An end-of-year round up of the best fiction and non-fiction books - and podcasts - of 2020. All are my opinion and this is only a tiny selection of the really good stuff out there - but it's good. Enjoy! We have to stop consuming stuff... but we never stop imbibing ideas. So here are some to choose from - all links to Blackwells. For obvious reasons. Non-Fiction 'From what is to what if' by Rob Hopkins The Trembling Warrior and others by Gill Coombs 'The Best of Times, the Worst of Times' by Pau...
Dec 23, 2020•31 min•Season 5Ep. 1
It's our Birthday... and it's the December Solstice, the time of transition and potential transformation . In honour of which, we are crafting a new tradition: a PodBoom shared with Della Duncan of UPSTREAM podcast and Nathalie Nahai of THE HIVE. So, it's our Birthday - and it's that time of year when every pundit endeavours to look back at the year just gone and ahead to the one that is coming. And we thought we'd like to establish a parallel tradition, where we bring together our favourite pod...
Dec 21, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Season 5Ep. 1
How can we make learning a genuinely transformational experience? One that's fun, and inspiring and that teaches us HOW to think, not WHAT to think? Rachel Musson had given her life to asking this question and ThoughtBox is her answer. Suppose we all learned three things at school: empathy, critical thinking and systems thinking... imagine how different the world would be. Suppose we learned how to think clearly, how to communicate, how to understand our own feelings and express them without fee...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 14
How bad are things really? Is it too late to avert the climate and ecological catastrophe? And if not, how do we pull ourselves back from the brink? Exploring answers with Paul Behrens, author of 'The Best of Times, The Worst of Times'. We live on the edge of change - the facts can be terrifying, but the creative potential of our times is inspiring and just as jaw-dropping as the horrors of the reality we inhabit. Paul Behrens is Assistant Professor of Energy and Environmental Change at Leiden U...
Dec 09, 2020•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 11
How can we take the radical, renegade, rule-breaking, revolutionary ideals of the golden age of Pirates and transmute them to gold in our world? Alex Barker, author of 'How to be More Pirate' lays out the maps to the treasure of change. The concept of radical, renegade, revolutionary insurgency based on the model created in the Golden Age of Pirates was given wings by Sam Conniff's best selling book, BE MORE PIRATE. In the wake of its success, Sam needed to find ways to help the many people the ...
Dec 02, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 10
In the midst of nonviolent direct action, is a red thread, holding the liminal space between the old and the new, between action and re-action, between hope and extinction. The Red Rebel Brigade is a distinctive feature of XR Actions and here we have a glimpse from the inside. More at Red is the colour of our life blood. It joins us to the land and all the web of life. It was chosen as the original colour of the silent life-dancers of Extinction Rebellion as an explicit symbol of this life blood...
Nov 25, 2020•54 min•Season 4Ep. 9
Greta Thunberg says that ‘We cannot save the planet by playing by the rules, so the rules have to be changed’. This is self-evidently true, but that leaves us with the question of what rules could we create that we could all live by. Polly Higgins has the Earth Protector law, but Shelley Ostroff has gone one step further with her Codes for a Healthy Earth and the World Water law. Together, these rules spell out our connection with the More than Human world, and leave us with agency, initiative, ...
Nov 18, 2020•58 min•Season 4Ep. 8
How do we shift the narratives of business so that it becomes part of the solution, not the core of the problem? Mike Raven of AQAI explores the ways business can adapt - and become part of a genuinely regenerative future. Mike is a Radical collaborator, rapid researcher, speaker, facilitator and entrepreneur. He's a holistic business graduate and practitioner. He's a qualified Naturopath, who has studied at Schumacher College and been a UN Global Goals Ambassador. He's co-Founder of LEAPS - whi...
Nov 11, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 4Ep. 7
How can we rebuild our cities to become place of community, connection and coherence? How can we build multi-generational tribes that thrive and support each other in the hearts of our urban areas? Mark Lakeman of the City Repair project explains the changes he has made - and continues to make. Mark Lakeman is the founder of the City Repair Project, as well as the founder and Design Director at communitecture, architecture & planning. Both organizations are Portland, Oregon-based world-chang...
