Accidental Gods

As we move towards Total Systemic Change, shifting from the death cult of predatory capitalism towards a future we'd actually be proud to leave behind, our absolute baseline non-negotiable foundations must be Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Soil. We talk a lot about regenerative agriculture on this podcast, and how we can rebuild living soils from the inert growing media we've created in the hellscapes of Industrial Agriculture.  One day, we'll talk about Clean Air.  Today, we're talking about water, that utterly essential part of our biological and spiritual lives.  It should be clean. It should be safe to drink, to swim in, for us and all the species with whom we share our beautiful blue pearl of a watery planet. As we all know… it's not.  It's not because our system values profit over the vibrancy of life. It's not because people in suits have found that if they treat our rivers as open sewers and our oceans as waste dumps they can get away with it.  It's not because for too long, we've believed the stories that say there is no alternative and this is the way the world has to be. But the masks are coming off and activism is increasingly being seen as an act of radical, necessary resistance that can bring people together, bridging across the false, toxic cultural divides that the establishment creates so that we fight ourselves instead of working towards a world founded on different values.  The push for clean water is one of the most unifying drives we have.  It doesn't matter where you are on the political spectrum, you don't vote for sewage to be poured into the rivers, for the dead zones in the oceans to grow and join up, for the rain to be full of forever toxins so that some suit in a company C-suites can buy themselves a new private jet and an invitation to Jeffrey Epstein's private parties. In the UK, we're in an almost unique position because back in the 80s, Margaret Thatcher saw Pinochet privatising the water and sewage companies in Chile and decided this was a fine idea and imported it wholesale to the UK. Our water and sewage companies were privatised at a steal in 1989 and pretty much everyone is agreed this is an incredibly bad idea. Except successive governments.  So people got together and formed their own activist groups based around the rivers near them - there's always at least one - and they are conducting citizen science, holding people's assemblies and generally making enough of a nuisance of themselves that those in power have to take notice.  All this being the case, it's World Water Day on March 22nd every year and this year - we're recording in 2026 for those of you who listen years later - we're talking to Claire Kirby co-founder of Up Sewage Creek and a member of the Sewage Campaign Network.  I first met Claire when my last dog was young - so nearly 20 years ago.  She has a degree in Environmental Science from King's College London and then went on to become a Pet Behaviour Specialist who used to run rather wonderful puppy training classes.  In 2020, following an episode of this podcast, she undertook a training with Trust the People and went on to co-found Up Sewage Creek, an activist group based around the River Severn in Shrewsbury on the borders between England and Wales.  More recently, she has become an active part of the Sewage Campaign Network and is actively campaigning against the latest Government White Paper on the Water Industry which as much of a greenwash/whitewash as you'd expect.  This was a lively conversation, a lot of it focussed on the situation in England, mainly because we live here and it's pretty bad.  But wherever you are in the world, you have water somewhere near you and I guarantee it's not clean - and there will be people around you who care that it become cleaner.  Clearly if you're in a war zone, even if it's an as-yet undeclared civil war, this is not your highest priority and I really do want to honour the people of Minnesota, Maine and Oregon who are taking to the streets in freezing weather to face the Terrorist gangs unleashed by the US government. You have other things to think about than the quality of your water, though not far away in Flint, Michigan, there is one of the most egregious failures of local politics ever to express itself in the quality of the water, so this is clearly a universal problem.   We each do what we can. For those of us not facing pepper spray, uniting our communities so that nobody is ever prepared to join up to the government's shock troops might be the front line.  If testing water is your thing, please do it.  And to find out how and why to connect and converge, let's talk to Claire Kirby of Up Sewage Creek. LinksWorld Water Day https://www.unwater.org/our-work/world-water-dayCastCo https://castco.org/Trust the People https://www.trustthepeople.earth/Top of the Poops (!)  - to help you connect with your MP https://top-of-the-poops.org/constituenciesSewage Campaign Network https://www.sewagecampaignnetwork.org.uk/Up Sewage Creek https://www.upsewagecreek.com/USC on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/upsewagecreekhttps://www.windrushwasp.org/single-post/new-vision-for-water-a-mirage-or-worse?cid=1dfba32d-7702-4cde-974a-08a8580126ffLeft Foot Forward Article https://leftfootforward.org/2026/01/public-ownership-of-water-is-the-only-way-to-deliver-security-efficiency-investment-and-value-for-money/National Security Briefing on BioDiversity Loss in the UK https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-assessment-on-global-biodiversity-loss-ecosystem-collapse-and-national-securityOther Accidental Gods water-related podcasts River Dôn Project Tim Smedley 'The Last Drop'BooksDrinkable Rivers - https://drinkablerivers.org/drinkable-rivers-book/About Accidental Gods If you'd like to support us, come along and join the Accidental Gods Membership. Here, you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river:

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 first met her, I also met this week's guest and they had so much to say that I wanted to talk to each of them.  So with this in mind, this week's guest is Brontie Ansell, the founder and co-director of Lawyers for Nature. Brontie founded Lawyers for Nature in 2019 with the (fairly infamous) barrister Paul Powlesland, they are a collective of lawyers who act to represent Nature. They reimagine the law for Nature and advocate for Nature to be given legal rights through education, Nature centric governance, consultancy, research and advocacy. Last year Lawyers for Nature were behind the We Are Nature campaign that sought to change the dictionary definition of Nature at the Oxford English Dictionary to include humans as part of Nature. Brontie was one of the key legal architects behind the Nature on the Board project at Faith in Nature and she was the first human to act as the Nature Guardian speaking on behalf of Nature at the company Faith in Nature, giving Nature a voice and a vote on a corporate board for the first time in history. She then went on to design the legal apparatus to appoint Nature and the voice of future generations to the board of House of Hackney, a company that credits Nature as their most important muse. Most recently she was advising the Comisiwn Seilwaith Cenedlaethol