Accidental Gods

Exploring the work of Dave Snowden and his approach to facilitating generative change in organizations and society. Discussing upbringing, activism, empathy in governance, global landscapes, redefining narratives for social transformation, language influence, data interpretation, and empowering change. Delving into political structures, societal interactions, and closing with a call to action for systemic change.

In this discussion, Professor David John Helfand, a seasoned educator and astronomer, highlights the urgent need to reshape education for a rapidly changing world. He shares insights on creating an innovative, integrated curriculum at Quest University Canada, blending science with the humanities. Helfand contrasts the engagement levels of younger students versus university learners, advocating for a shift towards curiosity-driven, project-based learning. He emphasizes dismantling academic silos to foster collaboration and creativity in education.

How can we create a world where our children can grow in safety - both physical and emotional?  How can we find that sense of psychological safety within ourselves? How can we find the authenticity and compassion to heal our own wounds so we don't pass them on? With Louis Weinstock, child psychologist and expert in complex trauma.  Louis Weinstock is a psychotherapist who works with children and the child within us all. He helps people find light in the darkness - in the things the are unseen, unheard and unspoken. For over 20 years, he has expertly guided children and adults through some of the toughest challenges life can throw at us - loss, trauma, divorce, burnout and breakdowns. And now he has a new book: How our World is Making our Children Mad - and what to do about it. He's taking 'mad' in both senses of the world - the one that means 'not fitting in with consensus reality' and the one that means 'massively angry - enough to go on strike and take to the streets'.   With absolute compassion, deep wisdom and years of insight, he opens up seven roots of our trauma and the fruits of healing that each offers if we heal it. In the podcast, we explore the origins of the book, and move beyond it to the ways we can heal ourselves and the divided culture in which we live.  We touch on some of the moving case studies in the book, and the ways we can extend the learning they bring to ourselves, our inner children, and the children in our lives, always striving for healing of self and planet.   I am always struck by Louis' deep authenticity, his emotional intelligence and his capacity to hold balance and find wisdom in the chaos of our world.  As a starter for healing, this feels huge. Louis' Website and Book: https://louisweinstock.comThe Visionaries: Rites of Passage: https://thevisionaries.org.uk/our-impact/

How do we bring the world's media on board with the climate and ecological emergency?  What would happen if they became the fourth arm of the climate movement?  Donnachadh McCarthy, journalist, columnist, author and long term climate activist explains why this is the single most urgent action we can take.  Donnachadh McCarthy is a professional eco-auditor, author and environmental campaigner. He is a former deputy chair of the Liberal Democrats and served on the board of the party for seven years. He is now not a member of any political party and enjoys working with people in all parties or none to address our common environmental crises. He is a former columnist with The Independent and has had articles printed in the Guardian, Times, Ecologist, Resurgence etc.He is the author of Saving the Planet Without Costing the Earth, Easy Eco-auditing, and The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy has Been Bought. He is the co-founder of the successful cycling campaign group Stop Killing Cyclists. His environmental consultancy 3 Acorns Eco-audits helps deliver the Corporation of London’s City Bridge Trust eco-auditing programme for London charities. His Victorian home in Camberwell, was London’s first carbon negative home. It has solar electric and solar hot-water, a Clean Air Act compliant wood-burner, solid-wall insulation, rain-harvester and composting toilet. In this rawly honest conversation, he lays out the reasons why he believes that if we are to survive the Great Derangement, the media must become the fourth pillar of the environment movement.   Along the way, we discuss his visit to the Yanomami and how it changed his life, his political experience at the rotten core of Britain's corrupt political system, and his swan-dive into a new future on the stage at Covent Garden.  Join us to reframe the setting of your intent. Climate Media Coalition http://climatemediacoalition.org/ Donnachadh on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/donnachadhBook: The Prostitute State: http://www.theprostitutestate.co.uk/buy.htmlPioneering the Possible by Scilla Elworthy

