Episoder
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We belong to our symbols as much as they belong to us. Like the planetary environment, our relationship with language and symbols has impacted our culture, even our biology, argues Professor of Anthropology, Terrence Deacon. Our capacity for interpretation allows us to understand one another and work as a collective mind, explaining the incredible leaps our species has madeâand also the trouble weâre in.
Terrence joins me to explain our relationship to symbols and how they evolve with the world. We then discuss what happens when our symbols get stuck, or disconnected, simplifying into ideological constructs which fix our identities.
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Whoever controls the energy supply controls the new world order.
Russia and China are deepening their relationship, Western allies in the Middle East are joining the fossil-fuelled BRICS alliance spanning the globe, and the Wagner group is loosening Europeâs grip of Africa. The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting along new fault lines as rising powers focus on securing resources while the old Empire in the West pretends it can decouple economies and energy. The world is at war, but only one side is being honest about what for.
Acclaimed energy expert Art Berman says this is the culmination of millennia of human fallibility. This is a conversation that takes us from 3000 BCE and the discovery of what he calls the most disruptive technology humans ever had right up to today and the energy wars blooming around the world. We discuss our psychological disposition to immaturity, our cognitive shortcomings when examining complexity, the secrets of holy texts and even morality. Art explains how energy is reshaping geopolitical alliances, which leaders understand the reality of our situation, and why technology cannot solve our problems.
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What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies?
Tim Garrett and I come to refer to these as âthe holy trinityâ. Tim is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, and over two years ago, he joined me to discuss the thermodynamics of collapse, where he explained his research into the behaviour of snowflakes and how you could extrapolate the behaviour of economies and civilization using the laws of thermodynamics. He's back on the show to explain how we use our energy, the necessity of a surplus of energy and how all of this relates to a society's growth and health.
In this conversation we discuss questions like: Will renewables facilitate an increased consumption of fossil fuels? Can we reduce inequality by reducing energy consumption? How can we organise a wave-like civilisation, which grows and decays within safe boundaries? Can we decline in order to recover before crashing completely?
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What does artificial intelligence have in common with eugenics?
The first person to float the idea of a "general intelligence" was a eugenicist who was determined to rank intelligence according to race. This is just one of the legacies of A.I., a technology which Silicon Valley vehemently promises will transform the world, but which for now only consumes enormous quantities of energy. Despite the warnings from technologists around the world, for-profit companies are racing to develop A.G.I. no matter the costs.
Artist John Wild has traced the deep history of A.I., finding its roots in disturbing schools of thought which seek to raise the dead. He's also found where these histories are alive and kicking in C-Suite boardrooms. He joins me to reveal the disturbing imaginaries associated with A.I., and how we can begin to reimagine it as an entangled, decentralised, collaborative tool to create new ways of being.
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Who takes the initiative when governments fail to ask?
Amazingly, in Denmark, an industry is lobbying its government for much tighter regulations to absolutely reduce emissions in order to meet the Paris Agreement. Stakeholders across the entire Danish building industry have agreed to an ambitious reduction roadmap tafter a team of architects undertook an independent review of government policies. They found that global building emissions must be reduced by 96% to limit global warming, and are currently lobbying for an emissions cap of carbon dioxide kilograms per meter squared.
I'm joined by Dani Hill-Hansen, sustainable design engineer, architect at EFFEKT, and co-author of the Reduction Roadmap. She explains the findings of their research, the ambitious targets of the roadmap, how they got 540 stakeholders across the industry to sign on, and the methodology of "brand activism" they've developed alongside this project to kickstart other industries across the globe to initiate necessary climate action.
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Whatâs the future of food?
Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to Georgeâs own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as âeco-modernistâ. George hit back that Chrisâ proposal is a âcruel fantasyâ.
I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.
Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food.
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Weâre breaking all kinds of records at the moment: cities are boiling at 62C, ocean temperatures are literally off the charts, and governments have increased the global defence budget to an alarming $2440 billion.
War costs life, and not just human life. The environmental impacts of war are colossal, with one study already showing that the first few months of Israelâs assault on Gaza emitted more carbon dioxide than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in one year. Our ecosystems are at their breaking point, with six of nine planetary boundaries crossed. We need global collaboration to commit the huge systems overhaul necessary to survive the planetary crises and mitigate the catastrophic decisions of the last centuries.
