Episode 4: Rebirth

 Rebirth can mean different things to different people. For some it speaks of seasonal cycles, of vegetation renewed, and natural processes. Yet for others, and historically, it also holds more metaphysical connotations, of resurrection, or reincarnation. A renewal and a renaissance, a rebirth can seem to offer a second chance, the opportunity to reset the clock, and begin again from the beginning. Yet will this time be any different? And would we want it to be? To what extent does rebirth mean a break with the past, and to what extent does it imply a recycling of it, an ultimate continuity, an eternal return? And to be reborn, does something first have to die? Can we bridge these gaps between a physical, and a more spiritual, or cultural renewal? What are the dangers of wanting to wipe the slate clean? And what is the potential.

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 Siv Watkins is an academically trained microbiologist, independent scholar, and ritualist. She is the founder of Microanimism, a platform for examining and developing relationships between humans and the microbial world, and she specializes in helping folks sit at the murky intersection of science and esotericism. Since 2003, Siv has held scientific positions in industry, commercial, and academic research and faculty settings. Her doctoral studies examined communities of bacteria in satellite wastewater treatment systems, and she has also performed scientific research in the areas of conservation microbiology, freshwater pollution and bioremediation, environmental virus population analysis, and the use of microbiomes and microbial communities in sustaining responsible stewardship of the extended natural environment. Originally from the UK, she currently lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico (homeland of the Pueblo peoples) where she makes home with two cats, one horse, and one human man. 

Carlos Zepeda began his academic career in economics and international development focusing on solidarity economics and the politics of alternative development in Latin America. Inspired by his experience studying and working first with the Jesuits, and later, as political advocacy campaigner for international development NGOs and civil society organisations in El Salvador and Central America, Carlos explored how power shapes the root causes of social and environmental degradation. His work has investigated how poor people, especially women, suffer social exclusion from the human right to water.

As Assistant Director in Policy and Practice, Carlos works as a catalyst to network and translate the Institute’s cutting-edge research on integral ecology into action. He mediates between the Institute’s academic research on integral ecology, on the one hand, and national and global policy actors, global civil society actors, faith communities, and the public at large, on the other. 

Carlos lives in Petersfield, at the heart of the South Downs National Park in Hampshire, England with his wife and two children. He loves walking and cycling in the countryside, creative art and literature, listening to West African kora music, and dancing Latin American rhythms (a wide range!).

Alastair Mant is Director of Business Transformation at the UK Green Building Council.

Alastair leads the scoping and delivery of co-created projects that provide the built environment industry with tools and guidance to radically improve its environmental and social impact. Current project topics include net zero carbon, climate resilience, circular economy, biodiversity, and innovation.  He is a Member of the RICS and a Practitioner of IEMA.

Away from work, Alastair's favourite hobbies are Japanese culture and rugby, and he has very fond memories of the 2019 rugby world cup in Japan. He previously spent three years in Japan teaching English and exploring the archipelago's amazing natural and built environments.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to the Regrowth Project from London National Park City. London National Park City is a large-scale and long-term movement to make London greener, healthier and wilder. It is a way to rethink our relationship with nature and the expectations we share for our urban habitats. Most importantly, it's about taking actions that result in a better quality of life for people and wildlife. My name is Russell Kelly, an urban designer, podcaster, and one of 110 volunteer rangers for London National Park City. This podcast, The Regrowth Project, is all about bringing diverse and fascinating people together to discuss the biggest issues facing London, humanity, and our natural world. Each episode is based on one word. This episode's word is rebirth, and our guests are Siv Watkins, microbiologist and animist, Alastair Mant, head of transformation at the UK Green Building Council, and Carlos Zepeda, researcher at Oxford University. Let's get started. Okay, hello, everyone. Hello, Siv, Alastair, Carlos. Let's get started with some introductions. Carlos, can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01: 1:29

My name is Carlos Apeda and I am the Assistant Director for Policy and Practice for an ecological research institute that's called Laudato Si Research Institute. It's based at Campion Hall at the University of Oxford and my role is connected very succinctly to the way I've embraced both research and policy and practice in the ecological arenas. I used to work for Oxfam as political advocacy officer in campaigns for the human right to water. And I also have been working in the field of development and teaching and writing on these topics. So very pleased to join this conversation.

SPEAKER_02: 2:20

Thank you very much, Carlos. Siv, can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00: 2:24

Yeah, thanks for inviting me. This is really cool. I am an academically trained microbiologist. I have a PhD in environmental microbiology, and I've spent a lot of my career sort of prodding and poking bacteria and viruses in lakes and wastewater treatment systems and soils. I don't really deal with humans that much. Not a big fan of humans, but throw me in a sewage plant and I'm a happy chappy. So I've done lots of research. I've been a postdoc. I've been an assistant professor over here in the States. And now I'm an independent scholar and I am the founder of a platform called Micro Animism, which is... It's a platform that allows people to examine human culture and human relationships with the microbial world. So I'm sort of a scientist, sort of a philosopher, and I talk to people a lot about the intersection between science and esotericism and mysticism and divinity, that kind of thing. I grew up in the UK, in Portsmouth. but now I live near Albuquerque, New Mexico. So thanks everybody for using your evening to record this, to accommodate the time difference. I really appreciate you all.

