Podcasts about dark mountain project

We look at a truncated overview of humanity's various oppositions to technological development, from Diogenes to The Dark Mountain Project, after laughing wildly at various insanities from the most recent news-cycle involving John "Shrekton LaVey" Fetterman and some unknown so-called president of the United States of America.Recorded on Saturday, May 10th, 2025 around 10.30 AM Korea Standard TimeCommiserate on Discord: discord.gg/aDf4Yv9PrYSupport: patreon / buzzsproutNever Forget: standwithdanielhale.orgGenral RecommendationsJosh's Recommendation: Grandaddy - The Sophtware SlumpTim's Recommendation: Four SeasonsFurther Reading, Viewing, ListeningShow notes + Full list of links, sources, etcMore From Timothy Robert BuechnerPodcast: Q&T ARE / violentpeople.co Tweets: @ROHDUTCHLocationless Locationsheatdeathpod.comEvery show-related link is corralled and available here.Twitter: @heatdeathpodPlease send all Letters of Derision, Indifference, Inquiry, Mild Elation, et cetera to: heatdeathodtheuniversepodcast@gmailSend us a textSupport the show

Today, we're bringing you a very special recording from the annual European Ecovillage Gathering held in Ängsbacka in 2024, where we had the privilege of hearing from Dougald Hine, an author, visionary thinker and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Through the Dark Mountain project, he has sparked a movement that critically re-examines the dominant...

(Conversation recorded on November 12th, 2024)     In today's modern era, the overwhelming flood of information that constantly flows our way can leave us feeling disoriented, lost, and powerless. Even science – our most trusted source of truth – can be taken out of context to fuel division and distort the reality around us. In the midst of this confusion, how can we learn to ground ourselves and find guideposts that can direct our lives and work?  Today, Nate is joined by storyteller and social thinker, Dougald Hine, to explore the importance of narratives in shaping our understanding of the world and how they can help us navigate the complexities of life, especially in the face of ecological crises. Together, they discuss the need for a reframing of conversations around environmental and climate issues, the importance of grassroots responses to systemic crises, and the concept of ‘engaged surrender' as a way to navigate the challenges of modern life.  How can we foster emotional resilience in the face of ecological overshoot and the death of modernity? What role do art and storytelling play alongside science and data in responding to our collective human predicament? And how can we strengthen our communities and plant the seeds for a different way of life, starting in our own small corners of the world?   About Dougald Hine: Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he went on to co-found the Dark Mountain Project, where he was the director until 2019. He is also the co-author, with Paul Kingsnorth, of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, and his latest book is titled, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies.  Dougald's recent projects include Notes From Underground, a ten-part essay series for Bella Caledonia exploring the deep roots of the new climate movements, and The Great Humbling, a podcast he co-hosts with Ed Gillespie. He and Anna Björkman are creating a school called HOME, ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture'. His latest writing is published on his Substack, Writing Home.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the whole story of The Great Simplification? Watch our 30-minute Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

ffinlo Costain speaks to Dougald Hine, author of 'At Work in the Ruins: Finding our place in the time of climate crisis and other emergencies'. Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker, and one of the great minds behind the Dark Mountain Project. We talk about his new book, and about the role of agriculture and food production in taking humanity through ecological, social and economic collapse. You can buy Hine's book - At Work in the Ruins - at all good book shops, on the street, or online.

Hannah Close is one of those human beings whose life's work defies easy static bios. She's a brilliant writer, to start with, author of METAXU, a Substack newsletter that delves into themes as personal as they are collectively relevant. Some of my favorite essays include Lives Never Lived, a musing on the ethics of bringing children into the world amidst our polycrisis, and Reading Fiction Again, a reflection on the social value of fiction. Her words have appeared in publications such as the Dark Mountain Project and Evolve. While her images, since she's a brilliant photographer too, have been featured in the Guardian, The Telegraph, the Times, among others. With a Ma in Engaged Ecology from Schumacher College, where she created the visual philosophy project ARCHIPELAGO: A Cartography of Relation, Hannah is currently making Islandness, a documentary expanding on the theme of islands and what they can teach us about resilience, togetherness, and our connection to the natural world.Beyond her artistic pursuits, Hannah is curator. In 2018 she founded the Experimental Thought Co, a network that convened events on culture change. More recently, she partnered with the transformational learning platform advaya (whose co-founder Ruby Reed I recently interviewed) to curate several courses, among them Contemporary Spirituality: Meaning and Mysticism in the Modern Age.Hannah lives between South West England, where she's from, and a wild Hebridean island where she occasionally hosts sailing residencies.I invited Hannah because, to me, she embodies the pursuit of wisdom and wholeness. Her art—whether in the form of an image, written piece, or Instagram post—emerges from a profound, quiet place. It moves the stuff of the spirit, and invites us to question who we are and what we're really here for. Together we unpack her early life as the daughter of a 17-year old mother in a working class household that revered flatscreen TVs and honest labor. We listen to the waking up moments that let Hannah to eventually commit to her artistic pursuits. We also talk about her reluctance to personal branding, and the subversive role of creativity in a consumerist culture. And, last but not least, how Hannah attempts to live her most waking life.Credits:* Music Audio Producer & Editor: Carlos Sierra* Producer, Writer & Host: Carlota Guedes To hear more, visit www.wakingyouth.org

Author, social entrepreneur and the co-founder of a School Called HOME and The Dark Mountain Project - and a long time friend - Dougald Hine sits down with Sara Jolena Wolcott to talk about (adult) education, which leads to so many other things, because education is connected to so many things.1:27 - Introduction to Dougald Hine5:04 -  When you know society has run to the end of its own story.... A question from a friend and student16:19 - On education and carrying a message21:38 - Education, Religion, and learning from what comes before us42:17 - Learning and unlearning as adults58:53 - Ethical Dilemmas in running our own schools1:14:00 - Divestment and disinvestment in culture and place 1:21:51 - “Our world has not always been made for us and yet we do / we are actively part of creating what's arising”Dougald Hine:WebsiteDark MountainDougald's new book: At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other EmergenciesDougald's book: At Work in the Ruins: Finding our place in the time of science, climate change, pandemics, and all the other emergenciesFurther Adventures in Regrowing A Living Culture: A five-week online serieswith Dougald Hine start of May 23rd and 24th, 2024 - Learn morea school called HOMESupport the Show.Learn more about Sara Jolena Wolcott and Sequoia SamanvayaMusic Title: Both of Us Music by: madiRFAN Don't forget to "like" and share this episode!

2023 kom journalisten Dougald Hine ut med den på flera sätt provocerande boken “At Work In the Ruins – Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and Other Emergencies”. Här samtalar han med prästerna Maria Bergius och Pontus Nilsen om varför han slutat att prata miljökrisen och nu istället satsar på annat. Hine var tidigare uppmärksammad internationellt i Dark Mountain Project  tillsammans med Paul Kingsnorth.

In this conversation, Dugald Hine of the Dark Mountain Project and A School Called HOME and the author of the book, At Work In The Ruins, discusses the limitations of science in addressing climate change and the need to question and reevaluate our understanding of the issue. He emphasizes the importance of embracing vernacular knowledge and ways of knowing, as well as living in hope and embracing the home, the community. Hine also explores the need for a new narrative that goes beyond the singularization of knowledge and the supremacy of science. He discusses the concept of coming home and the work of regrowing a living culture, as well as the role of hospitality and conviviality in creating a sense of home. Overall, the conversation highlights the importance of turning inward and embracing home as a way to navigate the challenges of climate change and create a more sustainable future. Watch this Episode on YouTube: YouTube Link!TakeawaysClimate change raises questions that go beyond what science can answer, necessitating a reevaluation of our understanding of the issue.The singularization of knowledge and the supremacy of science limit our ability to address climate change effectively.Embracing vernacular knowledge and ways of knowing, as well as living in hope and embracing depth education, can provide alternative paths forward.Creating a sense of home and regrowing a living culture are essential for navigating the challenges of climate change and creating a sustainable future.Hope is not a fixed concept but rather an empty palm into which something might land.Embracing uncertainty and letting go of the need to know the future is essential.Taking responsibility for the present and future is crucial in addressing global challenges.Getting implicated and actively engaging with the realities and needs of the world can lead to meaningful action.Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he cofounded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. He has collaborated with scientists, artists and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern (Sweden's national theatre) and as an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. At Work in the Ruins concludes the work that began with Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009), co-written with Paul Kingsnorth, and is his second title with Chelsea Green, following the anthology Walking on Lava (2017).Learn more about Dougald here: dougald.nu/aboutLearn more about Daniel here: danielfirthgriffith.comJoin Daniel's Substack here: danielfirthgriffith.substack.com

On this Reality Roundtable, philosopher and writer Dougald Hine, social scientist and farmer Chris Smaje, and ecologist and farmer Pella Thiel join Nate to discuss the future of food and community. Our disconnected relationship to agriculture and our neighbors have been shaped by a modern industrial society fueled by surplus hydrocarbon energy. What will these relationships look like in a lower energy future, where we need to once again work with each other and the land, rather than in isolation. Can we learn from history to celebrate with each other in times of abundance and find strength in community in times of need? In the present world where people are in constant search for meaning and purpose, what are strategies to find joy in simplicity and well-being through the growing and sharing of food? About Dougald Hine Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies (2023). He co-hosts The Great Humbling podcast and publishes a Substack called Writing Home. About Chris Smaje Chris Smaje is a writer, social scientist and small-scale farmer, co-running a mixed holding in Somerset, southwest England. He's the author of A Small Farm Future (2020) and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future (2023), both published by Chelsea Green. He blogs at and is contactable via www.chrissmaje.com. About Pella Thiel Pella Thiel is a maverick ecologist, part-time farmer, full-time activist and teacher in ecopsychology. She is the co-founder of swedish hubs of international networks like Swedish Transition Network and End Ecocide Sweden and a knowledge expert in the UN Harmony with Nature programme. Pella was awarded the swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/NVeCw-Ljenk Show Notes & Links to Learn More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/rr05-hine-smaje-thiel 

Today on Mushroom Hour we join in communion with the overflowing font of mythos, play and animated everything Sophie Strand. Sophie is a poet and writer with a focus on the history of religion and the intersection of spirituality, storytelling and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including the Dark Mountain Project, poetry.org and the magazines Unearthed, Braided Way, Art PAPERS and Entropy. Their newest book “The Flowering Wand – Rewilding the Sacred Masculine” is a potent retelling of classical European myths and masculine characters like Dionysus, Merlin, Jesus that encourages men to put down the iron sword and pick up a myceliated, vegetal thyrsus.    TOPICS COVERED:   Staying Alive by Exploring Ecology   Mediterranean Religions & Arthurian Myths    Myths as Vessels of Environmental Information   Replanting Myths - Reroot, Rewild, Retell    Polyphonic Iconography   Partnership Cultures and Dominator Cultures   Medusa & Mothers Turned into Monsters    Symbiosis & Synchronism    The Rebellion of Dionysus   Gender as a Morphic Field & a Mycelial Web    The King Becomes the Kingdom   Expanding Masculinity   Jesus the Magical, Nature-Loving Rabbi   Returning to the Compost Heap    EPISODE RESOURCES:    "The Flowering Wand": https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Flowering-Wand/Sophie-Strand/9781644115961   "The Madonna Secret": https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Madonna-Secret/Sophie-Strand/9781591434672   Sophie Strand Substack: https://sophiestrand.substack.com/   Sophie Strand IG: https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny/   "Bitch": https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lucy-cooke/bitch/9781541674905/?lens=basic-books   Microanimism: https://www.microanimism.com/   Chlorophyllum molybdites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyllum_molybdites   "Enlivenment": https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536660/   "An Immense World": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/

This week, Waylon Lewis is with author Dougald Hine of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies, as they talk about climate change and how the hell to think and act about it. Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer, speaker and the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. "I have spent my adult life talking to people about climate change, and I've never been the guy whose job it is to stand up there with the charts and explain the science of it. I come in when we get into the question of 'what does it mean? How are we changed by this knowledge? What would it take for us to absorb this in a way that looked like taking it seriously, rather than looked like assuming it was a problem that could be fixed and made to go away?'" ~ Dougald Hine Read the full article on Elephant Journal.

