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Accidental Gods – The Thrutopian Podcast

Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose – and now it’s collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we’d all be proud to leave as our legacy?

What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?

What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil – and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life – so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?

We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.

As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven’t yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. We have the choice now – we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.

Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.

Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.

Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda’s Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor

Copyright: ©AccidentalGods 2020

Latest Episodes:

Hagitude: Paving the way to empowered elderhood with Sharon Blackie Sep 07, 2022

Show notes

"As elders, our job is to die, as eventually we come to live —always in service to life." How do we do this? How can we pass into our elder years with grace and rage and depth and honouring of who we are, and emerge wiser, and more attuned to our soul's calling. With Dr Sharon Blackie, author of Hagitude.

Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist. Her highly acclaimed books, courses, lectures and workshops are focused on the development of the mythic imagination, and on the relevance of myth, fairy tales and folk traditions to the personal, social and environmental problems we face today.

As well as writing five books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted, her writing has appeared in several international media outlets, among them the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Scotsman. Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise.

In today's episode, we explore the writing of Sharon's latest book, HAGITUDE: what it is, how it came about, how the powerful old women of the European folk tales provide a model for what it is to live in the second half of life: we explore alchemy, the magic of the land, the Cailleach, death, dying...and Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax as the ultimate role model for older age!

HAGITUDE website: https://hagitude.org
Sharon Blackie personal website: https://sharonblackie.net
Sharon's podcasts dedicated to Hagitude: https://hagitude.org/podcast/
Accidental Gods Episode 90: https://accidentalgods.life/thresholds-of-being/
Sunday Times Review of Hagitude: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hagitude-by-sharon-blackie-review-busting-the-menopause-myth-dl0n6bbjx

Beyond the tribal divisions of right and wrong: Exploring Restorative Engagement with Sophie Docker Aug 31, 2022

Show notes

We know that tribalism is destroying us, that the need for 'us' to be right and 'them' to be wrong and to become enraged when we're challenged…is what's destroying us. But how do we change? How do we connect across our differences and hear pain without attributing blame? Exploring all this and more with Sophie Docker of The Restorative Engagement Forum and Open Edge.

Sophie Docker is a highly experienced workshop leader, facilitator and mediator working in organisations, education and community. She is Level 3 trained in restorative Justice and CNVC Certified Nonviolent Communication trainer with a number of other decision-making, dialogue communication and conflict engagement tools up her sleeve.

She has a degree in Politics and Economics and a Postgraduate diploma in Law but most of her learning came from meditation, and wide and wild experiments in living, being in community, collaborating and organising in economic, social and environmental justice campaigns and movements. Sophie's approach is underpinned by Nonviolent Communication and Restorative Practice, which she has been working with since 2012. She is a Restorative Justice practitioner registered with the Restorative Justice council and a Certified Trainer with the Centre for Nonviolent Communication and brings a systemic lens to these approaches using them personally and professionally to engage with presenting issues.

Sophie's work focuses on transforming internal and external domination systems and experiencing ourselves as essential to life, and as part of a complex adaptive living system. Her work is influenced by relational neuroscience, transactional analysis, meditation, multiple conflict engagement modalities and a deep exploration into the dynamics of personal and structural power, privilege, violence and its impacts.

In this episode, we explore the nature of our binary tribalism, our tendency to 'other' that which we don't understand and to become triggered when challenged. And then, with Sophie's guidance and experience, we talk of the ways we can move beyond that - how she has learned and is learning to step beyond our age-old tools of domination and power-over, into something where we allow our own pain but don't feel the need to project it out - and by being different, allow different outcomes.

Links:

Restorative Engagement Forum: https://restorativeengagementforum.com
Open Edge: https://www.openedge.org.uk
Sophie's page on the Nonviolent Communication Training portal: https://nvctraining.com/nvc-trainer/sophie-docker

Co-Creators of the future: exploring the birth of a new education system with YouthxYouth co-founder Zineb Mouhyi Aug 24, 2022

Show notes

Zineb Mouhyi is the co-founder of two charitable organizations, YouthxYouth & the Weaving Lab.

YouthxYouth is a movement to radically reimagine the future of education with the goal of accelerating the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their education.

The Weaving Lab is a global community of practice with the mission of advancing the field of weaving, understood as the practice of interconnecting ideas, people, projects, organizations, places, and ecologies to support systems change.