SPEAKER_02: 3:53

Excellent. Thank you so much, Suv. Alastair, please tell us about yourself.

SPEAKER_03: 3:57

Hello, everyone. Nice to meet you all. And yeah, thanks also for inviting me onto the podcast. So I am a London National Park City ranger. which is a little i guess side gig which is great to be involved in but my day job is director of business transformation at the uk gbc or uk green building council i've been there nearly five years before that i worked at a real estate consultancy whereas director of sustainability so my kind of academic background or my professional training is as a chartered surveyor. And then I moved quickly to sort of focus on the environmental impact side. So UK Green Building Council is an NGO. We're a membership body as well. So our mission is to radically improve the sustainability of the built environment. We've got a vision for a built environment that enables people and planet to thrive. And that means we work on issues including climate change, both on mitigation and adaptation, also on biodiversity, on sector economy and on social value. And so it's been a really busy, really busy year. Even though kind of working in lockdown and everything we do is about co-creating and collaborative. And sometimes I say we just sort of have our three Cs, which is we convene people, we curate the information, and then we communicate it back out to policymakers and to industry professionals to advocate and create change. And obviously this year with COP26 and focus on net zero and net zero buildings, especially. Yeah, it's been a real rollercoaster. And maybe we'll kind of explore some of those issues and what sort of a post-COP26 world means and around rebirth and the change we require. So really looking forward to the conversation today.

SPEAKER_02: 5:59

Excellent. Thank you all. As you alluded to, Alistair, we are here to talk about one word, which is rebirth. Rebirth can mean different things to different people. For some, it speaks of seasonal cycles, of vegetation renewed and natural processes, yet for others, and historically, it also holds more metaphysical connotations, of resurrection or reincarnation. A renewal and a renaissance, a rebirth, can seem to offer a second chance, the opportunity to reset the clock and begin again from the beginning. Yet, will this time be any different, and would we want it to be? To what extent does rebirth mean a break with the past, and to what extent does it imply a recycling of it, an ultimate continuity, an eternal return? And to be reborn, does something first have to die? Can we bridge these gaps between a physical and a more spiritual or cultural renewal? What are the dangers of wanting to wipe the slate clean, and what is the potential?

SPEAKER_00: 6:58

This is huge. This is such a juicy topic.

SPEAKER_01: 7:05

Yeah, I mean, you can start in many different starting points, as it were. But perhaps I'll have a go, but just as a broad kind of stab at the idea. So, In my own field, which is ecology and the research, we explore the intersection of everything, really, with the material and the immaterial expressions of nature and our embeddedness in it. Now, The thing about the word rebirth is that it is present, ever present, in every single space of nature and ourselves. And what this means is that we have so much embedded it into our own existence that we hardly ever stop and think about about this concept in a way that is meaningful to our own shaping of behaviors and practices in such way, which is why I'm so delighted that I can have this brilliant conversation with you all. For me, the river of life is one thing that can be represented. Perhaps this is, I will leave you this metaphor and then we can perhaps get into some other stuff. But think of it, I'm trying to think of it in a way that it's kind of present in every culture that you can think. And what could that be? And especially that embeds us, and connects us with everything, I would choose for the notion of rebirth, water. And this starting point, I choose it because if you think about it, when we see a river and we try to focus on the upstream and we're always seeking to see where that river is born, where is the birth and where does it end? So we're all... And if we think ourselves as a tiny droplet of that river, all of us are interconnected and flow generation after generation despite our own existence going on. a few seconds of that time. And we flow through history and despite these endless twists and turns, valleys and mountains that appear in our way, we always flow towards the glittering sea. But the key thing here is that is not just the sea this this flow is is is is there's something magical about it because we're all connected in this river and distinct from every other droplet um but we're also part of everything else we call life because um not only is the water going to in a cycle and it evaporates as we get transformed. But we also carve the landscape. We transform valleys and mountains and all the rest of it. But it's a cycle. And the cycle of life is, for me... really, really represented in that idea. And also, I would finish that connection with the idea that not only is that the material aspect of it, but also the spiritual connotations that indigenous communities around the world have embedded into that cycle of water and life. through millennia, rivers have had spirits in indigenous communities. And this real notion that a river can have deities that shape your life, life your behavior is your future um has been really ever present which is perhaps um then you know as we can connect with what alistair was saying with the the real things that go on in life um the um with the policies and practices that we mentioned climate change cop 26 things are in embedded um there's they and you see that we always focus on the on perhaps climate change is Too little water or too much water. But lots of people just focus on the material aspects of it. So when I bring water to the table, to the conversation, is because I think... it's an example of where also we can look at the material and immaterial aspects of it, the spiritual embeddedness into it and use it for rebirth. So I think it could be a wedge to bridge some of the things that we're trying to talk about today.