Nov 04, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Gill Coombs is a writer, coach, and facilitator. Her approach is rooted in her own long, colourful journey towards fulfilling work. In 2010, Gill left a corporate Learning and Development career to travel around the country on foot and public transport, leading workshops for communities on living in harmony with self, people and planet. She is now an elder visionary with Extinction Rebellion and her own experiences of street-level non violent direct action led to the writing of her newly updated...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 5
How do we re-democratise democracy? Understanding that our current system is broken is the first step, but then we need to find ways to gather voices and give agency to those with wisdom, so that we re-create our systems of governance from the ground up. At the start of Lockdown, Eva and Justin set out to interview 100 people in Scotland - deep, wide, broad interviews across the widest range of opinions. Now, they are bringing those together, creating the foundations for a consultative democracy...
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 4
If Climate Change is a failure of the imagination and this is a time when we need to be at our most imaginative, how can we change the trajectory of our falling imaginations? Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement, has explored the depths of our imagination and creativity. Our society is a dis-imagination machine. But we can reverse it. Rob Hopkins, author of 'From What Is to What If?', offers an answer. In this podcast, we explore the ways that all of us could combine to create a new futur...
Oct 14, 2020•56 min•Season 4Ep. 3
If we gather in ceremony, sitting on the land, with a fire-keeper who understands the holding and has trained in the ways of the fire, there is so much healing. Fiona Shaw is one of those people, trained in great depth and absolute integrity, to connect to the spirits of this land, and to hold the space for others to re-connect to the fire, the water, the land, the guides, gods and guardians of our ways. Here, she talks about the new depths and challenges - and, yes, opportunities, of this time....
Oct 07, 2020•56 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Doughnut Economics is a new, groundbreaking model that lets us see how we can embrace the needs of all within the means of a living, thriving planet. Rob Shorter, Communities Lead, of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab explains what it is, how it works and how we can embrace it at all levels in our communities of people and place and purpose. The imagination needs mental and emotional space to enable us to create a vision of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Rob Shorter wrote ...
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 1
If we view life as a Game between Light and Dark, where do we stand at any given moment? Hero or Manipulator? Altruist or Cynic? Sleepwalker, Avoider, Traditionalist? We can each be any of these at any given moment. Knowing we have choice is what gives us the power to be different. What do you choose? Gill Coombs is a facilitator, coach, peripatetic counsellor and an elder of Extinction Rebellion. Of her three books to date, The Game is the second. In it, she outlines the powers of the Dark Four...
Sep 23, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 18
What is the first, simplest and most profound change we can make in our lives? Sign up as an Earth Protector - and then encourage your local schools, hospitals, colleges, councils to sign too. Jozette Khimba of the Earth Protector Communities organisation, explores the ways we can have huge impact on our local communities. Jozette has been a lifelong activist, but it was her connection with activist Barrister, Polly Higgins that took her to Stroud and the Stop Ecocide campaign. With Polly's deat...
Sep 16, 2020•52 min•Season 3Ep. 17
What are we here for? Where does our heritage step into our potential? How can we build a genuinely ecological civilisation that sees people and communities flourish within the means of the living planet? Jeremy Lent, author of 'The Patterning Instinct', explores the answers to life's biggest questions. Jeremy is an author whose writings investigate the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current existential crisis. His recent book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural Histo...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 16
How can we shape a world where everyone has found and is following their soul’s calling? Gill Coombs, author of The Trembling Warrior and ‘Hearing your Calling’ on ways to discover our soul’s true path. Gill is a writer, facilitator, coach and activist. In 2011/12 Gill studied Holistic Science at Schumacher College, and then wrote her first book Hearing our Calling. In 2015 she stood as a Parliamentary Candidate for the Green Party, and the following year published The Game: Life vs the Dark Pow...
Sep 02, 2020•58 min•Season 3Ep. 15
How would our world feel if we let ourselves follow the wild dreams of our hopes? And how can we reshape the land around us if we let it teach us. Former garden designer and founder of "We are the Ark" (Acts of Regenerative Kindness) explores the wild dreaming of the land that brought her to a place where regeneration is the heart of all she does. Mary Reynolds set her intent to win a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower show with her first (and only) exhibit. To do it, she created a wild garden tha...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Season 3Ep. 14
How can we heal ourselves and the world? So many people ask the question and yet the answers are simple. We know what we need to do, we just don’t know how to do it. In this race through the grounding of Accidental Gods, podcast host, Manda Scott explores the answers. We know that our healing depends on our re-connection with the web of life, with what we call ‘The Natural World’ until we stop seeing it as something other and start seeing it as an integral part of ourselves. But knowing is diffe...
