Planet: Critical

The Achuar people first came into contact with the outside world sixty years ago. Since then, they have mostly been left in peace, able to take what they want from the modern world and leave the rest. That’s changing now. Their territory is under threat by careerist politicians within their own community, by other indigenous nations whose populations have exponentially increased thanks to contact with fossil fuels, and by industry who, every year, is figuring out how to penetrate even deeper into the forest.

I had the privilege of interviewing Chumpi Washikiat about these threats. Chumpi is an Achuar leader who has been instrumental in promoting their eco-tourism project as an alternative to extractivism. He is one of two of the thirty thousand strong Achuar who speak English, and I spent a few days with him near the village he grew up in. I watched him expertly debate his peers during a forum that lasted nine hours about which Presidential candidate would be best for indigenous nations in Ecuador. Floating down the river at dawn, I listened to stories of shamanism, learning how the Achuar inhabit the spirits of the forest. I heard the daily ceremony every morning when the Achuar arise before dawn to purge their bodies and interpret their dreams together. And, a few hours after this interview, Chumpi and I did an Ayahuasca ceremony together, listening to the voices of the Amazon echo across the lagoon.

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

We need a new story.

We also need to do the hard work of re-engineering our societies, re-imagining our relationships, and remembering our bodies. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, author of Hospicing Modernity, start our conversation right there, teasing apart the comforting notion that the hard work is just a language problem. Yes, we need a new story. And what else? And where do stories come from? And how are we wired to reject uncomfortable stories? And how do we make the uncomfortable possible? And which of our traditional strategies are getting in the way of the future?

Vanessa is celebrated for her work on modernity, and providing the tools to confront its collapse by reframing it as palliative care. Her new book, Outgrowing Modernity, develops more tools for how to nurse the possible futures emerging on our horizon. We harness these tools and metaphors to journey on a conversation of enquiry rather than conclusion, laughing with the notion that there is a single answer to any of this. This is a probing, thoughtful and curious conversation in which Vanessa and I think out loud together about what to do at the end of the world.

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Militarisation, isolationism, extractivism.

It looks like we learned nothing from the 21st century, as the powers that be are approaching looming civilisational collapse by cranking up the gears on the very machine which caused it. We’re re-entering a period of dog-eat-dog in a resource scarce world, which could result in the return of serfdom.

That’s the warning from Antonio Turiel,  physicist and a mathematician who works as an environmental scientist at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the CSIC in Spain. On this big picture episode, we cover everything from fossil fuel production to re-armament to male supremacy, with Antonio cutting through noisy data to reveal exactly how resource scarcity is driving the violent shift in global politics, and what we can expect to happen in the coming years including military colonisation, food shortages, oil crashes, and rampant inequality.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Choose a paid subscription to support independent, paywall-free journalism.

I recently interviewed Paul Hawken for Mongabay and want to share the moving conversation with you here.

Celebrated author, thinker and entrepreneur Paul Hawken joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life. He argues that the jargon and fear-based terms broadly used by the climate movement alienate the broader public and fail to communicate the nuance and complexity of the larger ecological crises that humans are causing.

In this wide-ranging discussion, Hawken explains that carbon — the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and a fundamental building block of life — is being maligned in a way that distracts from the root causes of ecological destruction in favor of technological solutions that are not viable at scale, or international agreements that prioritize carbon accounting.

Jargon is useful for communication of concepts within the scientific community, but when applied to messaging for the general public, it fails to communicate the problems humans face effectively: “We have to create a climate movement that is actually the human movement. And the human movement is humans that are not separate and distinct from nature.”

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

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Free speech is under attack.

Banning books, cutting library funding, attacking Wikipedia. The authoritarian regime of the tech-bro backed hard right doesn’t want to protect your free speech. It plans on eliminating freedom altogether.

When it comes to dismantling democracy, it’s far easier if your populace is divided and uneducated with limited access to diverse opinion. Enclosing our information spaces, both online and physically, is a key strategy in undermining our rights, minimising our power, and draining our wallets. Researcher, writer and software engineer, Molly White, has been tracking exactly how these tech billionaires have been dismantling the information space so their political allies can dismantle the political space, boosting their profits while we suffer.

Molly writes the newsletter Citation Needed and runs the websites Follow the Crypto and Web3 is Going Just Great. She joins me to the radical political agenda of these tech bros, how cryptocurrency helped buy the election, and how much money Trump and his family are making off of meme coins. We then explore the ideological failings of these power brokers, and why they’re determined on denying us access to information. Finally, we examine how to build resilient, reliable, open-access information systems, alternatives which protest our the erosion of our collective web of knowledge—and protect our fundamental human rights.

We can’t make this make sense.