SPEAKER_00: 12:45

Well, I'm pretty stoked that... This conversation started with broad ideas of animism, and it wasn't me who had to bring them up, because I think what you're speaking to is this idea of animism, which is, you know, if you go far back enough with anybody's ancestors, all of our ancestors were animists. And animism, broadly speaking, is this idea that we're in relationship with lots of people or aspects of the world that aren't necessarily human beings. So rivers have personhood in some cases legally, if you look at the Ganges or the Whanganui River, which have been legally granted personhood, but just day-to-day, on a personal basis, I have relationship with the mountains that I live next to, and I have relationship with my horse, and I have relationship with the soil, and I have relationship with microbes. And I think that's so fundamental, so basic to this conversation around rebirth, because those relationships frame almost everything about what it means to live, to be in existence. And I'll be the voice of teenage goth and take it to a slightly edgier place in as much as... We're, as humans, we're heterotrophs, right? So we have to consume other things to stay alive. And I'm a vegan, so I don't eat animals or animal products, but I still have to eat things that used to be alive in order for me to survive, right? And that's part of this sort of... duality around being alive that very much reflects the idea of rebirth the cycling, the death the life, all that kind of thing is that I know I have to eat broccoli I eat other stuff apart from broccoli but I like broccoli and there's a relationship there because it's something that was alive and now it's dead because I'm eating it and this feeds into so many aspects of our day to day life and it expands to politics to um the climate crisis or all these different things and um so i'm really thrilled that you brought that up i think it's a really important aspect of this discussion for sure

SPEAKER_03: 15:17

oh there's there's yeah we've blown the doors off sort of at the beginning i feel there's so many ways that could go in but i yeah it's just sort of there's a few few thoughts that started going in my head there listening to listening to both of you. I really feel that part of the reason that we've got ourselves into what is quite commonly referred to now, if not acted upon in this way, as a climate and ecological crisis is because we've managed to other ourselves from nature and the natural world. And I work in what we call the built environment. And that in itself immediately brings down a partition on what I see as the natural environment. And there's a growing movement now and the Park City movement is obviously really aligned with that, which is to bring the natural environment and the built environment more intertwined, not closer together, because that brings you to the idea of something like the Greenbelt in the UK, but much more actually how do we stop compartmentalizing and how do we bring nature back into cities and our other urban areas? And I think that's so important because not because of the immediate benefits that it actually brings to people by living with nature and being able to see nature. And there's plenty of evidence around that. And even down to the level of how house prices will be higher if they're, within x meters of urban open green space things like that but actually because i think it's a more fundamental issue that we've lost touch with nature and we don't understand our impacts on the natural world and the fact that we are part of the natural world and you know for years we've when I've been talking about this. And now I'm at the UK GBC, but before, you know, I was like the one kind of greenie in this very, you know, suit wearing, which I did as well. One has to fit in sometimes, but this suit wearing real estate consultancy and, you know, within the wider industry where, you know, it was very much a different point of view to be talking about, you know, about the issues about things like ecological crisis and the fact that the built environment had a role to play. But what I would say is it's not about saving the planet. The planet's going to be fine. I mean, it was fine for a few billion years before us, right? And the civilization that we've created now, let's say, you know, predominantly in the last 2000 years, but really in the last 250 years, that's what we're trying to save. It's our way of life now. That's really what we're trying to save. The planet will keep going on. It's not this sort of people and planet. We're part of it. So I think it's really important that we put ourselves back within the planetary, the natural world system. We're not at the top of it and we're not alongside it. It's something separate as built environment and natural environment. But it's got to be far more holistic. And I think when we bring people closer to it, they'll have more affinity to it. They'll want to protect it more. But more importantly, they'll understand what they gain from it and also the impacts they have on it.