Cymru/National Infrastructure Commission for Wales on their Nature Representation pilot. She features heavily in both Simeon Rose's new book Nature's Boardroom and Frieda Gormley's book In the Company of Nature. She has been a lecturer in law for 15 years, most recently at the University of Essex where she was an associate professor at Essex Law School. Brontie has taught courses on Rights of Nature, climate justice, employment law and land law. Her work is informed by the global rights of nature movement and she is grateful to all who came before her to create the bedrock for work she does. Brontie talks to me about what a society could look like if we really reformed the meaning of ‘justice for all’, and started to understand Nature and aspects of Nature as a subject of law.Because of the times we're in, I felt I could not ignore the shocking events that occurred in America this past week week and so we started with a quote from Elliott Morris and Strength in Numbers, which I was confusing with another organisation - Strength in Numbers is, in fact, a Substack blog -  well worth reading. I've put a link in the show notes, along with a few others that I think are worth adding to your must-read list every morning.  Last week - with his permission - I read a bit from one of these, by Oliver Kornetzke as part of the intro (hi Ollie if you're still listening!). I'm not going to make a habit of this every week, but I want to read something from Jackie Summers blog, Field Notes for Cracking An Empire, where she says, “If you’ve been reading my work for the last few years, none of this should be surprising. The old narratives are gone. This is what fascism looks like in real time. First, ICE agents killed Renee Nicole Good, a white woman. Now they’ve murdered Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old US citizen. A nurse with no criminal record. White women’s bodies were supposed to be sacrosanct. Respectable professionals were supposed to be “off-limits.” That’s no longer the case. For Black people, this country has always been fascist. What’s new is who else is inside the blast radius. The Venn diagram of “safe” and “endangered” is now a circle. If you’re shaken, it’s not just grief. It’s narrative whiplash. The distance between “this can’t happen” and “it just did, on camera” no longer exists. You have choices. You can either cling to the lie and let someone else keep paying. Or pay the cost of updating the story about this country. About who is “safe,” about what you’re willing to do now that protections are gone. I’ve said it before, the empire can handle outrage. It has no defense against empathy at scale. Outrage spikes, trends, and fades. Empathy—“it can be me; it already is them”—changes what people are willing to risk and protect. This is recruitment by atrocity. Your blood spilled red in the streets, just like ours. It shouldn’t take this. It always has."There follows one of the most cogent, clear, useful, grounded lists of how we can all join what has been called well-organised Anarchists. And if that's what we are, I'm not sure that's bad.  At the end, Jackie writes - If you’re going out, your first job is coming home. If you’re staying home, your first job is staying human.  I'm writing this from the privilege and safety of a rural home in the UK.  Wherever you are in the world, please look after each other. And for ideas on how we can transcend this moment, to start reimagining a world which sees us as humans who reconnect with each other and with Nature, and give Nature the rights it deserves to thrive, please listen on to Brontie Ansell and her beautiful models of Quiet Romance, Care, Guardianship and justice for all life. Linkshttps://www.lawyersfornature.com/https://immersives.pioneerspost.com/lawyers-leading-nature/index.htmlhttps://greenallianceblog.org.uk/2022/09/22/giving-nature-a-seat-on-the-board-is-a-powerful-way-to-make-sure-businesses-protect-our-environment/https://nationalinfrastructurecommission.wales/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/NICW_NOTB_LFN-Final-Report.pdfhttps://www.houseofhackney.com/pages/nature-our-directorhttps://www.natureontheboard.com/https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/professional-business/natures-boardroomhttps://www.waterstones.com/book/in-the-company-of-nature/frieda-gormley/9781645023500https://www.ukrightsofnature.org/https://wearenature.org/

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: White Americans are not witnessing the collapse of something noble. They’re witnessing the unveiling of what has always been true. The rot now visible is not a flaw in the foundation. Rather, it is the foundation. It was poured with concrete, inscribed into laws, and baked into the American mythos. The violence, the inequality, and the selective application of “justice”—none of it is a betrayal of the American promise. It is the American promise, applied unevenly by design.For centuries, Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities have lived under the weight of this system—disenfranchised, disappeared, surveilled, caged, and killed. They were told to be patient, to be peaceful, to vote harder, to “work within the system.” And when they told the unvarnished truth—that the system is the violence—they were mocked, criminalized, and ignored.Now the machinery begins to grind down those it once served, and only now does the shock begin to register. But this isn’t the system breaking. It’s merely the mask coming off.The laws of this land protects power and wealth. It has always protected power and wealth. The state defends itself. And democracy here has always been ornamental—used to sanctify what power had already decided. The rule of law is not impartial. It’s a weapon, a performance, a convenience afforded to the privileged. The pageantry of justice is reserved for those never meant to feel its weight.What you’re seeing now is not the end of the American dream. It is the truth of the American reality, finally uninterested in disguising itself. The empire is simply turning inward.Many will not want to read this. They will flinch, deflect, and rationalize. They will call me divisive, bitter, and extreme. They will attack, argue, and dismiss. And in doing so, they will only prove the point by choosing their comfort over clarity, and their denial over responsibility. Because that, too, is by design: the privilege of ignoring the truth until it shows up at your own door.So what do we do?  It is a founding principle of this podcast that there is still time to turn the bus that is humanity from the edge of the cliff of species-level extinction. We believe the Egregor, the Super-Organism, the death cult of predatory capitalism... whatever you like to call it, is in its death throes.  In its flailing, it might yet take us all with it, but that's not a given and in every single act of compassion, courage and community that we're seeing around the world from Greenland, to Venezuela, to Minnesota and beyond, we are building the leading edge of a new system. But we need a spiritual base to this.  I genuinely think we get through only if we can lift ourselves out of our Trauma Culture and into a new way of being - an Initiation Culture fit for the twenty first century.  