In a culture where age is, at best, ignored, how do we rebuild a cohort of genuine Elders fit for the rapid transitions of the 21st Century: those who can combine the wisdom of wide boundary perspectives with the humility that allows flexibility of thinking, feeling and being? This is one of the core questions of our time and this week's guest is working to find answers. Alain Gauthier is co-founder and coordinator of the Regenerative Elder Process at the Elders Action Network. With John Izzo, he is co-host of The Way Forward Regenerative Conversations podcast and over his long life, he has been an international consultant, facilitator, coach, researcher-educator, and author. His book Actualising Evolutionary Co-Leadership: To Evolve a Creative and Responsible Society was published in 2014 - and is only available on Kindle (sorry) - but it is nonetheless a fascinating and inspiring read. A graduate from HEC (Paris), with an MBA from Stanford University, Alain was once a senior consultant at McKinsey & Company, As you'll hear, a life-changing experience led him to co-found Core Leadership Development in Oakland, California and to focus his professional work on developing co-leadership, partnering and coaching capabilities. Now in his eighties and as an elder, he devotes his time to co-creating conditions for elders to explore how they can live a regenerative life and collaborate with younger generations in transforming education and community life.  Over the last seven years, he has been an active member of the Elders Action Network (EAN), where he initially led a visionary planning process and now co-leads the Regenerative Elder Process (REP) – which, this April (2026) is offering for the seventh time an in-depth exploration called Embodying Regenerative Worldviews. He co-leads the REP Community and is a member of the Advisory Council of Elders Rising, EAN’s educational arm. This was a rich, deep and heart-felt podcast.  Enjoy!LinksElders Action Network https:/

What is Integral Altruism and how could it crowd-source the answers to our meta crisis?  It's a while since I learned about 'reverse mentoring': a young person mentoring someone of an older generation. The idea really took hold, so when a mutual friend connected Jonas Søvik and me, I knew I'd found someone from whom I could learn a huge amount about life, ideas, thoughts and how the world feels in circles I would otherwise never reach.Jonas and I have been exploring all this together for the past 18 months and every conversation leaves me buzzing with the potential of new doors opening and new senses unfolding, and how could we not share something so rich?  And so here we are, a day after his 27th birthday, with Jonas now in Blackpool, working at the Effective Altruism Hotel, which is, in itself, a significant step outside the predatory capital model. Jonas Søvik is a coach, self-exploration and wisdom enthusiast, currently serving on the board of EA Denmark, and at the EA Hotel, helping to restructure and expand the organization/community to serve the EA community and the wider world. He is also building courses to help us all gain more control of our screen time.  He swims in similar waters to this podcast - interested in the metacrisis, particularly as framed by Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens, integral altruism, Life Itself, Learning Planet, John Vervaeke's work on modern wisdom, regenerative thinking, Game B, Liminal Web - & most things related in that field. This was one of those conversations where we were both freewheeling, thinking in real time, asking questions as they arose.  It's alive, and electric and takes us both to new places. I hope it leaves you feeling as optimistic as it did me.  Enjoy! Jonas' Website https://www.coachingforhuman.com/Integral Altrusim https://www.integralaltruism.com/John Vervaeke's TEDx Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKvRUfZ_u1oJonathan Rowson: The Flip, The Formation, The Fun https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-flip-the-formation-and-the-funEffective Altruism https://www.effectivealtruism.org/About the EA Hotel in Blackpool

In this podcast Manda dives deep into the nature of fear, what it is and how we might find our own resources, resilience and capacity to work with the parts that catch our attention.  Given this, it is recommended that you listen at a time and place where you can give it full attention.We believe that we are in a time of total transformation and the potential is enormous - if enough of us can do the work to free up the stuck parts inside so that we can be fully present, fully able to respond to the needs of every moment as it arises.  Nobody is suggesting this is easy work, but it is absolutely the work of this moment. If we can all free up our stuck places so that our connections between all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, ourselves and the Web of Life are free and fluid - then we can begin to step into what's ours to do in the moment, rather than rehashing old stories of old hurts - that may not be ours, but may be inherited from the generations that have gone before. We need not to pass them on, but more than that, we need to be able to connect in real time with all that's around us in an ever-changing world.  [For those of you who attended the Gathering Honouring Fear as your Mentor that Manda taught earlier this month, this podcast is designed both to cement the teachings of that Gathering and open them up to our wider group of listeners.]Manda's recommended reading from the Winter Solstice 2025  https://accidentalgods.life/word-magic-2025-accidental-gods-pick-of-fiction-non-fiction-poetry-and-podcasts-through-the-year/Nature and Neuroscience - 'mouse/almond blossom study' https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594Scientific American precis of the study https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fearful-memories-passed-down/About Accidental Gods - What we offer. We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the