SPEAKER_01: 18:56

Absolutely. I can agree more. And I follow up on that, Alistair, because I think that disconnection that you were talking about, that siloed approach to knowledge, the way we think about things the issues of climate change is very much connected to the way we're trying to approach it in my field. So think about, again, to the topic of rebirth as a tool, as an entry point to the conversation. So think about how this moment in time, we are in a deep, planetary ecological crisis, which could seemingly be the death of humanity and biodiversity in many, or at least a lot of biodiversity that's existing in the planet. This is associated with a death or something. And it's the death of, or at least something that we have made, is an equivocal. This is the latest report, the IPCC report on climate change said, is an equivocal that this is a man-made death of the planet, planetary life. And we have caused it. Now, what comes next? Obviously, we could choose to have this rebirth as a process of re-greening, re-wilding, re-doing something that is completely different to the way of life that we had been doing. But what's really, and I'd like to get your viewpoints here, Siv and Alistair, in your own spaces and places, because what I have noticed is that there is a systematic blindness to this connection between the... what you find here between the material and immaterial, the knowledge and the wisdom that brings everything together. I will use an example. So we... Siva was talking about how in our own field of animism and micro-animism, there's a lot of connections to the topic. I would say I recall the Goldman Environmental Prize winner of 2016, which is Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous woman. She gave a speech and talked about... how everything was connected, and she was defending the human rights to water, but also the indigenous right to access to a river in Honduras. That was... that had been threatened by the construction of dams and corporate powers were seeking to transform this area for the detriment of the communities, indigenous and also to the environment and nature. Now, what was really important of this example that I wanted to bring was that She, this indigenous woman, was more enlightened than all the COP26 people, policymakers that were there, because she could make the connection between the spiritual aspects of this river, where the community, the embeddedness of the indigenous communities, where the nature and the way of life and the way she spoke about it was really naturally weaved in. And we seem to, and I would love in this rebirth idea of to go into this ecological conversion that we use a lot in my institute, this idea that we can convert ourselves to wake up and see the connections. That is, because I think you, from my point of view, you, Sivan Alistair, you are very rare creatures, not the standard kind of, discourse, the mainstream. It's honestly the way everything is just framed as climate change is just a material aspect, net zero discourse, and that's it. And no one stands back to think how it's also part of our way of life as in the spiritual aspects of it, the way we have disembedded ourselves from nature. and from the spiritual aspects of it. It's just mind-boggling because it's been with us for millennia. But we, our latest version of way of life, is so destructive that it's also making us blind to this fact.

SPEAKER_00: 24:37

I think it's a perception thing. And I think a really, really good example of it, and Alistair, what you were saying, it was just like, I just wanted to shake the monitor screen, like, yes, that, yeah, this idea that we're removed from nature or that nature with a capital N even is a thing, you know, we're all part of a continuum of nature, but humanity as a whole is not separate from nature, but that is something That's really what's ingrained in us. And I noticed that a lot with my scientific training, with my degrees and things like this. A lot of the time, if you're training in science or I guess, you know, something that's very logical, linear, data driven, you're not encouraged to make room for information. intuition or spirituality or creativity, that kind of thing. And I really struggled with that personally, when I was younger, I was a complete jerk about it. You know, I looking, like when I was 21 studying biochemistry, being 38 now and doing what I do, I would have scoffed at myself. You know, this idea that spirituality could be as important and as impactful as science with a capital S. It's all part of the same thing. And I think this idea of separateness is something I've seen so starkly in the response to the current pandemic because The narrative around this one is very combative. So you'll hear a lot of politicians or people in the media talking about the fight against this virus or the fact that we're engaged in some sort of battle and we need to defeat it and that this one is evil. When really, you know, pandemics... particularly related to coronaviruses, are entirely predictable, entirely to be expected phenomena as we move forward in this sort of strange dysfunctional relationship that we've cultivated with the planet, and there's going to be more on the way. But it's much easier, I think, to engage in that idea that there's something malevolent that is causing this type of event. It's much easier for people to focus on that because I guess what that means is that it's not our fault. You know, there's something that's out to get us. There's something evil out there that is specifically trying to kill human beings, that kind of thing. Really, this virus is just very, very good at being a virus. And the byproduct of what its evolutionary drive to do is, which is to make more of itself, a byproduct of that is that it kills human beings, right? And this is like a fundamental misunderstanding that comes from this idea of, unnatural death or natural death or this disconnection with the environment that one of the things I heard a lot when this pandemic started getting really scary was this is a virus that's come to show us the error of our ways we don't need to be shown the error of our ways it's very very clear and it has been for a long time what it is that we're doing to sort of non-consensually mess up a lot of the ecologies on this planet. And so it's been really interesting to notice that response to the pandemic, I think, because it's kind of echoed throughout lots of other aspects and it's been quite highly resolving, I think.