This week, on The Conscious Consultant Hour, Sam is pleased to welcome Author and Speaker, Sophie Strand.Sophie is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels, The Madonna Secret was just recently published in 2023. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including The Dark Mountain Project and poetry.org and the magazines Unearthed, Braided Way, Art PAPERS, and Entropy.  Tune in and join the conversation as Sam and Sophie discuss  how to connect to nature to inspire us in everyday life. Please comment on our YouTube channel, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Page, and even our Twitter feed. Join in and ask your questions live! https://amzn.to/3QKdvVy   https://amzn.to/45yYD0y   https://sophiestrand.com/  Tune in for this enlightening conversation at TalkRadio.nycSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-conscious-consultant-hour8505/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode, my guest is Nick Hunt, the author of three travel books about journeys by foot, including Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Emergence, The Irish Times, New Internationalist, Resurgence & Ecologist and other publications. He works as an editor and co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. His latest book is an alternate history novel, Red Smoking Mirror.Show NotesAwe and the Great SecretOn Focus, Sight and SubjectivityThe Almost Lost Art of WalkingPilgrimage and the Half Way PointWhat if Left of Old-School Hospitality in our Times?When Borders Matter LessHospitality and PainThe Costs of InterculturalityAsking Permission: On Not Being WelcomeFriendship, Hospitality, and ExchangeHomeworkNick Hunt's Official WebsiteRed Smoking MirrorEssay: Bulls and ScarsTranscript[00:00:00] Chris Christou: Welcome Nick to the End of Tourism podcast. Thank you so very much for joining us today. [00:00:05] Nick Hunt: Very nice to be here, Chris. [00:00:07] Chris Christou: I have a feeling we're in for a very special conversation together. To begin, I'm wondering if you could offer us a glimpse into your world today, where you find yourself, and how the times seem to be rolling out in front of you, where you are.[00:00:22] Nick Hunt: Wow, that's a good, that's a good question. Geographically, I'm in Bristol, in the southwest of England, which is the city I grew up in and then moved away from and have come back to in the last five or so years. The city that I sat out the pandemic, which was quite a tough one for various reasons here and sort of for me personally and my family.But the last year really has just felt like everyone's opening out again and it feels... it's kind of good and bad. There was something about that time, I don't want to plunge straight into COVID because I'm sure everyone's sick of hearing about it, but the way it, it froze the world and froze people's personal lives and it froze all the good stuff, but it also froze a lot of the more difficult questions.So, I think in terms of kind of my wider work, which is often, focused around climate change, extinction, the state of the planet in general, the pandemic was, was oddly, you didn't have to think about the other problems for a while, even though they were still there. It dominated the airspace so much that everything else just kind of stopped.And now I find that in amongst all the joy of kind of friends emerging again and being able to travel, being able to meet people, being able to do stuff, there's also this looming feeling of like, the other problems are also waking up and we're looking at them again. [00:01:56] Chris Christou: Yeah. We have come back time to time in the last year or two in certain interviews of the pod and, and reflected a little bit on those times and considered that there was, among other things, it was a time where there was the possibility of real change. And I speak more to the places that have become tourist destinations, especially over touristed and when those people could finally leave their homes and there was nobody there that there was this sense of Okay, things could really be different [00:02:32] Nick Hunt: Yeah.As well. Yeah. I know there, there was a kind of hope wasn't there that, "oh, we can change, we can, we can act in, in a huge, unprecedented way." Maybe that will transfer to the environmental problems that we face. But sadly that didn't happen. Or it didn't happen yet. [00:02:53] Chris Christou: Well, time will tell. So Nick, I often ask my guests to begin with a bit of background on how their own travels have influenced their work, but since so much of your writing seems to revolve around your travels, I've decided to make that the major focus of our time together. And so I'd like to begin with your essay Bulls and Scars, which appears in issue number 14 of Dark Mountain entitled TERRA, and which was republished in The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century.[00:03:24] Nick Hunt: A hyperbolic, a hyperbolic title, I have to say. [00:03:29] Chris Christou: And in that exquisite essay on the theme of wanderlust, you write, and I quote, "always this sense, when traveling, will I find it here? Will the great secret reveal itself? Is it around the next corner? There is never anything around the next corner except the next corner, but sometimes I catch fragments of it.This fleeting thing I am looking for. That mountainside, that's a part of it there. The way the light falls on that wall. That old man sitting under a mulberry tree with his dog sleeping at his feet. That's a part of the secret too. If I could fit these pieces together, I would be completed. Waking on these sacks of rice, I nearly see the shape of it. The outlines of the secret loom, extraordinary and almost whole. I can almost touch it. I think. Yes, this is it. I am here. I have arrived, but I have not arrived. I am traveling too fast. The moment has already gone, the truck rolls onwards through the night, and the secret slides away.This great secret, Nick, that spurs so much of our wanderlust. I'm curious, where do you imagine it comes from personally, historically, or otherwise? [00:04:59] Nick Hunt: Wow. Wow. Thank you for reading that so beautifully. That was an attempt to express something that I think I've always, I've always felt, and I imagine everybody feels to some extent that sense of, I guess you could describe it as "awe," but this sense that I, I first experienced this when I was a kid.I was about maybe six, five or six years old, maybe seven. I can't remember. Used to spend a lot of time in North Wales where my grandparents lived and my mum would take me up there and she loved walking. So we'd go for walks and we were coming back from a walk at the end of a day. So it was mountains. It was up in Snowdonia.And I have a very vivid memory of a sunset and a sheep and a lamb and the sky being red and gold in sense that now I would describe it as awe, you know, the sublime or something like that. I had no, no words for it. I just knew it was very important that I, I stayed there for a bit and, and absorbed it.So I refused to walk on. And my mom, I'll always be grateful for this. She didn't attempt to kind of pull my hand and drag me back to the car cuz she probably had things to do. But she walked on actually and out of sight and left me just to kind of be there because she knew that this was an important thing.And for me, that's the start of, of the great secret. I think this sense of wanting to be inside the world. I've just been reading some Ursula LeGuin and there's a short story in her always coming home. I think it's called A Hole in the Air. And it's got this kind of conceit of a man stepping outside the world and he kind of goes to a parallel version of his world and it's the one in which some version of us lives.And it's the kind of, you know, sort of fucked up war-like version where everything's kind of terrible and polluted, dangerous and violent and he can't understand it. But this idea of he's gone outside the world and he can't find his way back in. And I think this is a theme in a lot of indigenous people.This idea of kind of being inside something and other cultures being outside. I think a lot, all of my writing and traveling really has been about wanting to get inside and kind of understand something. I don't know. I mean, I dunno what the secret is because it's a secret and what I was writing about in that essay was, I think in my twenties particularly, I kind of imagined that I could find this if I kept moving.The quicker the better because you're covering more ground and more chance of finding something that you're looking for, of knowing what's around the next corner, what's over the next hill. You know, even today I find it very difficult to kind of turn back on a walk before I've got to the top of a hill or some point where I can see what's coming next.It feels like something uncompleted and then I'm sure, as I imagine you did, you know, you were describing to me earlier about traveling throughout your twenties and always kind of looking for this thing and then realizing, what am I actually, you know, what am I doing? What am I actually looking for?Mm-hmm. So I still love traveling, obviously, but I don't feel this kind youthful urge just to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, see more things, you know, experience more. And then I think you learn when you get a bit older that maybe that's not the way to find whatever it is that you are kind of restless for.Maybe that's when you turn inside a little bit more. And certainly my travels now are kind of shorter and slower than they were before, but I find that there's a better quality of focus in the landscapes or places that before I would've kind of dismissed and rushed through are now endlessly fascinating.And allowing more time to kind of stay in a place has its own value. [00:09:19] Chris Christou: Well, blessings to your mother. What's her name if I can ask? Her name's Caroline. It's the same name as my wife. So it's a source of endless entertainment for my friends. Well, thank you, Caroline, for, for that moment, for allowing it to happen.I think for better or worse, so many of us are robbed of those opportunities as children. And thinking recently about I'll have certain flashbacks to childhood and that awe and that awe-inspiring imagination that seems limitless perhaps for a young child and is slowly waned or weaned as we get older.So thank you to your mother for that. I'm sure part of the reason that we're having this conversation today. And you touched a little bit on this notion of expectation and you used the word focus as well, and I'm apt to consider more and more the the question of sight and how it dominates so much of our sense perception and our sense relationships as we move through our lives and as we move across the world.And so I'd like to bring up another little excerpt from Bulls and Scars, which I just have to say I loved so much. And in the essay you write, quote, "I know nothing about anything. It's a relief to admit this now and let myself be led. All I see is the surface of things. The elaborate hairstyle of a man, shaved to the crown and plastered down in a clay hardened bun, a woman's goat skin skirt, fringed with cowrie shelves and not the complex layers of meaning that lie beneath. I understand nothing of the ways in which these things fit together, how they collide or overlap. There are symbols I cannot read, lines I do not see."End quote. And so this, this reminded me. I have walking through a few textile shops here in Oaxaca some years ago with a friend of mine and he noted how tourists tend towards these textile styles, colors and designs, but specifically the ones that tend to fit their own aesthetics and how this can eventually alter what the local weavers produce and often in service to foreign tastes.And he said to me, he said, "most of the time we just don't know what we're looking at." And so it's not just our inability to see as a disciplined and locally formed skill that seems to betray us, but also our unwillingness to know just that that makes us tourists or foreigners in a place. My question to you is, how do you imagine we might subvert these culturally conjured ways of seeing, assuming that's even necessary? [00:12:24] Nick Hunt: Well, that's a question that comes up an awful lot as a travel writer. And it's one I've become more aware of over these three books I've written, which form a very loose trilogy about, they're all about walking in different parts of Europe.And I've only become more aware of that that challenge of the traveler. There's another line in that essay that something like " they say that traveling opens doors, but sometimes people take their doors with them." You know, it's not necessarily true, but any means that seeing the world kind of widens your perspective. A lot of people just, you know, their eyes don't change no matter where they go. And so, I know that when I'm doing these journeys, I'm going completely subjectively with my own prejudices, my own mood of the day which completely determines how I see a place and how I meet people and what I bring away from it.And also what I, what I give. And I think this is, this is kind of an unavoidable thing really. It's one of the paradoxes maybe at the heart of the kind of travel writing I do, and there's different types of travel writers. Some people are much more conscientious about when they talk to people, it's, you know, it's more like an interview.They'll record it. They'll only kind of quote exactly what they were told. But even that, there's a kind of layer of storytelling, obviously, because they are telling a story, they're telling a narrative, they're cutting certain things out of the frame, and they're including others. They're exaggerating or amplifying certain details that fit the narrative that they're following.I think an answer to your question, I, I'm not sure yet, but I'm hopefully becoming more, more aware. And I think one thing is not hiding it, is not pretending that a place as I see it, that I, by any means, can see the truth, you know, the kind of internal truth of this place. There's awareness that my view is my view and I think the best thing we can do is just not try and hide that to include it as part of the story we tell. Hmm. And I, I noticed for my first book, I did this long walk across Europe that took about seven and a half months. And there were many days when I didn't really want to be doing it.I was tired, sick, didn't want to be this kind of traveling stranger, always looking like the weirdo walking down the street with a big bag and kind of unshaved sunburnt face. And so I noticed that some villages I walked into, I would come away thinking, my God, those people were awful.They were really unfriendly. No one looked at me, no one smiled. I just felt this kind of hostility. And then I'd think, well, the common factor in this is always me. And I must have been walking into that village looking shifty, not really wanting to communicate with anyone, not making any contact, not explaining who I was.And of course they were just reflecting back what I was giving them. So I think, just kind of centering your own mood and the baggage you take with you is very important. [00:15:46] Chris Christou: Yeah. Well, I'd like to focus a little bit more deeply on that book and then those travels that you wrote about anyways, in Walking the Woods and the Water.And just a little bit of a background for our listeners. The book's description is as follows. "In 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnail boots to chance and charm his way across Europe. Quote, like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar. From the hook of Holland to Istanbul. 78 years later, I (you) followed in his footsteps.The book recounts a seven month walk through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey on a quest to discover what remains of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, adventure, and the deeper occurrence of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe's surface.Now before diving a little bit more deeply into these questions of hospitality and xenophobia or xenophilia, I'd like to ask about this pilgrimage and the others you've undertaken, especially, this possibility that seems to be so much an endangered species in our times, which is our willingness or capacity to proceed on foot as opposed to in vehicles.And so I'm curious how your choice to walk these paths affected your perception, how you experienced each new place, language, culture, and people emerging in front of you. Another way of asking the question would be, what is missed by our urge to travel in vehicles?[00:17:36] Nick Hunt: Well, that first walk, which set off the other ones, I later did. It could only have been a walk because the whole idea was to follow the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was a very celebrated travel writer who set out in 1933 with no ambition or kind of purpose other than he just wanted to walk to Istanbul.And it was his own kind of obsessive thing that he wanted to do. And I was deeply influenced by his book. And I was quite young and always thought I wanted to kind of try. I I was just curious to see the Europe that he saw was, you know, the last of a world that disappeared very shortly afterwards because he saw Germany as this unknown guy called Adolf Hitler, who was just emerging on the scene. He walked through these landscapes that were really feudal in character, you know, with counts living in castles and peasants working in the fields. And he, so he saw the last of this old Europe that was kind of wiped out by, well first the second World War, then communism in Eastern Europe and capitalism, in Western Europe and then everywhere.So it's just had so many very traumatic changes and I just wanted to know if there was any of what he saw left, if there was any of that slightly fairytale magic that he glimpsed. So I had to walk because it, it just wouldn't have worked doing it by any other form of transport. And I mean, initially, even though I'd made up my mind, I was going to go by foot and I knew I wasn't in a hurry. It was amazing how frustrating walking was in the first couple of weeks. It felt almost like the whole culture is, you know, geared around getting away, got to go as quickly as possible.In Holland actually I wasn't walking in remote mountains, I was walkingthrough southern industrial states and cities in which a walker feels, you feel like an outcast in places you shouldn't really be. So, it took a couple of weeks for my mind to really adjust and actually understand that slowness was the whole purpose. And then it became the pleasure.And by halfway through Germany, I hadn't gone on any other form of transport for maybe six weeks, and I stayed with someone who, he said, "I'm going to a New Year's Eve party in the next town." It was New Year's Eve. The next town was on my route. He said, "you know, I'm driving so I might as well take you there."So I said, "great," cuz it'd been a bit weird to kind of go to this town and then come back again. It was on my way. So, I got in a car and the journey took maybe half an hour and I completely panicked, moving at that speed, I was shocked by how much of the world was taken away from me, actually, because by then I'd learned to love spotting these places, you know, taking routes along, along rivers and through bits of woodland.I was able to see them coming and all of these things were flashing past me. We crossed the Rhine, which was this great river that I'd been following for weeks. And it was like a stream, you know, it was a puddle. It was kind of gone under the bridge in two seconds. Wow. And it really felt like I had this, this kind of guilt, to be honest.It was this feeling of what was in that day that I lost, you know, what didn't I see? Who didn't I meet? I've just been sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and I have no sense of direction. The thing about walking is you're completely located at all times. You walk into the center of a city and you've had to have walked through the suburbs.You've seen the outskirts, and it helps, you know, well that's north. Like, you know, I came from that direction. That's south. That's where I'm going. If you take a train or get in a car, unless you're really paying attention, you are kind of catapulted into the middle of this city without any concept of what direction you're going in next.And I didn't realize how disorienting that is because we're so used to it. We do it all the time. And this was only a kind of shadow of what was to come at the very end of my journey, cuz I got to Istanbul after seven and a half months. I was in a very weird place that I've only kind of realized since all that time walking.And I stayed a couple of weeks in Turkey and then I flew home again, partly cuz I had a very patient and tolerant and forgiving girlfriend who I couldn't kind of stretch it out any, any longer. And initially I think I'd been planning to come back on like hitchhiking or buses and trains. But in the end I was like, "you know, whatever, I'll just spend a couple days more in Turkey, then I'll get on a plane."And I think it was something like three hours flying from Istanbul and three hours crossing a continent that you spent seven and a half months walking. And I was looking down and seeing the Carpathian mountains and the Alps and these kind of shapes of these rivers, some of which I recognized as places I'd walked through.And again, this sense of what am I missing, that would've been an extraordinary journey going through that landscape. Coming back. You mentioned pilgrimage earlier, and someone told me once, who was doing lots of work around pilgrimage that, you know, in the old days when people had to walk or take a horse, if you were rich, say you started in England, your destination was Constantinople or Jerusalem or Rome, that Jerusalem or Rome wasn't the end of your journey.That was the exact halfway point, because when you got there, you had to walk back again. And on the way out, you'd go with your questions and your openness about whatever this journey meant to you. And then on the way back, you would be slowly at the pace of walking, trying to incorporate what you'd learnt and what you'd experienced into your everyday life of your village, your family, your community, you know, your land.So by the time you got back, you'd had all of that time to process what happened. So I think with that walk, you know, I, I did half the pilgrimage thinking I'd done all of it, and then was plunged back into, actually went straight back to the life I'd been living before in, in London as if nothing had ever happened.And I think for the year after that walk, my soul hadn't caught up with my body by any means. Mm-hmm. I was kind of living this strange sort of half life that felt very familiar because I recognized everything, but I felt like a very different person, to be honest and it took a long time to actually process that.But I think if I'd, even if I'd come back by, you know, public transport of some sort it would've helped just soften the blow. [00:25:04] Chris Christou: What a context to put it in, softening the blow. Hmm. It reminds me of the etymology of travel as far as I've read is that it used to mean an arduous journey.And that the arduous was the key descriptor in that movement. It reminds me of, again, so many of my travels in my twenties that were just flash flashes of movement on flights and buses. And that I got back to Canada. And the first thing was, okay, well I'm outta money, so I need to get back to work and I need to make as much money as possible.And there just wasn't enough time. And there wasn't perhaps time, period, in order to integrate what rolled out in front of me over those trips. And I'm reminded of a story that David Abram tells in his book Becoming Animal about jet lag. And perhaps a hypothesis that he has around jet lag and that we kind of flippantly use the excuse or context of time zones to explain this relative sense of being in two places at once.To what extent he discussed this, I don't remember very well, but just this understanding of when we had moved over vast distances on foot in the past, that we would've inevitably been open and apt to the emerging geographies languages, foods even cultures as we arrive in new places, and that those things would've rolled out very slowly in front of us, perhaps in the context of language heavily.But in terms of geography, I imagine very slowly, and that there would've been a kind of manner of integration, perhaps, for lack of a better word in which our bodies, our sensing bodies, would've had the ability to confront and contend with those things little by little as we moved. And it also reminds me of this book Rebecca Solnit's R iver of Shadows, where she talks about Edward Muybridge and the invention of the steam engine and the train and train travel.And how similarly to when people first got a glimpse of the big screen cinema that there was a lot of bodily issues. People sometimes would get very nauseous or pass out or have to leave the theater because their bodies weren't used to what was in front of them.And in, on the train, there were similar instances where for the first time at least, you know, as we can imagine historically people could not see the foreground looking out the train window. They could only see the background because the foreground was just flashing by so quickly.Wow, that's interesting. Interesting. And that we've become so used to this. And it's a really beautiful metaphor to, to wonder about what has it done to a people that can no longer see what's right there in front of them in terms of not just the politics, in their place, but the, their home itself, their neighbors, the geography, et cetera.And so I'm yet to read that book in mention, but I'm really looking forward to it because it's given me a lot of inspiration to consider a kind of pilgrimage to the places where my old ones are from there in, in southeastern Europe and also in Southwestern England.[00:28:44] Nick Hunt: Hmm.Yeah. That is a, so I'm still thinking about that metaphor of the train. Yeah. You don't think of that People wouldn't have had that experience of seeing the foreground disappear. And just looking at the distance, that's deeply strange and inhuman experience, isn't it? Hmm.[00:29:07] Chris Christou: Certainly. And, you know, speaking of these, these long pilgrimages and travels, my grandparents made their way from, as I mentioned, southwestern England later Eastern Africa and, and southeastern Europe to Canada in the fifties and sixties. And the peasant side of my family from what today is northern Greece, Southern Macedonia, brought a lot of their old time hospitality with them.And it's something that has always been this beautiful clue and key to these investigations around travel and exile. And so, you know, In terms of this old time hospitality, in preparing for this interview, I was reminded of a story that Ivan Illich once spoke of, or at least once, wrote about of a Jesuit monk living in China who took up a pilgrimage from Peking to Rome just before World War II, perhaps not unlike Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mm-hmm. And Illich recalled the story in his book, Rivers North of the Future as follows. He wrote, quote, "at first it was quite easy, he said (the Jesuit said,) in China, he only had to identify himself as a pilgrim, someone whose walk was oriented to a sacred place and he was given food, a handout, and a place to sleep.This changed a little bit when he entered the territory of Orthodox Christianity. There, they told him to go to the parish house where a place was free or to the priest's house. Then he got to Poland, the first Catholic country, and he found that the Polish Catholics generously gave him money to put himself up in a cheap hotel.And so the Jesuit was recalling the types of local hospitality he received along his path, which we could say diminished the further he went. Now, I'd love it if you could speak perhaps about the kinds of hospitality or, or perhaps the lack there of you experienced on your pilgrimage from the northwest of Europe to the southeast of Europe.And what, if anything, surprised you? [00:31:26] Nick Hunt: Well, that was one of my main interests really, was to see if the extraordinary hospitality that my predecessor had experienced in the 1930s where he'd been accommodated everywhere from, peasants' barns to the castles of Hungarian aristocrats and everything in between. I wanted to see if that generosity still existed. And talking about different ways of offering hospitality when he did his walk, one of the fairly reliable backstops he had was going to a police officer and saying "I'm a student. I'm a traveling student." That was the kind of equivalent to the pilgrim ticket in his day in a lot of parts of Europe. "I'm a student and I'm going from one place to the next," and he would be given a bed in the local police station. You know, they'd open up a cell, sleep there for the night, and then he'd leave in the morning. And I think it sometimes traditionally included like a mug of beer and some bread or soup or something, but even by his time in the thirties, it was a fairly well established thing to ask, I dunno how many people were doing it, but he certainly met in Germany, a student who was on the road going to university and the way he was going was walking for days or weeks.That wasn't there when I did my work. I don't think I ever asked a policeman, but in a couple of German towns, I went to the town hall. You know, the sort of local authority in Germany. They have a lot of authority and power in the community. And I asked a sort of bemused receptionist if I could claim this kind of ancient tradition of hospitality and spend the night in a police station, and they had no idea what I was talking about.Wow. And I think someone in a kind of large village said, "well, that's a nice idea, but I can't do that because we've got a tourist industry and all the guest house owners, you know, they wouldn't be happy if we started offering accommodation for free. It would put them out of business." Wow. And I didn't pay for accommodation much, but I did end up shelling out, you know, 30, 40 euros and sleeping in a, B&B.But having said that, the hospitality has taken on different forms. I started this journey in winter, which was the, when Patrick Leigh Fermor started, in December. So, I kind of wanted to start on the same date to have a similar experience, but it did mean walking through the coldest part of Europe, you know, Germany and Austria in deep snow and arriving in Bulgaria and Turkey when it was mid-summer.So I went from very cold to very hot. And partly for this reason, I was nervous about the beginning, not knowing what this experience was gonna be like. So, I used the couch surfing website, which I think Airbnb these days has probably kind of undercut a lot of it, but it was a free, very informal thing where people would provide a bed or a mattress or a place on the floor, a sofa for people passing through.And I was in the south of Germany before I ran out of couch surfing stops. But I also supplemented that with sleeping out. I slept in some ruined castles on the way. Hmm. I slept in these wooden hunting towers that no hunters were in. It wasn't the season. But they were freezing, but they were dry, you know, and they gave shelter.But I found that the language of hospitality shifted the further I went. In Holland, Germany, and Austria, people were perfectly, perfectly hospitable and perfectly nice and would put me up. But they'd say, when do you have to leave? You know, which is a perfectly reasonable question and normally it was first saying the next morning.And I noticed when I got to Eastern Europe, the question had shifted from when do you want to leave to how long can you stay? And that's when there was always in Hungary and then in Romania in particular and Bulgaria, people were kind of finding excuses to keep me longer. There would be, you know, it's my granddad's birthday, we're gonna bake him a cake and have a party, or we're going on a picnic, or we're going to the mountains, or we're going to our grandmother's house in the countryside. You should see that.And so my stays did get longer, the further southeast I got, partly cuz it was summer and everybody's in a good mood and they're doing things outdoors and they're traveling a bit more. But yeah, I mean the hospitality did shift and I got passed along as Patrick Leigh Fermor had done. So someone would say, you're going this way.They look at my map, you're going through this town. I've got a cousin, or I know a school teacher. Maybe you can sleep in the school and give a talk to the students the next day. So, all of these things happened and I kind of got accommodated in a greater variety of places, a nunnery where I was fed until I'd hardly move, by these nuns, just plain, homemade food and rakia and wine. And I stayed at a short stay in a psychiatric hospital in France, Sylvania. Talking of the changes that have happened to Europe, when Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed there it was a country house owned by a Hungarian count. His assets had since been liquidated, you know, his family dispossessed in this huge building given to the Romanian State to use as a hospital, and it was still being run that way.But the family had kind of made contact, again, having kept their heads down under communism, but realized they had no use for a huge mansion with extensive grounds. There was no way they could fill it or maintain it. And so it was continued to be used as a hospital, but they had a room where they were able to stay when they passed through.So I spent a few nights there. So everything slowed down was my experience, the further southeast I got. And going back actually to one of your first questions about, why walk? And what do you notice from walking? One of the things you really notice is the incremental changes by which, culture changes as well as landscape.You see the crossovers. You see that people in this part of Holland are a bit like this people in this part of Germany over the border. You know, borders kind of matter less because you see one culture merging into another. Languages and accents changing. And sometimes those changes are quite abrupt, but often they're all quite organic and the food changes, the beer changes, the wine changes, the local cheese or delicacies change.And so that was one of the great pleasures of it was just kind of understanding these many different cultures in Europe as part of a continuum rather than these kind of separate entities that just happen to be next door to each other. [00:38:50] Chris Christou: Right. That's so often constructed in the western imagination through borders, through state borders.