Episodes
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Hey fellow Pathfinders, it’s Rob with another way to be happy at the end of the world.
In this one I’m going to hit you with something hard (sorry) and then I’m going to make it feel better than ever, so trust me and stick around to the end.
Here goes…
This civilisation is finished.
And that’s OK.
Because in our blood are the memories of our ancestors who have survived ice ages, floods, famine, war, pestilence and every horror imaginable. We wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t.
We’ve done this all before.
“Perhaps”, a part of me says “but it still hurts”.
Of course it hurts, but it needn’t hurt in time. Deep down, I reassure myself, this pain is all bound up in perception and attachment both of which I have the ability to affect.
So I tell myself a little story to try it out and it goes like this…
Our privilege in the West is catching up with us. The fear instilled in us by the thought of our civilisation being over is the same fear that we have instilled in others for several centuries by painting the leaves and people of the world in White European thought and culture. Now that everything is so thoroughly painted over, many of us have known nothing else than painted leaves on dying trees and we wonder where all the birds went.
And so I remind myself of the paint and I see it for what it is: a way of seeing the world, a creation, conscious or otherwise, based on the perception and belief of the painters who see (and have for a long time seen) the world with a detachment and arrogance that leads them to think that they can improve it. That they must improve it and make it in their own image. That things as they are, people as they are, life as it is and the cosmos as we find it to be, is not enough. And so they set to work painting over it. And we’ve all been painting ever since, even when those we seek to paint over tell us the folly of our efforts and predict with startling accuracy how it will all end in tears.
I see too that my own perception is a two-way thing: I project out into the world a light that is coloured and distorted by my thoughts and beliefs, which bounces off of all the things I perceive, right back into my eyes, my mind, heart and soul where I often falsely assume that I am seeing something entirely outside of me and for the very first time.
But it’s a reflection. And what’s more, the more I look at it the more I realise that my interpretation of that reflection does not have to be unconscious, that I can in fact participate in it. I can choose. I can also, it turns out (after making countless mistakes and enduring a great deal of self-inflicted suffering) choose what kind of light I send out, what I bounce it off of and how I interpret it when it comes back. And in doing so I am an active participant in the creation of my own reality.
If I’m awake to it. And so often I’m not because I find it incredibly hard at times to be that responsible - it’s exhausting. It’s also incredibly fun to learn about the world, but it’s hard.
I say it’s hard but to be more specific, what is really hard is the letting go; an incredibly simple act in itself perhaps - just stop doing what you’re doing - but it’s incredibly hard nonetheless because deep down, letting go is the relinquishment of known, experienced, relative safety, for an unknown; for an uncertainty.
It so often feels far safer to stay where I am than to let go and jump into another way of seeing and being in the world, to let go of my long held beliefs and to create new ones, even though I know I can no longer stay where I am because I realise that helping to paint the world doesn’t serve me.
I know that letting go will set me free and yet I hesitate.
So I take a look at freedom and imagine what it is and I see that perhaps it is nothing more than a feeling of no longer being bound by all the fears that stop me letting go.
So as I look at the end of civilisation I ask myself what it might take to let go of any and all the thoughts and beliefs, frames of reference and ways of perceiving the world that lead me to feeling scared and unsafe. What would it be like to let go of any fear and doubt, limitations, blocks and trauma that are triggered when I look at it? What would remain when they are all gone?
Love.
Unconditional love for all life, all people and myself. Acceptance, surrender and love.
What would it take to love it all, to love everything unconditionally? To fall in love with the world, all of it, every little bit? I’d have to let go of my fears and doubts.
Which leads me to ask some practical questions for my life: how do I do that? How do I cultivate conditions within me to perceive the world in such a way that I see the world and everything in it with unconditional love?
Perhaps with more gratitude, compassion, forgiveness and appreciation.
And most importantly of all: how can I create conditions within me to perceive the world in such a way that enables everyone I encounter to be fearless expressions of their own true nature, full of unconditional love for themselves, others and all of life? And for me to love them, no matter who they are, no matter how different their expression of their own true nature is from mine.
How do I do that?
I don’t think that question can ever be fully answered, in fact, it might even take a lifetime of asking and the answers I get may well be different every single day.
