Accidental Gods

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 f...

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:

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 wee...

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...

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 Ch...

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...

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 Ar...

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...

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.

Fiction

Rachel 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 Dionysus

Antonia Hodgson- The Rav...

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 o...

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 a...

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 S...

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...

This week's guest, Andrea Leiter, is one of those polymaths who brings not just breadth, but astonishing depth to the work of bridging the worlds of technology, biodiversity and international law; bringing them together in service of a new way of being built from the ruins of collapse.

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 holds a jointly awarded...

What is the true vow of your life, the one it would kill you to break?  This phrase comes from the poem 'All The True Vows' by David Whyte, but there can be no better introduction to this week's guest, who knows how to help people - ordinary, every-day people from our culture -  build true, heart-felt connections with the web of life such that we come to know what we are here for, our unique gift to the world, the promise is would kill us to break, what it feels like to be so heart-explodingly in love with th...

What is an eco-civilisation? What are its values and what are the frames within which it works? Why do we need it in the first place and what will the Establishment do to maintain business as usual? Most importantly, what can each of us do to live an eco-civilisation into being?

This week's guest, Jeremy Lent, explores these ideas in depth in his forthcoming book, Ecocivlization: Making a World that Works, which is due out in May of 2026. 

We've talked to Jeremy twice before, first in episode #38 about his award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A C...

How do we heal ourselves from the 'lost-ness' that afflicts our culture? How do we move on from the strange—and wholly untrue— belief our culture holds that we are separate from the natural world, that our cycles of exploitation, extraction, destruction, pollution are the way the world is, that this is the natural order and there's nothing we can do to change it, individually or collectively?

Knowing that our sense of separation is an illusion is one thing, but genuinely feeling it deep in the marrow of our bones is quite another.  Which is where this week...

'Each of us was put on this earth at this time to personally determine the fate of humankind.  Do you think you were put here for something less?' Chief Arvol Looking Horse. 

We exist in a world where the ultra-rich are getting richer, powered by a system we call 'the economy' which is serving to funnel power and value up to an ever-shrinking core of wounded individuals who then project their trauma out on the rest of the world in a doomed attempt to feel better about being caught in a system that doesn't promote human wellbeing.

...

What is humanity for?  What happens if we rethink not just the way we plan buildings, but our entire role as beings on a living planet?  These are the central questions driving Michael Pawlyn's third edition of the life-changing book, Biomimcry in Architecture. 

Michael Pawlyn is an architect, the founding director of Exploration Architecture Ltd and is a ground-breaking pioneer, not just of biomimicry as the design foundation of architecture and the built environment, but of the ways we might redesign humanity.

Before setting up his own practice, Michael was central to the team that rad...

Let the Wild Gods Rise.  Easy to say and harder to do - but if you were offered a portal, a way to step into the other-worlds, to reconnect with all that we have been and could be, would you take it?

If you're listening to this, you are likely steeped in the mechanical world of our culture - but it doesn't have to be like this.  The other worlds are alive, present…wild—and just within reach. All we need are doorways, places where the veils between the worlds grow thinner and then route maps to take u...

How do the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other and our place in the web of life shape our world?

How can we craft narratives that can shift the way we see and experience the world? Is this even the best leverage point to start off with or is there a deeper/wider/more effective acupuncture point we could explore as we evolve to become…what? 

What are we aiming for? What—who—do we want to be and how might we reach places we can't even express - and do it i...

Why are we here? How do we think? What is the nature of life? What are the boundaries between ourselves and the rest of the living web—between ourselves and the rest of the universe across space and through time…and in the timeless, formless place from which everything arises?

These are the big, foundational questions of our existence, and how we answer them shapes how we see ourselves and our relationship to everything around us. If we work on a human supremacist frame, then we have no qualms about destroying the rest of the living web. If w...

Our western (Trauma Culture) economies run on two falsehoods - we might go so far as to call them lies.

The first is that economies have to grow to be 'successful'.  The second is that government spending is limited by the tax take.  That is, they need to take money in as taxes in order to spend it out into the economy.  Both of these are untrue, and understanding that they are untrue, and the political forces of ignorance and mendacity that keep them in place, is essential to our moving forward into a future that works. We...

As the old system is splitting apart, a few brave souls are already working to hospice this old system, acting as Death Doulas to the Great Dying—as well as helping people to awaken the seeds of a new world within.  One of these is our guest this week. Sara McFarland is a Soul Initiation and Wild Mind Mentor and Guide, Artist of Consciousness and a Death Doula for the Great Dying.

Their website says, 'I believe Earth is always moving towards transformation and renewal—to our eyes, it may look like rupture or being stuck, a dead...

Our Trauma Culture has spread across the globe with terrifying speed and ghastly efficiency.  But the tide is turning and people of good heart in many nations are beginning to understand that what we need now is a move towards a 21st Century Initiation Culture. The language is often different, but at heart, this is where we need to go.

Our guest this week, Hilary Giovale, is a mother, writer, facilitator and community organiser who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.  As an active reparationist, she seeks to follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of human rights, environmental ju...

We are a storied species: Everything we do arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other and our relationship with the web of life.  Our current polycrisis: the accelerating annihilation of our cultures and our biosphere arises out of a particular set of stories that tell us we're isolated individuals caught in a system of separation, scarcity and powerlessness; that we can't trust anyone else and we have to do whatever it takes to get to the top of a steep-sided pyramid - that anyone who falls or fails is not worth o...