[00:38:58] Nick Hunt: Just talking of borders, they've only become harder, well for everyone in the places I walk through. And I do wonder what it would be like making this journey today after Brexit. I wouldn't be able to do it just quite simply. It's no longer possible for a British person to spend more than three months in the EU, as a visitor, as a tourist.So I think I could have walked to possibly Salzburg or possibly Vienna, and then had to come back and wait three months before continuing the journey. So I was lucky, you know, I was lucky to do it in the time I did. Mm-hmm. [00:39:38] Chris Christou: Mm-hmm. I'm very much reminded through these stories and your reflections of this essay that Ivan Illich wrote towards the end of his life called "Hospitality and Pain."And you know, I highly, highly recommend it for anyone who's curious about how hospitality has changed, has been commodified and co-opted over the centuries, over the millennia. You know, he talks very briefly, but very in depth about how the church essentially took over that role for local people, that in the Abrahamic worldview that there was generally a rule that you could and should be offering three days and nights of sanctuary to the stranger for anyone who'd come passing by and in part because in the Christian world in another religious worldviews that the stranger could very well be a God in disguise, the divine coming to your doorstep. We're talking of course, about the fourth and fifth centuries.About how the church ended up saying, no, no, no, don't worry, don't worry. We got this. You, you guys, the people in the village, you don't have to do this anymore. They can come to the church and we'll give them hospitality. And of course, you know, there's the hidden cost, which is the, the attempt at conversion, I'm sure.Yeah. But that later on the church instituted hospitals, that word that comes directly from hospitality as these places where people could stay, hospitals and later hostels and hotels and in Spanish, hospedaje and that by Patrick Lee firm's time we're talking about police stations.Right. and then, you know, in your time to some degree asylums. It also reminded me of that kind of rule, for lack of a better word of the willingness or duty of people to offer three days and nights to the stranger.And that when the stranger came upon the doorstep of a local person, that the local person could not ask them what they were doing there until they had eaten and often until they had slept a full night. But it's interesting, I mean, I, I don't know how far deep we can go with this, but the rule of this notion, as you were kind of saying, how the relative degree of hospitality shifted from [00:42:01] Nick Hunt: when do you have to leave to how long how long can you stay? [00:42:05] Chris Christou: Right. Right. That Within that kind of three day structure or rule that there was also this, this notion that it wasn't just in instituted or implemented or suggested as a way of putting limits on allowing a sense of agency or autonomy for the people who are hosting, but also limiting their hospitality.Kind of putting this, this notion on the table that you might want to offer a hundred days of hospitality, but you're not allowed. Right. And what and where that would come from and why that there would be this necessity within the culture or cultures to actually limit someone's want to serve the stranger.[00:42:54] Nick Hunt: Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I wonder where that came from. I mean, three is always a bit of a magic number, isn't it? Mm-hmm. But yeah, it sounds like that maybe comes from an impulse from both sides somehow. [00:43:09] Chris Christou: Mm-hmm. Nick, I'd like to come back to this question of learning and learning with the other of, of interculturality and tourism. And I'd like to return to your essay, Bulls and Scars, momentarily with this excerpt. And it absolutely deserves the title of being one of the best travel writing pieces of the 21st century. And so in that essay you write, "if we stay within our horizons surrounded by people who are the same as us, it precludes all hope. We shut off any possibility of having our automatic beliefs, whether good or bad, right or wrong, smashed so their rubble can make new shapes. We will never be forced to understand that there are different ways to be human, different ways to be ourselves, and we desperately need that knowledge, even if we don't know it yet."Hmm. And now I don't disagree at all. I think we are desperately in need of deeper understandings of what it means to be human and what it means to be human together. The argument will continue to arise, however, at what cost? How might we measure the extent of our presence in foreign places and among foreign people, assuming that such a thing is even possible.[00:44:32] Nick Hunt: Yeah, that's a question that's at the heart of that essay, which I don't think we've said is set in the South Omo Valley in Ethiopia. And part of it is about this phenomenon of tribal safaris, you know, which is as gross as it sounds, and it's rich western people driving in fleets of four by fours to indigenous tribal villages and, you know, taking pictures and watching a dance and then going to the next village.And the examples of this that I saw when I was there, I said, when I said in the essay, you couldn't invent a better parody of tourists. It was almost unbelievable. It was all of the obnoxious stereotypes about the very worst kind of tourists behaving in the very worst possible way, seemingly just no self reflection whatsoever, which was disheartening.And that's an extreme example and it's easy to parody because it was so extreme. But I guess what maybe you're asking more is what about the other people? What about those of us who do famously think of ourselves as as travelers rather than tourists? There's always that distinction I certainly made when I was doing it in my twenties.So I'm not a tourist, I'm a traveler. It's like a rich westerner saying that they're an "expat" rather than an immigrant when they go and live in a foreign country that's normally cheaper than where they came from. Yeah, that's a question again, like the great secret, I don't think I answer in that essay.What I did discover was that, it was much more nuanced than I thought it was originally. Certainly on a surface, looking at the scenes that I saw, what I saw as people who were completely out of their depth, out of their world, out of their landscape, looking like idiots and being mocked fairly openly by these tribal people who they were, in my view, exploiting. They didn't look like they were better off in a lot of ways, even though they had the, thousand dollars cameras and all the expensive clothes and the vehicles and the money and obviously had a certain amount of power cuz they were the ones shelling out money and kind of getting what they wanted.But it wasn't as clear cut as I thought. And I know that's only a kind of anecdote. It's not anything like a study of how people going to remote communities, the damage they do and the impact they have. I've got another another example maybe, or something that I've been working on more recently, which comes from a journey that I haven't not written anything about it yet.But in March of this year, I was in Columbia and Northern Columbia. The first time for a long time that I've, gone so far. All of my work has been sort of around Europe, been taking trains. I mean, I got on a plane and left my soul behind in lots of ways, got to Columbia and there were various reasons for my going, but one of the interests I had was I had a contact who'd worked with the Kogi people who live in the Sierra Nevada des Santa Marta Mountains on the Caribbean coast.An extraordinary place, an extraordinary people who have really been isolated at their own instigation, since the Spanish came, and survived the conquest with a culture and religion and economy, really more or less intact, just by quietly retreating up the mountain and not really making a lot of fuss for hundreds of years, so effectively that until the 1960s, outsiders didn't really know they were there. And since then there has been contact made from what I learned really by the Kogi rather than the other way around. Or they realized that they couldn't remain up there isolated forever.Maybe now because people were starting to encroach upon the land and settle and cut down forests. And there was obviously decades of warfare and conflict and drug trafficking and a very dangerous world they saw outside the mountains. And this journey was very paradoxical and strange and difficult because they do not want people to visit them.You know, they're very clear about that. They made a couple of documentary films or collaborated in a couple of documentary films in the late nineties and sort of early two thousands where they sent this message to the world about telling the younger brothers as they call us, where they're going wrong, where we are going wrong, all the damage we're doing.And then after that film, it was really, that's it. "We don't wanna communicate with you anymore. We've said what we have to say, leave us alone." You know, "we're fine. We'll get on with it." But they, the contact I had I arranged to meet a sort of spokesman for this community, for this tribe in Santa Marta.Kind of like an, a sort of indigenous embassy in a way. And he was a real intermediary between these two worlds. He was dressed in traditional clothes, lived in the mountains but came down to work in this city and was as conversant with that tribal and spiritual life as he was with a smartphone and a laptop.So he was really this kind of very interesting bridge character who was maintaining a balance, which really must have been very difficult between these two entirely different worldviews and systems. And in a series of conversations with him and with his brother, who also acts as a spokesman, I was able to talk to them about the culture and about the life that was up there, or the knowledge they wanted to share with me.And when it came time for me to ask without really thinking that it would work, could I have permission to go into the Sierra any further because I know that, you know, academics and anthropologists have been welcomed there in the past. And it was, it was actually great. It was a wonderful relief to be told politely, but firmly, no.Hmm. No. Mm. You know, it's been nice meeting you. If you wanted to go further into the mountains. You could write a, a detailed proposal, and I thought this was very interesting. They said you'd need to explain what knowledge you are seeking to gain, what you're going to do with that knowledge and who you will share that knowledge with.Like, what do you want to know? And then we would consider that, the elders, the priests, the mammos would consider that up in the mountains. And you might get an answer, but it might take weeks. It could take months because everything's very, very slow, you know? and you probably wouldn't be their priority.Right. And so I didn't get to the Sierra, and I'm writing a piece now about not getting to the place where you kind of dream of going, because, to be completely honest, and I know how, how kind of naive and possibly colonial, I sound by saying this, but I think it's important to recognize part of that idea of finding the great secret.Of course, I wanted to go to this place where a few Westerners had been and meet people who are presented or present themselves as having deep, ecological, ancestral spiritual knowledge, that they know how to live in better harmony with the earth. You know, whether that's true or not, that in itself is a simplified, probably naive view, but that's the kind of main story of these people.Why wouldn't I want to meet them? You know, just the thought that not 50 miles away from this bustling, polluted city, there's a mountain range. It's one of the most biodiverse places on the planet that has people who have kept knowledge against all odds, have kept knowledge for 500 years and have not been conquered and have not been wiped out, and have not given in.You know, obviously I wanted to go there, but it was wonderful to know that I couldn't because I'm not welcome. Mm. And so I'm in the middle of writing a piece that's a, it's a kind of non-travel piece. It's an anti travel piece or a piece examining, critically examining that, that on edge within myself to know what's around the next corner.To look over the horizon to get to the top of the mountain, you know, and, and, and explore and discover all of that stuff. But recognizing that, it is teasing out which parts of that are a genuine and healthy human curiosity. And a genuine love of experiencing new things and meeting new people and learning new things and what's more of a colonial, "I want to discover this place, record what I find and take knowledge out."And that was one thing that I found very interestingly. They spoke very explicitly about seeking knowledge as a form of extraction. For hundreds of years they've had westerners extracting the obvious stuff, the coal, the gold, the oil, the timber, all the material goods. While indigenous knowledge was discounted as completely useless.And now people are going there looking for this knowledge. And so for very understandable reasons, these people are highly suspicious of these people turning up, wanting to know things. What will you do with the knowledge? Why do you want this knowledge? And they spoke about knowledge being removed in the past, unscrupulously taken from its proper owners, which is a form of theft.So, yeah, talking about is appropriate to be talking about this on the end of tourism podcast. Cause yeah, it's very much a journey that wasn't a journey not hacking away through the jungle with the machete, not getting the top of the mountain, you know, not seeing the things that no one else has seen.Wow. And that being a good thing. [00:54:59] Chris Christou: Yeah. It brings me back to that question of why would either within a culture or from some kind of authoritative part of it, why would a people place limits to protect themselves in regards to those three days of allowing people to stay?Right. And not for longer. Yes. [00:55:20] Nick Hunt: Yeah, that's very true. Mm-hmm. Because people change, the people that come do change things. They change your world in ways big and small, good and bad. [00:55:31] Chris Christou: You know, I had a maybe not a similar experience, but I was actually in the Sierra Nevadas maybe 12 years ago now, and doing a backpacking trip with an ex-girlfriend there.And the Columbian government had opened a certain part of the Sierra Nevadas for ecotourism just a few years earlier. And I'm sure it's still very much open and available in those terms. And it was more or less a a six day hike. And because this is an area as well where there were previous civilizations living there, so ruins as well.And so that that trip is a guided trek. So you would go with a local guide who is not just certified as a tour guide, but also a part of the government program. And you would hike three days and hike back three days. And there was one lunch where there was a Kogi man and his son also dressed in traditional clothing. And for our listeners, from what I understand anyways, there are certain degrees of inclusion in Kogi society. So the higher up the mountain you go, the more exclusive it is in terms of foreigners are not allowed in, in certain places.And then the lower down the mountain and you go, there are some places where there are Kogi settlements, but they are now intermingling with for example, these tourists groups. And so that lunch was an opportunity for this Kogi man to explain a little bit about his culture, the history there and of course the geography.And as we were arriving to that little lunch outpost his son was there maybe 10, 15 feet away, a few meters away. And we kind of locked eyes and I had these, very western plastic sunglasses on my head. And the Kogi boy, again, dressed in traditional clothing, he couldn't speak any English and couldn't speak any Spanish from what I could tell.And so his manner of communicating was with his hands. And he subtly but somewhat relentlessly was pointing at my sunglasses. And I didn't know what to do, of course. And he wanted my sunglasses. And there's this, this moment, and in that moment so much can come to pass.But of course afterwards there was so much reflection to be taken in regards to, if I gave him my sunglasses, what would be the consequence of that, that simple action rolling out over the course of time in that place. And does it even matter that I didn't give him my sunglasses, that I just showed up there and had this shiny object that, that perhaps also had its consequence rolling out over the course of this young man's life because, I was one of 10 or 12 people that day in that moment to pass by.But there were countless other groups. I mean, the outposts that we slept in held like a hundred people at a time. Oh, wow. And so we would, we would pass people who were coming down from the mountain and that same trek or trip and you know, so there was probably, I would say close to a hundred people per day passing there.Right. And what that consequence would look like rolling out over the course of, of his life. [00:59:11] Nick Hunt: Yeah. You could almost follow the story of a pair of plastic sunglasses as they drop into a community and have sort of unknown consequences or, or not. But you don't know, do you? Yeah. Yeah. I'm, it was fascinating knowing that you've been to the same, that same area as well. Appreciated that. What's, what's your, what's your last question? Hmm. [00:59:34] Chris Christou: Well, it has to do with with the end of tourism, surprisingly.And so one last time, coming back to your essay, Bulls and Scars, you write, " a friend of mine refuses to travel to countries poor than his own. Not because he is scared of robbery or disease, but because the inequality implicit in every human exchange induces a squirming, awkwardness and corrosive sense of guilt.For him, the power disparity overshadows everything. Every conversation, every handshake, every smile and gesture. He would rather not travel than be in that situation." And you say, "I have always argued against this view because the see all human interactions as a function of economics means accepting capitalism in its totality, denying that people are driven by forces other than power and greed, excluding the possibility of there being anything else.The grotesque display of these photographic trophy hunters makes me think of him now." Now I've received a good amount of writing and messages from people speaking of their consternation and guilt in terms of "do I travel, do I not travel? What are the consequences?" Et cetera. In one of the first episodes of the podcast with Stephen Jenkinson, he declared that we have to find a way of being in the world that isn't guilt delivered or escapist, which I think bears an affinity to what you've written.Hmm. Finally, you wrote that your friend's perspective excludes "the possibility of there being anything else." Now I relentlessly return on the pod to the understanding that we live in a time in which our imaginations, our capacity to dream the world anew, is constantly under attack, if not ignored altogether.My question, this last question for you, Nick, is what does the possibility of anything else look like for you?[01:01:44] Nick Hunt: I think in a way I come back to that idea of being told we can't give you free accommodation here because, what about the tourist industry? And I think that it's become, you know, everything has become monetized and I get the, you know, the fact that that money does rule the world in lots of ways.And I'd be a huge hypocrite if I'd said that money wasn't deeply important to me. As much as I like to think it, much as I want to wish it away, it's obviously something that dictates a very large amount of what I do with my life, what I do with my time. But that everything else, well, it's some, it's friendship and hospitality and openness I think.It's learning and it's genuine exchange, not exchange, not of money and goods and services, but an actual human interaction for the pleasure and the curiosity of it. Those sound like very simple answers and I guess they are, but that is what I feel gets excluded when everything is just seen as a byproduct of economics.And that friend who, you know, I talked about then, I understand. I've had the experience as I'm sure you have of the kind of meeting someone often in a culture or community that is a lot poorer, who is kind, friendly, hospitable, helpful, and this nagging feeling of like, When does the money question come?Mm-hmm. And sometimes it doesn't, but often it does. And sometimes it's fine that it does. But it's difficult to kind of place yourself in this, I think, because it does instantly bring up all this kind of very useless western guilt that, you know, Steven Jenkinson talked about. It's not good to go through the world feeling guilty and suspicious of people, you know. 'When am I gonna be asked for money?' Is a terrible way of interacting with anyone to have that at the back of your, your mind.And I've been in situations where I've said can I give you some money? And people have been quite offended or thought it was ridiculous or laughed at me. So, it's very hard to get right. But like I say, it's a bad way of being in the world, thinking that the worst of people in that they're always, there's always some economic motive for exchange.And it does seem to be a kind of victory of capitalism in that we do think that all the time, you know, but what does this cost? What's the price? What's the price of this friendliness that I'm receiving? The interesting thing about it, I think, it is quite corrosive on both sites because things are neither offered nor received freely.If there's always this question of what's this worth economically. But I like that framing. What was it that Steven Jenkinson said? It was guilt on one side and what was the other side of the pole? [01:05:07] Chris Christou: Yeah. Neither guilt delivered or escapist. [01:05:11] Nick Hunt: Yeah. That's really interesting. Guilt and escapism. Because that is the other side, isn't it?Is that often traveling is this escape? And I think we can both relate to it. We both experience that as a very simple, it can be a very simple form of therapy or it seems simple that you just keep going and keep traveling and you run away from things. And also that isn't a helpful way of being in the world either, although it feels great, at the time for parts of your life when you do that.But what is the space between guilt and escapism? I think it really, the main thing for me, and again, this is a kind of, it sounds like a, just a terrible cliche, but I guess there's a often things do is I do think if you go and if you travel. And also if you stay at home with as open a mind as you can it does seem to kind of shape the way the world works.It shapes the way people interact with you, the way you interact with people. And just always keeping in mind the possibility that that things encounters, exchanges, will turn out for the best rather than the worst. Mm-hmm. You develop a slight sixth sense I think when traveling where you often have to make very quick decisions about people.You know, do I trust this person? Do I not trust this person? And you're not aware you're doing it, but obviously you can get it wrong. But not allowing that to always become this kind of suspicion of "what does this person want from me?" Hmm. I feel like I've just delivered a lot of sort of platitudes and cliches at the end of this talk.Just be nice, be, be open. Try to be respectful. Do no harm, also don't be wracked with guilt every exchange, because who wants to meet you if you are walking around, ringing your hands and kind of punching yourself in the face. Another important part of being a traveler is being a good traveler.Being somebody who people want coming to their community, village, town, city and benefit from that exchange as well. It's not just about you bringing something back. There's the art of being a good guest, which Patrick Leigh Fermor, to come back to him, was a master at. He would speak three or four different languages, know classical Greek poetry, be able to talk about any subject.Dance on the table, you know, drink all night. He was that kind of guest. He was the guest that people wanted to have around and have fun with mostly, or that's the way he presented himself, certainly. In the same way, you can be a good, same way, you can be a good host, you can be a good guest, and you can be a good traveler in terms of what you, what you bring, what you give.[01:08:20] Chris Christou: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think what it comes down to is that relationship and that hospitality that has for, at least for people in Europe and, and the UK and and Western people, descendants, culturally, is that when we look at, for example, what Illich kind of whispered towards, how these traditions have been robbed of us.And when you talk about other cliches and platitudes and this and that, that, we feel the need to not let them fall by the wayside, in part because we're so impoverished by the lack of them in our times. And so, I think, that's where we might be able to find something of an answer, is in that relationship of hospitality that, still exists in the world, thankfully in little corners.And, and those corners can also be found in the places that we live in.[01:09:21] Nick Hunt: I think it exists that desire for hospitality because it's a very deep human need. When I was a kid, I, I was always, for some reason I would hate receiving presents.There was something about the weight of expectation and I would always find it very difficult to receive presents and would rather not be given a lot of stuff to do with various complex family dynamics. But it really helped when someone said, you know, when someone gives you a present, it's not just for you, it's also for them. You know, they're doing it cuz they want to and to have a present refused is not a nice thing to do.It, it, that doesn't feel good for the person doing it. Their need is kind of being thrown back at them. And I think it's like that with hospitality as well. We kind of often frame it as the person receiving the hospitality has all the good stuff and the host is just kind of giving, giving, giving, but actually the host is, is getting a lot back. And that's often why they do it. It's like those people wanting, people to stay for three days is not just an act of kindness and selflessness. It's also, it feeds them and benefits them and improves their life. I think that's a really important thing to remember with the concept of hospitality and hosting.[01:10:49] Chris Christou: May we all be able to be fed in that way. Thank you so much, Nick, on behalf of our listeners for joining us today and I feel like we've started to unpack so much and there's so much more to consider and to wrestle with. But perhaps there'll be another opportunity someday.[01:11:06] Nick Hunt: Yeah, I hope so. Thank you, Chris. It was great speaking to you. [01:11:12] Chris Christou: Likewise, Nick. Before we finish off, I'd just like to ask, you know, on behalf of our listeners as well how might people be able to read and, and purchase your writing and your books? How might they be able to find you and follow you online?[01:11:26] Nick Hunt: So if you just look up my, my name Nick Hunt. My book should, should come up. I have a website. Nick hunt scrutiny.com. I have a, a book, a novel actually out in July next month, 6th of July called "Red Smoking Mirror."So that's the thing that I will be kind of focusing on for the next bit of time. You can also find me as Chris and I met each other through the Dark Mountain Project, which is a loose network of writers and artists and thinkers who are concerned with the times we're in and how to be human in times of crisis and collapse and change.So you can find me through any of those routes. Hmm. [01:12:17] Chris Christou: Beautiful. Well, I'll make sure that all those links are on the homework section on the end of tourism podcast when it launches. And this episode will be released after the release of your new, your book, your first novel. So, listeners will be able to find it then as well.[01:12:34] Nick Hunt: It will be in local shops. Independent bookshops are the best. [01:12:40] Chris Christou: Once again, thank you, Nick, for your time. [01:12:42] Nick Hunt: Thank you. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Two recent appearances of Sophie Strand at SAND. One was her Community Conversation with Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo the second a story she read called “Healing: A Ghost Story” with Bayo Akomolafe. Sophie's course The Body is a Doorway at SAND Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she'll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she's ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is available now from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels. She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny. sophiestrand.com Topics: 0:00 – Introduction 4:30 – We Must Risk New Shapes 14:24 – Disability and Sickness 26:50 – Collective Story Telling and Trance 39:16 – A Rescue Promise 44:20 – Healing: A Ghost Story

