conscient podcast

I think that the first thing artists have to do is to start telling the truth. You know, just like climate change five or six years ago, you just didn't really want to talk about it. You got shunned in polite company if you talked about it. Now we have the c word, right? We've got collapse. But the conversation hasn't started yet. And I think just broadly speaking, the artistic community… The best of the artistic community, has always been on the edge, right? The social edge. Pushing, complaining, challenging, resisting…

Robert R. Janes

My conversation with...

I’ve been (earnestly) taking courses, workshops and seminars these last few years, while producing over 300 podcasts about art and ecology, as my way of helping future generations prepare for what we are leaving them. 

My most recent learning and unlearning exercise is Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive 2025, a 10 week course inspired by the work of British ecologist David Fleming. 

I wrote about the first three weeks of the course in prepare, bend, sustain posting (also available in audio). So this is part 2 of 2. 

Surviving the Future has been very influential in my life. <...

Note: to read this posting on a calm presence see a conscient rethink

 

a conscient rethink

What needs to be said? Who needs to say it? Who wants to hear it? How does it help? 

February 16th, 2025, on the unceded lands of the Algonquin-Anishinaabe people.

I started publishing the conscient podcast and balado conscient in May of 2020. 

My goal was to ‘explore art and the ecological crisis as a learning and unlearning journey’. 

At that time I believed that ‘the arts and culture could play a critical...

Note: I wrote this facebook posting this morning (February 11, 2025) that I’m repurposing as a calm presence essay and as a bonus episode of conscient. 

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Hi,

We need social media spaces that are non profit, with decent values and ethics, community spirit and maturity. 

This will come. 

In the meantime we have extractive behemoths like Meta, that are nonetheless the product of human ingenuity and that are useful to help connect (even though I think having coffee with a friend or chatting by a fire is better.)

This...

What triggered my climate denial bubble to burst? I feel compelled to share this personal experience, in the hope that it might help others who are also struggling with the current sustainability crisis and searching for a path forward…

This is an ENCORE episode of the conscient podcast from season 1, episode 1, first published on April 30, 2020.

Kaboom !

You’ll understand what this Kaboom is about in a few minutes. 

This episode…

explores my reaction, or at least my experience, when I became much more aware of the climate emergency and what it meant to me an...

prepare, bend, sustain

what I learned in the first 3 weeks of surviving the future 2025

Note: the original posting on my a calm presence Substack is here. 

Sarah Heynen, Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Food & Ecology, suggested I take Surviving the Future : The Deeper Dive (StF), a 10 week course offered by Sterling College, in Vermont. The course is informed by the work of English economist, cultural historian and writer David Flemingand is led by British author and activist Shaun Chamberlin.

Sarah was right about taking the course.

So far it...

What's starting to interest me is stories of resilience for a post-carbon world. What are we going to need for our emotional well-being? It's going to be a different world, not long from now. If we do this, and we must do this, this transition has to happen and there's going to be a sense of loss and sacrifice and challenge, not just with what's happening externally from a climate point of view, but in how we're going to have to make changes to our lives and reorient our energies in terms of our advocacy. I feel like there's an...

A bonus episode in between seasons 5 and 6, featuring my new year’s 'a calm presence' reflection on hope with writings and stories by Peter Schneider, John Crier (as told to Vanessa Andreotti), Richard Heinberg, Zia Gallina, Naomi Klein, Azul Carolina Duque, Jem Bendell, Robert R. Janes and Hildegard Westerkamp. 

To read the original posting on Substack see https://acalmpresence.substack.com/p/when-spirit-becomes-one-5f5

 

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END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES

Hey conscient listeners, 

I’ve been producing the conscient podcast as a learning and unlearning journey since May 202...

Note: this is the audio version of my 'listen and co-create' posting on 'a calm presence'. 

On September 23, 2024, while driving in Victoria BC to record a conversation with educator and musician Azul Carolina Duque for conscient season 6 (to be released in 2025), I was listening to Nate Hagens' The Great Simplification episode 139 : Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health with regenerative living activist Daniel Christian Wahl. 

As I listened to the 36th minute of this engaging podcast, I felt a wave of relief ripple through my body, as if a burden had been lifted…

I...

flowing through

opening ever-new vistas through listening and conversation 

I received an email from composer Hildegard Westerkamp, about ego, and set Hildi’s words to  sound. 

The time seems right for you to let everyone’s words flow through you - as if through a medium or force - back to all of us in ever new shapes. This creates shifts in everyone’s perception, ideas, attitudes, feelings and approaches towards the world the way it is now.  I have always felt that this was precisely what I was doing with environmental sounds. I recorded them...