Today’s episode explores a simple but urgent question: is our education system still fit for the world we’re entering? Climate disruption, AI, and uncertainty demand new forms of education fit for complexity and change.

A rich lineage of alternative and experimental education has been evolving for decades, seeking to make learning more holistic, place-based, creative, and ecologically grounded. The focus of today’s conversation is one of those institutions: Black Mountains College in Wales. BMC is building a university model explicitly designed for a warming world, where nature is often the classroom and curriculum blends ecology and climate science with the arts, systems thinking, and community-rooted practice.

I’m joined by its co-founder and CEO, Ben Rawlence, award-winning writer and former human rights researcher, to explore:

• The historicity of Western educational systems
• What the role of a university should be in society
• Black Mountains College as model of the future of education 
• The role of ecological imagination
• Youth, eco anxiety and the challenges of parenting in today’s planetary moment

Episode Website

Links:

• Black Mountains College
• Think Like a Forest by Ben Rawlence
• Guardian: ‘We create changemakers’: the new UK college dedicated to climate crisis
• BMC and ecological imagination by Joseph Rowntree Foundation
• List of alternative schools and earth centered curriculum centers
• The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution from Below
• Britt Wray on Climate Grief
• Future Council
• Re-imagining education conference

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

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This Lifeworlds episode is a devotional journey into the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, the lyrical German poet of thresholds and embracing transformations.

Through readings of his most luminous poems and writings, we explore how Rilke guides us deliciously in reconciling suffering and turmoil with tremendous beauty. It’s an offering for anyone standing in the in-between, for those moving through sublimation, and longing for those secret, dazzling encounters with primal life forces.

Rilke’s words are an invitation in. To move towards. His poems are prayers…. “to go out into our hearts as onto a vast plain, so that life can feel us as it reaches for us.”

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In this episode, we explore the role of theatre and empathy in transforming worldviews. Dr. Dylan McGarry is one of the founders of Empatheatre, a South African theatre-making company and methodology that turns research and storytelling into living social sculpture. Their plays create what they call amphitheatres for empathy - spaces where art, ritual, and dialogue help people listen across difference, from mining conflicts to ocean governance to human-wildlife coexistence.

Empatheatre’s productions have brought together communities, policymakers, and activists that rarely meet, showing how imagination can transform civic life. The process of creating the plays generates profound potentials for restorative justice. As Dylan says, empathy is not about agreement, but about creating a vessel strong enough to hold our differences while keeping us in relation.

We will cover:

• Empathy as a creative act
• Theatre and storytelling as Trojan horses that open conversations that traditional politics often can’t
• How to design spaces that allow lifeworlds to touch and the practices that help us shift into another’s perspective
• How empathy, when practiced collectively, becomes a form of governance: a new infrastructure for democracy and care

Episode website

Links:

• Share your input for the whale production
• Empatheatre
• Dylan’s PHD
• 5min Empatheatre doc
• Indlela Yokuphila: The Soul's Journey (ZULU) film & the radio play used in the court case
• Lalela Ulwandle Trailer
• Umkhosi Wenala doc about Zulu musical on indigenous traditions & animist relationships
• Steiner’s 12 senses
• MOTH
• Project CETI
• Karen Bakker
• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
• One Ocean Hub
• dylanmcgarry.org
• Instagram: @dylan_mcgarry

Photo Credit: Casey Pratt. It captures a significant moment in a collaborative theatre-making & storytelling project titled "Umkhosi Wenala"

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In this episode, I sit down with Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Institute. Over the past 40 years, Bill has developed intricate, nature-based models of human development and education that challenge dominant psychological frameworks and invite us into a maturation process rooted in wholeness, wildness, and the more-than-human world.

We explore their three major maps of a person’s “soul-centric journey” and cover topics including:

• Why most modern humans remain developmentally stuck in early adolescence
• The 8-stage Soulcentric Developmental Wheel and how it mirrors nature’s rhythms
• The four cardinal facets of the psyche, and the inner protectors that distort them
• Whether other species undergo their own versions of soul initiation
• Why the path to a mature culture will not come from the strategic mind, but from descent, mystery, and imagination
• This is a deep-dive into a body of work that’s revolutionizing the lives of thousands of people, and how to think about adulthood, education, and healthy human cultures.

Episode Website Link

Links:

• Animas Valley Institute
• Animas Valley Offerings
• Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
• Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
• Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche
• The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries
• Parable of the Tribes

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo Credit: Midjourney

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Almost 40% of Earth’s land is degraded, meaning that the natural cycles that sustain biodiversity, water, food, and livelihoods are breaking down. This degradation is an ecological crisis, and, it also lies at the root of massive social breakdown, displacement, and conflict. And it’s accelerating.

In this episode, I speak with Dutch ecologist and entrepreneur Willem Ferwerda, founder of Commonland, one of the leading global initiatives tackling land degradation via large-scale holistic landscape restoration. Their work spans over 20 countries, with projects restoring millions of hectares from South Africa to Spain, Australia to the Netherlands. We get into their unique 4 Returns Framework - a powerful, intuitive model that integrates ecological, social, financial, and inspirational/spiritual returns.