We talk about this a lot on the podcast, and sometimes, we talk to other people who get this, and who are working explicitly towards a shift in consciousness of the whole human race.  Today's episode is one of those. Our guest is Marc-John Brown who describes himself with characteristic humility, as an integration coach, transpersonal life coach, and spiritually-oriented business coach. Since 2019, he has been an apprentice of the Shipibo-Konibo tribe of the Peruvian Amazon Jungle and an ally and collaborator among multiple other living indigenous peoples. Having met him, I'd say that Marc-John  is deeply connected with the spirits of the land in a way that is both profoundly wise, and deeply grounded.  He is one of those who comes to Elderhood at a young age, moving through the world with dignity and humility, helping others to reach the core of what it is to be human at this moment of total transformation.  Born and raised in Scotland, he has a deep spiritual connection to south America and to the indigenous peoples of that land. With his wife, Erika Huarcaya a native Peruvian of the Chanka peoples, Marc-John runs the Native Wisdom Hub, which seeks to bring people of our culture - the white, western culture that is currently eating itself alive - into authentic, enduring connection with the web of life such that we can all begin to change the way we are in the world.  On a recent Substack post, Marc-John says, 'We believe that, in large part, healing happens through nervous system co-regulation between indigenous wisdom keepers and modern seekers. Building healthy relationships. Creating psychological safety. Allowing trust to grow where mistrust has festered.'So this conversation delves deeply into the nature of the trauma we experience - and how we might heal the relationships between all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, ourselves and the web of life.  LinksNative Wisdom Hub https://www.nativewisdomhub.com/NWH on FB https://www.facebook.com/nativewisdomhub/Marc-John's Substack https://substack.com/@marcjohnbrownOliver Korntezke on FB https://www.facebook.com/okornetzkeWhat we offer—If you'd like to support us, come along and join the Accidental Gods Membership. Here, you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme, it's 'Honouring Fear as your Mentor' on Sunday 8th February 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member - but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass

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 week, Alexandra Pimor is Director of the Nature Governance Agency (NGA) within the Earth Law Center. Increasingly, she is acting as a proxy for the Voice of Nature in corporations and organisations, in professional practice, project management and organisational cultural evolution. For many years a legal scholar and academic, her practice, studies and research are anchored in a quantum-based ecology of law paradigm, espousing a critical, reflective and multidisciplinary approach. She has a deep passion for people and planet, and, as you'll hear, she now sees it as her mission to promote the facilitation of conscious governance and leadership, at individual, collective and organisational levels, to advance the emergence of an anthropo-eco-logical system of harmonious living. In our conversation, she lays out what it means to take Death - and Life - as our Witness; to evolve a Sacred No and a Sacred Yes; to speak as the web of life, not for it or to it. She walks the fine line between Two-Eyed Seeing - from a Western, Trauma Culture viewpoint as well as from the perspective of an Indigenous, Initiation Culture - and we explore how boardrooms can see ripples of change as we strive to turn the bus that is humanity away from the cliff edge of the 6th mass extinction. Earth Law center's NGAOnboarding Nature Toolkit ( developed in partnership between ELC, B Lab Benelux and Nyenrode Business University)Bio-leadership fellowship (a mycelium of regenerative and curious change makers)Thinking like Gaia cards (Ally invites these cards into board conversations when the time, space and dynamics are right)https://www.linkedin.com/in/apimor/ (Ally on LinkedIn) Article on Solidarity within the EU in 'The Conversation' https://theconversation.com/solidarity-was-a-founding-principle-of-european-unity-it-must-remain-so-74580If you'd like to support us, come along and join the Accidental Gods Membership. Here, you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme, it's 'Honouring Fear as your Mentor' on Sunday 8th February 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member - but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 we've had the dopamine drip that acquiring it evoked? How thin is the ice on which we are skating?  And how can we change the ways we do things so we don't fall into the void of extinction. Our guest this week spends his life exploring these questions. David Farrier is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. David’s first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looked at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future. It was named by both The Times and Telegraph as a book of the year, earned praise from Robert Macfarlane and Margaret Atwood, and has been translated into ten other languages. His most recent book is the one we're going to be exploring today - Nature’s Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet is one of the few non-fiction books I've come across that is capable both of going deep into the science of the anthropocene - the full genetic, chemical, noise-pollution havoc of it and going deep into how we can engage with indigenous cultures, languages and ways of thought so that we in the western trauma culture might become something new.  As he says early in the book, 'We pollute because we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world, but…learning to coordinate our time with nature's rhythms…could revolutionise our politics.'  The whole quote is in the episode. What you need to know now is that this is a genuinely ground-breaking, mind-opening book and I cannot imagine better reading as we step into 2026.  If you need to know I'm not alone in thinking this, it has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, and the Saltire Award (Scotland's national book awards) for non-fiction. For the New Scientist and Waterstone's bookshop, it is 'Best popular Science Book of 2025'.  You do need to read this.  And in the meantime, enjoy a conversation that left me buzzing for long after we stopped recording. David's booksFootprints: In Search of Future Fossils https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/footprints-david-farrier/6489943Nature’s Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/nature-s-genius-evolution-s-lessons-for-a-changing-planet-david-farrier/7811885David on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/david-farrier.bsky.socialDavid on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/proffarrier/If you'd like to support us, the best way is to come and join the Accidental Gods Membership: that way you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme, it's 'Honouring Fear as your Mentor' on Sunday 8th February 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here You don't have to be a member -but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Masterclass, the details are here