Zineb is also a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) where she collaboratively explores the question: How might we facilitate a planetary transition toward systems that serve all life?

In this episode, we explore the death of the old system and the birth of the new: how can the older generations become the allies the younger generations need? How can we explore together what it is to live in the wreckage of a dying system and how can we be part of the emergence of something new, generative and flourishing?

Because Zineb is deeply involved in education systems and how they might change, we explore how current education is often designed to facilitate control, to deliver workers who follow rules and orders, not lively activists who think for themselves. From here, we delve into the ways young people can reclaim their own education and mould it to serve the world that could be woven into being, not the one that is dying; how they can shift from One Truth thinking to the understanding of many truths; from linear concepts to systemic thinking, to the ways we might create toolkits to untangle ourselves from the depradations of capitalism.

We explore ways to leapfrog change, to put people, project and places at the heart of a global community of practice, to move out of the logic of separation into the logic of connection.

This is a conversation grounded in living practice of the ideals Accidental Gods endeavours to promote: finding ways to be the change, so that we might birth a new future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us... but really talking to those younger than us and finding what they need and how we can help them.

Links:

A Wild Farming Life: Building a regenerative croft from scratch with Lynn Cassells Aug 17, 2022

Show notes

Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer met while working as rangers for the National Trust and soon realised that they shared a dream to live closer to the land. They bought Lynbreck Croft at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park in the Highlands of Scotland in March 2016 - 150 acres of pure Scottishness - with no experience farming but a huge passion for nature and the outdoors.
Now, they raise their own animals and sell the produce, grow their own fruit and vegetables, and are as self-sufficient as they can be, alongside producing food for their local community and hosting educational tours and running courses.
Hailed as Best Crofting Newcomers in 2018, they were given the Food and Farming Award by the RSPB in Nature of Scotland Awards in 2019 and were nominated for Nature Champions of the Decade as part of teh Nature of Scotland 10th anniversary.
They have appeared in the series This Farming Life on BBC2 and have written the book, 'Our Wild Farming Life', linked below.

Lynn and Sandra were newcomers to farming and to regenerative concepts, but in the past 6 years, as they have faced success and (some) failures and learned from both, they have seen regenerative farming becoming a far more widely held concept.

In this heart-felt episode, we begin by exploring the writing process, and how Lynn, a new writer, came to write such a fluent book.

From there, we delve deeply into the practicalities of farming in a relatively inhospitable landscape, but also explore the spiritual nature of land-connection, the ways we can give the animals with which we share our lives the fullest capacity to be all that they can be, so that we can become all that we can be: so that we can feel safe, and held in connection to the land and the tribes of the more than human world that surround us.

Lynbreck Croft: https://www.lynbreckcroft.co.uk
Lynbreck on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lynbreckcroft/
Our Wild Farming Life: book: https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/our-wild-farming-life/

The Politics of Being: Wisdom and Science for the new world with Dr Thomas Legrand Aug 10, 2022

Show notes

Holding a Ph.D. in (Ecological) Economics and having studied international development, political science, and management, Thomas Legrand works in the field of sustainability for UN agencies, private companies, and NGOs. His focus is on forest conservation, climate change, sustainable finance, and organizational transformation.

His spiritual journey began at the age of 23 with an encounter with native spirituality in Mexico, before embracing the wisdom of a wide range of traditions and practices, including meditation, energetic healing and Tai-chi-chuan. He lives with his wife and their two young daughters near Plum Village, the monastery of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the South West of France, his country.

His spiritual search, his thought as a social scientist and his professional experience have gradually converged on the importance of spiritual wisdom in humanity’s ongoing transition. Searching for a way to mainstream this understanding in the political and sustainability conversation, he has dedicated much of the last 10 years to researching and reflecting how we can radically rethink our model of development.

The result is his book, 'The Politics of Being: Wisdom and Science for a new Development Paradigm' which synthesises so many of the foundations of Accidental Gods - the merging of a universal spirituality, grounded in connection with the web of life, and a political and social framework for a new way of organising ourselves and each other.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss how Thomas first encountered shamanic spirituality and then explore the ideas that are the backbone of his book: how do we shape our new reality and, crucially, who is already doing so?

