behave with each other, it’s driven the way we behave with our planetary home. And it’s totally unsustainable, as we know. So we’ve come to the end of the road of any way in which we can have that worldview be other than destructive.  

What happens in evolutionary biology is that when a system becomes unsustainable, whether it’s an ecosystem or a weather pattern or whatever, it literally begins to break down. And yet, at the same time that it’s breaking down, a new level of potential emergence, a higher level of complexity, begins to potentiate… what we find in evolutionary biology is something called flickering. When something flickers, it’s when the old system can no longer sustain, but as it breaks down, it’s also creating a bridge to this newer possibility. So it jumps forward and it jumps back. It flickers between the two states. And depending on the level of potentiality and coherence of the emergence system, it can prevail, and evolutionary progress continues.  

In this emergent new science, our entire universe exists and evolves as a unified, fundamentally sentient intelligent entity. So yes, we’re contributing to its journey of evolution of our entire universe, and our beloved home Gaia, regardless of whether humanity itself goes extinct or not.   

All the evidence is telling the same new story, the same new narrative. And it’s turning the old science upside down, because it’s showing us that our universe exists and evolves as a unified entity, everything is in relationship to everything else.  

For me, the opposite of love is fear. Love connects, fear divides. So in a sense, the old science was a cosmology of fear, a cosmology of scarcity, a cosmology of separation. And then the evidence of this new science is helping us wake up, to remember we’re inseparable. It’s innately a science of love, of relationship.  

[On the hard problem of consciousness]: It’s the wrong question. Because there is no separation of materiality and immateriality. When we see that mind and consciousness are what we and the whole world are, then what we’re seeing is a differentiation into the appearance of a physical body. But the appearance of the physical body is still ultimately, consciousness expressed as meaningful in-formation expressed as energy, matter, and space-time. Once we get past all of that separating out and realize that it’s a differentiation, not a separation, we’re making headway.  

[On how we can experience the unity of everything]: Do what makes your heart sing. What is it that when you experience it, you just feel love? It may be looking in the eyes of that Buddha baby, it may be a sunrise, it may be being with a tree and, or in a forest. In writing Gaia: Her Story, my new book, I’ve been in awe of this interrelated web of life, that the indigenous traditions have always maintained and spiritual seekers have always sought. So I would ask the question of everyone, if you’ve have something that makes your heart sing, go with it, live it, be it, because that is the way into remembering, literally re-membering that relationship, that love, that entire relationship.  

Another way into this great adventure of re-membering and experiencing unity awareness is intuition. Intuition is our superpower. It really is. If we listen to our intuition, and don’t discount it, but realize that it’s that resonance that connects us with everything else around us and beyond our horizon. The more we actually listen and follow and hear our intuition – the more it helps us to take this great journey of homecoming to who we really are.  

[My work is] helping and hoping to bring forward this new perspective, this new whole worldview, where science converges, and integrates with spirituality, and consciousness, and reveals a meaningful, purposeful, evolving universe, in which we have parts to play. If I can share that with others, and they get that not just here in our heads, but experience it in our hearts, and embody it in our purpose, then [the year] 2067 can actually be a world that is truly transformed. Because our collective dis-ease is our fragmented perspective of the nature of reality. It’s a more fundamental dis-ease than any pandemic. So if we can heal that dis-ease, which we now have the evidence to show is based on a wrong perspective of reality, and instead come from a lived science and experience of love, then we can literally come together to transform how we are with ourselves, with each other, and above all, with our planetary home Gaia.  

We belong here, we belong to each other, we belong to our planetary home, we belong to our entire universe. We are loved, we are supported. And if we can wake up to that knowingness, we literally can change the world, and heal ourselves and heal our relationship with the whole world.  

It’s so crucial that we begin from the perspective of unity, this wholeness, this understanding that we are all profoundly, fundamentally, not just interconnected, but we are all microcosms of the whole.  

Life is nonlinear.. it seems to me that this is our opportunity, wherever we’re called, however we’re called. Each of us is [called] at some point, and we have to link up and lift up together, and co create something that’s greater than the sum of all its parts.

Show Notes and Links:

Jude Currivan’s website

Don Hoffman: The Case Against Reality

Jude’s book: The Cosmic Hologram: In-Formation at the Centre of Creation

And her organisation: Whole World View

Featured image by Federico Beccari on Unsplash