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Hope Stories: The HARP of Harmony
Hope Stories: The HARP of Harmony episodes
- 006 Rethinking Climate Solutions in Drylands w. Joy Adebisi,
Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!
Joy Kehinde Adebisi, a PhD candidate in geography and environment at Western University, joins the podcast to challenge conventional climate solutions in dryland ecosystems. Drawing from her childhood experiences with deforestation in Nigeria, Joy explains why massive tree-planting initiatives—such as the early iterations of the Great Green Wall—can sometimes do more harm than good by depleting already scarce water resources. Instead, she highlights the natural resilience of drylands and advocates for community-led, context-specific interventions like planting native shrubs. Co-host Rob Hygate also draws parallels from his work installing sustainable water boreholes across Africa, emphasizing the need for data-driven, long-term environmental strategies that truly support local communities.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joy-kehinde-adebisi-86397a195/?isSelfProfile=false
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/africa/planting-trees-in-the-wrong-places-is-not-a-climate-solution
https://www.unccd.int/our-work/ggwi
57 min - 005 Plato By Candlelight with Mars Woods
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Mikey and Rob wlecome coach, mentor and initiation guide Mars Woods. This is a roller coaster of a conversation that oscillates between the deeply personal and the cosmic. It doesn't fall in any category I know of, which is why I was left bewitched and wanting more..
Find out more about Mars here:
What are we here for, if not to pray?
1 hr 3 min - 004 Wildwise Family Camp
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Mikey spent 6 days on Dartmoor as a WildWise volenteer. It was quite something.
This is the story of Family Camp told by the campers themselves. You might be surprised at what a deep and moving experience was cooked up from such simple ingredients.
https://wildwise.co.uk/
https://wildwise.co.uk/family-camp/
36 min - 003 Grassroots Development and Environmental Justice in The Gambia
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In this episode of Hope Stories, the Harp of Harmony, hosts Rob and Mike welcome their first guest, Mustapha Dumbuya. Drawing on over a decade of experience as a forestry officer and NGO program manager in The Gambia, Mustapha shares his profound philosophy on self-reliance, hard work, and community-led development.
The conversation explores:
- Challenges to African Development: An insightful look into how heavy reliance on foreign aid, colonial legacies, and slow technology adoption affect growth.
- Environmental Stewardship: Mustapha discusses his work in cross-border forest management between Gambia and Senegal, the critical issue of rosewood trafficking to China, and why tree planting alone is not enough to stop perennial forest fires.
- Empowering Women and Children: How the Agency for Development of Women and Children (ADWAC) utilizes Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) to help rural communities identify their own priorities, from clean water and beekeeping to building schools and hospitals.
- The Blueprint for the Future: Mustapha shares his dream of a world based on equity and resource distribution, and his current efforts to coach the next generation of environmental stewards through radio programs and international mentorship.
Tune in for an inspiring bottom-up perspective on creating sustainable change and "environmental justice" in West Africa.
Links
https://www.facebook.com/adwacgambia/about
The trees that bleed
The Documentary Podcast
Illegal logging of the endangered rosewood tree is decimating forests in Casamance in Senegal. The BBC investigates the trade worth trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p086fvn2
54 min - 002 Mikey the Dreamer
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Rob acts the host as he skillfully extracts the backstory from a rather spaced out Mikey.
51 min - 001 Rob the Builder
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From isolation in the Forest of Dean to bringing clean water to Africa. In the first episode of HopeStories, Mikey sits down with Rob to trace his remarkable journey and discover how he finally found a way to realize the music inside him.
Robs Current Album
HopeStories find out more
37 min
About Hope Stories: The HARP of Harmony
From the publisher's feed
Welcome to HopeStories: The HARP of Harmony.
You can't play a melody on a single string. We believe that thriving in a complex world requires a specific, tuned progression:…
Hope, Action, Resilience, and Purpose.
In The HARP of Harmony, we treat hope not as a passive feeling, but as the opening note in a larger system. Each episode, we sit down with doers, makers, and community builders to deconstruct how they play the chords of change without losing themselves in the process:
Hope: How do we find the agency to envision a better future?
Action: How do we strike the string and turn theory into motion?
Resilience: How do we absorb discordant shocks and adapt to friction?
Purpose & Balance: How do we tune our pacing to prevent burnout, ensuring our drive leads to sustainable, harmonious growth?
The Hosts
Mike and Rob have spent much of their lives navigating uncertain waters. We've paddled remote rivers, sailed oceans, and learned that when things turn chaotic, the answer is rarely a grand plan. More often it's a series of provisional solutions, small acts of ingenuity that never make it into the textbooks. Often because they probably shouldn't.
In Hope Stories, we talk with people who've spotted a better way of doing things and are now wrestling with all the reasons the world isn't set up for it.
Not people who have it all figured out. People who are in the thick of it. Who saw something that could work better and are now bumping up against systems, institutions and habits built around older assumptions.
These aren't polished success stories or tidy blueprints. They're proper conversations, with plenty of laughs along the way, about what it actually takes to move something new through a world that would rather you didn't bother. The small moves. The dead ends. The moments when the map runs out and you're navigating by feel.
We like a good tale, we like the people who tell them, and we're firmly on their side.
Because hope isn't wishful thinking. It's what happens when you see a better way and keep moving toward it, even when everything around you is pulling in the other direction.
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