Links

Politics of Being website: https://politicsofbeing.com
The Politics of Being: book https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Politics-of-Being-by-Legrand-Thomas/9782957758302
Video intro to the book: https://politicsofbeing.com
Politics of Being Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/politicsofbeing
Thomas on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-legrand-b8406215/
Politics of Being on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/politics-of-being/

Banking on the Beetles: Creating a local circular agro-economy with Liberty Nimmo of The Three Turnips Aug 03, 2022

Show notes

By now it's obvious that our current system is destroying all life on the planet - and our food/farming system is key both to the current levels of destruction: industrial farming is eroding soil, poisoning the biosphere on land and sea, gobbling up fossil fuels and harming our health.
Conversely, local community agriculture projects that link together viable enterprises in a network of circular economies is one part of the key to a viable, flourishing future.

Liberty Nimmo is part of a three-person team (The Three Turnips CSA) at Lower Hampen Farm in the English Cotswolds that is working towards a viable future. Their work aims to provide an environment where nature is allowed to flourish and thereby help to support a sustainable, diverse system of agriculture. In this holistic, regenerative approach they wish to benefit all life, building soil health, contributing to cleaner air and improving water quality. They operate a low input, low output farming system and constantly strive to reduce our energy requirements and aim to become carbon negative.
Liberty herself is a Regenerative Horticultural Grower, and the Founder of Nimmo Skincare which uses Pasture Fed Tallow as a key ingredient, along with home grown oil infused herbs. Liberty has a lifelong interest in herbal medicine and using local plants on people and livestock and combines her work at the farm with part time Italian Travel Consultancy.

In this episode, we explore the practicalities of starting from scratch in the evolution of a new regenerative project: what are the aims and values that underpin it, and how can a network of enterprises grow up, each sustaining the others, so that the end result is a community supported agriculture project that feeds and nurtures the local community.

Links:
Hampen Farm
Nimmo SkinCare
FiberShed
Zero Dig
Charles Dowding No Dig Growing
Huw Richards YouTube Channel (Growing)
Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons
Outrage and Optimism w Jacqueline Novogratz: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/outrage-optimism/id1459416461?i=1000570653731
Nicole Masters: For the Love of Soil: https://www.farmingsecrets.com/mentor/nicole-masters/

Of Course We Can! Lifting the lid on possibility with James Brown, mulit-Paralympian Gold Medalist and Climate Activist Jul 27, 2022

Show notes

James Brown is an athlete, inventor, social entrepreneur, multi-Paralympian gold medal winner - and climate activist. There was a time when James was known most for his astonishing achievements across many sports. Between 1980 and 2015, he took part in no less than five Paralympic Games (winter and summer) as well as eighteen World Championship events.

His range of disciplines was extraordinary: they included track running, cross-country skiing, triathlon, swimming, road/track cycling and guide-running. He has several Paralympic Gold medals, was holder of the 800m World Record for eight years and has three other World Firsts to his name, including being the first registered blind person to compete in a World Track Masters cycling event at the velodrome in Manchester.

In 2018, everything changed for James when his daughter - then at university - broke down in front of him in a cafe in Exeter and explained all she had been reading about the climate and ecological emergency. James wept with her, but she offered hope in the shape of the newly formed Extinction Rebellion, and the possibility that non-violent direct action might help foment change. James committed to being at her side in whatever actions she took and within weeks, they were walking arm in arm to the blocking of the five bridges that were the first London Extinction Rebellion action.

Since then, James has been arrested 13 times for his non-violent actions (once for spraying chalk paint on the road outside DEFRA in Bristol where it was raining so hard the chalk was washing off as they sprayed it one and was gone long before the arrest process was complete). Most recently, he spent two and a half months in Wandsworth prison for the action that propelled him to climate-activist super-stardom - when he climbed onto a plane at City Airport and superglued himself to the top. The Facebook Live video that he recorded at the time has gone viral and James received thousands of letters and emails while he was in prison, from people who felt desperate about the climate emergency and wanted to know how to find the same courage.

So this is what we explore in today's episode - courage and agency and activism in an age of total transformation. What can we do, and how can we find the courage to take the action we know the world needs?

James Brown Website: https://jamesbrownparalympian.co.uk

Bridging the Gap: finding truth, reconciliation and climate justice with Saurav Roy Jul 20, 2022

Show notes

With a track record of founding startups at a young age, and executing entrepreneurial roles in global non-profits, Saurav Roy was selected as one of the youngest Global Shapers by the World Economic Forum at Bangalore in 2017. Since then, he has studied for a Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher Collage, and is now working for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based, independent financial think tank that strives to influence the nature of global finance, away from stranded fossil fuel assets. It has cemented the terms 'Carbon bubble', 'stranded assets' and 'unburnable carbon' into the financial lexicon.