Olivia Lazard, research fellow at Carnegie Europe, joins me to discuss just how complex that task is, detailing the five steps of the Anthropocene and how violence increases at each step. We discuss these legacy systems of extraction and violence and how they are embedded into decisions being made around A.I., creating security risks in a resource-scarce world. We also cover the dematerialisation of our economies, the myths that blind us to energy and materials, before discussing the balance of power tipping our planet and human systems further into crisis.
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Can the market do the right thing?
Not without supportive policy. Market-based solutions do not have a good track record when it comes to climate, stuck as they are within an exploitative economic framework. But, equally, we cannot just do away with markets, which have existed for millennia in many different forms. They need revolutionised, not abandoned.
Civil engineer and geo-hydrologist Delton Chen joins me to discuss the Global Carbon Reward, a policy for managing climate-related risk. Described as a âcarrot policyâ, Delton says the GCR incentivises polluting industries to reduce their emissions whilst encouraging the private market to invest in research and development of mitigation technologies. This conversation is filled with nuance, technicality, analysis and discussion on the viability of market-based solutions in a market that drives perverse incentives.
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You can also listen to my latest episode of the Mongabay Newscast where I spoke with Dahr Jamail about the resource wars driving climate-fuelled conflict.
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Hereâs the good news: People can changeâquickly.
Sometimes it feels impossible to imagine anything other than collapse with the way our energy systems are designed, the corruption in governance, and the financial motives which skew the present system towards profit over everything else. Itâs true that if nothing changes, the global system will collapse. But itâs also true that people are capable of amazing feats of imagination and adaptationâespecially social imagination.
This week Iâm joined by Erin Remblance, degrowth advocate and co-founder of ReBiz, an âun/schoolâ designed to equip all people with the worldview and skills to create regenerative and pluriversal post-growth futures. ReBiz offers a core course on social tipping points and Erin joined me to discuss exactly that: What are social tipping points? And, importantly, how do we create them? This is a conversation about technology, economy, imagination, politics and a just transitionâbecause most people are good people.
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When do you think weâll run out of oil?
2050? 2100? Never? Thatâs understandable given the IPCC models access to oil until 2100; politicians like Rishi are betting big on North Sea deposits. Petroleum is the life blood of our global economy, and itâs difficult to imagine it drying up. More often, when we talk about transitioning away from fossil fuels, itâs because of the necessity to limit global warmingânot because we run out.
But a team in Scotland are warning exactly thatâweâre running out. Fast. Alister Hamilton is a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the founder of Zero Emission Scotland. He and his colleagues self-funded research into oil depletion around the world and the results are shocking: We will lose access to oil around the world in the 2030s.
They calculated this by establishing the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) and found that whilst there will still be oil deposits around the world, we would use more energy accessing the oil supply than we would ever get from burning it. This is because weâre having to mine further into the earthâs crust to access lower-grade oil. According to their calculations, the oil in the North Sea will be inaccessibleâin a dead stateâby 2031, and the oil in Norway by 2032. Around the world, oil reserves see the same trend through the 2030s.
Petroleum is the life blood, and we havenât yet built out a different circulatory system to support renewable energyâin less than a decade, the world as know it could crash.
© Rachel Donald
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I like to think of intellectual discourse as the entangled root network of an ancient tree: everything is connected to everything else. Not so much a linear march of progress but a gnarled and entangled mess from which fruits bear. This is why, despite thousands of years, some ideas donât travel very far, but double back and loop themselves around other roots, creating something that feels solid, but may be rotten at its core.
This week Iâm joined by ecologist and writer Carl Safina who has spent the past few years researching that root network of cultural beliefs from all over the world, discovering profound similarities and critical differences. He explains that the main difference between Western thought and most other cultures is the disconnectedness of humankind from nature, and he traces this back to Platoâs philosophy of absolute ideals.
This is my second episode with Carl. We first spoke over two years ago when he was deep in the process of researching his latest book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. That conversation was truly fundamental to my own thinking, so it was a real joy to have Carl back on the show now that the book is out. This conversation goes begins with Plato, takes us through the delightful common threads that weave together most human cultures, and ends with Carl explaining how this rift between humans and nature results in the perverse incentives in our psychotic system today.
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We need to confront political impossibility.
A few months ago, I was sitting on a train bashing out a furious article about the British governmentâs climate incompetence. The man next to me was in a zoom call on climate change, vigorously shaking his head. I couldnât help but ask.