What is a Network State and how does the concept matter in relation to the Trump administration's attempts to take Greenland - and their 'peace' proposals in Gaza and Ukraine?  This is the question I asked the transnational legal expert Dr Andrea Leiter: Who is trying to set up legal structure that mandate for No Death, No Taxes and No Democracy? And why might the rest of us end up dead or enslaved (I'll leave you to work out which you think is worse) - because as with any fascist enterprise, there will be the in-group that is protected but not constrained and the out-group that is constrained but not protected and if you're listening to this podcast, the chances of your being in the in-group are vanishingly small. So we ended up discussing Balaji Srinivasan's concepts of the Network State - and no, I have not linked to the book or the website in the show notes: if you want them, you can search.  I have, however, linkedto the ideas of the Co-ordiNations put forward by Primavera de Filippi and, of course, there's the ongoing Bioregional work being conducted by Joe Brewer and others: the merging of these two feels to me a good way forward if we're to get rid of the current Hobbesian concepts of a Nation State - which is, for sure, pretty outdated. For those who want background, Andrea works at the intersection of law, digital transformation, and economic innovation. Director of Amsterdam Center for International Law, she’s deeply aware of, and involved in, Transnational Law, Digital Economies & Institutional Innovation, all things crypto – as well as being a Social Justice Entrepreneur. She currently leads a Dutch Research Council-funded VENI project on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and their potential to reshape economic governance from below.So here we go: a radical ride through the forest of nationhood: what it is, why it matters and how we could craft something so much better than what we have now - without the nightmare of fascist police states. Andrea on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-leiter/Amsterdam Centre for International Law https://acil.uva.nl/%20VENI%20project%20https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/nwo-talent-programme/projects-veniPrimavera de Filipi

As we crest the wave of the Great Transformation, we have choices: we can crash into chaos and extinction - or we can step into our birthright as fully conscious nodes in the Web of Life, offering the astonishing creativity of humanity in service to life. We've said this on the podcast often, but it's not often that we speak with someone whose entire life is given to helping people step into our birthright, to opening the doors of what we might call Nature Connection, but is so much deeper than this -  so that anyone, of any age or circumstance can step forward into whatever it is that our birthright becomes in the twenty-first century. Our guest this week does just this. I've known of Jon Young for decades, heard of his 8 Shields practice and have friends who have trained in his Art of Mentoring, but it was only this last September that we met in person and I was struck by the deep inner stillness he brings to everything he does, the sense that his awareness stretches out across space and through time and he's listening to layers upon layers of meaning. Jon Young is a deep nature-people-self connection researcher, mentor, naturalist, wildlife tracker, author, consultant, and storyteller. Mentored by his grandmothers, Tom Brown, Jr., and a host of elders and experts, he has spent over 40 years leading the field of nature-based community building. His work explores the impact of nature on mentoring, human intelligence, spirituality, well-being, and development, influencing tens of thousands worldwide. He is the author and co-author of seminal works such as What the Robin Knows and Coyote's Guide to Connecting to Nature, and has appeared in documentaries including The Animal Communicator. In 2016, he received the Champion of Environmental Education Award for his innovative and globally impactful contributions to the nature connection movement.So, with all of this as our baseline, it was an honour and a delight to dive deep with Jon into the history and lineages of his learning, of his views of where we are now, and of how we can best navigate this moment of collapse and renewal. https://www.livingconnection1st.net/https://www.jonyoung.orghttps://www.livingconnection1st.net/pages/