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 Church, he’s now a bestselling author, speaker, and thought leader focused on social responsibility and intergenerational integration. He’s a a Distinguished Fellow at The Stimson Center in Washington DC, and a Board Member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action group. Most notably in terms of what we're talking about here, he's co-host of The Way Forward Regenerative Conversations Podcast on which I heard him speaking to our other guest, Suzette Brooks Masters.  Suzette describes herself as a sometime Cassandra who sees around the corner; a serial social entrepreneur, and a thought leader and strategist in the fields of democracy, governance and futures.She has degrees in Economics from Amherst College and Cambridge University, and a Law degree from Harvard. She has spent much of her working life as a strategist working on immigration, inclusion and democracy. She is currently Senior Fellow and Director of Democracy Innovation at the Democracy Funders Network and Co-Founder of the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance.  So listen in for a 3-way conversation on the nature of power, community and change as we move into the new year. John on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjohnizzo/John's showreel: https://vimeo.com/248012255?fl=pl&fe=vlJohn's website: www.drjohnizzo.comJohn's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1adiRng-Ab3d3Wos9pFjAA The Way Forward Regenerative Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-way-forward-regenerative-conversations/id1651941803Episode with Suzette: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-way-forward-regenerative-conversations/id1651941803?i=1000704364583The Way Forward on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@RegenerativeConversationsSuzette on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzette-brooks-masters-0614981bDemocracy Funders Network https://www.democracyfundersnetwork.org/Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance  https://www.ffaa-us.org/Suzette's recent report - Becoming Futures Ready: How Philanthropy can leverage strategic foresight for democracy https://www.democracyfundersnetwork.org/resources/2024/10/3/becoming-futures-ready-how-philanthropy-can-leverage-strategic-foresight-for-democracyIf you'd like to support us, there is a Patreon page, but we're not going to link to it, because, honestly, the best way is to come and join the Accidental Gods Membership: that way you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme, it's 'Honouring Fear as your Mentor' on Sunday 8th February 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member -but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 foundations for emergence into a new system  - one that we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us? In this solo episode, Manda Scott, host of the Accidental Gods podcast, reflects on the year just gone and looks ahead to the one that's coming and lays out ideas for how we can be the change we need to see in the world.  Join us for New Year's eve and let's find ways we can step into 2026 with grace, courage, bringing the best of ourselves in service to life. If you'd like to support us, there is a Patreon page, but we're not going to link to it, because, honestly, the best way is to come and join the Accidental Gods Membership: that way you can share in the ideas, the programme that will help you connect to the Web of Life in ways that will last—and you can come to the Gatherings half price. Or if that doesn't appeal, come along to one of the Gatherings. Or buy a subscription/Gathering for a friend... do something that feels like a good exchange of energy and minimises our connection with old economic paradigm. Remember that if any of this is difficult, contact us and we'll find something that works for you. Details below: What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake on Sunday 4th January 2025 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here You don't have to be a member -but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 Area. She is a co-host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, a faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, a founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and the designer and co-facilitator of the Cultivating Regenerative Livelihood Course at Gaia Education.Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of the Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She’s author of the international best-sellers Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She’s a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.Before we head into the conversation, I want to invite you to our transformative online course,  Dreaming Your Year Awake,  which takes place on Sunday the 4th of January from 16:00 - 20:00 UK time (GMT). This is a time to go inwards, to be kind to ourselves, to explore all that we can be and want to be. It's your chance really to delve deeply into the year just gone, and look ahead at how you want to shape your attention and intention for the year that’s coming, for each of us, individually and together to ask ourselves how we are going to navigate all the coming turbulence with grace and courage?  This, too, is part of our Accidental Gods tradition and we have people who’ve come year after year to give themselves the gift of time and space and the company of people who share the journey. So please do come along, we would love to share this time with you.What we offer in more detail: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member - but if you are, all Gatherings are half price) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 possibilities for how to live.Equally committed to holding space for grief and loss in turbulent times, Ally has trained as a death doula and rites of passage holder and recently co-created the Tending to Endings card deck, a garden-inspired tool for engaging more meaningfully with loss. She is based in Somerset in the UK, where she lives with her partner, young son and lurcher. In this wide-ranging episode, we explore the nature of advertising and how an industry that has been so deeply embedded in the death cult of predatory capitalism can turn all the wild, creative magic in service of life; how the skills that push us to buy the pseudo-satisfiers can instead remind us of our original connections, and turn us towards co-creation, connection and belonging.  We talk too, about grief and how learning to compost the old system is a key to the new growth we need and want.  