Thatâs how I met todayâs guest, Jonathan Mille, a researcher at University College Londonâs Climate Action Unit, where he studies systemic risk and the impact of our interdependent global systems on climate change response. Jonathan focuses much of his attention on the physical and political possibility of the energy transition, and in todayâs episode we discuss that exact tension between what is physically possible and what is politically possible. We explore the narrative challenge we face as a society, along with the distinct knowledge gaps found in industry, policy circles and business which create blind spots of psychological vulnerabilities, impeding the necessary psychological transition.
© Rachel Donald
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We need to restore our own ecology.
That doesnât just mean fencing off parts of the earth into ânature conservationâ spaces because, as this weekâs guest Laura Martin points out, what does that say about the space on the other side of the fence? That human spaces are unnatural? Or that they donât deserve to be protected?
Laura is an environmental historian, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College, and author of the extraordinary book, Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration. She joins me to discuss how policies create crises, not just abstract notions of neoliberalism, fossil-fuelled capitalism, and industrialisation. She says that environmental policies offer us alternatives to our present. So which ones can we use to build a world that protects both ourselves and the species with whom we share this planet?
We then discuss at length the difference between conservation and restoration, with ecological restorationârewildingâoffering a politics of care that sees humanity collaborate with fellow species to promote ecological well-being everywhere, from the grasslands to the inner city.
© Rachel Donald
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Nuclear: The perfect energy or perfect weapon.
There are such widely-heldâand understandableâfears surrounding nuclear that in 2023 the Green party in Germany were instrumental in decommissioning the nationâs final plantsâin the middle of an energy crisis. The environmentalists in the sixtoies and seventies were key to the anti-nuclear movement which swept the world, with France one of the only nations to resist the calls to shut down the reactors for fear of states weaponising the waste. That decision means France is now one of the only energy resilient nations in Europe.
There are obvious benefits to nuclear, and a new generation of nuclear engineers desperate to prove it. Mark Nelson is one of them. An engineer and consultant in the energy transition, Mark joined me to dispel myths around nuclear, where he believes the backlash started, and how we can transform existing fossil fuel infrastructure into truly renewable energy. We cover a lot in this conversationâincluding a couple of disagreements on the social and political anglesâand thereâs a lot to be mined in the episode. It certainly wonât be the last one on nuclear energy.
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Could AI be a natural intelligence?
Artist Mer Maggie Roberts, cofounder of the collective Orphan Drift, has been investigating how the natural world can inspire technological development to resist continuing anthropocentrism. The more-than-human world has so many perspectives to offer which could open our eyes to our own blind spots, and encourage a politics of care, stewardship and understanding. We need diversity, more than ever, and not limited only to human experience. But AI, an unknowably powerful tool, is being coded in manâs image, with all the biases, reductionisms, flaws and dispassion we exhibit.
Maggie sought to open up the fields of possibility with a project that imagines training an AI model on the experience of an octopus. Octopi are multi-perspectival creatures, boasting one brain in each leg and a ninth, central brain in their body. The way they experience the world is complex, nuanced and utterly different to our own experience. Building technology which reflects rather than consumes the natural world could be a critical tool in marrying manâs relationship to the wider world, which we discuss in this wonderfully wide-ranging and nuanced conversation on the role of art in a crisis.
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Truth is stranger than fictionâbut fiction is better written.
We know their playbooks and their networks, but the bad guys of this story are in no rush to change their tactics. From funding dodgy research to bleating lies on prime time television, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are audaciously villainous. Theyâd been getting away with it for decadesâbut now independent media has them running scared.
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative climate journalist and media founder with 20 years on the climate beat. Her investigations have exposed the worst crimes of the fossil fuel industry, and she now leads an international team of climate reporters at Drilled who uncover the connections between governments, industry and policy.
She joins me today to discuss their recent exposĂ© of The Atlas Network, the shadowy ecosystem of think tanks pushing for the criminalisation of climate activists all around the world. Amy explains the roots of the networkâs beginnings in World War Two, its rapid expansion as neoliberalism sunk its teeth into global politics, and its vast grip today on policy-makers around the world. This is a startling conversation, revealing the terrifying reach of right-wing extremism and corporate capture, with Amy suggesting the only path forward may indeed be revolutionary.
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If society is sick, how do we heal?
The idea of an âoriginal traumaâ bears similarities with the concept of an âoriginal sinâ: We fell, from grace, and have suffered ever since. The sinner, traumatised, cannot find his way back into paradise. The devil whispers in his ear. Hurt people hurt people.