The world’s most famous face of renewable solutions spent a record-breaking amount to get Big Oil’s candidate into the White House. The ruling communist party of China is backed by Chinese billionaires. Political pundits are whipping up war fever without reason. The international rule book is merely scattered pages in the wind. And, in the midst of it, the Left is struggling to produce a coherent and collective analysis.

David Edgerton, historian and author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, joins me to explain how we are in a unique period of history, pointing to changing geopolitical relations, emboldened authoritarians, oligarchic capitalists and flailing climate policy as evidence. We discuss the contradictions which make this world so hard to navigate, and probe the failures of Leftist discourse to make sense of the mess. This broad conversation covers war, productivity, dematerialisation, power and information — explaining why it’s so hard to keep up with a rapidly changing world.

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The s**t’s hit the fan.

We can’t turn the fan off, argues best-selling author Sarah Wilson. But we can learn how to clean up the mess.

Sarah, author, podcaster and creator of the This is Precious newsletter, has been on a similar journey to me. Four years of interview experts, research and writing on a topic the mainstream refuse to engage with: collapse. She joins me to discuss exactly that. What’s going on, how we got here, and what we can do about it.

This conversation weaves Western and indigenous theories, examining everything from Moloch theory and the Church to Tech Bro eugenics. We end by discussing crisis as turning point and opportunity, and how to spread the right ideas so that, when the time comes, the right ones are lying around in the ashes, ready to be used.

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Businesses could run differently — with the right leaders.

Brad Vanstone, cofounder of plant-based cheese company Willicroft, is an example. He founded the company out of a desire to protect the planet and innovate the food industry. Along the way, he pioneered campaigns, helped transition animal agriculture farms to plant-based farming, and even paid to have an activist on his payroll. Willicroft’s transparent and thoughtful values attracted solid investment, and within a few years their cheese was in major supermarkets around Europe.

But in 2024, Brad and his team decided to close the business. The finance on offer came at a price they wouldn’t pay: sacrificing some of the company’s values. Instead, they decided to liquidate. Brad joins me to walk us through that decision, beginning at the very beginning of how the company started and the amazing innovations they pioneered along the way. He also explains the strategic attacks on the plant-based industry levvied by the animal agriculture lobby which makes surviving in the food industry extremely hard, and how they tried to stay one step ahead. Brad’s analysis of our food systems is insightful, pragmatic and empathetic. This is a wonderful story of doing the right thing in a climate when people claim business has to put profit above all else — and what we can do differently, together.

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Civilisation always wants more energy.

The idea that our global society will merely switch from one energy source to another is fantasy masquerading as policy. Every time human beings discover a new energy source our overall consumption of raw materials increases. Whether that’s wood powering newly discovered coal mines in the 19th Century, or fossil fuels manufacturing renewable technology, the history of human energy consumption shows we have no precedent for the policy adopted by every single nation in the world.

So where did the idea come from?

Jean-Baptise Fressoz, historian and author of More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, joins me to explain this false history — that we have projected a story of technology onto a story of materials, explaining that raw materials never become obsolete. He explains how the phrase “energy transition” was coined by atomic scientists after World War 2, and only gained traction after being adopted by President Jimmy Carter, revealing how these fantastical notions were rubbished in the scientific discourse until the private sector inserted itself into the conversation, buttressed by the nonsense published by neoclassical economists.

Jean-Baptiste’s research is astounding, and this episode is filled with incredible insights and revelations, and he ultimately points to the same conclusion as almost every guest on this podcast: There is no such thing as “decarbonisation” or dematerialisation”. The only meaningful policy that will protect the planet is reducing our pollution and consumption.

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It wasn’t always like this.

Just decades ago, working people had power to leverage governments, ensuring our politicians weren’t just capitulating to markets — they were also working to keep people happy who had the power to shut the economy down. Then our unions disappeared.

Since then, the markets and states have worked in tandem to secure power and wealth, stripping everyday people from their communities, a sense of purpose, and their source of power: collectivism. Part of how they’ve done this, argues political economist Grace Blakeley, is create the illusion of markets and states being at odds with one another, of existing separately rather than being both sides of the same coin. She joins me to explain how we came to think of the economy as an abstract entity, why politicians throw working people under the bus the minute they come to power, and how people can organise to resist the erosion of their lives and livelihoods by reinvigorating local economies.

To learn more, you can read Grace’s most recent book, Vulture Capitalism. You can also read her regular analyses on Substack, and support her latest venture, the What Can We Do newsletter which platforms British communities who are organising pockets of resistance against neoliberal capitalism.

Planet: Critical is 100% independent and community-powered. If you value it, and have the means, become a paid subscriber today.