In this episode, Kimberly and Sophie explore the nuances of being public entrepreneurs and authors. They wonder aloud together about the various roles of knowledge, expertise, and experience and discuss issues such as psychedelics for women, the complexities of social media, the need for eldership, disability and sickness as an altered state, as well as healing practices outside of a hyper-fixated and individualistic framework. The common threads connecting their questions center around identities as facilitators and writers, the need for connection to community and lineages, and managing the challenges of social media and identity politics in a hyper-individualistic culture. Ultimately, they land on the beauty that comes from maturation, wisdom, and growth over time that cannot be done by a quick-fix nor in isolation.   Bio Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays “The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine” was published last year in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include “Love Song to a Blue God,” “Those Other Flowers to Come” and “The Approach.” Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, “The Madonna Secret,” that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels, and will be released this summer.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. What She Shares: –Cultural band-aids for deeper wounds –Public and private identities –Demonizing and idolizing figures –Impact of social media and identity politics –Elderhood, wisdom, and changing perspectives   What You'll Hear: –Problematizing psychedelics  –Gendered experiences with psychedelics –Harder for women to recover after psychedelics –Cultural band-aids on wounds –Sophie addresses disabled writer label –Publishing editorial choices and confinement –Public identities and social media –Collective energy demonizing or idolizing figures –Navigating social media pressures and intuition as entrepreneurs –Is the medicine of these times insignificance? –Story of Joan of Arc –No saviors, no heroes –Creating money and wanting to be insignificant –Tensions between community, authority, and parasocial diffusion –Bodily impact of social media –Problematizing gatekeeping of knowledge and lived experiences –Risk-averseness and obsession with safety  –Safety as limited capacity to survive –Hyperfixation and hyper-individualism of healing –Impact of identity politics on youth –Maturity, wisdom, and changing perspectives –Discerning between privacy, secrecy, and transparency –Using discretion when writing memoir –Difference between rot and fermentation   Resources Website: https://sophiestrand.com/ IG: @cosmogyny  

Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organisations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. He is most recently the author of the book 'At Work in the Ruins'. Dougald spoke about his childhood growing up in the United Reformed Church, his decision to leave the BBC, and how to respond to the 'end of the world'. Read the full transcript here: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2023/05/31/dougald-hine-on-climate-change-and-how-to-respond-to-a-bleak-looking-future Buy a copy of his book 'At Work in the Ruins' here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/At-Work-Ruins-Pandemics-Emergencies/dp/164502184X ***** The Sacred is a podcast produced by the think tank Theos. Be sure to connect with us below to stay up-to-date with all our content, research and events. CONNECT WITH THE SACRED Twitter: https://twitter.com/sacred_podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sacred_podcast/ CONNECT WITH ELIZABETH OLDFIELD Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESOldfield Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethsaraholdfield/ CONNECT WITH THEOS Theos monthly newsletter: https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/E9E17CAB71AC7464 Twitter: https://twitter.com/Theosthinktank Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theosthinktank LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theos---the-think-tank/ Website: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/ CHECK OUT OUR PODCASTS The Sacred: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sacred/id1326888108 Reading Our Times: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reading-our-times/id1530952185

Ashley and Dougald co-host Adam Greenfield to talk about his idea of LifeHouses as featured here https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/from-churches-to-lifehouses. Previously a rock critic, a bike messenger, a free-clinic medic and a sergeant in the US Army, Adam Greenfield has spent the past quarter-century thinking and working at the intersection of technology, design and politics with everyday life. Before founding his own practice, Urbanscale, in 2010, he worked as lead information architect for Razorfish in Tokyo and head of design direction for service and user interface design at Nokia headquarters outside Helsinki. Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics, he has taught in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Urban Design program of the Bartlett, University College London. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, and the bestsellers Against the Smart City and Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. His next book is Beyond Hope: Collective Power and Mutual Care in the Long Emergency, coming next year from Verso. You can sign up for his irregular dispatches from London at http://tinyletter.com/speedbird , or connect with him on Mastodon at http://social.coop/@adamgreenfield Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer, speaker and the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins (2023) and he publishes new essays on his Substack, Writing Home. atworkintheruins | Instagram | Linktree His substack can be found at: Writing Home | Dougald Hine | Substack

Have you noticed that the world as we know it is ending? And, no matter how much we think we can escape to some cozy little place away from all the chaos, the reality is there is no escaping this time of endings, death, and letting go. If this freaks you out, overwhelms you, or leaves you wondering, “well, what the hell do I do at the end of the world?”, then this episode offers a deep, empathetic, and enlightening look at how we can be At Work In the Ruins of what was.Today's guest, Dougald Hine, is a social thinker, writer, speaker, and the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and ‘a school called HOME'. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies (2023) and he publishes new essays on his Substack, Writing Home.Welcome to We Are Already Free, the podcast that empowers down-to-earth seekers to live their truth and be the change. I'm Nathan Maingard, breathwork facilitator, transformational guide, empowering wordsmith, and your host. Here you'll find authentic conversations with everyday heroes who defy societal norms simply by living their rooted truth. Together, we are shaking off limiting beliefs and remembering the simple truth that we are already free!In this episode, Dougald Hine shares:Why the end of the world is not the end of everything, and why we need to give it a good ending in order to allow something new to emerge.How disinvesting in the stories that power society allows us to see things clearly and find new ways of being.Why we need to listen to some of what science brings us without elevating it to a religious and political authority.How storytelling and culture have a deeper role in navigating the end of the world than just delivering a limiting message from the existing structures.Near the end, Dougald shares beautiful stories of why we all need initiation, even self-initiationThis barely scratches the surface, there is so much more to this heartwarming, challenging, and empowering conversation…You can find Dougald's book, links, Substack, and everything else at https://dougald.nu (love keeping it simple)Links and things discussed in this episode:some are affiliate links to support the podcast (at no extra cost to you)Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de OlivieraProphetic Cultures by Federico CampagnaFull video version of this episodeSorry if I missed things, it's been a long week

This is a segment of episode 342 of Last Born In The Wilderness, “Jumping The Gap: Green Transphobia & Where It Leads w/ John Halstead.” Listen to the full episode: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/john-halstead-3

Read ‘Jumping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads': http://bit.ly/40cdXxU Writer John Halstead returns to the podcast to discuss his widely read article, Jumping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads, published at A Beautiful Resistance. John Halstead's article uses the ideological trajectory of Paul Kingnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a fierce critic of “Big Green environmentalism,” to examine trans-exclusionary politics and rhetoric in certain leftist ecoactivist movements and spaces. John has remarked Kingsnorth was an “intellectual idol” of his, helping him form many of his own ideas about humanity's severed relationship with the earth, with poignant ruminations on the roots of anthropogenic climate change, the dead end of techno-optimism, and industrial civilization's inevitable collapse. But, as Halstead began to more closely examine Kingnorth's writings since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, he, like many others who admired his perspective, was disturbed by his “benevolent green nationalism,” defense of the British monarchy, and openly derisive characterizations of “wokeness” and trans identity. John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.

WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast SUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.com BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

Writer John Halstead returns to the podcast to discuss his widely read article, 'Jumping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads,' published at A Beautiful Resistance. John Halstead's article uses the ideological trajectory of Paul Kingnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a fierce critic of “Big Green environmentalism,” to examine trans-exclusionary politics and rhetoric in certain leftist ecoactivist movements and spaces. John has remarked Kingsnorth was an “intellectual idol” of his, helping him form many of his own ideas about humanity's severed relationship with the earth, with poignant ruminations on the roots of anthropogenic climate change, the dead end of techno-optimism, and industrial civilization's inevitable collapse. But, as Halstead began to more closely examine Kingnorth's writings since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, he, like many others who admired his perspective, was disturbed by his “benevolent green nationalism,” defense of the British monarchy, and openly derisive characterizations of “wokeness” and trans identity. John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org. Episode Notes: - Read Jumping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads: http://bit.ly/40cdXxU - The song featured is “Deneb” by Nick Vander from the album Kodama (Nowaki's Selection), used with permission by the artist. Listen and purchase at: https://nickvander.bandcamp.com WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast SUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.com BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

Chris and Ashley speak with Dougald about his new book At Work in the Ruins and where it intersects with both the Small Farm Future and Doomer Optimism. Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer, speaker and the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins (2023) and he publishes new essays on his Substack, Writing Home. https://linktr.ee/atworkintheruins His substack can be found at: https://dougald.substack.com/ Chris Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last 17 years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College on aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he's written for various publications, such as The Land , Dark Mountain , Permaculture magazine and Statistics Views, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the Journal of Consumer Culture . Smaje writes the blog Small Farm Future, is a featured author at www.resilience.org and a current director of the Ecological Land Co-op. Chris' latest book is: A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth.

Welcome to More Christ. We seek to bring some of the world's most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life's central and abiding questions. In this ninety-eighth episode in a series of discussions, I'm joined once more by my friend, Paul Kingsnorth and Tom Holland. Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered. Follow him here: https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ Tom Holland is a British writer, who has published several popular works on classical and medieval history as well as creating two documentaries. His recent book on the history of Christianity became a Sunday Times bestseller. He is currently the host of The Rest is History, alongside Dominic Sandbrooke. For more, please see here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-Holland/...https://www.tom-holland.org/https://open.spotify.com/show/7Cvsbcj...

We live beyond your modern manAnd all his justifications for his world of progressAnd though he has created his alibis by falsifying historyBy smearing what was left of our nameBy insinuating poisonous myths in the minds of our peoplesBy proclaiming himself sovereign at the crossroads of ideologiesThis, his modern civilization is not superiorIt is not enlightened nor privileged- “Master of the earth” by Rome The text above is an excerpt from the one-man band Rome. It's from one of his most anti-modern albums – The Lone Furrow (2020). The theme in the poem – that modernity and its cult of progress is a dead-end – runs through much of what Paul Kingsnorth, today's guest, has written and said. He has a background as a journalist, but in 2009 he started the Dark Mountain Project. The manifesto, called Uncivilization, argued that environmental collapse as inevitable and criticized the whole notion of progress. He left the project in 2017, and released the non-fiction book Confessions of a recovering environmentalist the same year to summarize his experiences. It also delves into why he became disillusioned with the environmental movement he was a part of for so long. He's also a novelist, whose work include The Wake (2014) and Beast (2017), and his latest novel is called Alexandria (2020). And he also has a Substack newsletter called The Abbey of Misrule. Which I highly recommend, if you find today's conversation interesting. In today's episode I focus on the fantastic essay Paul wrote a couple of years ago called The Cross and The Machine, published first in First Things. (It's also been translated into Swedish and published by Tidskriften Pilgrim). In it he tells the story of how he went from being a Dawkins-esque atheist, to an environmental activist on to zenbhuddhism, landing in a witch-coven. Yes, he was a witch for a while. Until he realized that what he was searching for was Christ. Christianity. An answer he didn't want to receive, but it nevertheless came to him. We also talk about what the machine is, and how to keep oneself from not being swallowed by it. (Spoiler: don't live your life on your smartphone.) Utgivaren ansvarar inte för kommentarsfältet. (Myndigheten för press, radio och tv (MPRT) vill att jag skriver ovanstående för att visa att det inte är jag, utan den som kommenterar, som ansvarar för innehållet i det som skrivs i kommentarsfältet.) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.enrakhoger.se/subscribe

On this, the first episode of Season 3: Invocations, my guest is Dougald Hine, a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he co-founded organisations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. He has collaborated with scientists, artists and activists, serving as a leader of artistic development at Riksteatern (Sweden's national theatre) and as an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. His latest book is At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies (2023). He co-hosts The Great Humbling podcast and publishes a Substack called “Writing Home.” Here, we discuss Dougald's travels (from Oaxaca to Sweden), his new book At Work in the Ruins, the missing links in the climate change discussion, flightshaming or flygskam, the quality of culture, Gustavo Esteva's "turnings" and hospitality, money and 500 years of abuse, becoming an immigrant in a Swedish pandemic, the Uzbek Storyteller and A School Called Home. Enjoy! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dougald's Official Website Dougald's Substack Writing At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies The Dark Mountain Project Black Elephant ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support the podcast and the movement through our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theendoftourism Discover more episodes and join the conversation: http://www.theendoftourism.com Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @theendoftourism‍

Rupert speaks with Paul Kingsnorth [author, deputy editor of The Ecologist], and Dr Philip Goff [author, Professor of Philosophy at Durham University] about the possible benefits of religious practices, without their associated beliefs. This is part of the _Meeting of the Minds_ series offered by The Weekend Universityhttps://theweekenduniversity.com/about/Paul Kingsnorth is a former journalist and deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine who has won several awards for his poetry and essays. He is also the author of ten books: both fiction and nonfiction. In 2009, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times. Philip_GoffDr Philip Goff is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, whose main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. Goff is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. He has authored an academic book with Oxford University Press – Consciousness and Fundamental Reality – and a book aimed at a general audience – Galileo's Error. He is currently working on a book exploring the middle ground between God and atheism. 

Get early access to our latest psychology lectures: http://bit.ly/new-talks5 This episode is part of our Meeting of the Minds series in which we bring together leading thinkers from different backgrounds to discuss topics of mutual interest. The topic is “religion without belief” in which we explore to what extent it is possible to benefit from religious practices, without fully adopting the associated belief systems. The speakers are Rupert Sheldrake, Paul Kingsnorth, and Philip Goff, and some of the key points discussed include: — How they arrived at their current understanding and the spiritual experiences that have had the biggest impact on them — What our culture's increasing drive towards secularisation might be costing us - both individually and collectively. — Whether it is possible to pick and choose ‘parts' of a religion without adopting it fully And more. You can learn more about their work by going to www.sheldrake.org, www.paulkingsnorth.net, and www.philipgoffphilosophy.com. --- Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 85 scientific papers, who was named among the top 100 Global Thought Leaders for 2013. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, then philosophy and the history of science at Harvard, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He is the author of 13 books, including “The Science Delusion”, “Science and Spiritual Practices”, and “Ways to Go Beyond”. Paul Kingsnorth is a former journalist and deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine who has won several awards for his poetry and essays. He is also the author of ten books: both fiction and nonfiction. In 2009, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times. Dr Philip Goff is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, whose main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. Goff is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. He has authored an academic book with Oxford University Press – Consciousness and Fundamental Reality – and a book aimed at a general audience – Galileo's Error. He is currently working on a book exploring the middle ground between God and atheism. --- Interview Links: — Galileo's Error - Philip Goff: https://amzn.to/3EFCByV — Why religion without belief can still make perfect sense - Philip Goff: https://psyche.co/ideas/why-religion-without-belief-can-still-make-perfect-sense — Philip's website: https://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/ — Paul's website: https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/ — The Cross and the Machine - Paul Kingsnorth: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine — The Abbey of Misrule (Paul's newsletter): https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ — Science and Spiritual Practices - Rupert Sheldrake: https://amzn.to/3CBBNsj — Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work - Rupert Sheldrake: https://amzn.to/3TaqG0n — Rupert's website: www.sheldrake.org — Rupert's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RupertSheldrakePhD

Welcome to More Christ. We seek to bring some of the world's most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life's central and abiding questions. In this eighty seventh episode in a series of discussions, I'm joined once more by Paul Kingsnorth and Carlo Lancellotti. Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered. Follow him here: https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/ https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ Prof. Carlo Lancellotti is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Mathematics at the College of Staten Island. He received his Doctorate in Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1998. His main field of scholarship is the kinetic theory of plasmas and gravitating systems. He has also translated and edited two volumes of works of 20th-century Italian political philosopher Augusto Del Noce. He is one of the organizers of the New York Encounter, a large weekend long cultural festival held once a year in New York City. He was one of the co-founders of the Crossroads Cultural Center, which for over fifteen years has been organizing cultural events around the country. If you'd like to learn more about Carlo and his work, then please see the links below: https://twitter.com/_clancellotti https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/arti... https://delnoceinenglish.files.wordpr... https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/de...