SPEAKER_03: 28:32

Yeah, there's a lot of use of... aggressive war-like terms in general. Whenever we have a challenge, it always seems to turn into something we've got to get the blitz spirit or there must be a silver bullet to solve an issue, right? Or it's a war on climate. Why do you have to have a war on everything? It always feels like there's a massive loser there. There's a really big negative element to it. There's no harmony at the end of any of that. And it's very much, again, othering that we're on one side and they, or it, whatever it is, or they are, is on the other. So yeah, I mean, Christina Figueres, I've noticed she picks it up in her podcast when they're talking about climate on outrage and optimism, and she tries to reframe those phrases that are very kind of military-based backgrounds. And I've never thought about it before then, but when you start listening for it, it really does permeate our culture and these sorts of conversations. But it is interesting, Siv, that you say, you know, we don't need to be shown what our impact is or where we're going in the world because it is really obvious. It is, but we seem to see it, but we do nothing about it, do we? I always think about a cartoon from many years ago that I saw when I started thinking about this and going to events where it's like a car speeding towards a brick wall and everyone's just fighting about which seat they sit in. No one's trying to change the direction. It's just, are you gonna take the full brunt of it or are you gonna be sitting in the back? But no one's actually going, well, how about we just stop speeding towards the brick wall? Maybe we change direction and go around the brick wall, or maybe we just slow down. And it often feels a bit like that. And it seems to be a very human trait that we really only change direction and do a real significant change in response to when a disaster has happened. um and failing that to a very specific threat which is perhaps why the othering is is done so often i mean if you look at back of societies pitting themselves against each other it's it's what always happens as well you know you bring a group together by making an enemy from an other which you label um but also only only do we change almost once it's too late and i think In the respect of this, when we're talking about real planetary level disaster, we can't wait that long on this occasion. So how do we change ourselves from that recurring That

SPEAKER_01: 31:43

exactly is the point, isn't it? How do we change? And the key thing, this is why we try to focus on the idea of ecological conversion, as you convert yourself to wake up, to wake up to this interconnectedness that we have with nature. And this just reminds me of hearing you talk about these things. There's one of a series of satyrs etched by the Spanish painter Goya is entitled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. And Goya believed that many of the follies of mankind resulted from the sleep of reason. But I would... I would probably go further than that. That is just from the sleep of wisdom and the waking up of this interconnectedness of all knowledges. So you focus on COP26 again. Again, the drivers of the seat of that car that you mentioned, who are they? They're just policymakers. And when I say just policymakers, I'm saying the very fact that Global Witness mentioned during this session, which was that most of the people there were of one certain kind, not a diverse community, planetary community, and that includes the indigenous communities, the poor, the excluded, every single human being is embedded in this planet and it was not represented there, there's just one kind. And in so doing, the discourse was very materialistic materialistically based and at some point they just dwelt into the details of a scientist and you know this probably said much better than i do in the sense that you know scientists would like to focus on their own science as the truth um and and and at some point that is the case you know they you know in in the cop 26 there was a this big visible round sphere or in the campaigners or the activists of this is a co2 you know a ton of co2 this is how it looks uh okay but what but what about if we could visibilize or make visible um rather the um the injustice or the blindness that we have. How would you translate all those immaterial aspects of injustice, of our blindness, into these kind of monsters that just wrap themselves up like in those terror movies where some creature just goes into your eyes and then you can't see anything and you're in this car and you're going to crash. And so I do like that. that idea, but also I think we can and we have the power to stop that car. It's not as if it doesn't have brakes or if it doesn't have a steering wheel. We have, we can, but we need to wake

SPEAKER_03: 35:14

up first. I'd say we haven't changed the driver. That's one of the problems, just thinking about it now, is that We're trying to solve the problems using the same system and the same people driving that system. So to come back to your point there of why aren't we listening to these other voices, voices of maybe societies who live in harmony with nature much, much better than our Western society who have created these issues, yet we've gone, oh, no, we're going to step up and lead it and help solve it. And I think someone told me that every... of the five yearly, the COPs which happen every sort of five years are traditionally sort of the most important ones. So we had 2015 when they actually set out that, the Paris Agreement on 1.5 and obviously we had it this year, but it was meant to be five years on in 2020. And that was when we came with the nationally determined contribution. So every nation saying, what would be their part they play towards meeting the Paris Agreement of two or hopefully 1.5 degree world. And every one of those five year ones has been in a European country or Western country. And the next one actually at the end of 2022 is gonna be in Egypt in Sharm el-Sheikh. And that has actually become an incredibly important one because we've kicked the can down the road in the one we just had. So actually those, those national plans, the NDCs, a lot of them need to be put forward in a year's time. And some people are a bit worried, I think, about how that will go, because traditionally that's led by, you know, sort of a Western democratic political entity. But I mean, that hasn't really been succeeding, has it? So maybe this is the sort of opportunity that we need, right?