Maybe that’s enough for here and now, for me at least.
Maybe I could even tell myself that in loving life unconditionally, with a collapsing civilisation or without, I am even helping to create conditions conducive to life. Because maybe, after all, that’s exactly what love is.
So if we want to know if we are on the right track, doing the right thing, creating the world we need and want, living the lives we want, helping to regenerate the Earth, all I need to do is check how I’m feeling and ask “Is this love?” and then change the way I’m seeing, thinking and acting until the answer is inescapably “yes”.
Perhaps that’s enough, perhaps that’s a start at least. Perhaps The Beatles had it right all along - love is all you need.
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Welcome to Part 4 of the How To Be Happy At The End Of The World series.
In this instalment I’d like to share something I’ve just submitted to Adbusters magazine. I want to share it with you as well because it brings together a lot of the ideas I’ve been writing about on my Substack and in the podcast and I thought you might enjoy it.
It’s a lot more poetic than normal and is usually the sort of thing I write in my journal but never share so I thought for that very reason I should start sharing that kind of thing.
The stuff that makes me a little hesitant to press ‘Publish’ on as it feels so personal.
But here goes….
I’m standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes, lost in thought as my wife is trying to get my attention. Apparently I was ignoring her. She’s looking at me with a mix of scorn and then concern and she asks me what’s going on.
I’ve just spent the last few weeks down a rabbit-hole of climate science in preparation for an interview with the world’s foremost earth systems scientist. Standing here at the kitchen sink I’ve still got the numbers from his paper ‘The Future Of The Human Climate Niche’ reverberating inside me.
How we’re on course for 3-4°C temperature increase by 2070 and that failing mass migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience mean annual temperatures of >29°C currently only found on 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. How the habitable area of the world is going to dramatically shrink. So much so, he concludes, that one way or another, be it by transformation or collapse, this civilisation is finished.
Rapid, almost miraculous transformation or billions will watch as hundreds of millions die. Crop failure, famine, wet bulb heat domes. Death but out of all proportion from anything I can fathom.
I take my hands out of the water and rest my weight on the edge of the sink, my head drops down and I stare at the water. Hearing the same numbers as I say them to my wife, she tries to reassure me that all I have to do is look after the kids.
“That’s just it” I reply. “I can’t. Not from this”. And I just break open and cry. Shoulder shaking, eyes screwed up, kind of crying. I gasp a little for air as I settle myself back down again.
A few days later I’m folding my 3 year old daughter’s clothes away in her drawers as she’s playing behind me on the bed and I cry again, this time silently but just as full of love and grief.
From what I see in the mainstream media, people seem to think that eco-anxiety is some strange abstraction that only affects young people who are too naive to know better and who must have got things out of all proportion. As far as I’m concerned, eco-anxiety is just plain old fear and it’s not limited to anyone based on their age. Its only limits, as I can tell, are awareness, compassion and the ability to experience and adequately deal with fear.
Fear is 100% the right reaction to our predicament. Fear is all bound up with control. Fear is what it feels like to not be in control, especially in high risk situations.
This is a high risk situation. The highest of all risks - existential no less.
And we as individuals understandably do not feel as if we are in control right now because no matter what any one person does to turn this around, it’s not enough.
What matters is what we do together.
A painful lesson within this grief is that individually, everything we do is both necessary and woefully insufficient at the same time. What we do together is everything.
What we’re currently doing together and have been doing for some time is the problem. It’s our culture, our values, our identities, our very way of seeing and interpreting the world.
Our shared stories that provide the unchecked lenses through which we make sense of the world and everything in it.
Right now our stories are no longer believable. The stage is flooding, the backdrops are on fire and the cast and crew are all too busy checking their phones to act or change the set between scenes.
Our stories don’t hold up anymore. I can no longer suspend my disbelief.
Go to school, go to Uni or College, get a job, work your way up, build a career making widgets or selling insurance, retire and get some sun, have some Grandkids and enjoy the fruits of your lifelong labour. Buy stuff, cool stuff, fill your new-build house with it, express the inner you through mass consumption and repress your fear. There is nothing to be scared of. Keep on shopping. Shop til you drop. The universe is a cold, dead, chance occurrence, devoid of meaning, nothing more than an empty void with some pretty lights that one day too will fade. You are all that matters so consume, consume, consume. You’ll be dead soon too.