Welcome to More Christ. We seek to bring some of the world's most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life's central and abiding questions. In this special eighty fifth episode in a series of discussions, I'm joined by Paul Kingsnorth and Paul Vander Klay. Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered. Follow him here: https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/ https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ Paul Vander Klay is the pastor of Living Stones Christian Reformed Church in Sacramento, California, USA, and host of a marvellous YouTube Channel which wrestles with being a Christian in a secular age, the struggle for ultimate meaning, identity, and more. He has worked at length to share and critique insights from Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, and other figures to a worldwide audience, adding his own unique contributions, and somehow producing videos at a prolific rate without diluting quality. If you'd like to learn more about Paul and his work, please see the links below: https://www.youtube.com/user/paulvand... https://paulvanderklay.me/

Welcome to More Christ. We seek to bring some of the world's most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life's central and abiding questions. In this special eighty fourth episode in a series of discussions, I'm joined by Paul Kingsnorth. Paul is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered. Follow him here: https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/ https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/

Sophie Strand: writer and academic cross-contaminator: on the ways we can improvise in academia and beyond. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. Today we speak about the importance of listening to one's body and its unexpected ways to bring out intellectual results and eventually new academic fruits. For Sophie, storytelling was a way out of trauma and around pain and then became her academic method allowing to border-cross paradigms and fuse ideas. We ask how to create safety in these subversive spaces? And how to confront the reactions of disapproval and discontent? Sophie leads us through her story of following that sensory vein and shares the ways that could work for others as eager to improvise. Listen to the episode to reflect on our intellectual editing processes together.   (TW: this conversation touches on trauma and mental health).   Mentioned in Podcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rice (Anne Rice) https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/about (Bayo Akomolafe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_and_Danger (Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo) by Mary Douglas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Weber_(writer) (Andreas Weber) https://orphanwisdom.com/die-wise/ (Die Wise – A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul) by Stephen Jenkinson Social media: https://sophiestrand.com/ (Sophie) https://sophiestrand.com/ (Strand)

Dougald Hine is a writer and social thinker, and one of the founders of the Dark Mountain Project. He and his partner Anna Björkman have recently bought an old shoe factory in a small community in Sweden, and are in the process of turning it into a home and a teaching house. In this interview with Campfire Stories founder Mattias Olsson, he speaks of what the Dark Mountain Project is, why it came about and how it's intertwined with the Transition Movement.Links:Support us on Patreon The song in this episode is called Till Skogen, by the band Kolonien Click here to watch our documentary series about the band Kolonien Watch our films and listen to all podcast episodes at Campfire Stories Read more about Dougald Hine's A School Called Home Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Making art is risky, especially when we honor our cycles of creativity. In this episode we sit down with writer Sophie Strand as she shares her experiences with risk, navigating the pressure to create, listening to guidance from our web of non-humxn kin and  how our relationships to land shape creative journey. Mentioned in this episode: Psychic Tour of Brooklyn Botanical Garden with Eliza Swann June 22Early Bird List for Creative Liberation Tarot ReadingsSophie's new book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred MasculineAbout the GuestSophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she'll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she's ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny.About the HostZaneta (they/them) is a queer, multi Brooklyn-based sound ritualist, listening educator, nature recordist, creativity activist, tarot reader, and podcast host. At the core of their work is a deep desire to remember how to live in interconnectedness.  Whether that is through meditation and connecting with the self, or in community rituals to connect to the land, Zaneta weaves sound and ritual to create experiences that transform the way participants hear and connect to the world.  In the spirit of an interconnected world, Zaneta focuses on supporting folx to make their art and express themselves fully, knowing that interconnection and interdependence are rooted in our individual wholeness and that our authentic creative expression is at the heart of that wholeness.  It's towards this collective vision that Zaneta offers channeled tarot readings for creative liberation, and offers readings to support artists in navigating their careers and projects. To learn more about Zaneta's work, visit www.soundartmagic.comOr follow them on IG @soundartmagic About the PodcastArt Witch is where creativity, magic, and healing align for personal and collective liberation.  Hosted by Brooklyn-based sound ritualist, arts educator, and tarot reader Zaneta, Art Witch aims to provide resources for the creative journey. In this podcast you'll hear from a variety of artists, witches, healers, and experts sharing their wisdom and stories, all with the intention of helping folx make art and share their unique magic with the world.Art Witch has a Patreon community where members meet regularly for group meditations, full moon rituals, and community conversations on art and magic. In addition, we have a full library of meditations and videos for the creative mystical journey. To support this podcast and become a member, visit www.patreon.com/soundartmagic@artwitchpodcast

This week I'm joined by Paul Kingsnorth, a writer who lives in the West of Ireland. He is a former deputy editor of The Ecologist and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. We chat about everything from big tech companies censoring peoples' views, being "labeled” if you go against the media trend, and how movements and communities thrive. His attitudes and opinions on complex subjects are pretty exciting. More Info: Subscribe to Paul Kingsnorth's Substack: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ My meditation podcast, Above the Noise, is out now, only on Luminary. I release guided meditations every Wednesday. Please check it out: http://luminary.link/meditate Elites are taking over! Our only hope is to form our own. To learn more join my cartel here https://www.russellbrand.com/join and get weekly bulletins too incendiary for anything but your private inbox. (*not a euphemism) Subscribe to my YouTube channel, I post four videos a week including video clips from these episodes!  https://www.youtube.com/russellbrand Subscribe to my YouTube side-channel for more wellness and spirituality: https://www.youtube.com/c/AwakeningWithRussell Instagram: http://instagram.com/russellbrand/ Twitter:  http://twitter.com/rustyrockets

This week I'm joined by Paul Kingsnorth, a writer who lives in the West of Ireland. He is a former deputy editor of The Ecologist and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. We chat about everything from big tech companies censoring peoples' views, being "labeled” if you go against the media trend, and how movements and communities thrive. His attitudes and opinions on complex subjects are pretty exciting.More Info:Subscribe to Paul Kingsnorth's Substack: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/My meditation podcast, Above the Noise, is out now, only on Luminary. I release guided meditations every Wednesday. Please check it out: http://luminary.link/meditateElites are taking over! Our only hope is to form our own. To learn more join my cartel here https://www.russellbrand.com/join and get weekly bulletins too incendiary for anything but your private inbox. (*not a euphemism)Subscribe to my YouTube channel, I post four videos a week including video clips from these episodes!  https://www.youtube.com/russellbrandSubscribe to my YouTube side-channel for more wellness and spirituality: https://www.youtube.com/c/AwakeningWithRussellInstagram:http://instagram.com/russellbrand/Twitter: http://twitter.com/rustyrockets

Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered.

This is a conversation with author, poet and brilliant ‘compost heap of ideas', Sophie Strand. Sophie is kind, generous of spirit and invitational. Our time together was an unhurried meander, getting a sense of each other before we approached the big topics that we planned to speak about. We arrived at things she has recently been writing about, namely challenging our conceptions of both healing and trauma, acknowledging incompleteness as an intrinsic and beautiful part of life, and the generativity that constraints offer us. We also briefly speak of the craving for rooted relationships, the impacts of pandemic times, the holobiont that makes us a 'we', the profound medicine of walking (for those who are physically able) intentionally and regularly around the places you live to build intimacy with the land and all the beings therein that you are in curious kinship with. Oh, and radical uncertainty.  Enjoy Sophie's amazingness.  Below you will find links to her social media and places you can preorder her up and coming book - The Flowering Wand - Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. Sophie's Bio (from her website): Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she'll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she's ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny.PREORDER her book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine Via Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Inner Traditions publishing, Bookshop.org, and other book sellers. Podcast Music:Podcast intro created by Amber SamayaCompleting song is intuitive song inspired by Sophie's essay "Your body is a doorway"You can hear more of my music on Spotify under Amber Samaya Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/ambersamaya)

You can support this podcast and get early releases and bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/aksubversive Or check out my writing and the early releases on Substack at https://alexkaschuta.substack.com/ I speak to Paul about freedom under liberalism, his conversion to Romanian Orthodoxy, the possibility of a truly secular society, transhumanism, the English people and their right to self-determination, the hedonic treadmill, London as the new Babel, what is Hell, scientism and the race for the preservation of bare life under Covid, materialism, localism, AI, technocapital and more. Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and former environmental activist who lives in the west of Ireland. He is the former deputy editor of The Ecologist and the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. You can find his work on his website https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/ and his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule. His recommended subversive is Jaques Ellul and his book The Technological Society (plus a nod to Uncle Ted, who has explored similar territory). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aksubversive/message

PAUL KINGSNORTH is a former journalist and deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine who has won several awards for his poetry and essays. He is also the author of two works of nonfiction. In 2009, he cofounded the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times. His recent essays on The Vaccine Moment have stirred a lot of conversation on the acceleration of The Machine. Paul is joined by author CHARLES EISENSTEIN, who has spent over a decade exploring similar themes, from The Ascent of Humanity to his essay The Coronation and beyond.

Study estimates lower risk of cardiovascular disease associated with improved vitamin D level University of South Australia, December 10 2021. Research reported on December 5, 2021 in the European Heart Journal estimated that improvement of vitamin D levels to 20 ng/mL could eliminate 4.4% of all cases of cardiovascular disease. “Our results are exciting as they suggest that if we can raise levels of vitamin D within norms, we should also affect rates of cardiovascular disease,” she stated. “By increasing vitamin D-deficient individuals to levels of at least 50 nmol/L [20 ng/mL], we estimate that 4.4 percent of all cardiovascular disease cases could have been prevented.” (NEXT) Capsaicin molecule inhibits growth of breast cancer cells Centre of Genomics (Germany) December 18, 2021 Capsaicin, an active ingredient of pungent substances such as chilli or pepper, inhibits the growth of breast cancer cells. This was reported by a team following experiments in cultivated tumour cells. In the cultivated cells, the team detected a number of typical olfactory receptors. One receptor occurred very frequently; it is usually found in the fifth cranial nerve, i.e. the trigeminal nerve. It belongs to the so-called Transient Receptor Potential Channels and is named TRPV1. That receptor is activated by the spicy molecule capsaicin as well as by helional – a scent of fresh sea breeze. (NEXT) Running down the exercise 'sweet spot' to reverse cognitive decline University of Queensland (Australia), December 14 2021 University of Queensland researchers have discovered an exercise 'sweet spot' that reverses the cognitive decline in aging mice, paving the way for human studies. After more than a decade of research, led by Queensland Brain Institute, the team found 35 days of voluntary physical exercise improved learning and memory. "We tested the cognitive ability of elderly mice following defined periods of exercise and found an optimal period or 'sweet spot' that greatly improved their spatial learning," Dr. Blackmore said. The researchers also discovered how exercise improved learning. (NEXT) Reducing copper in the body alters cancer metabolism to reduce risk of aggressive breast cancer Weill Cornell Medicine, December 15, 2021 Depleting copper levels may reduce the production of energy that cancer cells need to travel and establish themselves in other parts of the body by a process referred to as metastasis, according to a new study by investigators from Weill Cornell Medicine and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). The discovery of the underlying mechanisms of how copper depletion may help reduce metastasis in breast cancer will help inform the design of future clinical trials. In a series of research papers from 2013 to 2021, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers showed that in a phase II clinical trial when patients who had high-risk triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) were treated with a drug that lowers the levels of copper in their bodies, it prolonged the period of time before their cancer recurred and spread or metastasized. (NEXT) Yerba mate decreases your risk of metabolic disorders Kyungpook National University (Korea), December 4, 2021 Yerba mate is a herbal dietary supplement taken for weight loss. A study published in the Journal of Medicinal Food examined its ability to treat obesity and metabolic disorders. Rats were divided into two groups: a control group given a high-fat diet and a control group with a high-fat diet but supplemented with yerba mate. Upon analysis of the animals, the researchers found that yerba mate increased energy expenditure and thermogenic gene mRNA expression in white adipose tissue (WAT) and decreased fatty acid synthase (FAS) mRNA expression in WAT. These changes were associated with decreases in body weight, WAT weight, epididymal adipocyte size, and plasma leptin level. (OTHER NEWS NEXT) High-ORAC Foods May Slow Aging USDA. Foods that score high in an antioxidant analysis called ORAC may protect cells and their components from oxidative damage, according to studies of animals and human blood at the Agricultural Research Service's Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts in Boston. ARS is the chief scientific agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture ORAC, short for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, is a test tube analysis that measures the total antioxidant power of foods and other chemical substances. Early findings suggest that eating plenty of high-ORAC fruits and vegetables--such as spinach and blueberries--may help slow the processes associated with aging in both body and brain. In the studies, eating plenty of high-ORAC foods: Raised the antioxidant power of human blood 10 to 25 percent Prevented some loss of long-term memory and learning ability in middle-aged rats Maintained the ability of brain cells in middle-aged rats to respond to a chemical stimulus--a function that normally decreases with age Protected rats' tiny blood vessels--capillaries--against oxygen damage "It may be that combinations of nutrients found in foods have greater protective effects than each nutrient taken alone," said Guohua (Howard) Cao, a physician and chemist who developed the ORAC assay. Examples Women gave blood after separately ingesting spinach, strawberries and red wine--all high-ORAC foods--or taking 1,250 milligrams of vitamin C. A large serving of fresh spinach produced the biggest rise in the women's blood antioxidant scores--up to 25 percent--followed by vitamin C, strawberries and lastly, red wine Men and women had a 13- to 15-percent increase in the antioxidant power of their blood after doubling their daily fruit and vegetable intake compared to what they consumed before the study. Just doubling intake, without regard to ORAC scores of the fruits and vegetables, more than doubled the number of ORAC units the volunteers consumed, said Prior. Rats fed daily doses of blueberry extract for six weeks before being subjected to two days of pure oxygen apparently suffered much less damage to the capillaries in and around their lungs, Prior said. Middle-aged rats that had eaten diets fortified with spinach or strawberry extract or vitamin E for nine months. A daily dose of spinach extract "prevented some loss of long-term memory and learning ability normally experienced by the 15-month-old rats," said Shukitt-Hale. Spinach was also the most potent in protecting different types of nerve cells in two separate parts of the brain against the effects of aging, said Joseph. (NEXT) Paul Kingsnorth Interview Video  Paul Kingsnorth is an English environmental writer, novelist and the former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing addresses macro themes like environmentalism, globalization, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilization-level trends. He is a graduate of Oxford University and later joined the environmental campaign group EarthAction. He has subsequently worked as commissioning editor for openDemocracy, as a publications editor for Greenpeace and, between 1999 and 2001, as deputy editor of The Ecologist. He was named one of Britain's "top ten troublemakers" by the New Statesman magazine in 2001.  In 2020, he was called "England's greatest living writer" by Aris Roussinos. In 2004, he was one of the founders of the Free West Papua Campaign, which campaigns for the secession of the provinces of Papua and West Papua from Indonesia, where Kingsnorth was made an honorary member of the Lani tribe in 200.  His most notable book is Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (NEXT) Video - James Giordano Lecture James  Giordano, PhD, MPhil, is Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program, Scholar-in-Residence, leads the Sub-Program in Military Medical Ethics, and Co-director of the O'Neill-Pellegrino Program in Brain Science and Global Health Law and Policy in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics; and is Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA.  He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Brain Science, Health Promotions and Ethics at the Coburg University of Applied Sciences, Coburg, Germany, and was formerly 2011-2012 JW Fulbright Foundation Visiting Professor of Neurosciences and Neuroethics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. Prof. Giordano currently serves as Chair of the Neuroethics Program of the IEEE Brain Project, and an appointed member of the Neuroethics, Legal and Social Issues (NELSI) Advisory Panel of the Defense Advanced Research Projects' Agency (DARPA). He has previously served as Research Fellow and Task Leader of the EU Human Brain Project Sub-Project on Dual-Use Brain Science; an appointed member of United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary's Advisory Council on Human Research Protections (SACHRP); and as Senior Science Advisory Fellow of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment Branch of the Joint Staff of the Pentagon.