In this week's podcast I was honoured to join a four-way conversation between Giovanna and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and Tim Logan of Future Learning Design Podcast, to celebrate the publication of Vanessa's new book, Outgrowing Modernity.

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism which we have referenced many times on Accidental Gods.  She is also Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria in Canada. She is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David La...

In the midst of the Great Transformation, one of the most exciting changes taking place is in our capacity to find what makes our hearts sing - to find our flow, to find what it is that we can do best, that we can do with all our hearts and souls—that leaves us radiant; that lets us lead with our Heart Minds, letting our Head Minds relax into service to life.

Getting here, though, is not a trivial pursuit.  And finding ways for parents to lead their children into this place of discovery and switched-on joy is...

“In a world where our wildlife is becoming extinct at a frightening rate, we are setting up an oasis where animals, wild flowers and even ancient fungi can thrive.” Charlie Bennett writing of Middleton North Farm.

It's clear to most of us that the existing food and farming system is unsustainable.  What's less clear is what to do about it, particularly when the behemoths of the industry put so much time, effort and money into propaganda which suggests we can't feed humanity unless we keep doubling down on the industrial systems that are destroying our soils, our water...

Water is our lifeblood and Clean Water (along with Clean Air and Clean Soil) is one of our core Three Asks, the non-negotiable baselines that underpin a flourishing future for people and life on our planet. Getting there, means everyone beginning to care at a bone-deep level, way beneath our conscious minds and having a sense of how we might get there, supported by evidence of what works (or doesn't) so that we can create positive feedback loops of growing community between the human and Beyond-Human worlds. 

Living this into being is one of the core pillars o...

We know that our 'democracy' is, in fact, a kleptocracy that is not fit for purpose IF that purpose is the continuation of complex life on earth. The sociopaths who have stolen control show no signs of shifting to something that works, so it's way past time that ordinary people across all walks of life embraced the tools of participatory democracy and wrought the new system that we need - a new House of the People which would, finally, accrue power to those with wisdom and enact governance of, for and by the people and the planet. 

T...

We're on the edge of a cliff and the way out is through - through the obfuscations and extractive values and downright lies of predatory capitalism.  Through to authenticity, and integrity and finding language for how we can be who we really are, what our souls yearn to be.  And that language is not always English.

This week's guest, Diarmuid Lyng, speaks Irish - one of the older, indigenous languages of these islands. Listening to him is a genuinely fabulous experience in the truest sense of the word in that it lifts us to the place of my...

Our priority now is to find -and then embody - a sense of grounded stability, a sense of safety, a sense of embodied connection to the Web of Life...

 This is the single most important thing we can be doing to create a world we'd want to leave behind, and this week's guest, Dan McTiernan, is one of those who is leading courses, trainings and embodied meditations that give people a genuinely grounded set of resources to feel this at a cellular, bone-deep level so that it can become the foundation for a life of authentic practice.

How can Bioregionalism supplant the nation state as the natural unit of civilisation? Joe Brewer is living, breathing and teaching the ways we can work together with each other and the natural flows of water and life.

We know that the current paradigm is breaking apart in real time, but how do we become the light that shines through the cracks?  How do we build ways of being that reunite us with the web of life, create new/old ways of letting value flow and become what humanity has been and could be: stewards of that massive, m...

Here is a meditation for the Solstice – the moment when the sun stands still.

It is suitable for Summer and Winter solstice. 

You don't have to do this at the exact moment of stillness: it’s the connection that counts, the marking of the turning point from days lengthening to shortening (or vice versa if you’re in the southern hemisphere).  This is a moment of reflection and a re-affirming of our connection to the web of life. 

You don’t have to limit yourself to one pass through – please feel free to explore this...

As we head into the solstice- that moment when the sun stands still—whether you're in the northern hemisphere where we have the longest day, or the southern, where it's the longest night—this solstice feels like a moment of transformation.

The world is turning over, turning a page. The old system is visibly—palpably—breaking apart. A new system will arise from the ashes, because there is always going to be a system. The question is what it looks like, works like, feels like. We are a prosocial, communitarian species, but our culture has shattered from our know...

Our guest this week, Rob Hopkins, is a towering figure in the world of regenerative change.  Co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes, he is host of the podcast 'From What if to What Next', stars in the groundbreaking French film 'Demain', speaks at TED Global and TEDx events and most recently, has created a collaborative music project with artist Mr Kit, ‘Field Recordings from the Future‘ which will be released on 17th of May 2025, alongside his new book,‘How to Fall in Love with the Future’.

With the subtitle, 'A Time Traveller's Guide to Changing...

If you listen to this podcast for any length of time, you'll know that I believe the way forward is predicated on our finding shared values—I'd go for integrity, compassion, courage and generosity of spirit as the baselines—and then a suite of clear asks in the outer world and needs in the inner world.  In logistical terms, at an absolute baseline, we need Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Soil. These are non negotiable and the fact that we currently have none of these is a grim indictment of how much we live in an economy that sucks the l...

How do we let go of the sense of scarcity, separation and powerlessness that defines the ways we live, care and do business together? How can we best equip our young people for the world that is coming - which is so, so different from the future we grew up believing was possible?

This week's guest, Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann is an educator, regenerative - and I would say renegade - economist who is Project Lead at the Regenerative Economics for Secondary Schools and Lead Author of the online textbook of the same name. Jennifer has taught economics for...