B******t.
Fear is the right reaction to our predicament, and as my pain points me to the source of my anxiety being control, the only thing I can do now in order to be happy at the end of the world is to give up trying to control any of this.
To give up running from the fear.
So I let it catch up with me, fully aware. I look it in the eye and let it know that I’m here. I let it watch me. I let it know exactly who I am because there simply isn’t enough time nor tears to put this off any longer. And as it gets closer to me, and I get closer to it, instead of shaking into a blubbering mess its mountainous shadow starts to shrink until it's the exact same size as me. It’s just a shadow. My shadow.
As we talk without words I realise that it wants me to stay alive. It loves me and needs me to live. So I listen to it as it silently speaks. I take the letter from its black-smoke hand and I let go of whatever has been holding me back from reading it.
I read the words.
Two words, nothing more: “WAKE UP”, in black, dripping letters.
Written in oil.
Wake up, it tells me, to the idea that all ideas are made together in community, all ways of life are shared experiences, all cultural norms are handed on. That all that seems so toweringly huge and insurmountable in this civilisation of growth and oil is built on nothing more than shared belief in a crumbling status quo.
And that in between the cracks of the pasted-on smiles of fake tanned celebrities, billionaires and Presidents, life finds a way to come through. All roads lead home after all. The cracks will deepen and converge, the monuments will falter and tilt. The ground will give way with a tug of the rug beneath it. And yes, finally, the woodcutters that we’ve become will fall with the cut of the last branch that supports us and as it drops we will come to realise what’s always been wrong. That there is no escape from being entangled. There is no separation - there is no ‘here’ without ‘there’.
We’ve never been in control. We’ve never been separate individuals. We’ve built all this together. Each of us a whole and a part in the story of the world. A story that is changing because it no longer holds. We’re all waiting with bated breath for what will happen next. Where will this story go? How will it end? How will the next one begin?
There are whispers in creation. There are clues in the ground itself, buried beneath the layers of the Anthropocene’s ‘wealth’ where a different kind of treasure has been waiting for milennia to be found. Where both XX and XY have long marked the spot to dig, with clue after clue leading us to find that every atom in us was forged within a Sun. That everything we know and love has been drawn together by the magic of the stars, watered by the ocean and nurtured by the land. That a spreading out of the branches of life from one shared source, sprawling in all directions across the globe, has been weaving everything together for 3.8 billion years. Nature’s intelligence running more imperfectly perfect than any AI, learning to know itself as it creates the very conditions conducive to itself in all that it does.
And that as it explores and learns, it has in us, folded in on itself as if pressing its face into a mirror for the very first time. It learns to live upright. It builds everything we know, have ever known and all that is lost. It stands here now in you and I just as much as it does a tree. And it wants us to live so it makes us scared. It chases us across the landscape of our souls until finally we succumb to ourselves and take the letter from its black-smoke hand and read the words aloud, so loud they reverberate across the seas, the land and sky, rattling every star-forged soul in creation with: “WAKE UP!”
Wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up.
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Why won’t we solve the climate crisis?
Because the climate is not the problem - we are.
Our worldview, the way we interpret the world and each other, what Herman Daly calls our ‘pre-analytic vision’, or what other’s refer to as our paradigm or our culture -that’s the problem.
Our current crises serve to show us that our whole way of understanding our shared reality is faulty. This understanding is foundational to our entire civilisation and has been for thousands of years. Which is what makes the current predicament so monumental and why plastic straws just aren’t going to cut it.
This shared understanding has gifted us immense wealth and prosperity and has freed so many from so much suffering but it’s based on an understanding of the world and ourselves as separate.
We are not separate from each other or from nature - we are nature.
Yet we see ourselves as somehow distinct and detached, isolated and alienated from the world around us; somehow we’ve become discrete actors on a stage with everything else serving only as a painted, fixed backdrop.
It’s a lie. An unconscious one but a lie all the same.