Does it still make sense to talk about climate change? This seems a strange question to ask, for someone who has spent much of his adult life talking to people about climate change, but it is the question writer Dougald Hine has found himself wondering about lately. When we talk about climate change, we are entering into a conversation that is framed by science, yet climate change also asks us questions that lead beyond that frame. In recent years, however, the language of science has become supercharged: from the placards that read ‘Unite Behind the Science' to the political leaders who insist that they are ‘following the science' in their response to the pandemic, there's a new emphasis on the total authority of science that makes it harder to ask these frame-breaking questions. This is converging with a particular approach to climate change, one that points to a dystopian future in which the world has been remade as an object of total management. What does this mean for how we have meaningful conversations about what Dougald Hine refers to as ‘the trouble we're in'? Dougald Hine is a writer and culture maker. Ten years ago, Dougald co-founded The Dark Mountain Project, which has grown into world-wide community of artists and writers. He and his partner Anna Björkman now run A School Called Home, a learning community for those drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. He also podcasts together with futurist Ed Gillespie at The Great Humbling. This episode was recorded at a live event co-organized by the Forest of Thought Podcast and CEMUS (Centre for environment and development studies) at Uppsala University, on November 22nd, 2021 at the Uppsala Public Library, Sweden. For full show notes please go to: www.forestofthought.com/e16-live-dougald-hine

Grief caught me unawares this past month, and it's been a strange and beautiful journey. In this episode I talk about my grandpa, who passed away recently, about my forefathers, and about grappling with my heritage. I explore the aloneness I have been sitting with recently, and the joy I have somehow experienced in this process. I also read you a piece of my writing that was recently published in The Dark Mountain Project's annual publication (Issue 20: Abyss), titled 'Do not avert your eyes'. About me: My name is Sage Freda and I'm a storyteller and journeyer who currently lives on a farm in South Africa with my dog and too many books. I am setting out on some new adventures soon and hope you'll come along for the ride! Send me questions, comments, or voice messages at sagefreda@gmail.com. My website is www.sagefreda.com, or find me on social media: Instagram and Facebook. Cover art done by my talented sister, Hannah. Music by Lesfm on Pixabay.

Anthea Lawson is a campaigner who's interested in the connections between our inner lives and the world we create together.  Over two decades, she has campaigned to shut down tax havens and stop banks fuelling corruption and ecological destruction. She launched an award-winning campaign for transparency over who owns companies, which was taken up by many other organisations and has resulted in changes to the law in dozens of countries. She worked on the successful campaigns for an Arms Trade Treaty, and for the international ban on cluster bombs. She has worked for Global Witness, Amnesty International, and many other campaign groups. She's dug up Parliament Square in guerilla gardening efforts, and was arrested with Extinction Rebellion. In her writing she explores what we can learn from how we do campaigning: how our inner lives are entangled in our work to change the world. I've been exploring this as an associate at Perspectiva, and in her book The Entangled Activist: Learning to recognise the master's tools, to be published in spring 2021.She is interested, too, in the limits of campaigning in a time of breakdown, which I've been exploring through editing at the Dark Mountain Project.​Her book is a deep exploration of personal process that then expands so that it becomes relevant to us all - if we're activists (and frankly, if you're listening to this podcast, I imagine you're an activist at some point in your life even if you don't identify as such), then we are also an integral part of the system that is the problem - disentangling ourselves from this is not going to happen. So the question arises of how we can be the change we need to see in the world. Anthea has explored this in depth  and it was such a pleasure to engage with her on this question.  Anthea's website: https://www.anthealawson.uk/Perspectiva Press: https://systems-souls-society.com/insight/perspectiva-press/Dark Mountain Press: https://dark-mountain.net/

I am excited to be speaking to Paul Kingsnorth in this episode. Paul and I talk about the challenges that society faces and how we got here this journey encompasses education, capitalism and we discuss how the old stories warn us of such times. Paul is deeply insightful as always and it is good to speak to someone who wears his heart on his sleeve. https://www.paulkingsnorth.net Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth's nonfiction writing tends to address macro themes like environmentalism, globalisation, and the challenges posed to humanity by civilisation-level trends. His fiction tends to be mythological and multi-layered. After travelling through Mexico, West Papua, Genoa in Italy, and Brazil, Kingsnorth wrote his first book in 2003, One No, Many Yeses. The book explored how globalisation played a role in destroying historic cultures around the world Kingsnorth's second book, Real England, was published by Portobello Books in 2008. In this book, he reflected on how those same forces of globalisation affected England, his own country, in the homogenization of culture. This was Kingsnorth's first successful book, resulting in reviews by all major newspapers and citation in speeches by both David Cameron and the archbishop of Canterbury. He has contributed to The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, London Review of Books, Granta, The Ecologist, New Internationalist, The Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 2, BBC Four, ITV, and Resonance FM. His first novel, The Wake was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and won the Gordon Burn Prize.Film rights to the novel were sold to a consortium led by the actor Mark Rylance and the former president of HBO Films Colin Callender. Kingsnorth's second novel, Beast, was published in 2016 by Faber and Faber and was shortlisted for the Encore Award for the Best Second Novel in 2017. His third novel, completing a loose thematic trilogy beginning with The Wake, will also be published by Faber. Announcing the deal, Faber's editorial director, Lee Brackstone, said: "We are welcoming to Faber a writer who belongs in the tradition of past greats like William Golding, Robert Graves, David Peace and Ted Hughes. His sensibility sits comfortably with theirs and his literary achievement could well go on to be their equal. He is that good". To support the podcast and get access to features about guitar playing and song writing visit https://www.patreon.com/vichyland and also news for all the creative music that we do at Bluescamp UK and France visit www.bluescampuk.co.uk   For details of the Ikaro music charity visit www.ikaromusic.com   Big thanks to Josh Ferrara for the music

Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. In this episode we discuss his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Western cultural collapse, modernity, hell and spiritual belief in contemporary society. Kingsnorth's blog can be found here: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ --- Become part of the Hermitix community: Hermitix Twitter - https://twitter.com/Hermitixpodcast Support Hermitix: Hermitix Subscription - https://hermitix.net/subscribe/ Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/hermitix Donations: - https://www.paypal.me/hermitixpod Hermitix Merchandise - http://teespring.com/stores/hermitix-2 Bitcoin Donation Address: 3LAGEKBXEuE2pgc4oubExGTWtrKPuXDDLK Ethereum Donation Address: 0xfd2bbe86d6070004b9Cbf682aB2F25170046A99

Sophie Strand is a poet, historical-fiction writer, and essayist based in the Hudson Valley with a focus on the intersection of spirituality and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming from Sacred Planet Books (Inner Traditions). She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan) Her writing has been published by The Dark Mountain Project, www.poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way Magazine, Creatrix Magazine, and Your Impossible Voice.  And you can continue to follow her work and poetry on Facebook or Instagram: @cosmogyny. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/aprilklingmeyer/support

Sophie Strand is a poet, historical-fiction writer, and essayist based in the Hudson Valley with a focus on the intersection of spirituality and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming from Inner Traditions. She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press), Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press), and The Approach (The Swan). Her writing has been published by The Dark Mountain Project, poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way Magazine, Creatrix Magazine, and Your Impossible Voice. IN THIS CONVERSATION Sophie and I discuss a plethora of topics, including her definition of magic, the limits of language, queerness in nature, and why the term "Divine Feminine" has become too restrictive for her. Follow Sophie on Instagram Visit Sophie's Website --- Support this podcast on Patreon Follow Nick on Instagram manofthecards.com In Search of Tarot theme music was written and recorded by AJ Ackleson.

Update on Thacker Pass with guest Will Falk. Will and Max Wilbert (another of our frequent guests), launched an occupation of a proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada in January of this year.Will is a biophilic writer, lawyer and the author of “How Dams Fall: Stories the Colorado River Told Me,” published by Homebound Publications. The book describes his relationship with the Colorado River through his involvement in the first-ever American federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem, the Colorado River. Will has published numerous articles and essays through Earth Island Journal, the Dark Mountain Project, CounterPunch, and many others. For more information about Will, visit willfalk.org. To keep up with the news about Thacker Pass, check out the website at protectthackerpass.org and Protect Thacker Pass on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Production Credits:Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota), Host and Executive ProducerLiz Hill (Red Lake Ojibwe), ProducerTiokasin Ghosthorse, Studio Engineer and Audio Editor, WIOX 91.3 FM, Roxbury, NY Music Selections:1. Song Title: Tahi Roots Mix (First Voices Radio Theme Song)Artist: Moana and the Moa HuntersCD: Tahi (1993)Label: Southside Records (Australia and New Zealand)(00:00:44) 2. Song Title: What I've SeenArtist: Michael Franti and SpearheadCD: Yell Fire! (2006)Label: ANTI- and Liberation Records(00:29:10) 3. Song Title: They're Mining UsArtist: John TrudellCD: DNA Descendant Now Ancestor  (2001)Label: Effective Records(00:33:53) 4. Song Title: 500 YearsArtist: Rhonda HeadCD: Kisahkihitan (2019)Label: Rhonda Head(00:37:30) 5. Song Title: Who Discovered AmericaArtist: Ozomatli CD: Street Signs (2004)Label: Real World/Concord(00:41:11) 6. Song Title: Earth Was MotherArtist: John TrudellCD: DNA Descendant Now Ancestor (2001)Label: Effective Records(00:45:39) 7. Song Title: In the AnthropoceneArtist: Nick MulveyCD: N/A - released as a single in October 2019Label: N/A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYnaQIvBRAE(00:55:10)

Bio: Sophie Strand is a poet, historical-fiction writer, and essayist based in the Hudson Valley with a focus on the intersection of spirituality and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming from Inner Traditions. She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan) Her writing has been published by The Dark Mountain Project, www.poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way Magazine, Creatrix Magazine, and Your Impossible Voice. And you can continue to follow her work and poetry on Facebook or Instagram: cosmogyny. What daily practice do you currently find most nourishing? Every morning I call on every being - ancestor, plant, mushroom, type of stone, animal, geological formation, river, bird, invasive species, weather system - in a twenty mile radius of my home. I gather around me the beings that "constitute" me so that when I make decisions throughout my day I know my choices include more than just the "fiction" of an individual me. What are you reading? As much or as little as you would like to share. The list is insane. But currently I am enjoying a return to Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality paired with Bayo Akomolafe's These Wilds Beyond Our Fences. Big thanks to our sponsor The Apricot Grove! Eternal gratitude to Bart Matthews for our amazing intro music! Check out our FB page if you roll like that. For books! https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=59079037

Join us for an exceptional discussion on Myth, Mycelium, and Rewilding Masculinities with Sophie Strand. Some of the themes we explored: How has patriarchy colonized the ideas of the masculine? What does it mean to use mycelium to think through myths? How can we root ancient stories in ecology? What makes ancient myths potent in the age of ecosystem collapse? How does storytelling allow us to transcend our human narratives? What is the role of modern science in reinterpreting ancient myths? How can we complicate our ideas of progress and individuality via folklore and biology? Are there any modern examples of these ancient mythic figures? How has the history of monotheism obscured the biodiversity of masculine spiritualities and archetypes? In particular, the figures of Dionysus, Orpheus, Tolkien, Rabbi Yeshua, Tristan, Merlin the Wizard, Parzifal, and King David were focus points of Sophie's recent books. In this live discussion with Sophie, you will have the opportunity to learn some beautiful wisdom teachings from her and to ask questions. Sophie Strand is a poet, historical-fiction writer, and essayist based in the Hudson Valley with a focus on the intersection of spirituality and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming from Sacred Planet Books (Inner Traditions). She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan )Her writing has been published by The Dark Mountain Project, www.poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way Magazine, Creatrix Magazine, and Your Impossible Voice. And you can continue to follow her work and poetry on Facebook or Instagram: cosmogyny.

On this episode of “Death in The Garden,” we interview Paul Kingsnorth, author (The Wake, Beast, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, and most recently, Alexandria, to name but a few) and creator of The Dark Mountain Project. The Dark Mountain Project is a cultural movement through storytelling, writing and art, centered around the Dark Mountain Journal. We spoke with Paul about what it means to be honest with ourselves in these times of social, ecological, and spiritual breakdown. We covered the issues of the current environmental movement, and the emotional processes of accepting that these “solutions” being given to us are not solutions at all. We talk about spirituality, religion, alchemy, and the importance of looking to pre-history & indigenous cultures to understand our place and path forward. If you are enjoying the show, please rate, review, and subscribe. If you want to know more about “Death in The Garden,” please visit our website and Instagram. Editing: Jake Marquez Music: Daniel Osterstock

Ep. 53: Breaking News: Activists Occupy Site of Proposed Mine in Nevada, feat. Will Falk In this special breaking news episode, I talk to Will Falk, who is at an occupation of public land in Nevada in order to stop a proposed lithium mine. The encampment was just announced on Monday, Jan. 18th, and I spoke with him by phone that day. The long and the short of the story is that the Bureau of Land Management just gave the green light to a company called Lithium Americas to establish a massive operation in Thacker Pass. The company has already built roads, drilled boreholes, constructed a weather station, and dug a 2-acre test pit. They plan to build large tailing ponds for toxic minewaste, drill new wells, build a sulfuric acid processing plant, import more than 170 semi-loads of sulfur per day, pump 850 million gallons of water annually, and dig an open pit of more than 2 square miles into the mountainside. Additionally, the project will burn some 26,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day. At risk from this habitat-destroying industrial activity are a number of animal and plant species including the threatened Greater Sage Grouse, the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, a critically imperiled endemic snail species known as the Kings River Pyrg, old growth Big Sagebrush and Crosby's Buckwheat, to name just a few. The stakes are high for all the creatures who live in and around Thacker Pass, and that's why the activists have set up there. Will Falk is a biophilic essayist, poet, and lawyer. He believes the intensifying destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today and he aims his writing at stopping this destruction. His work has been published by Earth Island Journal, the Dark Mountain Project, CounterPunch, Whole Terrain, and the San Diego Free Press, among others. He is also the author of the book, “How Dams Fall.” His most recent endeavor was a multimedia project called, "The Ohio River Speaks." Will and I talked about the geology of the area and its ancient natural history; the current landscape, including the observable effects of ranching; the details of what Lithium Americas plans to do in the area; the effects of human over-consumption on wildlife habitat; the sixth great extinction; how government policy instituted car culture; how dwindling resources will lead to social crisis; the fast-tracking of this project by the Trump administration; the bipartisan consensus on using public lands for industrial energy development; the endangerment of First Foods, a vital cultural resource; and what the campaign needs and how to follow and support them. Visit protectthackerpass.org for more information. Protect Thacker Pass, Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ProtectThackerPass Protect Thacker Pass website: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ Will Falk's writing: http://willfalk.org/ Previous podcast episode with Will Falk: "The Unsustainability of Civilization Itself": https://radiofreesunroot.com/2020/06/14/episode-18-the-unsustainability-of-civilization-itself/ This episode's introduction music is "The Warm Green Mist of the Afternoon" by Dan Hanrahan. Find more of his music here: https://danhanrahan.bandcamp.com RADIO FREE SUNROOT: Podcasting by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume https://radiofreesunroot.com KOLLIBRI'S BLOG & BOOKSHOP: https://macskamoksha.com/ ONE-TIME DONATION: https://paypal.me/kollibri KOLLIBRI'S PATREON: Get access to members-only content https://www.patreon.com/kollibri Support Voices for Nature & Peace by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/voices-for-nature-and-peace This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-a50345 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Voices for Nature & Peace.

