My guest today is Dr Claire Scobie, award winning author of Wild Hope: Stories of Living and Leading in Uncertain Times, her fifth book, out September 1.

In our conversation, we talk about how hearing that a tiny marsupial called the Bramble Cay melomys had been declared extinct in 2019 shifted Claire from denial into what she calls wild hope. We explore Prigogine's islands of coherence, how change happens in hyperlocal ways and ripples outward into whole systems, and why storytelling itself is a regenerative practice. Claire shares story after story from the book, from a community social media page in a small Northern Irish town that grew into a national food strategy, to the campaign to make Melbourne's Yarra River swimmable again, to what her husband Aden's Gumbaynggirr culture teaches about a world with no separate word for nature.

This was the first time Claire and I had met, and after we stopped recording we kept talking for ages. I loved this conversation, and I know you will too.

Claire is the award winning author of Last Seen in Lhasa, an enduring classic about Tibet, The Pagoda Tree and A Baboon in the Bedroom. She has written for the Observer, the UK's Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald. Her training in regenerative practice includes the Work That Reconnects methodology and Regenesis, and she draws on applied improvisation and storytelling when she facilitates workshops. Through her company Wordstruck, she and her team help global companies, not for profits and sustainable businesses uncover the stories that shape their work and the change they want to make in the world.

• 0:00 Welcome and introducing Claire and Wild Hope
• 3:20 The Bramble Cay melomys and the moment denial cracked open
• 8:30 Why it takes time to let ourselves care, and what helps
• 11:30 Lee Robb and the Facebook page that became a national food strategy
• 12:50 How stories myceliate
• 15:30 Aidan's Gumbaynggirr culture: a world with no separate word for nature
• 20:00 Tibet, the Bön religion, and being cracked open by another worldview
• 23:40 Prigogine's islands of coherence and archipelagos of change
• 28:20 The campaign to make Melbourne's Yarra River swimmable again
• 33:40 "That mountain claims you as a human" — flipping the Western view of landscape
• 34:30 Charles Massey's veggie garden paradox
• 38:50 Giles Hutchins on being a Sherpa, not a rescuer
• 40:40 Paul Hawken on real leadership and the degenerative path we're on
• 43:40 Unlikely leaders, and why they rarely see themselves that way

Claire's Links

• Wild Hope: Stories of Living and Leading in Uncertain Times — out September 1, at all good bookstores
• Claire Scobie Substack

I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

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MORAG GAMBLE

Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

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I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care. 

This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.