How do we design our built environment to be more than just 'sustainable' (doing things slightly less badly) and instead to be genuinely regenerative where all we build and make heals people and the planet? Professor. Janis Birkeland is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in the University of Melbourne. Janis has dedicated her personal, professional and academic life to figuring out what is genuine sustainability - how to plan for a built environment that is not just 'less bad' than the alternatives, but actually returns more to the land and the people who live in and around it thn whatever went before.  Throughout her professional career, she has been drawn to figuring out how cities and buildings, despite their huge impacts, can transform society and save the planet. First, she became an architect and urban designer, transferring into city planning. Later, she became a lawyer to better understand the barriers to systems change. Now she is an academic, author of many dozens of papers and a number of books, of which the most recent is ‘Net- Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development’. She is a clear and consistent advocate for the design of human settlements that are socially and ecologically ‘net positive’ and has just published "Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development" (Routledge) which provides methods, models and metrics to enable practitioners and students to create eco-positive environments. It also includes a free computer app to facilitate net-positive designIn this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the myriad ways we could choose to design our buildings differently - and the many practical ways we could upgrade what exists as well as creating new models for what might arise.  Janis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janis-birkeland-84135120/Net Positive Design WebsiteAlgae-Tecture: https://carloratti.com/project/algaetecture/Mycelial Bricks: https://wasterush.info/mycelium-construction/https://whitneyfungifun.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/sustainability-of-mycelium-bricks/https://happho.com/an-emerging-sustainable-construction-material-mycelium-bricks/https://www.certifiedenergy.com.au/emerging-materials/emerging-materials-mycelium-brick

What are the most effective tools we can engage to create new, different, better futures?  How do we translate our visions of a generative future into action now? What are our bridging tools, that exist now and take us forward to a world that would work for everyone?  Phoebe Tickell is an imagination activist, renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur.  Originally trained as a biologist (she has a first class degree in Biological Natural Sciences from Cambridge University), she now works across multiple societal contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and has worked in organisational design, advised government, the education sector and the food and farming sector. Until 2021 she was working in philanthropy at The National Lottery Community Fund to implement systems-thinking approaches to funding and and leading insight and learning in the £12.5 million Digital Fund.On the way through, she has co-founded a series of organisations dedicated to systems change via innovative approaches, including 225 Academy, which delivered 5-day transformative experiences for young people aged 11-18 globally; Future Farm Lab, which created systemic interventions to the food system and the Our Field Project — an experiment in a group of citizens co-owning and co-governing a field of grain in Hertfordshire.More recently, she is founder of Moral Imaginations and RenaissanceU, a member of Enspiral, part of the Don't Go Back to Normal Project, on the board of Renaissance U, and an advisor to the Consilience Project.  She's a certified Warm Data Lab host and an advisor to the International Bateson Institute.  She recently led 1,000 people in a Collective Imagination journey in Berlin and then 4,000 in Sweden. In all of this, she took time out to talk to Accidental Gods about the nature of the present moment, how we can find the learning tools that will bridge to the future we want to envision, and how we translate those visions of the future into values. In a wide ranging, inspiring, edge-walking conversation, she explored the balance of inner and outer worlds, tangible and intangible and how we might connect them; she talks of falling in love with Solar Punk again (her Twitter handle is @solarpunk_girl, so that feels quite huge), having read that 'Solar Punk without the end of capitalism, is just greenwasher CyberPunk'.  So we explore what cyber punk is, too, and Protopian writing, and how it relates to Thrutopian writing, before we move onto the nature of existing Solar Punk communities and how they frame their underlying values. This was a genuinely sparky conversation: it felt as if we really dug deep into the nuts and bolts of change and how it could happen - come along for the ride!SolarPunk links: SOLARPUNK: Life in the future beyond the rusted chrome of yestermorrowHow We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now (ft. @Andrewism) How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future (ft. @Our Changing Climate)

Joe Brewer, a bioregionalist and earth regenerator, discusses the transition from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene, emphasizing the importance of regenerative change and healing amidst planetary collapse. Topics include sustainable human culture, regenerative design, shamanic connection with the land, and reconnecting with nature in urban environments. The podcast explores the role of community and Earth Regenerators in fostering connections for mutual growth and healing.