We are completely entangled in countless systems. Not only is everything we do entangled in such systems but so too is everything we think as well, because living in these webs means that everything is constantly being determined in relationship to everything else.
Everything we think and do is co-created in a giant dance that seems messy and chaotic but is playing out in nested systems where the distinction between parts and wholes is no longer as useful as principles, functions and relationships, all co-evolving in one giant self-regulating system that is the earth, itself a part of larger systems all the way up to the universe.
The problem isn’t the climate, it’s us. It’s our inner world, our stories, our ways of seeing and making sense of the world. We are seeing the world askew, through distortions and misperceptions and we can’t address our climate and ecological crises until we transform the way we see the world and ourselves.
We are not separate from the world. The universe is not a cold, dead place. Your consciousness itself is evidence that the universe is conscious because it is not separate from you - you are it, it is you.
The climate isn’t the problem, it’s that we’ve somehow lost our souls, our roots and our connection to the world and all life on it.
How else could we cut down the Amazon, burn fossil fuels, and kill each other?
It is a problem of our minds and their perspectives and a problem of our hearts and their disconnection.
Both have been programmed by our stories. Stories of scarcity, hostility and separation. Stories of machines, of parts, of false competition and duality of mind and body, of us and them - stories of the ‘other’ when there is only one.
Stories of how we were made and put here. Of nature as a cold, harsh beast and of the human as even colder and far harsher when left to express our true nature.
Stories that no longer serve us.
Separation drives a wedge of division between us and all things like a stake through the heart. What we do to the world, to each other and all living things, we do to ourselves. It is only our worldview that tells us otherwise, a story that enables mass destruction. A story that is nothing more than an illusion, a misperception and a distortion. It is a story that confers great power to the teller, which is why it continues to be told - we’ve built our entire civilisation on it after all.
But it is just a story.
Our solution doesn’t lie in carbon capture and storage technologies that don’t yet exist, or anything for that matter in the external world. It lies in the changing of our minds and in the reconnection between ourselves and all life that flows as a result.
It lies in the wiping of our eyes to remove the distortions and misperceptions that keep us from seeing the world as it truly is: infinite and full of love, all the way through.
Such a transformation is inevitable, it is the lesson of the climate crisis.
The question is simply one of: how long will it take us to learn it as a culture? How long will it take to assimilate what our sciences are telling us, into the stories of who we are and how all this came to be? How long will it take us to realise just how miraculous, wonderful and entangled we all are? When will our stories become one?
This lesson will cost us dearly to learn. Just how much it ends up costing us is up to us and our appetite for change. I’m often told by my coaching friends that people only change once it becomes more painful to stay the same than to transform (aka hit rock bottom), a rock bottom that is either achieved or imagined, depending on the individual’s beliefs and values.
So what will it be for this civilisation? Will we transform overnight following a great realisation? Or over many decades as we find rock bottom? This is for us all to decide.
The fact that we’ve been born at a time where such a choice is possible is unbelievably rare, perhaps even unique and the consequence of this choice has implications not only for all life on earth but on the nature of human consciousness too. It is a call to a level of self-awareness we’ve never experienced before, an awareness of our oneness, of our entanglement in all things, of a different way of seeing ourselves and all life.
This choice is yours, it’s all of ours and we shouldn’t be scared to make it. It’s easy and there are no wrong answers, whatever we choose to do. Why? Because we are not separate from it, everything we do we are doing to ourselves, this is Karma.
Even at times of great crisis and chaos, upheaval and change, everything is always absolutely perfect as it is because it is you.
So in making your choice of the story you want to tell of the world you are in and how you want to respond to it, you define yourself because you and it are not separate.
Which equally means that in defining yourself, you define the world and every entanglement you have with it.
If we want to change the world, we need only change our selves by changing our stories. The stories that define us, that shape our beliefs and our identities because it is these stories that programme the way we see the world and how we see the world determines how we interpret it and how we act.
The climate isn’t the problem that needs solving, it’s us.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately talking with activists and changemakers about the future of the environmental movement and one thing that keeps coming up again and again is spirituality.
I think it is because the heaviness of the current existential situation causes us to suffer internally.
And while it is important to take action in the world, we often forget that it all starts inside us in our thoughts and emotional lives.
