“The first guitar I built, I took it to a friend who has a guitar business. And he looked at it and he said this instrument has the approximate shape of a guitar, but it's not a guitar. It's a piece of junk. And he was right. So, what I found is that it's thrilling, as an artist or as a scientist, to pursue something, even if you don't achieve the thing that you're pursuing but it's the attempt that expresses the humanity.”

What can thousand-year-old trees teach us about living sustainably? If we want to be sustained by this planet indefinitely, we need to stop trying to suck it dry.

Doug Larson is an award winning scientist, author, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Guelph. He is an expert on deforestation and regularly contributes to The Guardian and other publications. His books include Cliff Ecology: Pattern and Process in Cliff Ecosystems, The Urban Cliff Revolution: New Findings on the Origins and Evolution of Human Habitats, Storyteller Guitar, and The Dogma At My Homework.

https://experts.uoguelph.ca/doug-larson
https://volumesdirect.com/products/the-dogma-ate-my-homework
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cliff-ecology/7502E52B487789BEA2CACC4553AA663B

https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Cliff-Revolution-Evolution-Habitats/dp/1550419927
https://www.amazon.com/Storyteller-Guitar-Doug-Larson-ebook/dp/B00B9VZQXU

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Image courtesy of Doug Larson

What can thousand-year-old trees teach us about living sustainably? If we want to be sustained by this planet indefinitely, we need to stop trying to suck it dry.

Doug Larson is an award winning scientist, author, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Guelph. He is an expert on deforestation and regularly contributes to The Guardian and other publications. His books include Cliff Ecology: Pattern and Process in Cliff Ecosystems, The Urban Cliff Revolution: New Findings on the Origins and Evolution of Human Habitats, Storyteller Guitar, and The Dogma At My Homework.

“The first guitar I built, I took it to a friend who has a guitar business. And he looked at it and he said this instrument has the approximate shape of a guitar, but it's not a guitar. It's a piece of junk. And he was right. So, what I found is that it's thrilling, as an artist or as a scientist, to pursue something, even if you don't achieve the thing that you're pursuing but it's the attempt that expresses the humanity.”

https://experts.uoguelph.ca/doug-larson
https://volumesdirect.com/products/the-dogma-ate-my-homework
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cliff-ecology/7502E52B487789BEA2CACC4553AA663B

https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Cliff-Revolution-Evolution-Habitats/dp/1550419927
https://www.amazon.com/Storyteller-Guitar-Doug-Larson-ebook/dp/B00B9VZQXU

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Image courtesy of Doug Larson

“I had a very tangible interaction with a teacher that shaped everything in my life. I'm dyslexic, but I managed to get into a good university in the UK, and I was messing around in a class with 300 students, and the teacher sent me out of the class. But he met me after that class, and he essentially said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you here?’ And I was like, ‘I like ecology, but I just can't keep up. There's too much reading. There's too much statistics.’ And he said, ‘If you like ecology, just find the bits that you like.’ And I just needed to look at the fungi and find them fascinating. And then that gives you positive endorphins when you have a successful experiment. So I just immersed myself in the parts that I enjoyed and through that process, things started to go really well and my degree went really well. And then after that, my career sort of exploded. And genuinely, I know if I had not encountered that professor, there's no way my career would have gone in the direction it has done. And I just think teachers are unbelievable inspirers, not necessarily for the knowledge they give you, but more for just inspiring you to follow your own your own path, your own trajectory.”

Although they comprise less than 5% of the world population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. How can we support farmers, reverse biodiversity loss, and restore our ecosystems?

Thomas Crowther is an ecologist studying the connections between biodiversity and climate change. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, chair of the advisory council for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and founder of Restor, an online platform for the global restoration movement, which was a finalist for the Royal Foundation’s Earthshot Prize. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for his work on the protection and restoration of biodiversity. Crowther’s post-doctoral research transformed the understanding of the world’s tree cover, and the study also inspired the World Economic Forum to announce its Trillion Trees initiative, which aims to conserve and restore one trillion trees globally within the decade.

https://crowtherlab.com/about-tom-crowther
https://restor.eco/?lat=26&lng=14.23&zoom=3

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Although they comprise less than 5% of the world population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. How can we support farmers, reverse biodiversity loss, and restore our ecosystems?

