Planet: Critical

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Community organising has never been more important in a world where people are increasingly isolated from one another, competing in a deliberately precarious market, dislocated from their culture, their land, their history. We experienced the power of community resilience during the pandemic, and the deep desire to help and rebuild. Humankind has a long history of doggedly overcoming the odds when facing a crisis. But we don’t have to rely on a crisis to push us over the edge—and the coming crisis will be much worse than anything we’ve ever experienced.

CIVIC SQUARE in Birmingham is infrastructure for the public good, embedded in the local community’s needs, dreams and desires. Launched by the team who ran Impact Hub for five years, CIVIC SQUARE is reimagining the public space as a neighbourhood that fosters the convening of ideas in a participatory ecosystem.

Immy Kaur is the co-founder of CIVIC SQUARE. She explains the history of community organising which led to this immense project, detailing how to leverage systemic change and nurture imagination. She explains the history between public good, government and industry, the importance of knowledge, and the role communities will face in the upcoming crisis.

See also WeCanMake in Bristol.

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 Denise Utochkin was a postdoc researcher at the University of Copenhagen investigating how artificial intelligence could be used in the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. However, Denise was fired from their postdoc for starting a campaign that sought to abolish AI altogether, after realising that the only way to produce and work with fair algorithms was to not use them at all.

I invited Denise onto the show to contextualise AI for us, asking: what are its connections to capitalism, colonialism, extractivism, supremacy? Throughout the episode,  we also discuss the moral purity of the left, the collapse imaginary, and actually end with a discussion on what kind of revolutionary action is helpful today—and what has been tried and tested and proven to fail. 

Show Notes

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10,000 years ago, homo sapiens began farming a grain surplus. This surplus led to the creation of societal and cultural hierarchies which divorced our species from our long relationship with the natural world.

This week’s guest, Lisi Krall, argues that our current economic system of fossil-fuelled capitalism is an interpretation of that same system—and we must repair our relationship to the more-than-human world if we are to change the system. But it is a momentous challenge. One, she argues, we must not think culture alone can overcome.

Lisi Krall is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York Cortland where she researches political economy, human ecology, and the evolution of economic systems. She's also the author of Bitter Harvest: An Inquiry into the War Between Economy and Earth. She explains how systems self-propagate, evolve and dominate culture, arguing acts of local resistance are key to building a sustainable world, and warns against projects like the Green New Deal, which she claims is the status quo masquerading as the solution.

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Since I first interviewed OB/GYN and independent researcher, Jane van Dis, on the dangers of plastic two years ago, the science has only become more stark.  Not only are we discovering more ways in which plastics are harming our biological health—from changing our brain chemistry, our pregnancies and births, and polluting our organs more broadly—we're also learning exactly how the plastic industry buried this evidence as early as the 1950s, and continues to manufacture doubt for what is already a global public health crisis.

On this episode, Jane walks us through the updated research about the impact of plastic on our health, and then reveals shocking stories which show the reach and power of the plastic lobby. She names the chemical companies that were instrumental in stacking the Supreme Court with corporate-bought justices who are not only tearing apart environmental protection, but actively dismantling the legislation that keeps corporate abuse at bay. Finally, she also explains in detail why the idea of recycling plastics is simply not a solution scientifically, revealing how the discourse has been deliberately muddied by that same lobby so they can continue polluting our environments, bodies and institutions just to turn a profit.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Fadhel Kaboub is a former Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University where he researched political economy, decarbonisation, colonialism, and the financial and agricultural policies necessary to facilitate a global—and just—green transition. Since recording, Fadhel has been appointed Under-Secretary-General for Financing for Development at the international intergovernmental organisation, Organisation of Educational Cooperation.

This episode is thrilling. Fadhel explains the traps of inflation, debt, globalisation, and the financial and agricultural policies weaponised by the global north to exploit the global south. He walks us through the three structural traps which keep wealth pouring out of the global south into the global north, amounting to modern colonialism. And he explains why we can afford a just transition, revealing the exciting mechanisms of Modern Monetary Theory by exploring the solutions global south countries can implement to ensure their sustainable development.

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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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