So now, more than ever, I’m looking for ways to be happy, even at the end of the world.
The first way I want to share is a mix of two things: compassion and forgiveness.
More and more I’m ascribing to a theory of change that suggests that personal change is fundamental to social change so focusing on things like this isn’t just about my own happiness but actually bringing about change in the world around me too.
The idea is that our internal world and our societies are nested systems, fractal even.
Each consciousness within a collective consciousness that is feeling and perceiving the same things, just from different viewpoints. All interconnected and interdependent.
And behind all of us as individuals is the same awareness and this awareness, once rid of all the ego and baked on layers of b******t over a lifetime of seeing the world in a certain way, is itself pure peace. No one gives you peace, you already have them, you just don’t always experience them in the same way that the sun is always shining, it’s just that the clouds get in the way.
Spirituality, Eastern traditions and indigenous cultures show us this too.
They teach us that peace is here the whole time, we’re just not seeing it. Which is refreshing in such a fraught and tense world.
Perhaps the miracle we need is really an awakening, a more conscious awareness of all the b******t and a rediscovering of the peace that is always here.
A mass transformation from fear to love. From separation to connectedness. That starts within each of us and spreads to all we come into contact with.
Especially with our enemies, those we argue with, those who seek to double down on business as usual just as we seek to abandon it.
Spiritual traditions would urge us to see that our ‘enemies’ are not evil, they are simply blind to love - and that instead of fighting them or making demands of them, we need to show them how blind they are to love by showing them and ourselves compassion and forgiveness.
Like me, your immediate reaction might be to recoil from this but I’ve persisted with it recently and given it a chance.
I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with this idea, as uncomfortable as it is and stayed with it to see if I can find something in it that makes sense.
So here goes…
Our enemies are no different from us, they are simply perceiving the world through very different lenses and filters of past experiences, thoughts, beliefs and identities.
All of which are socially constructed and open to change but only when we become aware of them and engage in their construction.
Most of us, but especially our enemies, do not do this. They and we operate out of unconscious thoughts and beliefs more often than not. In truth, probably about 99% of the time.
When we judge our enemies we reinforce and agree with their misperceptions - but the point is to call out the misperception instead, which first requires empathy and compassion.
When we persist in our judgment of others, with our anger, fear and hate, we undermine ourselves in the process.
Take for example, the loathing of the state to the extent that many of us feel compelled to make demands of them to stop doing what they’re doing.
Demanding things from bad guy governments actually puts us into a state of victimhood and serves to perpetuate the illusion that they have power over us that is greater than our combined power. We give away our power to them by saying “if only they would do this then everything would be fine” as our satisfaction then becomes contingent on their action or lack of it.
This gives them power over us as we place ourselves at their mercy. So maybe there is something to be said for not going down this route and instead finding new ways of seeing things.
So, back to compassion and forgiveness with another question: How do we call out the misperceptions in our enemies without fighting them?
Compassion and forgiveness.
Us seeing the good in them opens the door to them seeing it in themselves and this is what is most needed of all.
Contrary to what you may feel when looking at oil companies at the moment, there is no evil in the world, only insanity, ignorance and misperception.
If, like them, we can’t see truth we have no choice but to accept illusion.
Put another way, our oil exec enemies can’t see the truth and instead are glad to accept the illusions their egos have spun up for them to keep them happy doing what they’re doing.
They see what their lives have shown them and what their peers have shown them. Just like us. And they’ve found stories to tell themselves that make everything alright.
It’s just that their lives look very different to ours. And their stories sound nothing like ours.
Everything I am saying is also a story that I’m spinning up too. This is all conjecture but stay with me for a while as I imagine what the stories of others might look like as I try to appreciate a different point of view, one where it makes sense to burn as much oil as possible…
What if I had gone to boarding school from the age of 5 and been raised by staff at private school, seeing my family in the holidays in luxurious surroundings at every opportunity, surrounded by people and things of huge wealth, with the acceptance and full belief in a way of life that has rewarded them like no other, the ultimate positive reinforcement.