Aug 19, 2020•57 min•Season 3Ep. 13
If you could transform your life with three questions whose answers would bring you into right relationship with yourself, the Earth and the whole web of consciousness, would you ask them? Even if they took you to the full depths of yourself? In this profoundly moving podcast, Mac Macartney guides us through. "When a human embryo is in the mother’s womb, creation whispers into their being ‘I am placing a piece of my genius inside you’. Our task then is to find it, discover it, and share it. If t...
Aug 12, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 3Ep. 12
What links the neuroscience of love, the embracing of failure and the pheromones of trees? Adam Hamdy, novelist, screenwriter and sense-maker in an increasingly non-sensical world shares ways to be the best of ourselves, and help others to reach the same place. Adam Hamdy is a novelist, screenwriter, advisor-to-ministers (not that they necessarily listen, but that's their loss) and soon-to-be author of a book on the neuroscience of empowerment - how we can do it and why it's essential. Our conve...
Aug 05, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 3Ep. 11
How could our entire political system be rewoven so that it met the needs of all humanity - and the More than Human world? How can we step beyond the tribal toxicity that is tearing us apart and find ways to build a future that work? The One Nation Party is a key to a radical new mode of governance. Here, Benjamin Ross describes how it arose, what draw him to it and how it can work to transform the world. As we awaken to an emergent planetary coherence, we rely on stories about our Cosmovisión o...
Jul 29, 2020•45 min•Season 3Ep. 9
How can we reWeave the political governance, not just of individual nations, but of the world? In Part 2 of our conversation, Benjamin Ross outlines the ways in which One Nation Politics is creating Elder Councils, a United Peoples' Coalition and how the One Thousand Fractal shards of Burning Man might ignite change across the world As we awaken to an emergent planetary coherence, we rely on stories about our Cosmovisión or Ultimate Purpose to place ourselves within our bodies, our communities, ...
Jul 29, 2020•37 min•Season 3Ep. 10
How can we embody the change we need to see in the world? How can we find the new ways of being before we even have words to describe them? What is 'Warm Data' and how does it help us see the world as it really is? Phoebe Tickell, utopian, sense-maker and facilitator of radical change talks us through answers that will help us to change the world. Phoebe is embedded in, and embodies the new sense-making and change-making of the world. Founder of Moral Imagination and facilitator of Radical Colla...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 8
In this second of two episodes, practical visionary, Miki Kashtan, lays out her visions of a flourishing, generative future based on providing for the needs of all - the human and More-Than-Human world. And how to get there. Miki Kashtan, co-founder of the Bay Area NVC and adept nonviolent communication practitioner, lays out the pathways she believes could take us towards a future where everyone flourishes. If we explore the flows of life - of need and resource, of how we interact, then we can ...
Jul 15, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 7
How can we reweave the fabric of humanity to create a world where everyone's deepest needs are met? How do we even know what our deepest needs are - for security (physical and emotional), freedom, connection and meaning? In part 1 of 2, Miki Kashtan gives us answers - and a vision of the future. Practical visionary Miki Kashtan has devoted her life to the exploration and practice of non violent communication: to finding ways in which choice can become a central part of human existence: the capac...
Jul 08, 2020•59 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Musician, artist, maker-of-ceremony and guardian of the ancestors of the land, Carolyn Hillyer talks - and sings - about the three things that take care of this land: a deep honouring of the ancestors, a fierce guardianship, and the absolute heart-felt connection of tribe. Carolyn Hillyer lives on a 1,000 year old farm in the heart of Dartmoor. Her fierce, deeply spiritual guardianship of this place involves a heart-commitment to sharing the space with those who have been and those yet to come. ...
Jul 01, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 3Ep. 5
What if our work made our hearts sing every day? What if everyone were paid what they were actually worth? What if the profits went into the community, to build the better world our hearts know is possible? How would that actually work? Let’s find out! Renegade Economist and Right Livelihood coach, Della Duncan, has spent most of her professional life exploring the ideas that might transform our culture into the more beautiful, flourishing - fun, joyful, - safe - world our hearts know is possibl...
Jun 24, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Business as usual has brought us to the edge of extinction. Can we switch off our complacency and turn towards life in time? Raw, honest thoughts from Professor Rupert Read of Extinction Rebellion. Professor Rupert Read, Green Party activist, XR speaker, and deep adaptation philosopher, speaks openly, deeply - and with a raw, almost unique honesty - about the dangers of the current time, and the need to turn away from ‘business as usual’ There are times when we need to shock ourselves out of our...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Season 3Ep. 3
