Local Futures Podcast

Learning for our lives: Localizing education in turbulent times – Ben Rawlence

Ben Rawlence is an award-winning writer, activist and co-founder of Black Mountains College, Wales. He has written extensively about the human consequences of environmental catastrophe in Africa, and later turned his attention to similar issues in Europe and the Arctic. Ben's research led him to focus on building institutions that promote new ways of thinking, seeing, and learning, with a particular focus on climate adaptation through localization.  
In this concise episode, Ben introduces the Black Mountains College project against the backdrop of a mainstream educational and economic system that is unfit for the future. He discusses the paramount need to reinvent education to prepare people and communities for a future in which intersecting global challenges will necessarily be met with local solutions.
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Climate, carbon and technocracy: Co-opting the environmental movement – Camila Moreno

Camila Moreno is one of civil society's foremost experts on climate policy, and her critical analysis of carbon metrics, digitalization and corporate power is unparalleled. Coming from social and environmental movements in Latin America and her native Brazil, Camila has attended all the COP climate negotiations since 2008. She has written _Carbon Metrics and the New Colonial Equations_ and is a researcher at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.In this episode, Camila elucidates the history and possible future trajectories of the emerging techno-globalist power structure, with a particular focus on how that agenda is closely tied to international climate governance, like the COP climate negotiations. She highlights how the complexity of climate has been reduced to a narrow focus on carbon dioxide, and how that has served to co-opt diverse environmental struggles into a corporate-friendly agenda based on market-based schemes, digitalization and the financialization of nature. Camila gives us all a strong warning about continuing further down this technocratic path.
 
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

A spiritual-political praxis I Alnoor Ladha

Resisting categorization, Alnoor works towards the healing of culture, people and the living world, bringing spirituality, politics and place-based work into dialogue with one another. He co-founded The Rules – a global activist collective and thinktank for economic alternatives. He also co-founded the post-capitalist community Tierra Valiente in Costa Rica, where he lives. He is a board member of Culture Hack Labs and The Emergence Network, co-director of the Transition Resource Circle and co-author of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.
In this episode, Alnoor brainstorms how we might appropriate, co-opt, discard and/or reclaim the proverbial master’s tools in order to take down the house and revolutionize the system we live in. He brings a non-dualist complexity to discussions about movement building and awareness raising and localization, and finally turns his attention to healing the rift between political work and spiritual work.
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Finding meaning in a world gone mad – Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is an Oxford literary scholar, and a doctor in psychiatry and neuroscience. A champion of holistic thinking, Iain’s tour-de-force book The Master and His Emissary, along with his more recent The Matter with Things, have transformed academic and popular understanding not only of the human brain, but also of the importance of a fundamental worldview shift. His works sustain an in-depth critique of reductionism, and unfold different approaches for understanding who we are and what the world is.   
In this episode, Iain’s research on the differences between the left and right hemispheres provide the backdrop for discussions of the human experience of the sublime, and how important that experience is if we are to reestablish social and ecological balance in the world. He discusses his long-standing appreciation for the local, the place-based and the natural, suggesting that these offer avenues towards right-hemisphere aspects of our experience – aspects which have been neglected to our detriment.
 
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Small-scale on a large scale: Lobbying for local food – Jyoti Fernandes

A small farmer and Campaigns Coordinator for The Landworkers Alliance, Jyoti both embodies and powerfully communicates the possibility for a more just and sustainable future through local food sovereignty. On her 20-acre farm in Dorset, UK, Jyoti raises animals and grows vegetables and fruit, and processes apple juice, wool and jam. She is also a spokesperson for the international peasants' movement, La Via Campesina, and is a powerful advocate for policy change in the UK and beyond.
In this episode, Jyoti presents a robust case for policy change, helping us understand what kind of structural decisions are needed to shift our food systems away from exploitation and corporate control,  and towards sustainable, local food sovereignty, worldwide. She combats widely held misconceptions touted by global agribusinesses, and draws on personal experience to give detail about how food policy decisions are currently being made.
 
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Re-nesting Humanity – Darcia Narvaez

Darcia Narvaez is a Professor Emerita of Psychology (University of Notre Dame), and Fellow of the American Psychological Association. She employs an interdisciplinary approach to studying morality, child development and human flourishing, integrating disciplines like anthropology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, and more. Darcia’s publications include 'Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom', 'Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth', and, most recently, 'The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities'. 
 