Elite universities, sat side by side with Duchesses and future presidents. Opulence, decadence and luxury, the continual comparison of wealth and material success with others, the incessant yearning for external validation in the material world. Years spent working horrendous hours, fortunes amassed. A mechanistic worldview completely ignorant of the web of life.
A deep belief in our separation as a natural consequence of a life spent in spaces impeccably sculpted by humans to be devoid of anything wild. A growing sense of foreboding as I grow older and older, always chasing satisfaction and never finding it, even with all the material goods in the world I’m still left with an empty feeling inside that I cannot name. The result of a severed connection to a living planet and the cold embrace of a meaningless universe. The product of a childhood without the warmth of my mother when I needed her most aged 5, struggling to sleep in a shared dorm and the cold judgment of a father who never knew how to love me because that was left to my Nanny. Feeling empty but full of enjoyment of the chase of success I keep going, it’s all I’ve known and it makes me feel powerful and better than others, which gives meaning to this otherwise meaningless endeavour. Every month I’m judged on my numbers being bigger than the month before and I’m scared of what might if they’re not. I have to keep going and now that I can start to se how messed up this all is, secretly, I’m working even harder to make as much money as I can so I can cash out and protect my kids. Others may have to starve but not us, the more I keep going, the more money I can make the better able I am to protect the ones I love from what’s coming. I need more power, I need more money, I need more security, safety and strength.
From that perspective, I don’t hit the brakes, I hit the gas as I subconsciously ask myself “what has this all been for?” I did as I was told. I did everything right. I suffered to make this happen. And so I no longer see anything that might stop me because I’m not looking for it, I’m avoiding it like the plague. My ego mind is working overtime to protect me from seeing anything like it. Which is why I am so offended when I’m shown it by people gluing themselves to my building. They terrify me. They are a huge threat and need to be locked away.
Now all those thoughts, that whole story isn’t true.
It’s all just stories.
Perhaps oil execs tell themselves stories like that in their minds, perhaps they don’t.
But whatever stories they are telling themselves, the stories are the reason they act as they do.
It’s all because of the stories. Because of the ego.
Maybe there is something to this spirituality stuff after all and compassion is actually quite useful to understanding the world.
But what of forgiveness?
Ego sees a world of evil, fear and separation while non-thinking awareness sees mystery, beauty and love.
The distinction between ego and awareness is a tricky one but it’s crucial, so try this…
Ask yourself: “What am I more: the voice in my head or the thing that hears it?”
This is the difference between ego and awareness. Your ego is the voice, your true nature is the bit that hears it. When you quieten the mind, you’re left with pure awareness, that’s always there, that’s the real you. It’s the exact same thing in me when I quieten my mind and it’s in every living thing. It’s pure consciousness.
It’s all any of us really are and it’s what makes us all one.
What my recent readings in spirituality have shown me, is that more than ever, we need to rediscover our humility and recognise that the world is utterly mysterious, beautiful and complex beyond our comprehension.
We’ve just lost our way and forgotten. We’ve been wrapped up in the ego and it has served us well, too well. It now threatens our very existence.
We still need to use our ego minds and the words and numbers it likes to play with so much to make sense of the world but we must always remember that these understandings are only ever attempts at understanding, mere perceptions that we inherit from one generation to the next about what is true and what seems to work but it is never complete knowledge.
When we act as if we have full knowledge and believe ourselves without question, our world will eventually collapse because it is built on distortions, ignorance and misperception.
Just look at the news. This is what we are living through right now.
This is where forgiveness comes in. Forgiveness for ourselves and others that we have been so blind, so misguided and so unaware. If we couldn’t see the truth, we had no choice but to accept illusions.
We need to remind ourselves that the true nature of reality is beyond comprehension.
Even the size of it is beyond our comprehension - trillions of planets orbiting billions and billions of stars inside billions and billions of galaxies in an ever expanding universe.
Consciousness erupting from inside each and every one of you so that the larger whole can know itself, hear itself, see itself and love itself through you.
This also means that if we can’t accept others, it means we can’t accept out true selves because they are us and we are them, just looking out through different eyes.
True self-acceptance requires acceptance of everyone else too - it requires compassion and forgiveness.