Thomas Crowther is an ecologist studying the connections between biodiversity and climate change. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, chair of the advisory council for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and founder of Restor, an online platform for the global restoration movement, which was a finalist for the Royal Foundation’s Earthshot Prize. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for his work on the protection and restoration of biodiversity. Crowther’s post-doctoral research transformed the understanding of the world’s tree cover, and the study also inspired the World Economic Forum to announce its Trillion Trees initiative, which aims to conserve and restore one trillion trees globally within the decade.

“I had a very tangible interaction with a teacher that shaped everything in my life. I'm dyslexic, but I managed to get into a good university in the UK, and I was messing around in a class with 300 students, and the teacher sent me out of the class. But he met me after that class, and he essentially said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you here?’ And I was like, ‘I like ecology, but I just can't keep up. There's too much reading. There's too much statistics.’ And he said, ‘If you like ecology, just find the bits that you like.’ And I just needed to look at the fungi and find them fascinating. And then that gives you positive endorphins when you have a successful experiment. So I just immersed myself in the parts that I enjoyed and through that process, things started to go really well and my degree went really well. And then after that, my career sort of exploded. And genuinely, I know if I had not encountered that professor, there's no way my career would have gone in the direction it has done. And I just think teachers are unbelievable inspirers, not necessarily for the knowledge they give you, but more for just inspiring you to follow your own your own path, your own trajectory.”

https://crowtherlab.com/about-tom-crowther
https://restor.eco/?lat=26&lng=14.23&zoom=3

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

As we reach the tipping points of climate change, how will our world change? Greenland has already lost 4,700 billion metric tons of ice, an amount that is enough to flood the entire United States in 1.5 feet of water.

Peter D. Ditlevsen is an Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. The institute was founded in 1921 as the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Ditlevsen is a Professor in Physics of Ice, Climate, and Earth. His fields of interest include climate research, turbulence, meteorology, complex systems, time series analysis, and statistical physics.

"The big problem we have with climate change is that this is not like any other crisis because it influences all parts of life. I'm a physicist. I like doing experiments. I thought, you know, how terrible would it be for me not eat meat, right? You know, I was used to going home on Friday night, putting on a steak, and a bottle of red wine. That was sort of the easy thing, right? So now, I don't buy an expensive steak. I buy some vegetables that are cheaper, okay? So I have money left over. If I spend that money on an airplane ticket somewhere, then it doesn't really matter. That's the spillover effect.

I think, in our part of the world, and if we are to be frontrunners, we have to crack that nut. We do like to think that our children should have a better world than we grew up in, and they should be better off and so on. So it should be a different kind of wealth, right? The wealth should not be having a large car and a big house and a lot of goods."

https://nbi.ku.dk/english/staff/?pure=en/persons/peter-ditlevsen(77e9801a-6b31-4488-a282-6c99a406a5f1)/cv.html

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"This too is a skill, learning how to listen. It takes humility. It takes openness. It takes a certain kind of courage because if you really listen to someone else, there's a chance that your view of the world will be changed. And this is not something that people are comfortable with. So we say it's important to be a good listener, but I think we underappreciate just how hard it really, really is to listen to what other people are saying. I think it's important for young people to understand that life is hard and that they need to be, on the one hand, ambitious, and on the other hand, humble. Because they are likely to make mistakes and every mistake is an opportunity to become wiser and become smarter. The task is to try to make it so that the consequences of mistakes are not catastrophic so that you actually get to live another day and do it better the next day than you did this day. And I want young people to appreciate how much they have to learn from one another and from older people."

Does having too many choices make us unhappy? How can we learn practical wisdom?

Dr. Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor Emeritus of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College. He is the author of many books, including Why We Work, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and co-author of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing.

www.swarthmore.edu/profile/barry-schwartz
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Work/Barry-Schwartz/TED-Books/9781476784861
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-paradox-of-choice-barry-schwartz?variant=32207920234530
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307231/practical-wisdom-by-barry-schwartz-and-kenneth-sharpe

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Photo credit: Bill Holsinger-Robinson - CC BY 2.0

Does having too many choices make us unhappy? How can we learn practical wisdom?

Dr. Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor Emeritus of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College. He is the author of many books, including Why We Work, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and co-author of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing.