Ally is so multi-talented, it was a joy to explore so many ways we can bring our world back into love with life, into balance, into each of us being part of the solution and letting go of the parts of the problem. Purpose Disruptors https://www.purposedisruptors.org/Agency for Nature https://www.agencyfornature.com/Tending to Endings https://www.tendingtoendings.com/Ally on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ally-kingston-75922025/Ally on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/allykingstonALLY is co-guiding a deep dark creative winter journey with Dan Burgess and co, Into the Dark, in January: https://www.becomingcrew.com/intothedarkWhat we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member - but if you are, all Gatherings are half price) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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. FictionRachel 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 DionysusAntonia Hodgson- The Raven Scholar   +Katherine Addison - The Tomb of DragonsAmal El Mohtar  - The River has RootsJacqui Morris and Tamsin Abbott - Wild Folk  Wild Gods Rising - Podcast with the authors (WILD FOLK is being published anew by Chelsea Green in time for the Spring Equinox of 2026You can order (or pre-order) here in the UK  https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/wild-folk-tales-from-the-stones-jackie-morris/d934f63a50bf69fdand here in the US https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/828350/wild-folk-by-jackie-morris/ ) Richard Morgan Altered Carbon Becky Chambers A Long Way to A Small Angry Planet Poetry: You better be Lightning by Andrea GibsonA Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales by Joy Harjo (YouTube Interview on the Power of Poetry) Non Fiction  Economic Space Agency (Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez and Akseli Virtanen)  Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hübl - Releasing our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective TraumaJulie Brams The Nature Embedded Mind: How the Way We Think Can Heal Our Planet and OurselvesTristan Gooley  How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Roots to Leaves Justine Afra Huxley and Anna Kovasna  Co-creating with a Living Intelligent Earth: Pathways towards Kincentric LeadershipEliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: The case against superintelligent AIPODCASTSNate Hagens The Great Simplification: If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: How Artificial SuperIntelligence Might Wipe Out our Entire Species w Nate Soares Your Undivided Attention: Feed Drop: “Into the Machine” with Tobias Rose-StockwellUpstream - A World out of Balance: Introducing Doughnut 3.0 w Andrew Fanning Point of Relation with Thomas Hübl: Becoming an Ally of Life Love and Philosophy by Andrea Hiott: Moving Beyond Binaries in Eduction: Andrea Hiott in Conversation with Tim Logan of Future Learning Design Future Learning Design What’s Love Got to Do with Education? A Conversation with Dr Laura Penn, Khadija Shahper Backthiar, Jamie Bristow and Andrea Hiott Step Outside, Stand Still Pauline Leitch MagazinePermaculture Magazine SubscriptionsWhat we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 of the rest of the living web, it's not always clear what a flourishing economy might look like.  So we're going to explore exactly this with our guest today. Inez Aponte is a self-described 'Dissident of Capitalism', she's an educator, storyteller, and consultant who's spent 15 years bridging mainstream economics with human-scale alternatives. Using the Human Scale Development Approach (Barefoot Economics), she helps professionals see the economic system itself, and imagine what comes next.Barefoot Economics (also known as Human Scale Development) was developed by Manfred Max-Neef and colleagues in Chile as a response to the predations of the colonial capital system. It reframes economic thinking away from endless wants and towards nine fundamental needs: Subsistence, Freedom, Participation, Understanding, Affection, Creation, Idleness, Protection and Identity.We are wealthy when our needs are satisfied, regardless of our income. This means we can also be poor in multiple ways, even when we have a ‘healthy’ bank balance.Inez has built this forward into a framework for the 21st century. Her 'Beautiful Economies Learning Lab' breaks people out of mainstream economic thinking to explore how we can build systems that meet real needs while healing ourselves, communities, and the Earth.So this is our deep dive.  Let's go. https://www.beautifuleconomies.com/https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/The_Future_of_Money-Bernard_Lietaer.pdfWhat we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 at City St. George's University of London, and a Master's in Environmental Science and Management from Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. She is Director and Coordinator at Shropshire Good Food Partnership; Director at Light Foot Enterprises; Project Lead at Food Forward BC (where BC stands for Bishop's Castle, not British Columbia or any of the other potential options) -   and she's co-owner of Little Woodbatch CIC, a farm just outside BC that hosts the Bishop's Castle Community Seed Bank. She is the author of the town's Community Food Resilience Strategy - the only such policy in Shropshire.Daphne and I are relatively near neighbours, we have swapped seeds - her more than me - and share ideas about systems thinking and how we might evolve our world. She's deeply involved at every level from actual growing up to governmental meetings trying to get those in power to find some wisdom when it comes to food resilience, food security and all the other things we say as we try to get them to move away from the corruption innate in our system towards something that actually works in service to life. Daphne on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/daphne-du-cros-743128332Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlewoodbatch/ Shropshire Good Food Partnership:  https://www.shropshiregoodfood.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shropshiregoodfood/ Soil Ed UK: https://www.instagram.com/soil_ed_uk/  Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty Network: https://www.seedsovereignty.info/Serving the Public https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/serving-the-public-the-good-food-revolution-in-schools-hospitals-and-prisons-kevin-morgan/7657661?ean=9781526180469&next=tCivil Food Resilience Report: https://nationalpreparednesscommission.uk/publications/just-in-case-7-steps-to-narrow-the-uk-civil-food-resilience-gap/  Little Woodbatch Farm https://www.littlewoodbatch.co.uk/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 Spiritual Warrior in our times - a concept to which Jamie has given the past 16 years of his life. Jamie is someone who lives and breathes at the intersection between spirituality - specifically Buddhism - and international policy in the realm of what is still called sustainability but which must, now, be shifting towards systemic change. For eight years, he was clerk to the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness and director of the associated policy institute, the Mindfulness Initiative, where he helped to introduce mindfulness to a number of other parliaments around the world. In 2023, he joined the Inner Development Goals team to lead on public narrative and policy development, emphasising the inner skills and qualities needed for a sustainable transition. His work includes influential reports such as Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out and The System Within: Addressing the inner dimension of sustainability and systems transformation. He is an associate of Life Itself, The Climate Majority Project, Mind & Life Institute and Bangor University and now is working with Professor Rebecca Henderson on an initiative which is currently called the ReWeaving Project and it's in this area that we focussed our attention. There are many ways these conversations go. Often, I'm exploring a particular body of work and am asking questions to which, broadly, I have a sense of the answer - 'tell me about [x] that is squarely in your field'.  