In this episode, Darcia describes “the evolved nest”, which is the set of conditions needed for healthy human development. Stemming from our deep evolutionary past, these conditions include close-knit community, affection, care, play, and connection to nature. She sheds light on the way so many of us, in the disconnected world of modernity, experience great insecurity, dysregulation, and lack of self-understanding because of the myriad developmental challenges that arise from being “un-nested”. As such, Darcia calls for localization - at both the structural level and in practice at the community level - in order to restore our wellbeing.
 
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.
 
 

Our North Star: towards tangible connections – Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein is an independent writer and speaker on topics traversing the economy, society, spirituality and the environment. His work is renowned for its boldness and poetics. The author of six books – including Sacred Economics, Climate: A New Story and The Coronation – he is an indispensable guide towards “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”. Over the past year, Charles has become involved with Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s campaign for president of the United States.
In this episode, Charles articulates the philosophical basis for his enduring support of the localization movement, expressing how the reweaving of local connections is fundamental to birthing a new story for humanity – one based on interbeing. He considers the process of societal change itself, dissolving restrictive intellectual binaries and rigid frameworks. Instead, Charles invites action that is grounded in humility and based on the powerful combination of information and intuition.
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.

Creating an economy of the common good – Diego Isabel la Moneda

Diego Isabel la Moneda is the Executive Director of the New Economy and Social Innovation (NESI) Forum, and Co-Founder and Director of the Global Hub for the Common Good. NESI aims to co-create a new economy at the service of people and the planet through innovative impact initiatives, public policy proposals and the organization of forums and other events aimed at connecting and promoting the new economy and social innovation ecosystem. Diego is author of the book Yo Soy Tú: Propuesta para una Nueva Sociedad (I Am You: Proposal for a New Society) (Octaedro, 2013) www.yosoytu.com, co-author of Dentro de 15 años (Within 15 years) (Lid, 2014) as well as an international speaker.
In this episode, Diego contrasts today's dominant economic system based in growth, profit maximization, redundant global trade (for example Spain, a top orange-producing country, both exporting and importing oranges from the global market), competition and urbanization with the needed alternative of an "economics of the common good", based in collaboration, democratization, decentralization, and rural revitalization. Shifting to this new economy will require both supportive public policies, as well as a cultural shift rooted in a redefinition of "success" from wealth and power to strong webs of relationships with other people and nature and doing meaningful work for the common good.
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.
 

Creating the future our hearts know is possible – Rupert Read

Rupert Read is a highly respected activist and thought-leader, eco-philosopher, campaigner and self-described “recovering academic”, who has influenced public and academic opinion on issues like climate, genetic engineering, technological development and advertising to children. Rupert has (co-)authored books including ‘A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment’ and ‘This Civilization Is Finished’. He has been a spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion movement and the UK Green Party, and now directs the Climate Majority Project.
 
In this episode, Rupert explores the possibilities for renewal and reconnection latent within the ecological, social and spiritual catastrophes of industrial modernity. He suggests we can, through the localization movement, simultaneously humble ourselves enough to address our civilizational predicament, while healing ourselves and nature. He calls us to take action at the level of human-scale groups and institutions to bring about the local future "our hearts know is possible", making a plea that we embrace this future through conscious choice, rather than being delivered to it through traumatic collapse.
 
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.
 

Re-embedding ourselves in the community of life – Liz Hosken

Liz Hosken is the Founding Co-Director of the Gaia Foundation. For nearly 40 years, Gaia has been upholding indigenous wisdom and working with both indigenous and industrialized communities to restore their biocultural diversity. Inspired by decades of work with Amazonian peoples, Liz co-developed a three-year training in the philosophy and practice of Earth Jurisprudence, seeding the revival of Earth-centred consciousness, cultures and landscapes.
 
In this episode, Liz offers profound reflections on the need for deep reconnection with the web of life if we are to heal the wounds of industrial modernity. To move beyond hubris, reductionism and control, Liz suggests we need to decolonize our minds, remember humility, and re-embed ourselves in place, to become 'healing cells in the body of Gaia'. Pointing out how indigenous, land-based cultures can remind us of a more beautiful way of being, she offers practices like traditional seed saving as practical ways of re-indigenizing and re-localizing our cultures.
 
To watch the video of this series, visit: Planet Local Voices interview series.
The music for this series is ‘Pines and Violet’, by Sky Toes.