So, one way to be happy at the end of the world is to find the joy of self-acceptance that is hiding in plain sight behind compassion and forgiveness for everyone - yourself, your friends, your family, and yes, even insane oil executives hell-bent on destroying the world.
After all, persisting in the judgment of others as evil merely serves to keep us from the love and peace we are so inspired by in the first place and which is right here, right now and always has been, waiting for us to find it again.
Getting angry at the world and others in it, is the same as drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Instead, let go, forgive, love and set yourself free.
It might just change the world.
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In this episode I speak with Verel Rodrigues about eco-anxiety, youth activism and the future of the environmental movement.
As the conversations on this podcast have progressed I’m now of a mind to give more attention to eco-anxiety and a growing feature of future episodes will be to explore ways to be happy, even against a backdrop such as the one we are currently experiencing.
I want to give voice to how our situation is making many people feel (especially but not exclusively young people) and what we can do about it.
I’ve started work on a book called ‘How To Be Happy At The End of The World’ and in this episode that’s exactly what I got to chat about with Verel, a young climate activist who has been all over the news and social media in recent years as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.
Verel and I dig deep into our own experiences of eco-anxiety and how this fear drew us into activism and how the shape of activism is currently changing considerably as things evolve both in the movement and in policing and legislation.
We cover anxiety, youth activism, storytelling and the future of the environmental movement.
It is a personal, emotional and thought provoking chat that asks us to look deep inside ourselves and develop the courage we need to imagine a different future and believe that it is possible.
If you’re struggling with anxiety at the moment, please reach out to your GP and get a referral to some help, look after yourself and talk about it with others.
Please check out Force of Nature so you can learn about their work and check out all the resources they’ve put together on eco-anxiety and how to deal with it.
For now, get comfortable, hit play above and let’s go listen to Verel and I chat about Eco-Anxiety, Youth Activism and the future of the environmental movement.
To connect with Verel and stay up to date with his work and activism, follow him on LinkedIn - Verel Rodrigues
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Hands down one of the best conversations I’ve ever had on the topic of life, climate and ecological collapse and the future of the planet with one of the world’s most eminent Earth systems scientists (or Gaia scholars as they should also be known), this episode is not to be missed.
This felt like therapy as I asked all the questions I’ve ever had about the climate crisis and the future of life on earth.
How screwed are we? Why is there such inaction from governments? What can we do? Where are we headed? Am I going crazy or are we all really looking at the potential end of civilisation?
Strap yourselves in for one hell of a ride as we explore grief and optimism in the face of climate breakdown, what it feels like to crunch the numbers that predict the future of the human climate niche and how identifying with the life force in all things might just be enough to keep us going.
In this episode I meet with Prof Tim Lenton, Director of the Global Systems Institute and Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter and all round climate hero.
A mentee of James Lovelock, Tim carries on the torch of Gaia theory for the next generation. His work to date has covered the ways in which many different earth systems self-regulate and interconnect and has taken him from studying the nutrient balance of oceans to climate modelling, the evolution of life on earth as well as the identification of tipping points in past, present and future climatic systems - the kind that lead to significant accelerations in global heating in a non-linear fashion.
Tim and his group at Exeter focus on understanding the Earth as a system, modelling evolution, ecology, and biogeochemistry, providing early warning of climate tipping points, and identifying positive tipping points towards a better world.
Recent papers from Tim highlight the existential threat posed by climate change to our entire civilisation which make for some truly sobering reading. However, he has also recently published work on positive tipping points - tipping points in society that lead to non-linear, positive change such as the move to electric vehicles in Norway or the spread of ideas on social media.
This is my favourite episode of the podcast so far - Tim’s knowledge across a huge number of disciplines is astounding and he embodies the very best science has to offer in that his thinking is meticulous, he’s driven by awe and reverence for the natural world and he is thoroughly grounded in his humanity and connection with nature. Talking with him was a joy and we couldn’t ask for a better guide through these challenging and often overwhelming topics.
We cover a lot of ground in this episode, so hold on to your seats as we stare down civilisational collapse and envision an ecological alternative that takes inspiration from Gaia herself.
