EmpathyMedia Podcast

'Camino to COP' was a multi-faith pilgrimage designed to be both a personal commitment to walk together for 8 weeks and also a chance to take messages of climate justice to the world leaders in COP26.

Anuradha Vittachi asks psychotherapist Chris Robertson why we keep refusing to take proportionate action in the face of looming calamity. He explains our need to distance ourselves from the guilt of complicity – and points us to Sally Weintrobe, who links our uncaring to neoliberal economics and its roots in Exceptionalism. 

Meaning It: How the UK's financial sector enables the world's fossil fuel addiction. Is the UK the climate innocent it claims to be or a fossil fuel enabler? Donnachadh McCarthy reveals to Anuradha Vittachi the shocking reality that the UK, far from contributing only 1% of the world's carbon emissions, is one of the prime enablers of our addiction to fossil fuels. Young climate activists from Green New Deal Rising are unimpressed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak's financial announcement at COP26 – and Juice Media hilariously satirizes the gap between the Morrison government's pro-climate claims and what it actually does.

Meaning It: Behind the scenes of COP negotiations . Simon Maxwell is both a COP outsider and an insider: he has spent his working life pressing for socially just development in the global south – and, as a world expert in development, he has also chaired COP negotiations. He explains to Anuradha Vittachi, step by step, the complexities of the vital process of planning socially-just transitions out of fossil fuel based economies.

Ahead of COP26 in November 2021, Anuradha Vittachi is in conversation with award-winning science author, Mark Lynas. What are real issues confronting the negotiators, and what is their chance of a successful outcome?

Journalist and author Nury Vittachi discusses his fascinating new novel with a quantum physics theme with Peter Armstrong.

Giles Fraser, priest and prophet of the airwaves, in conversation with Peter Armstrong.

Adam Groves and his colleagues are doing fascinating work to build VR experiences that can help children overcome the kinds of stress they are facing, particularly at school. This is a short first glimpse of their work, that we will hope to be following up in detail.

Phil Sheppard is an experience gamer who believes that the friends made playing games online together are not only very real but a hopeful sign for the future of how we can widen the scope of our empathy. 

An informal chat with an old friend of Anuradha Vittachi and Peter Armstrong's, the psychotherapist Chris Robertson. Since retiring from the organisation he co-founded, Re-vision, he's been exploring the ways in which therapy needs to move beyond the personal to the cultural, as we face new forms of alienation - everything from social media to climate change.

Dr Lilian Beattie, President of the UK Adlerian Society, reflects with Peter Armstrong on a lifetime's connection to the world of the psychological pioneer Alfed Adler.

At this year's Adlerian Summer School Peter Armstrong had the opportunity to sit down with one of the keynote speakers, Mia Levitt Frank, a psychotherapist and Director of the Adlerian School of Coaching in Israel. 

Alfred Adler's pyschology has insiqhts to offer to the most immediate issues we face in our increasingly digital world. Are we becoming additcted to our iphones - or even our podcasts? And what of the future when artificial intelligence threatens to make us humans redundant? At this year's Adlerian Summer School Peter Armstrong had the opportunity to meet someone with fascsinating insights to offer - the Adlerian pyschologist, Professor Ursula Oberst.

What do you do when an army major arrives at your door, salutes and says: "Sir, I have orders to kill you."?  What do you do when your village water supply fails and the government does nothing?  It's sixty years since the man they call 'the little Gandhi', Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, affectionaly known as Ari, started the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka - putting people in 10,000 villages on the front line of social change. It's based on principles of non-violence and what he calls 'Buddhist economics'.  When they met, Anuradha Vittachi started by asking about the background to the movement he founded.

The radical Cambridge theolgian, Don Cupitt, in conversation with Peter Armstrong. Why he believes the age of traditional Church religion is coming to an end, to be replaced by a religion of this life only.

The controversial environmentalist, Mark Lynas, in conversation with Peter Armstrong in 2013. Why has he changed his mind about nuclear power?

Nick Dunlop, founder of the Climate Parliament, in converstion with Peter Armstrong. What's his breakthough idea for talking dangerous climate change?

Robin Daley, founder of the NGO Yes to Life, talking to Anuradha Vittachi about his work supporting people with cancer.