Saurav's Master's thesis focused on the 'just transition' elements of the Green New Deal with the realisation that 'everything would change and everything would stay the same' in terms of the balance between the global north's endless consumption at the expense of human dignity, ecosystem annihilation and cultural balance in the global south. He examined the lack of supply chain justice in the existing concepts, evolved radical, inspiring ideas of how a global token system might fund non-debt-based climate reparations, and created the idea of a 'Carbon Truth and Reconciliation Commission' - because not all climate devastation can be healed simply by throwing money at it.

In this inspiring, thought-provoking episode, we explore these ideas in depth, evolving ideas and questions for COP27 and learn Saurav's three core concepts for healing our times.

Saurav on LinkedIn
Carbon Tracker Initiative
SDRs
Barbados PM Mia Motley: article
Jayati Ghosh

Trees, Trees, Trees! How we can grow food around, within and on them - with Ben Raskin Jul 13, 2022

Show notes

Ben is head of Horticulture and Forestry at the Soil Association. Author or co-author of eight books including Zero Waste Gargenind, The Woodchip Handbook and The AgroForestry Handbook, Ben holds specialist knowledge and experience that includes Community Supported Agriculture, woodchip, and starting up new horticultural businesses.

All told, he has been working in horticulture for more than 25 years and has been with the Soil Association since 2006.During that time he has chaired the DEFRA Edibles Horticulture Roundtable, sat on the boards of the Organic Growers Alliance and Community Supported Agriculture Network UK, and on the committee of the Farm Woodland Forum.

His own experience includes running a walled garden in Sussex supplying a Michelin starred restaurant, working for Garden Organic at their gardens in Kent and running the 10-acre horticultural production at Daylesford Organic Farm, before moving to the Welsh College of Horticulture as commercial manager.

More recently he is project managing an agroforestry planting at Helen Browning’s farm in Wiltshire and has acted as Horticultural Advisor and Board Member for the Community Farm near Bristol.

This conversation follows on from the one on Regenerative Farming with Caroline Grindod, as part of our ongoing exploration of how we can transform our food and farming systems, heading for the complete paradigm shift that we need to an entirely new system and a new way of being in the world, while allowing farmers, growers and ordinary people to continue to flourish in the existing system.
Ben is at the heart of an agro-forestry revolution in the UK and abroad, experimenting and gathering data and experience in the planting of trees as we move deeper into a changing climate. We talk about the practical implications of working with trees that, by their nature, require long term thinking and planning. We learn of the mistakes that have been made, and the accidental discoveries of things that work. We explore the changing face of farming, and how agro-forestry, sylvo-pasture and other ways of farming with trees can transform modern agriculture from being part of the problem, to being part of the solution.

Ben's Website
Ben at the Soil Association
Ben at the Sustainable Food Trust
Ben at LinkedIn

Ben's Books
The Woodchip Handbook
Plant a Tree and Save the World
Zero Waste Gardening
Books mentioned by Ben
The Reindeer Chronicles
Barn Club

Events and Organisations:
The Farm Woodland Forum

Weaving with the Land: The future of regenerative farming with Caroline Grindrod Jul 06, 2022

Show notes

Caroline Grindrod is a consultant and coach in regenerative systems and leadership. Along with background in environmental conservation and upland land management, holistic management and experience in designing sustainable and regenerative food businesses, Caroline has a lifelong passion for personal development, wild spaces and a growing interest in regenerative leadership.

She draws upon that diverse range of skills and experience to offer an ever-evolving and truly unique approach to working with ‘keystone’ people in food and farming.

Our climate is changing month on month, year on year. Growing food has always been precarious, but never more so than now. Our global food system lacks resilience and people are starving in greater numbers than ever. If we believe the answer is not in yet more chemical inputs, or in growing food in vats that distance people ever more from the heart of the land, how can we foster resilient systems that enable people to heal our damaged landscapes while still growing good, nutritious, health-full food.

First of two episodes exploring regenerative farming in practice. The second is with Ben Raskin in 2 weeks' time.

Roots of Nature
Wilder Culture
Primal Meats
Caroline at LinkedIn

We Are Carbon (Caroline has featured on this podcast, and recommends it)

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