Wisdom suggests there may be some truth to these tales. That a portion of humanity aeons ago faced terrible strife and were traumatised to the extent their relationship with the world suffered, and they became extractive accumulators, unable to trust in the gift of life, suspicious of the world and one another. These people took without giving, and the trauma spread through the land. From this, the âveneer of civilisationâ was imposed upon the wildness of the natural world, a bid to control which resulted in the eventual destruction of nature.
My guest this week, Paddy Loughman, is my friend. He describes himself as a strategist and narrative consultant working in the climate space. I think of him as a story-teller and word-weaver. Paddy and I have weekly phone calls about the state of the world, and he kindly acquiesced to recording one of them. We discuss original trauma, civilisation vs savagery, sickness, collapse, healing and story. This conversation spans life and decay, death and possibility, love, hope and reality, with Paddy offering we may be in a position now where the best we can do is create crash pads to save all that is beautiful when the veneer comes tumbling down.
Paddy is the cofounder of Stories For Life and Inter-Narratives, focusing on the interplay of narrative change and systems change. Heâs a former advisor to the UNâs Climate Champions and some of the worldâs biggest businesses. This week he has launched his own Substack which offers a gentle yet unflinching exploration of the world as it is, and how it could be.
Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisisâand what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.
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If they wonât get it done, then weâll do it ourselves.
Chaytan Inman is uninspired by politics. The computer science student was fed up or energy-blind and materials-blind promises made by big political names, promises of unlimited economic growth on a finite planet and infinitely available renewable energy, all tied up in the language of âNet Zeroâ. Chaytan didnât see anyone running on a political platform which promised a liveable future. So he decided to run for Governor of Washington State.
âWe cannot consume our way out of an overconsumption problem.â
Chaytan joined me to discuss his decision and his political platform: Enshrining the rights of nature in the state constitution. He aims to ensure the Pacific Northwest will âstill have rain, trees, food and waterâ for the future, envisioning a radical shift in how natural resources are valued by giving nature the same rights as people, and embedding citizenship in the stateâs natural ecosystem. He also reveals two other policies around taxation and agriculture, offering a true degrowth platform for Washington residents.
Chaytan is youngâand he says he truly does not want to have to run for governorâbut his elders have failed his generation. It's truly heartbreaking to see how many young people are having to put themselves on the line because of this failure. We should have a society of elders that knows how to lead, that can use all of their life experience to seed their imagination with possibilities for the future. Elders know when it's time to move on. In such a society, young people should have the freedom to be idealists, not burdened with the pressure of being realists. But, in our world, we are led by no one, and run by idiots and ideologues. This crisis demands leadership. It may come from surprising places.
© Rachel Donald
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What do W.E.I.R.D countries have in common?
Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. The citizens of these countries exhibit markedly more extreme psychological characteristics than those of non-WEIRD nations. One of the weirdest characteristics is a belief in a fixed âselfâ which will behave in a reliable and predictable manner no matter the environment. The belief in this unchanging self is what makes it very difficult for us to change our mindsâand even concoct wild rationalisations to justify our behaviour. Welcome to the age of cognitive dissonance.
Sarah Stein Lubrano, a researcher at Oxford University, joins me to explain the cognitive dissonance phenomenon, its roots in the alleged security granted to us by a fixed sense of self, and why itâs so hard to change our beliefs. She then reveals what neurophilosophy tells us about how to help others change our minds, the power of storytelling, and the importance of social infrastructure for creating cohesive, fluid and non-judgemental communities. It is these brave communities which dare examine themselves, their beliefs about the worldâand change their maladaptive behaviours. This is an episode about how to dare change our minds.
© Rachel Donald
Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisisâand what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.
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Did you know the government doesnât spend your taxes?
Welcome to the world of Modern Monetary Theory, a revolutionary way of decoding our monetary systemsâand making them work better for us. Iâm joined by Steven Hail, economist and lecturer, who explains, using MMT, what we get wrong about money, taxes, inflation and even currency. Steven reveals how the notion of states not being able to afford certain necessitiesâlike education, health, the green transitionâis nonsense, explaining how the supply of resources impacts our economy, not running a deficit. Alongside debunking a range of money myths, he also reveals the fascinating history of taxation as a means to create a citizenry and their dependence on a centralised state.
This is a technical episode, but Stevenâs explanations are clear and concise, and we successfully cover a lot of ground to uncover the real relationships between governments, markets and the monetary system they swear by.
Episodes referenced include my interviews with Fadhel Kaboub, Jason Hickel and Kate Raworth.
© Rachel Donald
Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisisâand what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription.
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