Sometimes, though, I'm talking with someone I know well enough, and where we share enough of a common grounding, that I can ask questions to which I don't know the answer. Where we can find the places where our Theories of Change meet but perhaps don't overlap, and explore the fertile, liminal spaces of uncertainty.  Jamie is one of these people and this was one of those conversations - where we explored love and power and game theory and how we get from where we are, through a nexus of power that is arrayed firmly around the Dark Triad of Narcissism, Psychopathy and Sadism (and I know that's slightly different to other Dark Triads that have Raw Cunning as the third one and sadism as an afterthought, but I think the cunning is in there with Psychopathy and the Sadism is, as we're seeing around the world, an essential part of the performative power-over that the wounded egos need to tell themselves they're safe). Anyway - we explored all the things that matter - and still only scratched the surface. So Jamie will definitely be coming back for another conversation, but in the meantime, here we are, delving deep into what it is to be human, and to be striving for emergence into a new, generative, kin-centric and flourishing system at this moment of total transformation. LinksRebecca Henderson https://rebeccahenderson.com/Jamie’s website Jamie’s substack Jamie on LinkedIn Mindfulness Initiative Mindfulness initiativeUN IDG Inner Development GoalsLife Guild lifeguild.earthJamie in Episode #274 https://accidentalgods.life/becoming-spiritual-warriors-exploring-a-politics-of-radical-compassion-with-jamie-bristow/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 Henion is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Backpacker, The American Scholar, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.  Wall Street Journal says of this book. "Lovely…truly inspired…and very clever…An appreciation of nature’s nocturnal organisms can help us reset our relationship with the night…That’s the gift of Night Magic: It may make you think differently about the night."Leigh Ann's Website https://leighannhenion.com/Night Magic book (UK): https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/night-magic-leigh-ann-henion/7832118What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 PhD in Law from the University of Melbourne and the University of Vienna, where her dissertation examined the historical foundations of international investment law and the legal architectures of global capital. Her resulting manuscript titled ‘Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922-1959’ was published with Cambridge University Press. She is a junior faculty member at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. As legal scholar and strategist, her expertise lies in transnational law, private ordering, the governance of digital economies, and the design of new institutional forms for just and sustainable futures.  I came across her when she was a guest on the Blockchain Socialist podcast - one of my must-listens - and heard that she was co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI), a venture which aimed to 'merge nature with digital ecosystems and introduce online communities to ecological stewardship whilst developing novel funding mechanisms for vital biodiversity protection and restoration'.  you'll hear more about this in the conversation that follows, but I want to emphasise that the SNI team designed and implemented the Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP), which demonstrated how blockchain infrastructure can serve biodiversity goals. Over two years, SNI developed and distributed more than one million digital collectibles, activating new models of ecological value creation.Currently, Andrea leads a Dutch Research Council-funded VENI project on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) and their potential to reshape economic governance from below. She also serves as Acting Director of Research at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, where she guides strategic research planning and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. She also co-developed and launched an Advanced LLM in Technology Governance with a public purpose orientation, an effort that included curriculum design, funding acquisition, and stakeholder engagement.One of Andrea's superpowers is the ability to take complex concepts and make them comprehensible to ordinary people: blockchain, cryptocurrency, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum, the potential for technology to be used to heal as well as the many ways it is already being used to harm, so we spent the first half of our conversation exploring the baselines of where we are and what's happening in the world. I refer to Andrea's blog post, 'Who gets to bet on the future?' which first appeared on her Transformative Private Law Blog and is linked in the show notes. She mentioned several books and I've linked those in the show notes too, because they were new to me, and completely mind blowing.  I found ExoCapitalism as a pdf where you decide what you pay - this is the value of small presses that actually get what their books are discussing - and Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression is open source - you can read it and engage in the process with others in the Economic Space Agency. Links Sovereign Nature Initiative https://sovereignnature.com/Andrea on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-leiter/Amsterdam Centre for Intenational Law https://acil.uva.nl/VENI project https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/nwo-talent-programme/projects-veniTransformative Private Law Blog "Who gets to bet on the future?" https://transformativeprivatelaw.com/who-gets-to-bet-on-the-future/Andrea on Blockchain Socialist Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-blockchain-socialist/id1501607045?i=1000660699306Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli https://dukeupress.edu/between-gaia-and-groundExoCapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo https://goodpress.co.uk/products/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits-by-marek-poliks-roberto-alonso-trilloPROTOCOLS FOR POST CAPITALIST EXPRESSION by Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen https://postcapitalist.agency/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Year Awake' (you don't have to be a member) on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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 the sheer wonder of being alive that we can step out of the world we thought we knew, into the world as it really is, alive with connection to all parts of ourselves, each other and the whole of the more than human world. Bill Plotkin is one of those who has found what he's here for. He's been a Thrutopian activist and cultural catalyst since long before those were buzzwords in our firmament.  