As we move towards Total Systemic Change, shifting from the death cult of predatory capitalism towards a future we'd actually be proud to leave behind, our absolute baseline non-negotiable foundations must be Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Soil. We talk a lot about regenerative agriculture on this podcast, and how we can rebuild living soils from the inert growing media we've created in the hellscapes of Industrial Agriculture.  One day, we'll talk about Clean Air.  Today, we're talking about water, that utterly essential part of our biological and spiritual lives.  It should be clean. It should be safe to drink, to swim in, for us and all the species with whom we share our beautiful blue pearl of a watery planet. As we all know… it's not.  It's not because our system values profit over the vibrancy of life. It's not because people in suits have found that if they treat our rivers as open sewers and our oceans as waste dumps they can get away with it.  It's not because for too long, we've believed the stories that say there is no alternative and this is the way the world has to be. But the masks are coming off and activism is increasingly being seen as an act of radical, necessary resistance that can bring people together, bridging across the false, toxic cultural divides that the establishment creates so that we fight ourselves instead of working towards a world founded on different values.  The push for clean water is one of the most unifying drives we have.  It doesn't matter where you are on the political spectrum, you don't vote for sewage to be poured into the rivers, for the dead zones in the oceans to grow and join up, for the rain to be full of forever toxins so that some suit in a company C-suites can buy themselves a new private jet and an invitation to Jeffrey Epstein's private parties. In the UK, we're in an almost unique position because back in the 80s, Margaret Thatcher saw Pinochet privatising the water and sewage companies in Chile and decided this was a fine idea and imported it wholesale to the UK. Our water and sewage companies were privatised at a steal in 1989 and pretty much everyone is agreed this is an incredibly bad idea. Except successive governments.  So people got together and formed their own activist groups based around the rivers near them - there's always at least one - and they are conducting citizen science, holding people's assemblies and generally making enough of a nuisance of themselves that th

In the midst of collapse, as we watch our governments lay waste to our social agreements, it can be hard to imagine extending the franchise of legal rights to Nature and the More than Human world.  And yet, if we're to transcend this moment, it must be because we have become something other than we are now - and to do this, we need the roadmaps that show us how to move through, and beyond, the collapse of the old into something new. We spoke to Ally Pimor about this a couple of weeks ago and when I first met her, I also met this week's guest and they had so much to say that I wanted to talk to each of them.  So with this in mind, this week's guest is Brontie Ansell, the founder and co-director of Lawyers for Nature. Brontie founded Lawyers for Nature in 2019 with the (fairly infamous) barrister Paul Powlesland, they are a collective of lawyers who act to represent Nature. They reimagine the law for Nature and advocate for Nature to be given legal rights through education, Nature centric governance, consultancy, research and advocacy. Last year Lawyers for Nature were behind the We Are Nature campaign that sought to change the dictionary definition of Nature at the Oxford English Dictionary to include humans as part of Nature. Brontie was one of the key legal architects behind the Nature on the Board project at Faith in Nature and she was the first human to act as the Nature Guardian speaking on behalf of Nature at the company Faith in Nature, giving Nature a voice and a vote on a corporate board for the first time in history. She then went on to design the legal apparatus to appoint Nature and the voice of future generations to the board of House of Hackney, a company that credits Nature as their most important muse. Most recently she was advising the Comisiwn Seilwaith Cenedlaethol Cymru/National Infrastructure Commission for Wales on their Nature Representation pilot. She features heavily in both Simeon Rose's new book Nature's Boardroom and Frieda Gormley's book

