From What If to What Next

Today's episode of From What If to What Next is about care. Care has been very much on our minds of recent. COVID has highlighted how vitally important care is and yet how undervalued it is. It is so often seen as being the domain of women, and around the world it is often either underpaid, or unpaid work. As the populations of the Global North live longer and longer, and as young people are unable to afford, often, to leave home, it tends to often fall to women to care for both the younger and the older generations simultaneously, what is sometimes called the 'Sandwich Generation'.

Many people are happy to stand on their doorsteps and clap for those who provide the care in our society, but not to really value care, not to campaign for it to be truly valued. These days of COVID have the potential to be a real watershed moment. So in today's episode, with two extraordinary women, we're asking "what if care work was valued?" This is an episode that might very well lead to inner paradigm shifts...

Kavita Ramdas is a recognized global advocate for intersectional gender equity and justice. She currently serves as the Director of the Women's Rights Program at the Open Society Foundations. She also serves on a few select non-profit advisory boards, the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the board of directors of GRIST, a publicly supported journalism non-profit focused on climate justice.

Ai-jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women's movement. She is the Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Director of Caring Across Generations, Co-Founder of SuperMajority, Co-Host of Sunstorm podcast and a Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on elder and family care, the future of work, and what's at stake for women of color. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.

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You are in for such a treat. This is one of the most thought-provoking and inspiring episodes of this podcast yet. It was my huge honour to be joined by Yumna Hussen and Lottie Cooke to discuss what a reimagined education system would be like. Honestly, spending an hour in the company of these two remarkable young people, so articulate and well informed, was just a joy.

Lottie and Yumna are part of an organisation called Pupil Power which is "committed to educating, engaging and transforming young minds around the issues impacting our experience of school". "So", they add, "we're demanding an entire transformation in education". And this conversation will inspire you that such a transformation is not only possible, and thrilling, but also long overdue. If one of these two young people isn't Prime Minister within 20 years I will be most disappointed.

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Here is the perfect accompaniment to the long summer days. Or the deluge. Or perhaps a bit of both. Today we are talking about travel. As many cities begin to actively take steps away from the dominance of cars, we are asking what might it be like if that had already happened? What might it be like to live in a city in which more travel now takes place on food or on two wheels? And how are electric vehicles transforming that? It's a brilliant discussion with two amazing guests. As always, do let me know what you think, feedback is much appreciated.

Carson Brown is a Co-founder and Head of Product at TAUR an electric scooter brand. Having spent the majority of his career dedicated to developing micromobility products. He is a strong advocate for greener, more efficient cities, and enabling people to change their lifestyle through considered design.

Melissa Bruntlett is a urban mobility advocate specializing in communications and engagement. She is also the co-author of Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality and the newly released Curbing Traffic: The human case for fewer cars in our lives. Melissa focuses on urban mobility and sustainable cities, and believes it is imperative to build cities that work for every citizen, using her experience as a writer, marketer, and media producer to share the human perspective of multi-modal transport to a mainstream audience. Professionally, Melissa supports knowledge sharing and capacity building to create more equitable mobility environments, working with and advising public and private partners in Europe, North America and Australasia to develop effective and compelling communications and engagement plans and strategies. She is a Canadian living in the Netherlands with her husband Chris and their two children

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Firstly, sorry I'm late posting this. I was on a clifftop in Cornwall and the sun was shining and so it took me a while to get home! But, I must say that this episode is absolutely worth the wait. One of my favourites so far. This week we are exploring the black imagination, with two amazing guests.

Natasha Marin is an antiracism consultant based in Seattle, specialising in communications, community building, and digital engagement. She is the curator of Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures and a conceptual artist whose people-centred projects have circled the globe since 2012 and have been recognised and widely acknowledged. BLACK IMAGINATION—a series of conceptual exhibitions—amplifying, centring, and holding sacred a diverse sample of voices including LGBTQIA+ black youth, incarcerated black women, black folks with disabilities, unsheltered black folks, and black children was her bravest work thus far. Her viral web-based project, Reparations, engaged a quarter of a million people worldwide in the practice of "leveraging privilege," and earned Marin, a mother of two, death threats by the dozens.