SPEAKER_00: 37:09

I'm getting flashbacks to every Adam Curtis documentary that I've ever watched. I think ultimately you can't really talk about this without talking about capitalism and politics and it drains my life force and I would hate to rant for the next half an hour about capitalism. that kind of thing but you know fundamentally I think the policymakers are failing us they're failing all of us at the moment for whatever reason it's just I guess it's because it's what they do like that seems to be the track record and I speak to a lot of folks about this because it feels really cruddy like it's really easy especially if you're you know you're like my age you don't have really any plan for the future financially. You're struggling in the States at the moment. It's really rough for an awful lot of people and it's easy to sink into despair and it's easy to think that there's no hope because the folks in charge encourage you to vote and everybody voted and look at where we are, you know? And I haven't lived in the UK for eight years, but when I left the UK, it was the same situation. And so what I encourage folks to think about, and I encourage them to think about it because it's what I have to do to maintain my own sanity as well, is go back to this idea of agency and productivity and remind ourselves that as individuals, we still, for the time being anyway, have the capacity to make our own decisions. And I'm not talking about kind of recycling, you know, because I don't want to feed into that narrative that if you don't recycle, then you're single-handedly destroying the climate. You know, if you leave your light on at night, then it's you, it's you, it's your fault why the climate crisis is happening, because we know that's not the case. You know, we know it's corporations, phosphorus, all that kind of thing. But The idea of empowerment, empowerment of the individual and recognizing that you can make decisions that sit well with yourself. Recognizing that if you think relationship with the greater natural world elements of the world that you haven't been in relationship with before, if you recognize that that's important, at the point of recognition, you become accountable. And it is community work to engage in these relationships and to engage in these practices. I live less than a mile away from the Rio Grande. The Rio Grande has never been this low before, you know, and it's not a big deal for me to go down and pick up trash. If everybody in Albuquerque did that, that could make a conceivable difference on the habitats around the Rio Grande. So I don't know if it sounds trite or not, but it is very, very powerful to work on these small incremental personal steps that you know will ultimately make a difference. And something that comes from that sense of achievement and productivity is also sometimes the kind of bolshiness that leads to things like protests and a little bit more noisiness, a little bit more activity that has to be looked at, has to be taken notice of. Because at the moment, what they are telling us is going to work and is going to make changes is not working. So we have to go back to ourselves and figure out what it is that we can do so that we can be right with ourselves and kind of hold this intense anger and rage and sense that we've been let down and that we in turn have let down other than humans around us. How can we reclaim this idea that we're actually taking those steps? And I don't think it's necessarily right. going to come from looking to the policy makers. We can do that at the same time, but there has to be a very sort of ground level fundamental from the roots type of action that human beings can take so that they don't sink into despair and so that they do feel like they're doing something that's useful because that is the very essence of community, right? And humans are designed to be in community. And part of the reason why this is so rough is the isolation of it. particularly in the middle of a pandemic, right? It's getting out of that isolation, I think, that's going to make a really, really big difference. We just, we can't do anything unless we survive, I guess, fundamentally.

SPEAKER_01: 42:06

Yeah, yeah. I was thinking, Kieran, you said about, so I come from a land of, from my whole family is from the Mayan culture as in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and there's this embeddedness with the land this cycle of connected I used to work for Oxon on campaigns from the human right to water and there was a lot of discourse about the material aspects of the things that we were fighting for. But the immaterial aspects were there and the value systems that really shape our behaviours are the ones that I think are the sources of rebirth, the things that we can definitely tap into to change. Because if you think about it, what is it that is going on here. There's enough information now about climate change and the planetary crisis, about the biodiversity crisis. There's oceans of information. So it's not lack of information. It's not because of that that we're not changing. If you think about the example that Alisa was bringing, we have a dashboard full of indicators of the crisis. Everything is with warning lights saying, red alert, red alert, you're going to crash. Or you're going to go into this abyss. So why are we not changing? And I go back to this idea of rebirth in the sense that we, well, I go back to the idea that I was saying about the deeply intertwined aspect of our own humaneness with nature. So, for instance, in the land where I come from, the Maya dead were laid to rest with corn. placed in their mouth, the maize. Maize was highly important in Maya culture because it's a symbol of rebirth and also was food for the dead for the journey to the other world. Similarly, a jade or stone bead placed in the mouth serves as a currency for this journey. Because due to its green color, resembling that of corn stalks, burying the deceased with jade was believed to allow them to follow the path of the maze god, eventually leading to their rebirth. And so this is embedded into the culture. And of course, value systems and and and uh shape our behaviors the way we interpret our embeddedness with nature and then you start appreciating things beyond the matter the material aspects of what you can see and can touch so in this sense corn has a lot of connotations. It's got the idea of rebirth. It's got the idea of embeddedness with the land. The importance that agriculture was for an ecologically sustainable way with the Mayans. And also, it's a way intertwined with the spirituality of it, with a maze god. And And I just think about how this wisdom has been excluded every time in this policy summit. And why not? go back to this millennia of wisdom and break the silos, break the walls that have excluded these people, excluded the poor, excluded the indigenous, excluded the environmental defenders. Those are being now assassinated and killed in the Amazon for defending the land. Why not? bring their indigenous cosmologies into the mix, into really, really making us reflect of our value systems. The theologians, theologians, I work a lot with theologians at the Laudato Si Research Institute. And it's remarkable how you think there was Pope Francis on BBC Radio 4 right before cop 26 and he was talking about the the idea that we need to convert and see togetherness and this ecological conversions is a deeply contemplative deeply you know kind of process that we need to go. And it's, and it's a full of hope rather than seeing monsters, like you were saying to me, you know, lots of the negative connotations of it that paralyzes people. It's, it's more about seeing how this wisdom, how this value systems can wake us up from this, this this kind of transition point in which the dashboard is completely irrelevant. That's not going to change us. It's what makes us feel that is important to us. Love is important to us. I care about my children. I will act for my children. And this is why I care about the work where I work with ecological issues. What does make people take for change? That's a question.