As the old paradigm splinters into rage-filled, grief-stricken fragments, how can we lay the foundation for the total systemic change we so badly need?Even beyond the listeners to this podcast, it is obvious by now that there is no going back. As Oliver Kornetzke wrote in a particularly sharply written piece on Facebook back on 22nd January - before Alex Pretti was murdered by Trump's Federal Agents - what white America is not experiencing is not new, and is not a flaw in the system, it is the system.  This is what he says in more detail: White Americans are not witnessing the collapse of something noble. They’re witnessing the unveiling of what has always been true. The rot now visible is not a flaw in the foundation. Rather, it is the foundation. It was poured with concrete, inscribed into laws, and baked into the American mythos. The violence, the inequality, and the selective application of “justice”—none of it is a betrayal of the American promise. It is the American promise, applied unevenly by design.For centuries, Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities have lived under the weight of this system—disenfranchised, disappeared, surveilled, caged, and killed. They were told to be patient, to be peaceful, to vote harder, to “work within the system.” And when they told the unvarnished truth—that the system is the violence—they were mocked, criminalized, and ignored.Now the machinery begins to grind down those it once served, and only now does the shock begin to register. But this isn’t the system breaking. It’s merely the mask coming off.The laws of this land protects power and wealth. It has always protected power and wealth. The state defends itself. And democracy here has always been ornamental—used to sanctify what power had already decided. The rule of law is not impartial. It’s a weapon, a performance, a convenience afforded to the privileged. The pageantry of justice is reserved for those never meant to feel its weight.What you’re seeing now is not the end of the American dream. It is the truth of the American reality, finally uninterested in disguising itself. The empire is simply turning inward.Many will not want to read this. They will flinch, deflect, and rationalize. They will call me divisive, bitter, and extreme. They will attack, argue, and dismiss. And in doing so, they will only prove the point by choosing their comfor

Across the world, our legal systems are crumbling, the rule of sane law dismantled in real time. Yet at the same time, rivers, mountains, bees are being granted legal rights in ways that would have been thought impossible even a few years ago.  And in boardrooms around the planet, C-suites and businesses are increasingly looking to the natural world for guidance on how to be in ways that heal the web of life. So how do we make this work? How do we ensure that it's not just another layer of corporate greenwash? Our guest this week, Alexandra Pimor is Director of the Nature Governance Agency (NGA) within the Earth Law Center. Increasingly, she is acting as a proxy for the Voice of Nature in corporations and organisations, in professional practice, project management and organisational cultural evolution. For many years a legal scholar and academic, her practice, studies and research are anchored in a quantum-based ecology of law paradigm, espousing a critical, reflective and multidisciplinary approach. She has a deep passion for people and planet, and, as you'll hear, she now sees it as her mission to promote the facilitation of conscious governance and leadership, at individual, collective and organisational levels, to advance the emergence of an anthropo-eco-logical system of harmonious living. In our conversation, she lays out what it means to take Death - and Life - as our Witness; to evolve a Sacred No and a Sacred Yes; to speak as the web of life, not for it or to it. She walks the fine line between Two-Eyed Seeing - from a Western, Trauma Culture viewpoint as well as from the perspective of an Indigenous, Initiation Culture - and we explore how boardrooms can see ripples of change as we strive to turn the bus that is humanity away from the cliff edge of the 6th mass extinction. Earth Law center's NGAOnboarding Nature Toolkit ( developed in partnership between ELC, B Lab Benelux and Nyenrode Business University)Bio-leadership fellowship (a mycelium of regenerative and curious change makers)Thinking like Gaia cards (Ally invite

We live in an ever-changing world, but it is not always obvious what kinds of evolutionary change we are seeing in the broader web of life: in physiology, behaviour, language - and human responses to these.  How plastic is the natural world? How resilient?  How capable - or not - of adapting to the chaos of the climate emergency, the cascade of toxins in our air, soil and water, to the plastics, heavy metals and other detritus we throw out into the world as if the entire planet were one vast sewer for waste we forget about as soon as we've had the dopamine drip that acquiring it evoked? How thin is the ice on which we are skating?  And how can we change the ways we do things so we don't fall into the void of extinction. Our guest this week spends his life exploring these questions. David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David’s first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looked at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future. It was named by both The Times and Telegraph as a book of the year, earned praise from Robert Macfarlane and Margaret Atwood, and has been translated into ten other languages. His most recent book is the one we're going to be exploring today - Nature’s Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet is one of the few non-fiction books I've come across that is capable both of going deep into the science of the anthropocene - the full genetic, chemical, noise-pollution havoc of it and going deep into how we can engage with indigenous cultures, languages and ways of thought so that we in the western trauma culture might become something new.  As he says early in the book, 'We pollute because we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world, but…learning to coordinate our time with nature's rhythms…could revolutionise our politics.'  The whole quote is in the episode. What you need to know now is that this is a genuinely ground-breaking, mind-opening book and I cannot imagine better reading as we step into 2026.  If you need to know I'm not alone in thinking this, it has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, and the Saltire Award (Scotland's national book awards) for non-fiction. For the New Scientist and Waterstone's bookshop, it is 'Best popular Science Book of 2025'.  You do need to read this.  And in the me