Natalie Creary is the Programme Delivery Director for Black Thrive Lambeth. The cross-sector partnership works to dismantle the structural barriers that create and sustain mental health inequalities for Black African and African-Caribbean communities in Lambeth. She has a long-standing interest in approaches that tackle the root causes of inequality and push conventional boundaries. Her interest lies in working with communities and grassroots organisations to decolonise knowledge and to create opportunities for communities to have ownership of their stories and the solutions they deliver to address the social challenges they may face. Her work and research explore how race, age, class, gender and sexuality intersect to shape the health and wellbeing experiences of Black and mixed race communities. She has also completed postgraduate studies in Health Psychology and lectures on health inequality, quality improvement methodologies and health promotion for Middlesex University's MSc Public Health. She is also on the editorial board of the Lancet Psychiatry.

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This is such an incredible episode. One of those ones I had to go off and sit under a tree afterwards to absorb. Today we talk about gender. I grew up in a society that thought in terms of two genders, you were male or you were female. This was accompanied by expectations that men behaved in ways that were 'masculine', and women in ways seen as being 'feminine'. If you were someone who didn't identify as either, or someone who challenged society's expectations of what being masculine or feminine meant, it was a bleak time. And in many cultures, far bleaker still, indeed very dangerous.

Some cultures recognise a 'third' gender, but what would it be like if we were to see gender instead as a spectrum, and where you choose to place yourself on that spectrum is up to you, and can change as often as you like? What if society accommodated, supported, nurtured even, such a degree of fluidity? What if everyone could be who they wanted to be, to define themselves however they wanted to, and the kind of abuse so many LGBTQI+ people experience was instead replaced by a culture that valued people wherever they are across the spectrum. What wonders might such an approach unlock in our culture?

Syd Yang is the Senior Advisor for Healing Justice and Wellness at Movement Voter Project. Syd's work finds its resonance in the stories we each hold at the intersection of memory, body, sexuality and mental health. Syd works primarily with queer and trans BIPOC individuals as well as regularly leads workshops, community healing circles and has been a group facilitator for over two decades, with a specific focus on grief, healing ancestral trauma, sexuality + spirituality, body liberation and eating disorder recovery.

Mahfam Malek has held many roles in justice movements over the years, including facilitator, somatic coach, non-profit staff of many stripes, social justice-oriented stand-up comic, direct-action and cultural organiser, environmental educator, and more. In addition to training, facilitating, and coaching, they write, organise with a group of abolitionist diasporic Iranians, hang out with their dog, and chat on the phone nearly daily about absolutely nothing with their parents. They are also the Training and Operations Director at the Chicago Torture Justice Center.

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Episode Thirty. Wow. Whoever thought we'd get this far? Thank you so much for your support in making that possible. We have a delicious episode to mark this moment.

Farzana Khan is a writer, director, cultural producer and award-winning Arts educator. She is the co-founder and Director of Healing Justice London. She has a background in Youth and Community work particularly focused on arts based education projects both in the UK and internationally. She was also the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake and is currently a Fellow at the International Curatorial Forum. Farzana was recently awarded Writer in Residence at Toynbee Hall, working on 'All Water Has a Perfect Memory' a screenplay exploring trauma, poverty, womanhood and bodily dignity amidst gentrified East London and ecologically violent times.

Looby Macnamara has been teaching permaculture for nearly 20 years. During this time she has been a pioneer of personal and social permaculture, authoring the first book globally to focus on the peoplecare ethic People & Permaculture. Looby is also author of 7 Ways to Think Differently and Strands of Infinity. Her latest book, Cultural Emergence shares a pioneering toolkit for regeneration and transformation. She runs Applewood Permaculture Centre in the UK with her partner Chris Evans. She is also one of the partners of the European Mother Nature project, empowering mothers. Looby has been an active member of the permaculture community, and was a chairperson of the Permaculture Association and is a senior diploma tutor.

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If you had a Time Machine, which year would you set the dial to? This episode is about time travel. More specifically, it is about using imaginary time travel, or futurism, or deep dreaming, or whatever you want to call it, in our activism. Why is it so powerful to invite people to imagine the future? What does it do to us to step into an imaginary future? And what tips of the trade can help us to really bring it alive for people?