SPEAKER_03: 48:27

I would come back to the point that we were talking about before, which is the people that are in charge or have put themselves in charge of making the change, they're in the top of the system that has created the problem. And on the whole, they're generally doing very well out of that system. And If you just look at innovation in businesses, you very, very rarely get disruptive innovation from an existing business. So one of the often used examples is Kodak, who actually invented the digital camera, but then because they were making so much money out of film, they put it away again into a cupboard and said, no, we don't want that on the market. And then look what happened. Someone else had to come along. and do it. And, you know, Blockbuster didn't come up with Netflix and there's all sorts of various other examples. So I think what we're doing is we need, you know, I think we're kind of all in agreement that we need a sort of a rebirth of our cultural system, which is, you know, predominantly a global cultural system now. So, and it's at a pretty large level. But the people in charge of kind of that systems innovation are the people who are doing nicely out of the existing system. And those with the new ideas are very much kept on the side. But what's really interesting is those with the new ideas are actually, they're not new ideas. But again, I think we're fixated. There's something in us as humans that we always want the new thing. So sometimes I think that there's two ways we can go at this point, which is one, It's that kind of looking forward, the next shiny, bright, new thing that's really exciting. The sort of advancing of society, which seems to be this movement towards tech. And I see that Matrix, a new Matrix movie has come out, which I'm very excited about. But dear God, please, let's not have that as the future, right? There's this increasingly connected world that we talk about, which actually is increasingly disconnected from the world. And that seems to be one way that tech is going to solve this. Tech is the solution. And the other way is actually to go back to what you were talking about, Carlos, and some of the points that you've made, Siv, and what you seem to be close to, which is actually, can we just learn from societies previously and those societies that still exist and live much closer harmony? And it's a weird twist of irony that the people who are on the front line of the climate impacts are those who have had the least impact have done the least to change the climate. And I don't know how the world has conceived of that. But again, one of those results is those in power are those who are most insulated from the change, partly because of just geographical location, but also because obviously of financial power as well.

SPEAKER_00: 51:34

It's kind of business as usual. And you see that, you know, Again, the pandemic is the easiest example in vaccine equity. A lot of the initial responses to the pandemic 700 years ago when it started, which is what it feels like, some of the best responses were led by countries that don't have access to any vaccines now. And as a result, we're seeing more and more variants and there's this weird business going on in the United States about vaccine hesitancy and stuff like that. But what you're saying about tech, Alistair, is really, really key. And it's something that I've been thinking about for the last few months because certainly in biotech, a lot of startup companies and a lot of existing researchers are trying to figure out ways that we can use aspects of particularly the microbial world to help with some of these problems. So I see a lot, for example, about fungi or bacteria that can eat microplastics. The sort of very, very basic idea being if you can throw enough of these organisms at the rafts of plastics in the Atlantic Ocean that they're going to clean them up for us and, you know, it's going to be a collaboration between humans and the microbial world and it's going to solve this really huge problem, which is... bananas, right? Because the mindset behind that approach is exactly the same as the mindset that got us to this point in the first place. And also, throwing fungi at rafts of pollution in the Atlantic is, you know, one thing, but still throwing plastics into the ocean while we're asking this group of organisms to clean up this mess for us is sort of just really rude at best, but also mostly an exercise in futility. And the way that these technologies are kind of pitched and developed and ultimately sold, they're not altruistic, right? Somebody's making... pretty good money off of them that's how they come into being to begin with and so it's almost as if people are figuring out ways to expand on the the big problem which you mentioned Alistair this I the idea that the folks who sort of causing all of this the ones who are making the most out of it and they're probably going to be all right and they're all heading out into space to do whatever they want to do in space while everybody's left on the planet to deal with everything, we're still doing it. We're still doing it. And it is driven by the same people, ultimately. And I don't have an answer to it. I can't think of any situation short of some sort of Star Wars type thing revolution where this changes fast enough for it to have real impact as we need it and all I can keep going back to is the idea of personal agency and looking to other parts of humanity and other parts of our global community that make more sense and seem to be doing everything a bit better. And I wish I had an answer to the big problem, but it's weird. You know, it's really weird. It's like a, I don't know, fractal of things kind of just following themselves.

