Starrlight Augustine is the director at the Institute of Ecotechnics, a research initiative developing technologies that exist in harmony with nature. She heads up their agroecology division, which is based at Synergia Ranch in New Mexico where she applies a little known but radical theory of biology: Dynamic Energy Budget Theory.

DEB theory is a way of understanding how energy flows through organisms and through their living environment, and how the living environment flows through organisms themselves, providing a big picture overview of the metabolic organisation of life itself. Starrlight explains the theory in depth, including what makes it distinguishes itself to other theories of biology, before describing how she applies it practically on the farm to improve their yields and reduce their impacts. 

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Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, an organisation offering education and solutions to address the intersectional impacts of human overpopulation and over consumption on the planet, people and animals. Nandita also co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast, and teaches at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, where she researches prenatal ism and human supremacy and their impacts on reproductive ecological and intergenerational justice.

This episode is about the dangers of pronatalism. Nandita reveals how the coercive pronatalist policies around the world coupled with cultural mechanisms are causing a devastating impact on the planet. She also explains how existing power structures benefit from a growing population, illustrating how our economic obsession with growth demands exponential population growth. Nandita also explores the elevation of rights—human, species and natural—as a cornerstone climate policy to tackle population and create a sustainable world for everyone, and everything.

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The world is full of good ideas and solutions to the crisis. But good ideas cannot trump the laws of physics, and solutions will only be such if they are deployed in a manifestly different way than our current high-energy, high-material, high-consumption regime demands. 

Philippe Bihouix is an engineer and the author of The Age of Low Tech (UK version, US version), which examines why technological innovation is just not going to be enough to get our way out of our resource bottlenecks, the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and rising inequality. On the episode, he lays out his thesis, explaining from an engineering perspective the constraints of renewable energy, the fallacy of a circular economy, the reality of how our metals are used and recycled, and the importance of the longevity of demand side technology. Instead, Philippe calls for "techno-discernment", a collective approach for choosing what we're using our finite resources for—and what we're choosing to leave in the ground for future generations.

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What happens when a small percentage of the population amass resources and power? Oligarchy. And polymath Sally Goerner says oligarchy is the final stage of most human civilizations—and a symptom of dysfunctional human systems.

She joins me to explain why the future is integral and collaborative, why empowering people with vision and hope is key to creating systemic changes, why citizenship is the foundation of any human system, and how to measure the health of those systems.

This is a far-reaching and impressive conversation covering neurobiology, history, sociology, political theory and systems thinking. I found Sally and her research utterly fascinating and hope you all get as much out of it as I did.

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Mark Lee Hunter is an investigative journalist, a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the principle author of Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists. I asked Mark to join me to explain a little-known story of how a group of left-wing media outlets became instrumental in the gutting of USAID. This consortium of left-wing publications released an investigation accusing one of the world's most influential investigative journalism outlets, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), of being in bed with the US government—an accusation that originated in Russia after Putin's offshore finances were exposed by the OCCRP.

Their report made its way into the hands of the MAGA crowd, who then used it as justification to gut government funding for investigative journalism around the world—and act which is has enormous repercussions for us all. 

This conversations details exactly what happened, and Mark's published rebuttal of their investigation which shows how the journalists extrapolated conclusions from publicly available data. We then have a fascinating discussion about the importance of morality and strategy in journalism, with Mark warning that a fringe trend of finding facts to fit one's own bias is rapidly becoming more and more common in journalism today.

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Reverend Billy is the world-famous secular preacher singing out against climate change, corporate greed and consumerism. Billy has been pounding the streets of New York for decades, preaching against Disney, against mindless consumption, and against the corporations putting our planet in danger. Together with his choir, The Church of Stop Shopping, Reverend Billy uses song and arrest as a form of protest, trespassing into banks, labs and private land to sing about the dangers of the sixth extinction event—and what we can do to stop it.

Billy joins me to discuss his journey to secular preaching and the faith in humanity that drives the particular and beautiful protests of The Church of Stop Shopping.

This is preaching like you’ve never heard it before.

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What does it mean to be alive? Where does intelligence originate?  What do we share with other living creatures? Where does the individual begin, and how do each of us fit into the living world?

These are the questions I pose researcher and writer, Melanie Challenger, author of Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World (UK version, US version). In this brilliant episode, we explore the definition of aliveness and intelligence, with Melanie revealing the ancient histories which have dominated our cultural understanding of intelligence. She offers a new definition, one grounded in our sensory bodies—a physical intelligence that comes from being here, being present, and being finite. We also discuss the supposed binary between individualism and collectivism, with Melanie challenging both the neoliberal hegemony and the environmental mantra of unlimited entanglement, offering a nuanced perspective which reconciles these two oppositional positions into something profoundly meaningful. 

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This week I’m joined by James Dyke, a senior lecturer in Global Systems at the University of Exeter. James reveals why net-zero targets for carbon emissions do nothing but provide an excuse to continue business as usual, posing an existential threat to humanity. He goes into great detail about the interplay of politics, economies, culture and the industrialisation connecting us all, explaining that while there is no one quick fix to the climate crisis, decarbonisation is possible—if we get rid of fossil fuels.

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We need to live differently. Part of that means learning how to live together differently, both with each other, and with the wider environment around us. 

 James Bullen is the founder of the Land-Based Living Collective, a UK initiative aiming to create accessible, land-based communities that provide economic opportunities for the residents, nurture the land back to health, foster a sense of community and tackle some of our biggest modern problems such as food insecurity, energy insecurity and financial precarity. James has spent much of his adult life living in alternative land-based collectives like this, and is honest about the challenges of such a life—and also the great wonders it offers. His vision is grounded in meeting material needs, interweaving existing solutions to create an ecosystem of resilience that can both support its residents and facilitate them supporting one another.

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So much of the hope we put in solutions for climate change falls away under a microscope. Did you know wind turbines aren’t recyclable, for example? Guess where they’re buried. Are enough people thinking about what happens when globalisation fails and post-industrial states like Europe and the US are left to mine their own materials? How can we mitigate climate change, truly, without plunging billions into poverty?

Simon Michaux is working to find solutions to all these questions. As an associate professor in the circular economy solution unit at the Geological Survey of Finland, Simon models the mining and energy industries to figure out what we can do sustainably—and what is nothing more than greenwashing. He drops more than a few bombshells throughout this episode concerning energy use and politics, but also reveals a new energy paradigm he’s working on that could provide genuine zero emission energy.

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