In this episode we are joined by Anab Jain of Superflux and by Johannes Stripple of Lund University, both fantastic exponents of the art of time travel. Essential listening for anyone who wants to bring a bit of the future into their lives and is wondering the most skilful way to do so. Enjoy the journey!

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The time for imagining that change happens in small, incremental steps is now way behind us. As Naomi Klein says, "there are no non-radical solutions left". Today we are thinking big. Really big. With big thinkers. While some of our episodes focus on what if questions that are quite specific and focused, in this episode, Episode Twenty-Eight, we are thinking big, so hang on to your hats. Luckily we have two guests for you who are brilliant at thinking big.

Atossa Soltani has been a global campaigner for tropical rainforests and indigenous rights, for going on three decades. She is founder and board president of Amazon Watch and served as the organisation's first executive director for eighteen years. Currently she is the director of global strategy for Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative working in alliance with 30 indigenous nations to protect 86 million acres in the most biologically diverse ecosystem on Earth. She is the Hillary Institute 2013 Global Laureate for Climate Leadership and is a producer of The Flow, a feature-length documentary currently in production on learning from nature's genius.

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilisation's existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His upcoming book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, will be published in June this year. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth, and he writes topical articles exploring the deeper patterns of political and cultural developments at the blog Patterns of Meaning.

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This new episode, one of my favourite so far, comes with a challenge. Can you listen to it and not reimagine your own relationship with flying or, as one of our guests puts it, being "twanged around in an aluminium sausage"?

I stopped flying in 2006. I travel to the far reaches of Europe on the train, travelling to Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Mallorca, as the extent of my reach. I long one day to take the Trans-Siberian express. Yes, there are now places in the world I probably will never reach, but that's OK. I can honestly say that not flying has not diminished my quality of life at all. I travel slower, I see more. As we reach a time where airlines and travel companies are falling over themselves to tempt you back onto airplanes to head off on holiday, we are taking a pause, a breath, to ask a question that once felt heretical, but which now feels rather exciting… "what if we all stopped flying?"

Anna Hughes is an author and flight-free adventurer, and hasn't been on a plane for more than a decade. She is the director of Flight Free UK, a campaign that asks people to give up flying for a year in order to break a habit and try different ways of travelling. With a background in sustainable transport campaigning and behaviour change, Anna is passionate about how our individual choices can change the world.

Ed Gillespie describes himself as a 'recovering sustainability consultant' . He is a Director of Greenpeace UK, a facilitator at the Forward Institute on responsible leadership and is an investor/mentor of numerous ethical environmental start-ups. You may also be enjoying him on the 'Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts' podcasts, or even have seen him compering the wonderful Imaginarium tent at the equally wonderful, but sadly postponed, for this year, Shambhala Festival.

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These days of COVID have shown us that extraordinary profound reimagining of many aspects of society are entirely possible. Might this be the time to forever do away with the idea that the only way to measure our progress, cultural, social, spiritual, economic, is purely by how much bigger our economy is than it was last year?

It's a weird metric… imagine if that was the only way we assessed the growth and evolution of our children? Sure, some growth at the start might be useful, but as they mature, we want to be able to measure their growth and their defining qualities in other ways than just their becoming ever more enormous… And what might the world look like if we did replace this idea of growth with something else?

We are joined for this episode of 'From What If to What Next' by two amazing guests. Kate Soper is Emerita Professor of Philosophy and a former researcher with the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University. She is the author, and co-author, of many books, and was lead researcher in the research project on 'Alternative Hedonism, and the theory and politics of consumption' between 2004 and 2006. Her latest book Post-Growth Living: for an Alternative Hedonism was published in 2020.

Our second guest is Tim Jackson, is an ecological economist and writer. Since 2016 he has been Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey in the UK, where he is also Professor of Sustainable Development. His book Prosperity without Growth has been translated into 17 foreign languages. His latest book Post Growth – life after capitalism was published by Polity Press in 2021. In 2016, Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate for exceptional international leadership in sustainability.

Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.