SPEAKER_01: 55:28

Yeah, no, I'm really, really inspired about what you were saying in the sense that It just reminds me of a book I read many years ago that really struck a chord and which is strangely very relevant now is the book is on blindness it's called blindness and actually there was a film out coming out of it is by Jose Saramago I thoroughly recommend it for this times of blindness of collective blindness and you can watch a film at some point and it really strikes a cause because it's about this pandemic that starts and the pandemic is blindness suddenly and it's a white blindness there was once upon a time someone driving I won't say the whole thing but just one little example there was someone at a traffic light and suddenly there's this blindness this white blindness that suddenly comes up for no reason and then as soon as uh someone speaks to the other it just completely goes literally viral and um and there's many things coming stemming out of this um implications in society of this white blindness now what i what i was going to say about that is is that effectively um we have we are entering this capitalism verse which has kind of blinded us into thinking that's the universe so as opposed to universe we have capitalism verse and which is a very constrained view of possibilities as humankind and this universe is can and should flourish beyond that capitalism verse the barriers that that that utilitarian frames that are used by those that you rightly point out. I couldn't agree more. The 1% of the rich, the ones that are being propelled by CO2 across the world in jet planes and rockets. And how can we... wake up so that the rebirth the idea that brought us originally into this conversation can be ignited I would say let's look at the ideas that really trigger that can make people move and be moved and I think those ideas that can move people and can make them be moved are in the value systems that we hold dear. And the way to bring them into the conversations is by quite literally doing that, by making them, making the movement, the social movement, break those silos, break those barriers. So, for goodness sake, for next COP, let's break the barriers so that there's... indigenous leaders there's community leaders there's um there's um ethicists ethicists uh theologians there's all sorts of knowledges and wisdoms included in the same table and throughout the world we've got technology why not use technology in a way that is much more democratic and that can really um embrace all this planetary community into a new interconnectedness beyond what Mark Zuckerberg was saying with the metaverse in which we will be connected in this virtual world but we will be completely disconnected from the real world which is absolute rubbish and thrashed and filthy as Pope Francis was saying in the encyclical letter Laudato Si that we've left the planet as a pile of filth and that we should convert ourselves to really shift the tone of our practices and behaviours to really embrace our planets and community I would probably say one other last thing which is effectively I just worry about our blindness. And for me, what really ought to be left is the idea of hope. Because one thing that comes with blindness is that you can either be paralyzed, which is what's happening a lot. You know, I think about my children. I've got my daughter, she's five years old. And what she's going to be, you know, she's going to have eco-anxiety. Of course, I don't want her to have eco-anxiety or to suffer the consequences of this. I have my son. He's two years old. But the questions are already coming from this early age, you know, about what did that man say in the radio show that we're all going to die because of climate crisis? And how else can i put it um to my daughter and and the only way i can think of is the things that we can do to do the rebirth one again and again and again but in our local communities the things that we can control the things that we can do and in the and the global level the things that break the silos, as we've been saying again and again, break the silos so that we really put those colourful humans from all over the world and their ideas into the right seat, the driver's seat.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:16

Yeah, I think that chimes really nicely with what Siv was saying as well, because I was getting from that earlier conversation, it's about, you know, rebirth from the bottom up which is perhaps slightly strange phraseology but um and keeping that agency which i think is so difficult as you say you know the more you learn about this the more you are likely to have eco anxiety and kind of fall into despair but i think you can't have agency when you're feeling hopeless and and and you're despairing so i it's you know i i feel that for those of us who work in this area and feel deeply about it, it's, we need to find ways to keep our own agency, our own hope, but also create those opportunities and those outlets to bring the rest of society on it, you know, at a community level and sort of, yeah, spend time on really tangible actions that people feel that they are being part of the solution. Because I think otherwise, I can absolutely, and I get this sometimes when I just want to disappear into YouTube videos, mainly of rugby matches, actually, and things like The Matrix, but I can see why people might want to live in a metaverse if your real world around you, you feel is crumbling and being destroyed and is incredibly stressful and despairing, then the nice, shiny digital world might feel like the better, safer option. So I think we need to create, you know, you spoke earlier, Carls, about this river. We need people to understand that there can be a really beautiful ocean at the end of that river, the journey that we're on, and we need to give them some direction towards it and maybe some rafts of hope and give them a paddle and make them feel tangible. Have I gone too far with that metaphor? I think so. I think

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:08

that's perfect. You get it, yeah? Yeah, no, that's comprehensive. I think I

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:14

was... That's kind of a challenge, I I would

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:19

just finish up by saying that I've kind of made a career out of being a miserable old git, but I do think that human beings are capable of really exceptional things. For all of the really not great stuff, that we do and I think a lot of people kind of personally hold in themselves like your average person on the street feels a lot of guilt about a lot of things but it's important to realize that humans still do really exceptionally wonderful things you know like I spent an hour yesterday outside with a five-year-old boy who wanted me to help him rescue frogs you know that kind of thing that's enough that's enough to recognise that you don't need to sink into despair and to just remember the power of an individual person and the individual person's decisions, that's enough too. I think that's a really important thing for people to hold on to.

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:28

Until next time, thanks very much.