We talk about:

• Communities building long-term visions together across sectors
• The importance of meeting different audiences where they are
• The role of storytelling, spirituality, and local leadership
• How restoring land helps restore meaning and purpose
• And how, ultimately, all this work is about regenerating life

Episode Website Link

Show links:

• The 4 Returns Framework in Practice
• 4 Returns Framework Publication
• 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration
• 4 Returns Diagnostic Tool
• The Meaning of Laudato Si for a Landscape Ethic
• Towards financing large-scale holistic landscape restoration in Europe
• The Trillion-Dollar Promise Of A Landscape Restoration Industry, Forbes
• We must tackle global risks in an integrated way – here’s how
• How the Ecosystem Approach supports “Cooperation in a Fragmented World"
• Albania landscape project

Look out for meditations, poems and readings in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo Credit: Commonland

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What if the next shift in planetary consciousness didn’t come from looking back at Earth from space, but from listening deeply to the voices already here? In this thought piece I propose the “inworlding effect” as the overview effect of our time: one where developments in science, technology, law, and many other disciplines are revealing our entangled presence within a multispecies world.

Medium Article Link

Episode Website Link

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Today we’re joined by artist, musician and communal grief ritual facilitator Alexandra “ahlay” Blakey to speak about the cultural forgetting of communal mourning, the sacred role of professional mourners, and the re-emergence of grief ceremonies as necessary spaces of remembrance, healing and repair.

Ahlay brings her experience weaving song, body, and ritual into collective spaces where grief is given breath and movement, and we explore the history of grief practices across cultures, the political power of public mourning, and how grief can soften the heart and stitch community back together. We explore what to expect in a communal grief ceremony, and ahlay shares the story behind her 200-voice album WAILS: Songs for Grief, inspired by whales, ancestral sorrow, and Francis Weller’s work. Within the episode are woven tracks of her haunting songs, so tune up your headphones, and sink in.

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Healing at the Roots: ahlay’s website
• Song: Carry this All
• The Sacred Role of Eastern European Professional Mourners
• Sobonfu Some
• WAILS: Songs For Grief
• One Body Song Circle Live
• Francis Weller
• Book: Dangerous Voices
• Book: Caliban and the Witch
• Martin Prechtel
• Myth of Lindworm: Martin Shaw
• Bandcamp
• Youtube Channel
• Spotify
• Soundcloud
• Instagram

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo Credit: Cover image (Earth Altering)

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In this episode we’re joined by the renowned environmentalist, activist and author Paul Hawken to explore the lifeworld of carbon and its role as a vital agent in the story of life.

Paul speaks about the dysfunctions in Western language on how we speak about climate and nature, and why metaphors of war, control, and fixing actually perpetuate the very mindset that created the crises in the first place. We explore common traps we fall into, and how to recarbonize, to bring life back and restore relationality in how we think, feel, and act.

This is a wide-ranging and intimate conversation on language, grief, science, reverence, and what it means to come home to Earth and to the deeper meanings of life.

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Carbon, the Book of life (Paul’s book)
• Drawdown (Website & Paul’s book)
• Regeneration (website resources with projects)
• Regeneration (Paul’s book)
• Francis Weller Course on grief
• Closing Poem: Love in a Time of Climate Change By Craig Santos Perez

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we journey into the vibrational worlds of sound, ancestry, and deep listening with Whaia, a Ngāti Kahungunu woman of Māori descent and First Nations sonic weaver and multi-instrumentalist.

Raised between the salt of the Pacific and the red dust of the Australian desert, Whaia’s voice carries ancient songlines, blending traditional Māori instruments, crystalline singing bowls, and her original mother tongue, the language of Te Rā, the Sun. We explore her work singing with whales, reclaiming cultural instruments once left silent in museums, and remembering the sacred oceanic highways navigated by her Polynesian ancestors, guided by the stars and whale ancestors.

This is a conversation about song as medicine, the voice as ceremony, and reclaiming lineage through sound. We ask: what might the whales be singing to us now? What frequencies are we called to remember in order to heal ourselves and our waters?

Stay on after the episode wraps to hear a special feature from Whaia’s debut album WHAIA & WATER — the first of a twelve-part series known as her Sacred Sonic Sessions.

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Whaia website
• Instagram
• Whaia Water Album Download
• Wisdom Keepers Delegation
• Oceanic Global
• Australian Songlines
• The Pleiades
• Masaru Emoto: Messages in Water

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo of Whaia: Chanel Baran Photo

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a remote cabin in Vancouver Island in 2019, far away, I sat by the shore. I listened. I re-read poetry. I swam with jellyfish. I ate bright salmon berries and raw samphire. I gazed around and listened to the songs of the land. This piece of writing is a result of my days there.

Full poem on Lifeworlds Website

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