If we ever had a genuine democracy (and I would argue we never have) then it is clearly disintegrating now, along with the entire system with which it was entwined.  Everyone agrees we need something new, what we don't necessarily agree on across the board is the design of this new thing.  This week's guests are two people who spend their lives imagining how things might be different, particularly in the US, where even the pretence of democracy has been abandoned. Dr John Izzo is a friend of the podcast. Once an ordained Minister in a Presbyterian Church, he’s now a bestselling author, speaker, and thought leader focused on social responsibility and intergenerational integration. He’s a a Distinguished Fellow at The Stimson Center in Washington DC, and a Board Member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action group. Most notably in terms of what we're talking about here, he's co-host of The Way Forward Regenerative Conversations Podcast on which I heard him speaking to our other guest, Suzette Brooks Masters.  Suzette describes herself as a sometime Cassandra who sees around the corner; a serial social entrepreneur, and a thought leader and strategist in the fields of democracy, governance and futures.She has degrees in Economics from Amherst College and Cambridge University, and a Law degree from Harvard. She has spent much of her working life as a strategist working on immigration, inclusion and democracy. She is currently Senior Fellow and Director of Democracy Innovation at the Democracy Funders Network and Co-Founder of the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance.  So listen in for a 3-way conversation on the nature of power, community and change as we move into the new year. John on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjohnizzo/John's showreel: https://vimeo.com/248012255?fl=pl&fe=vlJohn's website: www.drjohnizzo.comJohn's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1adiRng-Ab3d3Wos9pFjAA The Way Forward Regenerative Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-way-forward-regenerative-conversatio

Well…2025 was the year the masks came off the old system: nobody is pretending it's there to help us, or that those who have stolen the reins of power have any intention of 'saving the planet', still less resolving the horrors of inequity or anything at all but feeding the ravenously hungry ghost of capitalism. So how do we bring power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power?  If we have the destructive capacity of gods, how do we find in ourselves the compassion, prudence and wisdom of gods?  What does it take to lay the foundations for emergence into a new system  - one that we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us? In this solo episode, Manda Scott, host of the Accidental Gods podcast, reflects on the year just gone and looks ahead to the one that's coming and lays out ideas for how we can be the change we need to see in the world.  Join us for New Year's eve and let's find ways we can step into 2026 with grace, courage, bringing the best of ourselves in service to life. If you'd like to support us, there is a Patreon page, but we're not going to link to it, because, honestly, the best way is to come and join the Accidental Gods Membership: that way you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake on Sunday 4th January 2025 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here You don't have to be a member -but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.If you'd like to join us at Accidental God

At the end of a turbulent year that has seen the masks come off the death cult in ways that were probably predictable, but still shocking, we reconvene our December Solstice Traditional conversation. Manda is joined by Della Duncan of the Upstream Podcast and Nathalie Nahai of 'Nathalie Nahai in Conversation' to explore the things that have stood out for each of us in our explorations this year—and to look forward to the year about to begin for what will be our baselines. Della Z Duncan is a Renegade Economist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a co-host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, a faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, a founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and the designer and co-facilitator of the Cultivating Regenerative Livelihood Course at Gaia Education.Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of the Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She’s author of the international best-sellers Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She’s a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.Before we head into the conversation, I want to invite you to our transformative online course,  Dreaming Your Year Awake,  which takes place on Sunday the 4th of January from 16:00 - 20:00 UK time (GMT). This is a time to go inwards, to be kind to ourselves, to explore all that we can be and want to be. It's your chance really to delve deeply into the year just gone, and look ahead at how you want to shape your attention and intention for the year that’s coming, for each of us, individually and together to ask ourselves how we are going to navigate all the coming turbulence with grace and courage?  This, too, is part of our Accidental Gods tradi

Here's our December Solstice Meditation for 2025 - please find a place and time where you can relax, take space for yourself, and build the connections to the web of life that will carry us forward. Details of 3iATLAS https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/3i-atlas-facts-and-faqs/