The big story of never-ending Progress has captured our imaginations for hundreds of years. But now we seem to be witnessing its unravelling. The search for other stories is no longer a fringe activity, but taking place in all parts of society. What do we want to keep from this story, and what do we leave behind? In this episode we explore the idea of Progress together with writer Dougald Hine. Ten years ago, Dougald co-founded The Dark Mountain Project, which has grown into world-wide community of artists and writers. He and his partner Anna Björkman now run A School Called Home, a learning community for those drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. He also podcasts together with futurist Ed Gillespie at The Great Humbling. LINKS TO THINGS WE TALKED ABOUT: Dougald's site: dougald.nu. A School Called Home: aschoolcalledhome.org. The Dark Mountain Project: dark-mountain.net. The Great Humbling: thegreathumbling.libsyn.com. Dougald's interview with Vanessa Andreotti: dougald.nu/the-vital-compass-a-conversation-with-vanessa-andreotti/ . Walter Mignolo: The Darker Side of Western Modernity: www.dukeupress.edu/The-Darker-Side-of-Western-Modernity/ . A World of Many Worlds, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser: www.dukeupress.edu/a-world-of-many-worlds . The Zapatista Movement: www.thoughtco.com/zapatistas-4707696. Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution: onestrawrevolution.net. Follow us and stay in touch! Facebook and Instagram handle: @forestofthought . Web: forestofthought.com. Email: ingrid@forestofthought.com. MUSIC by Christian Steen at stoneproduction.no.

The Unsustainability of Civilization Itself Will Falk is a biophilic essayist, poet, and lawyer. He believes the intensifying destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today and he aims his writing at stopping this destruction. His work has been published by Earth Island Journal, the Dark Mountain Project, CounterPunch, Whole Terrain, and the San Diego Free Press, among others. He is also the author of the book, "How Dams Fall." His newest project is an ongoing multimedia project called "The Ohio River Speaks." Will and I spoke on June 14th. We talked about the problem of civilization, about depression as a gateway to understanding that, and about the profound cultural changes required for collective, individual and ecological health. Will's website: http://willfalk.org/ Will's current multimedia project: "The Ohio River Speaks" https://www.theohioriverspeaks.org/ RADIO FREE SUNROOT: Podcasting by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume https://radiofreesunroot.com KOLLIBRI'S BLOG: https://macskamoksha.com/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/kollibri.terre.sonnenblume KOLLIBRI'S PATREON: Get access to members-only content https://www.patreon.com/kollibri Support Voices for Nature & Peace by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/voices-for-nature-and-peace This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-a50345 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Voices for Nature & Peace.

Since the last episode of Notes From Underground was published, a lot has happened in the world. As the Coronavirus pandemic reaches into all of our lives, this special episode is a reflection on the encounter to which it is bringing us – a collective encounter with parental mortality on a planetary scale.Notes From Underground began in November 2019 as an essay series and podcast in which Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) explores the deep roots of the new climate movements, the dark knowledge of climate change and the initiatory journey into which people are increasingly drawn by the encounter with this knowledge.The regular series of Notes From Underground is produced in collaboration with Bella Caledonia. This episode is a one-off collaboration with the Dark Mountain Project.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

The climate art of Cape Farewell, Ian McEwan's novel Solar and the oil industry connections of Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand all come under scrutiny in episode 10 of Notes From Underground.This is a series of essays from Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project), exploring the deep context of the new climate movements. The first six episodes traced a series of lines from the moment of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes, back into the longer history of industrial society and its unacknowledged consequences. In the sequence that began with episode seven, the theme is 'knowing what we know': the encounter with the knowledge of climate change, not as a set of facts that can be held at arm's length, but an experience of knowing that leaves us changed.Notes From Underground is produced in collaboration with Bella Caledonia. You can support the making of this series by going to:https://www.patreon.com/dougaldSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

Even when we know the facts of climate change, we don't seem to act as if we know – that's the observation from the sociologist Kari Norgaard which starts this week's essay in the Notes From Underground series. The theatre maker Chris Goode suggests that the difficulty might be that we lack 'a living-space in which to fully know what we know'. And the similarity between these two thoughts sets us on a journey across the threshold from knowledge to knowing.It's a journey that takes in the history of written language, the persistence of indigenous ways of knowing in the face of systematic cultural destruction, and the way that modern science tangles with all of this.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) invites listeners into the darkness of knowing a thing like climate change and the ways this knowledge changes us. The first six episodes of the series followed different threads into the labyrinth, starting from the new wave of awareness and activism around the climate crisis that emerged over the past eighteen months. Now, in the second part of the series, we're headed deeper into the strangeness of 'knowing what we know'.Notes From Underground is produced in collaboration with Bella Caledonia. You can support the making of this series by going to:https://www.patreon.com/dougaldSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

This week's essay looks at the production of scientific knowledge about climate change and what we do with that knowledge. It's about the history of the relationship between science and the environmental movement, and it's about my own experiences when I was commissioned to collaborate with a climate scientist on writing a play.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project) invites listeners into the darkness of knowing a thing like climate change and the ways this knowledge changes us. The first six episodes of the series followed different threads into the labyrinth, starting from the new wave of awareness and activism around the climate crisis that emerged over the past eighteen months. Now, in the second part of the series, we're headed deeper into the strangeness of 'knowing what we know'.Notes From Underground is produced in collaboration with Bella Caledonia. You can support the making of this series by going to:https://www.patreon.com/dougaldSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

What can we say for sure about the future? The seventh instalment of Notes From Underground is about the predicament of mortality and the difficulty which modern industrial societies have in facing it. This week's essay marks the start of Part II of the series and over the next few weeks, I want to think about the difficulty of knowing a thing like climate change, how this knowledge changes us and what it costs us.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves. The first six essays looked at what makes the current wave of climate activism different, how conversations about degrowth are reaching inside political institutions, and where we might look for hope – as well as the implications of 'climate emergency' declarations and the Green New Deal, and the common roots of Extinction Rebellion and the gilets jaunes.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

"I don't think these are times when you can sell people a vision of ‘how not only can we save the world, but we can make all of our lives better in the process.' There's too much loss written into the story, too much hardship around and ahead of us, whichever path we take. I think people can smell that, whether or not they want to face it yet. It doesn't mean we give up, it doesn't mean there's nothing left worth fighting for. But it may not be the kind of fight where memories of last century's heroic future are much help."In the last episode for 2019, we come to the Green New Deal and ask whether it represents a reckoning with the ongoing collision with ecological realities, or a way of postponing more difficult conversations. This week's essay touches on the way the political imagination is shaped by the industrial era, the desire to ‘reboot the future' – taken to its extreme in Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism – and the tendency of the left to treat climate change as a vindication of positions it held all along, as exemplified by Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything. In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselvesSupport the show

'What happens next may look like failure. Or it may be a success that asks many of the questions failure would have asked of us.'The fifth episode of Notes From Underground starts in late 2018, as two movements erupt on opposite sides of the Channel: Extinction Rebellion and the gilets jaunes. It's easy enough to treat them as opposites, the one group of protesters pushing for climate action, the other standing in the way of measures to curb the use of fossil fuels. But there is another story to tell, one which reveals a shared lineage, rooting these two movements in a common indignation.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

'When you organise politically to demand a declaration of emergency, you cannot avoid the question of democracy. If such a declaration means anything, then it marks a fork in the road. It says that our existing political systems have failed, that they have been no match for the scale of the crisis, and this seems hard to refute. But having acknowledged their failure, two paths remain: more democracy, or less.'This week's episode of Notes From Underground is a reflection on what it means to call for a declaration of climate emergency, one of the distinctive demands of the new climate movements. Just last week, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary declared 'climate emergency' their word of the year, one marker of the extraordinary momentum which has gathered around this language over the past twelve months. So this is an invitation to think harder and speak more clearly about what it means to organise around such a demand.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves. This is a weekly series, running through the winter of 2019/20. You can read the essays at Bella Caledonia, watch them on YouTube, or listen to them as a podcast.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

'If there is any hope worth having, in a time when we are rightly haunted by the thought of an "uninhabitable Earth", then I don't believe it lies in the triumph of reason, nor in the recovery of an imagined past. If I have any clue where it lies, I'd say it's in the difficult work of learning to feel and think together again...'This week's episode starts in Stockholm in the autumn of 2017, as two prominent Swedish professors meet to debate the question: 'Is there hope?' The rhetoric used that night sets off strange echoes of an old argument about the history of English poetry – and sparks thoughts about what happens when science and reason are elevated into objects of faith, and how this laid the ground in which the poisoned seeds of climate denial could grow.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves. This is a weekly series, running through the winter of 2019/20. You can read the essays at Bella Caledonia, watch them on YouTube, or listen to them as a podcast.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

'The need for economic growth is a social construct, not a law of nature, but this construct is the tablecloth on which our current society has been arranged. The question we face, as the 2020s come around, is whether we can pull the tablecloth out fast enough without smashing all the plates and glasses?'In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves. This week's episode asks what happens when the incompatibility of economic growth and ecological viability becomes speakable in the corridors of power.Notes From Underground is a weekly series, running through the winter of 2019/20. You can read the essays at Bella Caledonia, watch them on YouTube, or listen to them as a podcast.To support the making of this work, go to Dougald's Patreon page.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

The last time the climate crisis was getting this much attention, it was Al Gore striding on stage to talk us through the high-end PowerPoint presentation of An Inconvenient Truth. From Greta Thunberg to Gail Bradbrook to Jem Bendell, the strange collection of public figures at the centre of the new climate movements have little in common with Al Gore. They don't have a neat story about how it can all be OK. Their voices are powerful because we can hear their fear.In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of these movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves. This first episode traces a route from Stockholm in August 2018, through the advice that Extinction Rebellion didn't take from climate communications experts, to the question of what an Alcoholics Anonymous for a whole culture would look like.Notes From Underground is a weekly series, running through the winter of 2019/20. You can read the essays at Bella Caledonia, watch them on YouTube, or listen to them as a podcast.To support the making of this work, go to Dougald's Patreon page.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/dougald)

Progress! Economic growth! Affluence! Forget about it—at least while basic laws of science are in effect. I talk with Tom Wessels, ecologist, professor, and one of New England's clearest environmental voices. We focus on Tom's gem of a book, The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future. In it he explains how any economy focusing on economic growth (which differs from economic development) conflicts with basic scientific laws. And that never ends well. Here's the deal: Life on Earth isn't linear. It's much more interesting, dynamic, and creative. Most aspects of our lives—the biotic world we live in, our weather, bodies, communities, economies, our political structures—are complex systems. They can't be understood through the linear, reductionist thinking that has held sway for several hundred years. Damn you, Descartes! Tom Wessels has a knack for explaining simply and clearly where our daily lives meet scientific laws. Once we can see systems, relationships, and emergence as how the planet rolls, we might be able to build living economies that thrive within living ecosystems. We talk about how, on a finite planet, "economic growth" is a dangerous fantasy (particularly addictive to politicians), how to improve our relations with natural systems, and: How complex systems work—and how they can thrive How linear systems work Where these ideas have been the past several hundred years How positive feedback loops can bite us in not-so-positive places How corporate mergers and free trade defy the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics—BAD! How a return to "ancient values" can bring us back to what matters ...And we're greeted by the sight of a doe and her tiny fawn enjoying a romp in the field outside the window. Tom Wessels is a terrestrial ecologist and professor emeritus at Antioch University New England where he founded the master's degree program in Conservation Biology. Tom has conducted ecology and sustainability workshops through out the United States for over three decades and is the author of six books, including Reading the Forested Landscape, The Myth of Progress, with his latest being Granite, Fire, and Fog: The Natural and Cultural History of Acadia. Want more on complexity and systems thinking? The late, great Donella Meadows wrote Thinking in Systems. And while we're talking books, my comrades at the Dark Mountain Project in the UK have just published Walking On Lava, Selected Works for Uncivilised Times. I'm really honored to have my work included. Essays, stories, and art from Dark Mountain's first ten years take a slant look at our critical age. Included is the original Dark Mountain Manifesto, which says it all...

Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins describes the late historian and green economist David Fleming as "one of the most original, brilliant, urgently-needed, under-rated and ahead-of-his-time thinkers of the last 50 years." Fleming thought the globalised market economy would, in the not too distant future, begin to fail as it faces limits to growth from resource depletion, and said: "Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility. But it has the decisive argument in its favour that there is no alternative." And his work explores how we can create rich local cultures and economies as an alternative to global capitalism.Fleming died suddenly in 2010, but his good friend, Shaun Chamberlin has recently turned a manuscript Fleming left behind, into two books: his magnum opus, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, and a smaller introductory text, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy. We speak to Shaun by Skype from his home in Devon. Shaun's also behind the website darkoptimism.org where you can read his rather impressive bio, which includes co-founding Transition Town Kingston, and authoring the Transition movement's second book The Transition Timeline. You can find out more about the books at the Fleming Policy Institute. We also mention the Dark Mountain Project and Mark Boyle, the Moneyless Man. The podcast contains a slightly extended interview than what went to air.x GtA

Paul Kingsnorth, former deputy-editor of The Ecologist, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of novels including The Wake and Beast, talks about his changing attitude to the environmental movement. Environmental lawyer James Thornton and writer Martin Goodman recount their travels from Poland to Ghana, Alaska to China, to see how citizens are using public interest law to protect their planet. Plus, critic Maria Delgado and biographer Adam Feinstein consider the lost poems of that Chilean lover of nature, Pablo Neruda. Client Earth by James Thornton and Martin Goodman is published on the 11th of May. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth is out now. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry selected and introduced by Paul Kingsnorth is out now. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, by Pablo Neruda is published on Thursday 27 April 2017. Neruda a film by Pablo Larraín starring Gael García Bernal as a policeman searching for the Chilean politician Pablo Neruda played by Luis Gnecco is out in cinemas across the UK now. Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.