"This too is a skill, learning how to listen. It takes humility. It takes openness. It takes a certain kind of courage because if you really listen to someone else, there's a chance that your view of the world will be changed. And this is not something that people are comfortable with. So we say it's important to be a good listener, but I think we underappreciate just how hard it really, really is to listen to what other people are saying. I think it's important for young people to understand that life is hard and that they need to be, on the one hand, ambitious, and on the other hand, humble. Because they are likely to make mistakes and every mistake is an opportunity to become wiser and become smarter. The task is to try to make it so that the consequences of mistakes are not catastrophic so that you actually get to live another day and do it better the next day than you did this day. And I want young people to appreciate how much they have to learn from one another and from older people."

www.swarthmore.edu/profile/barry-schwartz
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Work/Barry-Schwartz/TED-Books/9781476784861
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-paradox-of-choice-barry-schwartz?variant=32207920234530
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307231/practical-wisdom-by-barry-schwartz-and-kenneth-sharpe

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Photo credit: Bill Holsinger-Robinson - CC BY 2.0

Can we stop talking about growth and mediate an environmental crisis through the structures of capitalism?

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with Japanese scholar Kohei Saito, whose book, Marx in the Anthropocene sold over half a million copies. In it, Saito shows how late in life Marx came to a richer sense of production when he released that there was a law above the economic as he had conceived it—it was the law of Nature. Marx saw how disturbing Nature’s metabolism could bring about a “rift” that sent destructive ripples across human life.  Today we make the connection between that scholarly book and Kohei’s new book, Slow Down!!, which has just come out in English translation. Here he offers a sharp critique of liberal and socialist attempts to “sustain”—like the Green New Deal, and argues for a radical form of degrowth communism that de-celerates our compulsion to add more stuff into the world, in whatever form, and derails our compulsion to sustain, rather than revolutionize. Saito argues that we can lead much happier, and more healthy lives, if we emphasize use value, and revitalize democracy so we all have a hand in deciding what is valuable.

“The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.”

Kohei Saito as an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. He completed his doctorate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2018 he won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for Marxist research—becoming the first Japanese, and the youngest person, ever to win that prize. His books include: Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World (2023); Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (2022), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017).

https://researchmap.jp/7000022985?lang=en

https://www.hachette.com.au/kohei-saito/slow-down-how-degrowth-communism-can-save-the-earth

www.palumbo-liu.com 
https://speakingoutofplace.com
https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with noted researcher and scholar Ben Franta about two new articles he has written that add to his growing archive of seminal work on climate change.  Ben tells us now the fossil fuel industry paid economists to join scientists in denying the true nature of the fossil fuel industry’s destruction of the environment. Economists argued that even if some science were correct, implementing change would be too costly. This became a powerful tool to stall and kill climate change legislation. Ben also talks about how communities have tried to sue fossil fuel companies for damages incurred by such misinformation and disinformation. In sum, we learn about what the industry has done, and how ordinary people and municipalities can fight back.

Benjamin Franta is the founding head of the Climate Litigation Lab and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. The Climate Litigation Lab is a multidisciplinary research initiative to inform, enable, and accelerate climate change litigation globally. Ben is also an Associate at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a former research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is the recipient of numerous academic and research fellowships including the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. His research and writing have appeared in 10 languages, been featured in the Paramount+ documentary Black Gold, been cited in the U.S. Congressional Record, and been published in numerous scholarly and popular venues including Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and more. 

“For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.”
www.inet.ox.ac.uk/people/benjamin-franta
www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/oxford-sustainable-law-programme/research/climate-litigation-lab

www.palumbo-liu.com 
https://speakingoutofplace.com
https://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20

"The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change.

All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural."

How do we navigate ambiguity and uncertainty? Moving beyond linear thinking into instinct and intuition, we might discover other sources within ourselves that lie beyond the boundaries of science and reason.

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. His many books include The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past, and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. At Cambridge University, Dr. Sheldrake worked in developmental biology as a fellow of Clare College. From 2005 to 2010,  he was director of the Perrott Warrick Project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College Cambridge. He was among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute.

www.sheldrake.org

www.amazon.com/Science-Delusion/dp/1529393221/?tag=sheldrake-20

www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery/dp/0770436722/?tag=sheldrake-20