Over the years, he has been a research psychologist, professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide. Now, I would say he is a visionary, a mystic and an elder. More importantly, he's a map-maker, a way-breaker, a trail-leader of the routes we will have to take to walk out of this moment of dissolution, into a world of remembering and creating anew. Back in the early 80s, Bill founded the Animas Valley Institute, whose central purpose is to assist people through the initiatory process that leads to visionary leadership and cultural artistry. Its primary work is with those ready to undergo the joys and challenges of the underworld descent to soul, which flowers into a life of meaningful service and abundant fulfilment — or a deepening for those already on the journey.In other words, Animas Valley Institute supports people in our culture to find what they're here for, to undergo, in his words, the journey of soul initiation. To embark on this journey requires that people break out of the perpetual early adolescence of modernity and endure the ecstatic initiations of late adolescence and that eventually result in true adulthood and perhaps, for a few, genuine elderhood. Bill offers maps and models for his work in depth and detail. He has four books to date and I encourage you to read them all in order from Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, through Nature and the Human Soul, to Wild Mind and finally, The Journey of Soul Initiation.  He writes a blog, Soulcraft Musings, which I also recommend, because we could have explored the basics of Bill's models of human evolution and what it means for people of our culture, who have been subject to what he calls 'systemic human developmental oppression' for many hundreds of generations… and in the long conversation that follows, we did explore the basics of this, but in the days before recording, Bill shared the early draft of a paper called 'A Map to the Next World' and this lit all kinds of fires in my heart and mind and soul—because Bill's capacity to write lucidly the things this podcast is all about  is beautiful and sharp and perfect.  He writes: 'We need a map to the next world because our current world is clearly in its death throes…We need a map to the next world, a way to navigate the long trail from here to cultures that we will be proud to leave for the future ones — of all species. And nature, as always, including human nature, provides this map, or at least templates for creating one. And we need to translate the map into a contemporary language that we can understand — and act on — even though the journey is necessarily through realms of great mystery. We won’t find our way using the maps of other peoples or of other times. We must make our own map.'As and when his paper on the Map becomes available, I'll put it in the show notes.  In the meantime, I have included the poem by David Whyte, because truly, it is one of the guiding lights of our movement, and I've included Joy Harjo's poem, also called 'A Map to the Next World' both as a YouTube recording of her speaking it, and the poem, and the book of the same name from which it came. Please do explore these. And now, let's head into the ways we can change our world, with Bill Plotkin. LinksAnimas Valley Institute https://www.animas.org/Soulcraft Musings (https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/Bills Books Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (an experiential guidebook), Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (a nature-based stage model of human development through the entire lifespan), Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (an ecocentric map of the psyche — for healing, growing whole, and cultural transformation)The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (an experiential guidebook for the descent to soul). AG #302 The Crisis and the Call with Sara McFarland https://accidentalgods.life/the-crisis-and-the-call-journeys-through-species-wide-soul-initiation-with-sara-mcfarland/David Whyte  'All The True Vows' https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/W/WhyteDavid/AllTrueVows/index.htmlDavid Whyte website https://davidwhyte.com/Joy Harjo 'A Map to the Next World' on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4ab9vOC4PoJoy Harjo 'A Map to the Next World' text https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49621/a-map-to-the-next-worldJoy Harjo 'A Map to the Next World' book https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-map-to-the-next-world-poems-and-tales-joy-harjo/b45e39c2525e82e5Joy Harjo website: https://www.joyharjo.com/The Parable of the Tribes by Andrew Bard Schmookler  https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-parable-of-the-tribes-the-problem-of-power-in-social-evolution-second-edition-andrew-bard-schmookler/7823092What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Wr...

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 Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, and then in #102 about his second book in the series, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Ecocivlisation is the third book in this trifecta and I was privileged to read the pre-proof draft, so I can tell you that it's one of the few genuinely Thrutopian books I've read. It that lays out the iniquities and downright horror of the imperial/colonial system of the Trauma culture - termed Wendigo Inc. in the book - and then brings Jeremy's trademark meticulous research and fluent prose to bear on the ways through to a system in which we all live and thrive and work towards the wellbeing of the entire ecosphere.   Given that there is such detail, I wanted to talk to Jeremy now, so that we could explore some of the foundations - the nature of the existing narratives of Business as Usual, of TINA: There is No Alternative  - and why this is so ubiquitous in spite of being self-evidently untrue.  Then I wanted to look at the broader frame of the Theory of Change proposed here so that next spring we can go into more detail ahead of the book's publication. For those of you who don't yet know him, Jeremy was born in London, has a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. Now, he is an author, speaker and founder of the  Deep Transformation Network, a global community exploring pathways to an ecological civilization. He is also founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth. Jeremy's Website: https://www.jeremylent.comJeremy's Blog https://patternsofmeaning.comJeremy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-lent-ba153017/Jeremy's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@JeremyLentDeep Transformation Network https://deeptransformation.network/feedGuardian article on global tipping point https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-reefs-ice-sheets-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point-global-heating-scientists-reportBooksThe Patterning Instinct https://www.jeremylent.com/the-patterning-instinct.htmlThe Web of Meaning https://www.jeremylent.com/the-web-of-meaning.htmlEcoCivilization https://mhpbooks.com/books/ecocivilizationPrevious Episodes#102 - Weaving the Web of Meaning  https://accidentalgods.life/weaving-the-web-of-meaning/#38 - Fractal Flourishing https://accidentalgods.life/fractal-flourishing/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Death Awake' (you don't have to be a member) it's on 2nd November - details are here.The next one after this is 'Dreaming your Year Awake' on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

