conscient podcast

Proximity proportionate responsibility: if we were to do an inventory of where all the things we own were made, that would give us a very interesting map of where our responsibility, our attention and our donations ought to go because our pressures on the global systems can be revealed. That's a much more reasonable way to interact with different crises than to simply read about it on the news and interact with the whole of it without the context of our footprint. 

Jimmy Ung was born in Montreal to a family of refugees from the Cambodian war. He has t...

I’m wanting something from art, which I think is much deeper, is a re-imagination of what it means to be human. I feel like we've instrumentalized and trivialized art and actually lost its capacity to expand our thesis of how we imagine ourselves and the world around us. I asked that question because the economy that we've created around art may have actually distorted its capacity to disturb us and to challenge our imagination of selves, which I think is probably at the root of the crisis that we face, a much deeper structural challenge of pretty much how we...

I think as musicians we have particular concerns that perhaps looking at those through an ecological lens can be helpful. One of them is to think about the structures of funding which allow us to operate and to maybe reconsider them because they might change. And to be open to that change and to find solutions. And those solutions might be that we need to advocate for other kinds of support, if we still want to advocate for support, or to engage in other types of activities to make a living. Maybe that sounds a little bit defeatist, but I...

This is a special bilingual episode of the conscient podcast recorded on April 8, 2024 during the solar eclipse in Ottawa. The same  recording can be found on both the conscious podcast and the conscious podcast. Here is a transcript of what I said. 

This is a bonus episode of the conscient podcast.

It's 3.15pm Eastern Standard Time. I'm in Ottawa near the path of totality of the solar eclipse that's going to hit its peak in about 10 minutes. 

Un épisode spécial du balado conscient le lundi 8 avril 20024. On est à la veille d'arriver au point...

'It's kind of like sacred medicine or sacred plant medicine in a way where it meets you where you are, based on your intentions, on your setting, your relationships and everything. Where that space in between is the most powerful piece and it’s us holding the container and guiding people in certain directions. But then, here's the silence: go run with it and see what comes up for you'. - Kamea Chayne, host of the alchemize program and  the Green Dreamer podcast, March 28, 2024, conscient podcast e161

This is a special episode of the conscient podcast about Green Dreamer’s alc...

We are in a very unstable environment right now. We don't have to be change makers. Change is happening. It is happening quickly and the pace of change is accelerating. So this ‘plan and execute’ way of engaging with the world is less and less relevant. Building this capacity to play and improvise and allow for emergent possibilities to arise is a kind of new leadership capacity that makes more sense in the context of the world as it is in this moment. 

This is a follow up conversation with Shannon picking up on our exchange on December 8, 2021 in Tkaró...

It's all about balance and moving away from perpetual growth mode. It's about understanding that if you're a tightrope walker, you can't stand still, because the minute you stand still, you fall off. So you have to move forwards, or backwards. There’s no qualitative judgment about whether it's better to move forward or backward. It doesn't matter. You can grow or you can shrink : it's all about balance. If you stay balanced, you'll survive.

A colleague recommended that I invite arts administrator and consultant Jane Marsland to a conscient podcast conversation.

I went to Jane’s webs...

We're not just talking about saving the environment. What we're first and foremost trying to get people to do is care for the environment and you can't care for the environment unless you feel part of it, unless you feel attached to it, unless you can see outside the building and understand we're not living in bubbles. What I mean by bubbles, especially, is that we're not living in an individual bubble, that we have social responsibility, that we make connectivity with other people, building blocks for community, for betterment of, of various kinds.

Robert (Bob) Sirman served as...

The most interesting part to me is to discover what we're not listening to and why we are not doing that. I think it's wonderful that I've had the chance to learn this listening from so early on where you're trained to listen to the environment and at that time it was more about listening to the sounds of the environment and critiquing them, analyzing them, trying to understand them. To me that subject has widened hugely and really has to do about listening in general and trying to understand why we are listening to things and why we're not...

I think that's what the arts contribute to these discussions. There's the possibility of that kind of emotional or embodied connection to things that, as I think these questions of climate and environment, come closer and closer to people's lives, right? We can think of the wildfire smoke here last summer, people experiencing flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, drought in real time... Through storytelling or sound or visual media, we can really feel that on an embodied level and that  is a really powerful starting point.

I first heard about Siobhan Angus through a Carleton University Climate Commons Noon for Now e...