How do we create the stories that will bring a whole new generation back to the web of life, that will help people find hope again, and lean into their heart's yearning for connection, relationship, being and belonging? This week's guest, Ally Kingston, is a creative facilitator and strategy lead at Purpose Disruptors, where she co-developed the breakthrough Agency for Nature, a pop-up agency bringing nature into youth culture. A former advertising strategist, she is curious about how creativity intersects with myth, meaning, consumerism and desire, and how we might design new cultural infrastructures that seed fresh possibilities for how to live.Equally committed to holding space for grief and loss in turbulent times, Ally has trained as a death doula and rites of passage holder and recently co-created the Tending to Endings card deck, a garden-inspired tool for engaging more meaningfully with loss. She is based in Somerset in the UK, where she lives with her partner, young son and lurcher. In this wide-ranging episode, we explore the nature of advertising and how an industry that has been so deeply embedded in the death cult of predatory capitalism can turn all the wild, creative magic in service of life; how the skills that push us to buy the pseudo-satisfiers can instead remind us of our original connections, and turn us towards co-creation, connection and belonging.  We talk too, about grief and how learning to compost the old system is a key to the new growth we need and want.  Ally is so multi-talented, it was a joy to explore so many ways we can bring our world back into love with life, into balance, into each of us being part of the solution and letting go of the parts of the problem. Purpose Disruptors https://www.purposedisruptors.org/Agency for Nature https://www.agencyfornature.com/Tending to Endings https://www.tendingtoendings.com/Ally on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ally-kingston-75922025/Ally on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/allykingstonALLY is co-guiding

Here's Manda's round up of (some of) the best books, poetry and podcasts she's come across this year.   Most of the links are to Bookshop.org in the UK where you can link to an independent bookshop of your choice.  In some cases, we've linked to the authors' website. FictionRachel Neumeier - Rihasi, Marag, Sekaran, Hedesa - all four are part of the TUYO series. 8 Doors from Dawn to Midnight is a stand alone. Natasha Pulley - The Hymn to DionysusAntonia Hodgson- The Raven Scholar   +Katherine Addison - The Tomb of DragonsAmal El Mohtar  - The River has RootsJacqui Morris and Tamsin Abbott - Wild Folk  Wild Gods Rising - Podcast with the authors (WILD FOLK is being published anew by Chelsea Green in time for the Spring Equinox of 2026You can order (or pre-order) here in the UK  https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/wild-folk-tales-from-the-stones-jackie-morris/d934f63a50bf69fdand here in the US https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/828350/wild-folk-by-jackie-morris/ ) Richard Morgan Altered Carbon Becky Chambers A Long Way to A Small Angry Planet

If we are to build systems that meet our real needs we have to first understand what those needs are and start growing the stuff that will allow us to thrive: good food from healthy soils, safe and supportive homes and communities, space to develop and express our creativity, opportunities to increase our capacity for co-operation and kindness.  As much as these, though, we need to understand what an economy is for - why it does what it does. And while we're all clear that the death cult of Predatory Capitalism exists to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of the living web, it's not always clear what a flourishing economy might look like.  So we're going to explore exactly this with our guest today. Inez Aponte is a self-described 'Dissident of Capitalism', she's an educator, storyteller, and consultant who's spent 15 years bridging mainstream economics with human-scale alternatives. Using the Human Scale Development Approach (Barefoot Economics), she helps professionals see the economic system itself, and imagine what comes next.Barefoot Economics (also known as Human Scale Development) was developed by Manfred Max-Neef and colleagues in Chile as a response to the predations of the colonial capital system. It reframes economic thinking away from endless wants and towards nine fundamental needs: Subsistence, Freedom, Participation, Understanding, Affection, Creation, Idleness, Protection and Identity.We are wealthy when our needs are satisfied, regardless of our income. This means we can also be poor in multiple ways, even when we have a ‘healthy’ bank balance.Inez has built this forward into a framework for the 21st century. Her 'Beautiful Economies Learning Lab' breaks people out of mainstream economic thinking to explore how we can build systems that meet real needs while healing ourselves, communities, and the Earth.So this is our deep dive.  Let's go. https://www.beautifuleconomies.com/https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/The_Future_of_Money-Bernard_Lietaer.pdfWhat we offer: Accidental Gods, D