Revolutions don't work, and we don't have time. What we need now is a Regenerative Renaissance where we all envisage the whole, beautiful, clean, thriving world we want, and set about making it happen. In this second part (of two) podcasts, Rieki Cordon of the SEEDS regenerative currency explains how a new economy could work, based on regenerative values and principles.Rieki Cordon of SEEDS says, 'We need a Renaissance over revolution because a revolution is technically just revolving. It’s having the same power structures, but with new people in power.  What’s interesting about a Renaissance is it’s a fundamental shift of the paradigm. So it’s not something that’s “us vs them”; like a revolution where the mission is often, “let’s take down the 1%.”It’s more about rethinking how our systems are designed, and how we show up in society. We have fundamentally new technologies. We have a fundamentally different environment that humanity is operating in and we’ve never before had a global civilization."SEEDS is not just about money and value exchange, it's about finding ways we can be in the world that are genuinely regenerative: Reiki is also a part of HYDRA, which is evolving the rules and baselines for regenerative villages.  In this second of two parts, we explore how a genuine regenerative renaissance might spread, how it might look and feel - how we can make it work. SEEDS: https://joinseeds.earthSEEDS conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqfAy1mKQGM

We all know that our economic system is broken - that the ways we share value are skewed so that the super-rich grow richer while the rest of the people and planet suffer. But if we're to replace the dollar as an international currency, what will work, how will it work, how can we make the transition to a genuinely equitable, regenerative currency?  What does a Regenerative Renaissance look like? Rieki Cordon of SEEDS has an answer. First part of two. Rieki Cordon, one of the facilitators of SEEDS regenerative currency, describes the necessary regenerative renaissance as follows: "We need it (the renaissance) to be regenerative; if not, humanity is not going to be able to continue this experiment called civilization because our planetary ecosystem services will fail. That’s one side. The other side is we can build the most beautiful world and civilization the world has ever known. And why not? Why not make all of our rivers drinkable again? Why not live in forests full of food?"  And why not create a currency that grows out of, through and alongside community so that never again do we enter into the bizarre transactional nightmare of debt and compound interest where, beyond a certain threshold, money is a self-replicating extractor, sucking value and life from people and planet. SEEDS currency is built on the blockchain, but it's not Bitcoin: the principles that govern its creation and exchange are built on the values of a genuinely regenerative renaissance. In this first part of two podcasts, Reiki describes how SEEDS arose and what it can do. SEEDS: https://joinseeds.earthThrutopia Masterclass: https://thrutopia.life

It's long been said that it's easier to imagine the total extinction of humanity than it is to imagine an end to capitalism.  But Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics blew that away.  An updated version has been released on the tenth anniversary of publication.  Here, Della Duncan talks to Charles and his son Jimi about life, capitalism and building the more beautiful future our hearts know is possible.For over a decade, Charles Eisenstein has been a pillar of the movement to a regenerative future.  His book is essential reading, his blogs and podcasts are always thoughtful interventions that offer insight at crucial junctures of our progress towards a more conscious evolution.  He dares to go where others either fear to tread or just don't have the insight, and he leads by example: his life is based on compassion and the gift economy. He's one of the few people who lives as far as possible outside predatory capitalism.  His son, Jimi, is a transformative animator whose clear, clever art explains complex regenerative principles in ways that everyone can understand.  He, too, explores the edges of our being and lives them into reality. Here, these two remarkable people speak with Della Duncan of the Upstream podcast, celebrating the tenth anniversary edition of Charles's book, but also exploring the delicate and transformative moment in which we live, shining lights on ways we can live the change we need to see. As we head into Thrutopia, we are delighted to be able to bring you this as an introduction to thinking - and being - the transition. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/sacred-economics-money-gift-and-society-in-the-age-of-transition/9781623175764Jimi's You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6IIFtrrKH_J3555XGJkl1AMusical Chairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BZ-WGnZMXMRegenerative Agriculture: https://youtu.be/fSEtiixgRJICharles Eisenstein's website: https://charleseisenstein.orgCharles Eisenstein's Substack: https://charleseisenstein.substack.comThrutopia Masterclass: https://thrutopia.life