Doctors are tasked with an impossible job: Keep our bodies healthy while Earth’s collapses.

Our healthcare systems are already under-funded and over-stretched, and that’s before we throw in the drastic changes in disease and mortality that warming temperatures are unleashing around the world. That all this falls on the shoulders of healthcare workers is another symptom of the madness of modernity. Each and every policy is responsible for our healthcare, not just the industry itself.

Sharon Friel is a Professor of Health Equity at Australia National University, researching how planetary health and human health intersect. She joins me to explain the state of health in the coming decades, which institutional policies are already preventing effective treatment, and how our atomistic relationship to cause and effect with regards to climate change is reflected in the biomedical paradigm itself. We discuss how medical curricula around the world can and must change, the necessary integration of different epistemologies, and Sharon reveals what is sending the medical insurance industry into a panic—revealing just high Earth’s fever is climbing.

Is China the next world leader?

Ken Hammond is a professor of history at New Mexico State University, where he specializes in the history of China in the early modern period. Author of China's Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future, Ken joins me to explain the stark differences in how China is deploying its newfound wealth and political power within its own borders and throughout the Global South.

We also discuss the persecution of the Uyghurs, with Ken and I taking very different positions about how nation states should manage diversity within their borders. We end up debating whether or not a sustainable, socialist future can ever be achieved through centralised forces—and what the possible fallout could be.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

Imagine if we rolled up our sleeves instead of pointed our fingers?

Jessica Hernandez is an indigenous climate scientist and author of Growing Papaya Trees. Her work reveals that the roots of our planetary crisis lies in the violence of colonialism and neo-colonialism. In this gentle and humorous conversation, Jessica explains what it means to be a displaced indigenous person, why the Lands need people to be well, and the worldviews impeding us as a global collective to take the necessary action to protect Earth and each other.

We discuss the recent creation of a global indigenous identity, how renewable energy is encroaching on indigenous rights, our shared suspicion of the “just transition”, the common failures found amongst all humans, and how Western individualism has promoted a culture of blame when what we need, more than ever, is to take accountability for our world today.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

The climate crisis is causing an invisible health crisis.

The number one cause of neurodegenerative disease is the environment. And our environment is changing—releasing bacteria, neurotoxins and pathogens into our warming world which can change the very matter in our brains.

Clayton Aldern is a neuroscientist and environmental reporter at Grist. In his 2024 book, The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, Clayton revealed how the climate crisis intersects with our psychological, mental and brain health, warning that this health crisis, if left untreated, could upturn our lives. In this astounding episode, he walks through the different ways climate intersects with brain health, revealing the increased risk of a number of different diseases, what triggers them, and the absolute failure of policy-makers to address it. We discuss stress, violence, aggression, and using our bodies as an empathetic tool to understand the pain of others, with Clayton painting an optimistic picture about the power of story-telling to change the world.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

The two hemispheres of our brain collaborate to produce a coherent understanding of the world—at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. In his groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, neuro-philosopher and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, proposed that our culture has been captured by the left hemisphere, whose dogmatic, technical and irrational way of processing information leads it to manifestly dangerous conclusions about the way the world works. Importantly, the left hemisphere never changes its mind.

In one of the widest-ranging conversations on Planet: Critical to date, Iain explains how we came to lose sight of the bigger picture by forsaking the intuition, creativity and intelligence of the right hemisphere. We discuss how our relationship to language makes and unmakes the world, the search for meaning, human agency, relationality, morality, art and the divine, with Iain clearly spelling out a path to human fulfilment—which may very well be the only thing which can save Earth from the worst of us.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

Gordon Katic is the founder of the award-winning podcast production company, Cited Media. This week, they’re launching Green Dreams, the new season of their flagship podcast which tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future, asking: Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares?

Gordon contacted me to arrange a mutual podcast shout-out, and instead I invited him on the show to discuss both the season and their innovative research method which prioritises and plural and collaborative approach. Gordon braids in much of what he’s learned into this conversation, in which we tackle some of the historical and current fallacies of the environmental movement. He shines light on the cult of the Western environmental intellectual whilst holding in high esteem the possibility for a bright future—his own realistic and determined green dream.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

Collapse has historically benefited the 99%.

That’s the amazing conclusion of Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.  Luke is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and has spent the past five years studying the collapse of civilisations throughout history. He joins me to explain his research, detailing the difference between complex, collective civilisations and what he calls “Goliaths”, massive centralising forces by which a small group of individuals extract wealth from the rest through domination and the threat of violence. Today, he says, we live in a global Goliath.

In this astounding conversation, Luke takes us from the Ancient times to the modern day, revealing the root causes of collapse and paralleling them what we’re living through today. He explains the egalitarian nature of our species, and shines new light on what a future could look like free from today’s global Goliath. He reminds us all that we tend to view collapse through the eyes of the 1%, those who have the most to lose, and gives startling accounts of how populations bounced back after their domineering rulers fell. For a conversation about the collapse of the modern world, this conversation is as hopeful as it is brutal.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

How can we become good ancestors?

Permaculturist and educator, Kara Huntermoon, says the hobbies we pick up now can be skills we pass on to our children, even if we never have to use them ourselves. In this wide-ranging and empathetic conversation on relationality, intergenerational solidarity, and hard work, Kara explores how community sufficiency practiced properly creates the common ground in which we can plant the future.

This conversation weaves the importance of our relationships with the increasing political alienation experienced by many on the left, with Kara examining how to find allies in those our political binaries would deem enemies. Braiding feminism with back-breaking work, Kara invites us all to remember that there are always different worlds possible, but it's only if you get your hands dirty and do the work that they will grow from the soil.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself.

This is the message of this week’s guest, Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunkaporta. In his explanation of the importance of learning through living, and living with learning, Tyson points to the how the discourse around decolonisation has granted expertise based on identity rather than experience. He highlights how indigenous thinking is fundamentally consensus building, mirroring the Western scientific method, and warns that neoliberal thinking has infected what should have been a radical transformation, creating individuals who consider themselves fully contained “little corporations”.

In this unflinching and compassionate conversation, Tyson weaves the culture wars, knowledge production, indigenous science, landscapes and the body to reveal the mismatches between how we think and how we live, which have opened wounds in the collective body which act as voids into which our potential solidarity falls. This is a dialogue on truth, kinship and action, in which Tyson gives one of the most honest accounts of where the best of intention has gone wrong in recent years, delivering a call to refuse these narratives of separation between ourselves, our kinfolk and the great Earth upon which we all depend.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.

Is the world even collapsing?

Joseph Tainter is a Professor at Utah State University and the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies. He explains on this episode that collapse happens when a civilisation experiences a diminishing return on complexity, the fact that it takes more capital, more energy, more resources to maintain society until eventually that maintenance is no longer useful.

We discuss his research and apply it to today’s world, linking in energy, technology, even geopolitical order, with Joseph—surprisingly, despite all the evidence that points to this moment in history as truly exceptional given Earth’s systems breakdown—stating that there is nothing special about the world we live in and its precarious future.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.