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In Episode 4 of The Pathfinders Collective podcast, I met with Ben Jack, Director of Common Seas - an organisation on a mission to tackle plastic pollution. This is another area where the reality of the situation is often under reported so I wanted to find out more about where we really are in order to better engage with possible solutions.
Ben is a font of knowledge on the whole plastic pipeline from production to waste and everything in between. Common Seas do amazing work in policy development, education and also work with researchers to explore the impact of plastics on our health - Ben himself was one of the first people in the world to have his blood tested for the presence of plastic and what he learned is incredibly eye-opening.
I was shocked at the scale of the challenge and the audacity yet again of the oil and gas industry but also emboldened by the work of Common Seas and the policies they are helping to make happen across the world.
So, if you're ready, let’s listen to Ben and explore the real problem of plastic and learn what the best solutions for a different kind of world look like.
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Welcome to Episode 3 of The Pathfinders Collective Podcast.
In this episode I meet with Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, a world leading climate scientist and the lead author of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment report.
Fresh from being at COP26 in Glasgow, Pierre spoke to me about:
- Carbon budgets
- The problem with economic growth
- Protest and civil disobedience
- What a post-fossil fuel economy might look like
- How a 1.7 - 1.8C degree warmer world is actually an optimistic target
- As well as discussing the emotional toll of climate change and how lines in the sand are different all over the world, with many lines already having been crossed
- Towards the end of our chat we touch on the inadequacy of the current state of democratic processes and the lack of success of green politics
- The need for market incentives to decarbonise the economy
- And how now is the time for businesses to step up with bold new visions to lead the way to a post-carbon world Pierre is an incredibly well accomplished academic having spent the last 30 years raising the alarm on climate change, whose analysis has enabled us to think about how we might best budget for carbon emissions, and helped to create a framework that is incredibly useful for scenario planning in order to avoid runaway climate change.
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In this episode of The Pathfinders Collective I sit down with Alex Rahir to answer his questions about The Pathfinders Collective - what it is for, why it exists, and what it seeks to achieve.
We cover emerging economic paradigms, theories of change that suggest we can’t have social transformation without personal transformation, eco-anxiety, climate grief, entrepreneurship and regeneration.
We tackle and address limiting beliefs that delay action, we identify why it’s actually more painful for climate activists to give up than to keep going and how climate change is an opportunity to re-imagine civilisation.
We learn that there is no one path, no one Pathfinder, instead we recognise that diversity, cooperation and collaboration are essential to meaningful action on climate and that no one person can do this alone.
Prompted by Noam Chomsky’s words of advice to Extinction Rebellion, we ask if there is a way to make the greening of capitalism profitable in order to accelerate the evolution of the current system into something new.
And finally, we learn how deeply interwoven our thoughts, beliefs, feelings and communities are in creating and changing the way we see the world, which in turn determines how we act to change the world itself.
Top Quotes:
“It’s more painful to give up than it is to keep going”
“We can’t have social change without deep, personal change”
“Can we make the greening of capitalism profitable and reward its evolution?”
“We don't have the time to completely deconstruct the system and start again. We have to work with what's in front of us”
“We can create a legacy by trying things out, testing things out and passing it on and hopefully finding things that work”
“I think we have to wake everybody up and that might annoy a lot of people. But then, once they've become aware, we need to take them with us, so we need to engender a system that actually rewards the kind of behaviours that we want to see in the world. That's how economies work.”
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Episode 1 of The Pathfinders Collective podcast is with Dr Pedro Baiz entrepreneur and data scientist at the Blockchain and Climate Institute, Imperial College London and also holds several CTO and Founder roles in data science focused startups and scale-ups.
We discuss disrupting business as usual through sustainable FinTech, how blockchain is revolutionising everything from pensions to global corporations and how the emergence of a new, decentralised economy and financial system has the power to change the world for the better.
We also cover what might happen if climate agreements were on a decentralised ledger, how retail finance can take on entrenched power and what the future holds for green focused leaders, entrepreneurs and businesses.
Find out more about Dr. Baiz and his work here and here.
Check out The Blockchain & Climate Institute for more on their work in using distributed ledger technology to tackle climate change.
And to find out more about regenerative business, entrepreneurship and to become a Pathfinder, visit thepathfinders.co
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