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's guest comes in.  Kelly Wendorf is an executive and personal coach,  spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur.  As you'll hear, her book 'Flying Lead Change: 56 million years of Wisdom for living and leading' offers a unique answer to these questions. Kelly is founder and CEO of EQUUS whose central question is, 'What are you Yearning for?' and whose central offer is: 'We create conditions for your transformation'. As the name suggests, she and her team do this, by engaging the generous spirits of a herd of horses as mirrors to the people who come to EQUUS for coaching - and, although this is often not why they think they're coming, for healing.  Kelly's childhood experience with a whole-hearted man in Ethiopia, and later, with one of the First Nations people in Australia, taught her a way of listening, of being fully present, fully in her heart mind and body mind, in the present moment, and this is what she helps others to find with the help of the horses who often just don't engage if we're not congruent, not present, not fully embodied. She has been called a ‘corporate shaman’ and a ‘CEO whisperer’, but as we crash through the boundaries of the Great Transformation, it seems to me that Kelly's work opens doors for us all. We may not have access to a herd of free-living, re-wilding horses, but even reading about the experiences of her clients can melt some of the concrete around our hearts. And with this, we can always step outside, stand still, let the living world teach us. So this was a deeply moving read, and a fascinating conversation, at the end of which, Kelly offered our community coupons for two of her forthcoming online courses - the first 'Breaking the Loop, Transforming Habits that hold you back' is on Saturday 1st November at 10-11:30 am Mountain Time and she's offered 50% off that one.  The second is nearly a year from now: How to lead a Transformative Life' takes place over two Saturdays, for two hours each at 10am - 12 noon Mountain Time and this one has a base cost of $457, but Kelly is offering it to our Accidental Gods community for free.  So please do go and check out the show notes for the links and the coupon codes. LinksEQUUS Inspired website https://www.equusinspired.com/Kelly's Book: https://www.equusinspired.com/flcCOURSES2025 - BREAKING THE LOOP: Transforming Habits that hold you backSaturday 1st November 10-11:30am Mountain Time  Coupon for 50% off - EQUUS50KW (full cost $97 - 50% =$48.50)2026 How to Lead a Transformative LifeSeptember 26th, 2026 | 10:00am-12:00pm MTOctober 3rd, 2026 | 10:00am-12:00pm MTCOUPON  for 100% off - EQUUS100KW (original cost $457 - coupon cost = Free )Podcasts mentioned: #297 Charlie Bennet https://accidentalgods.life/otterly-amazing-common-sense-farming-can-feed-us-all-with-charlie-bennett/#288 Abel Pearson https://accidentalgods.life/farm-as-church-land-as-lover-community-farming-and-food-with-abel-pearson-of-glasbren/#273 Daniel Firth Griffith Kin Centric ReWilding https://accidentalgods.life/farm-as-church-land-as-lover-community-farming-and-food-with-abel-pearson-of-glasbren/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Death Awake' (you don't have to be a member) it's on 2nd November - details are here.The next one after this is 'Dreaming your Year Awake' on Sunday 4th January 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are hereIf you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here

'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. So far, so very obvious.  The system is clearly dysfunctional and the cost of failure is the sixth mass extinction. The stakes could not be higher.  So how do we create the unity and clarity we need to coalesce around a common cause? Explicitly, how do we create a system that aims for the longterm wellbeing for all - where 'all' is not just all of humanity now and for generations to come in perpetuity, but all of the web of life, the human and the more than human worlds? How, in fact, do we persuade at least a critical mass of our existing system, that we as humans exist to transform our selves and our world for the flourishing of all? This weeks' guest has wrestled with these questions for all her adult life.  Victoria Hurth is an Independent Pracademic who works at the cutting edge of theory and practice to help the world clarify its consensus on foundational issues.  As you'll hear, she firmly believes that we need to agree that our goal is the longterm wellbeing of all, and then co-create the governance system to frame the strategies that will take us there.  We don't need everyone to sign up, but we do need a critical mass of people at all levels of our organisations from government, to NGOs to industry and beyond.  To this end, Victoria co-led the five-year development of the global ISO standard in Governance of Organizations (ISO37000), was Technical Author for the first national standard in Purpose-Driven Organizations and is currently Project Leader of the development of an equivalent ISO (ISO37011). Victoria is a Fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership (CISL), Director at the Soil Association Certification Ltd and advises Planet Mark, UnaTerra Venture Capital, and formerly Creatives for Climate Collective and SACE – Italy’s national export credit agency. She advised the UN on the SDG methodology for the business reporting target 12.6.1 and has over 25 years’ global experience in business transformation and as a full time Associate Professor of Marketing and Sustainable Business.   Alongside all this, she is a practicing Stoic. How inspiring is that?  She is also co-author of a new book called 'Beyond Profit' which is one of those potentially world-changing books that lays out in explicit detail why the old system is dead, how slight tweaks to make it 'more sustainable' are never - were never - going to work - and how instead we might craft a new system of governance that allows us to step forward into a world that does prioritise the longterm wellbeing of all life. Beyond Profit book https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/beyond-profit-purpose-driven-leadership-for-a-wellbeing-economy-lorenzo-fioramonti/7895496Victoria's website https://victoriahurth.comVictoria on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-victoria-hurth/'Beyond Profit' Book Community https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13085230/ISO37011 (Purpose-Driven Organisations) community  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13091442/What we offer: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass If you'd like to join our next Open Gathering offered by our Accidental Gods Programme it's  'Dreaming Your Death Awake' (you don't have to be a member) it's on 2nd November - details are here.If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life. If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here. If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here