We all know by now that plants grown in living, thriving, life-filled soil, give us living, thriving, life-filled food... but the steps to getting there in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive - and highly profitable - ultra-processed 'food-like substances' are harder to see.  This week's guest, Daphne du Cros, spends her life deep in the mycelial networks of food and farming systems, bringing both into genuinely regenerative balance. Daphne is a food policy researcher, educator, and farmer. She holds a PhD in Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy at City St. George's University of London, and a Master's in Environmental Science and Management from Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. She is Director and Coordinator at Shropshire Good Food Partnership; Director at Light Foot Enterprises; Project Lead at Food Forward BC (where BC stands for Bishop's Castle, not British Columbia or any of the other potential options) -   and she's co-owner of Little Woodbatch CIC, a farm just outside BC that hosts the Bishop's Castle Community Seed Bank. She is the author of the town's Community Food Resilience Strategy - the only such policy in Shropshire.Daphne and I are relatively near neighbours, we have swapped seeds - her more than me - and share ideas about systems thinking and how we might evolve our world. She's deeply involved at every level from actual growing up to governmental meetings trying to get those in power to find some wisdom when it comes to food resilience, food security and all the other things we say as we try to get them to move away from the corruption innate in our system towards something that actually works in service to life. Daphne on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/daphne-du-cros-743128332Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlewoodbatch/ Shropshire Good Food Partnership:  https://www.shropshiregoodfood.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shropshiregoodfood/ Soil Ed UK: https://www.instagram.com/soil_ed_uk/  Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty Network: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/

What does it mean to (re)orient our entire culture around the power of love?  To answer this, we have to understand the nature of love and of power and how both of these have many meanings in our culture, some of them essential to moving forward - and some of them so toxic they turn the entire concept into a poisoned cue. This week's guest is friend of the podcast, Jamie Bristow. We spoke to him back in episode #274, recorded at the start of this year, and there, we consider what it was to be a Spiritual Warrior in our times - a concept to which Jamie has given the past 16 years of his life. Jamie is someone who lives and breathes at the intersection between spirituality - specifically Buddhism - and international policy in the realm of what is still called sustainability but which must, now, be shifting towards systemic change. For eight years, he was clerk to the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness and director of the associated policy institute, the Mindfulness Initiative, where he helped to introduce mindfulness to a number of other parliaments around the world. In 2023, he joined the Inner Development Goals team to lead on public narrative and policy development, emphasising the inner skills and qualities needed for a sustainable transition. His work includes influential reports such as Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out and The System Within: Addressing the inner dimension of sustainability and systems transformation. He is an associate of Life Itself, The Climate Majority Project, Mind & Life Institute and Bangor University and now is working with Professor Rebecca Henderson on an initiative which is currently called the ReWeaving Project and it's in this area that we focussed our attention. There are many ways these conversations go. Often, I'm exploring a particular body of work and am asking questions to which, broadly, I have a sense of the answer - 'tell me about [x] that is squarely in your field'.  Sometimes, though, I'm talking with someone I know well enough, and where we share enough of a common grounding, that I can ask questions to which I don't know the answer. Where we can find the places where our Theories of Change meet but perhaps don't overlap, and explore the fertile, liminal spaces of uncertainty.  Jamie is one of these people and this was one of those conversations - where we explored love and power and game theory and how we get from w

Do you love the dark?  Do you yearn for sunset and the amber glow of a fire with the night growing deeper, more inspiring all around you?  Most of us don't - though our ancestors through all of history have lived by firelight, moonlight, starlight... until the modern era of light at the flick of a switch.  But there's a world out there of sheer, unadulterated magic that is only revealed when we put aside the lights and the phones and the torches and step out into the night  - as this week's guest has done. Leigh Ann Henion is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Backpacker, The American Scholar, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.  Wall Street Journal says of this book. "Lovely…truly inspired…and very clever…An appreciation of nature’s nocturnal organisms can help us reset our relationship with the night…That’s the gift of Night Magic: It may make you think differently about the night."Leigh Ann's Website https://leighannhenion.com/Night Magic book (UK): https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/night-magic-leigh-ann-henion/7832118What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to co