How do we scale the transformative change we evidently need to respond to the unprecedented ecological challenges of our time? Global challenges, on tight timelines of necessary change, regarding profound destabilization of natural systems…: all this adds up to a clear need for rapid, scaled action in response, and, at one remove, for determined strategic prioritization of this agenda. Yet this, in turn, is increasingly clear, backed by ever-growing demand and initiative, and still change is still dispiritingly slow and so lacking in evidence. Why?!?

This podcast is about ideas, and the power of ideas.  And perhaps the problem here is not just, or even primarily, a practical problem – e.g. of lack of will or energy, of missing resources or massive obstacles – but rather a conceptual one? What if we struggle even to think the very possibility of ‘practical’ responses – i.e. individual actions and initiatives – being able to aggregate up to the kinds of global scaling and system transformation we know we need? If so, we are stuck in a kind of paradox: human actions are unintentionally changing the planet… and yet deliberate human action seems to be unable to do anything about that?!

Rebelling against this defeatist conclusion, we are joined for episode 27 by a scholar who has been taking the lead in formulating a different and more positive way forward precisely by thinking deeply – both in practice, as co-lead of a major report on transformative change for the International Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and conceptually, regarding that foundational block to our understanding of scaling.

Professor Karen O’Brien, an internationally recognized expert on the human and social dimensions of global environmental change at the University of Oslo, is also a pioneering thinker regarding long overdue engagement with the implications forthe social sciences of the quantum revolution in our understanding of the physical world. As she sets out in her remarkable book ‘You Matter More than You Think’ (cChange Press, 2021), if we are prepared simply to update our understanding of the nature of physical reality, from a ‘classical’ Newtonian to a quantum perspective, the resulting world of entanglement, potentiality and indeterminacy radically shifts our capacity to conceptualize global scaling of transformative change.

Join us for an insightful exploration of these key conceptual shackles holding back transformative change, how we can begin to break them and thereby find new strategic motivation, and what doing so looks like regarding the key ‘planetary boundary’ of biodiversity.

This podcast explores how we need to change science so that it is part of the ‘solution’ not part of the ‘problem’ regarding our contemporary meta-crisis. But how much science offers fundamental reflections on the predicament of the meta-crisis itself and as a whole, rather than just crucial elements of it like climate change, biodiversity loss or the seeming crisis of democracy? One particular theory – and one particular proponent of that theory – is doing just that, and with both a breadth and depth of vision that is understandably attracting enormous and ever-growing interest because of the extraordinary insight and synthetic coherence it offers. 

This theory draws primarily on a close and expert reading of the contemporary neurosciences, building up its case for a breakthrough in our understanding – of ourselves, not just of our ‘brains’ – over more than three decades of research. But it stands out in also then marshalling in its support, and thereby reciprocally illuminating, cutting-edge science from physics and the life sciences, and, indeed, literature and cultural history.

The theory in question is the hemispheric theory of the divided brain, and the fundamentally different – contrasting, complementary but not tidily coherent – perspectives of left and right hemispheres. And the polymathic advocate of this theory is Iain McGilchrist, whose latest work (The Matter with Things - Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2023) has been described by an Oxford professor as “one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever.”

Join us for this extended episode in which we set out: the basic building blocks of Iain’s argument regarding hemispheric differences; the crucial issue and insight regarding the way in which these two ways of being in the world themselves interact (viz. as a ‘coincidence of opposites’); how this illuminates the nature of the metacrisis regarding dysfunctional domination of the left hemispheric perspective; and, last and by no means least, what all this tells us about how we are doing science (wrongly), how we should be doing science and what science can and cannot contribute to the urgently needed rebalancing towards right hemispheric perspectives.

We know this is a long episode, but it’s published with excitement not apology. Every minute in Iain’s company is illuminating, given both the beautiful incisiveness of his overall thesis and the mind-stretching breadth of issues it draws on and, in turn, illuminates.  So we wanted to cover as much ground as possible with him while he was with us. We trust you’ll agree, the result is a treat (for both hemispheres of your brain!).

Reforming the scholarly disciplines so that we are developing knowledge adequate for our age of seismic change is evidently not a project limited only to the ‘hard’, physical sciences. Indeed, according to Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal, unless we pay specific and particular attention to reviving the beleaguered humanities, such an objective will continually elude us. But the humanities are not just neglected in today’s academy and society (and increasingly so as policy celebrates productivity of ‘STEM’ subjects alone).  They are also in a very bad way – with at least a major element of the blame for this situation sitting with the humanities themselves.

So what can be done about this? And why is rejuvenating the humanities, as a crucial (maybe even central?) pillar of the university and higher education of our societies, so important – in itself, and especially today?

 In considering both of these questions with Kripal we follow his ground-breaking lead by diving in with perhaps a surprising – but certainly arresting – starting place, namely what he calls, in his excellent 2020 book (reviewed as ‘mindblowing’ by Michael Pollan), ‘the Flip’.  This phrase refers to life-changing experiences amongst hard-headed, materialist scientists that ‘flip’ their view, convincing them that mind, and not matter, is the real stuff of the cosmos. While unspeakable in the respectable world of contemporary scientific materialism, it turns out that pausing and taking such experiences seriously – as, at least, posing crucial questions, if not presenting straightforward answers – opens up a whole new vista of understanding, that simultaneously: affirms that same ontological priority of mind over matter, and thereby highlights and punctures our current self limitation of view; thereby reviving and asserting the reality of meaning and the meaning(fulness) of reality; and, in turn, reclaiming the modes and disciplines for the study and illumination of meaning – i.e. the humanities – as indispensable tools in the education and edification of modern society.

Join us in discussion about the necessary revival of a sense of ‘perennial philosophy’, unifying all humanity as so much more than the individualized and differentiated rational egoistic consumer of the contemporary imagination, and hence paving routes beyond the depressed meaninglessness characteristic of our current collective crisis.

We need a new science for and in the Anthropocene – that is the whole premise of this podcast. But what if we’re trying to build that new science on broken and/or inadequate foundations? What if the whole massive global enterprise of ‘science and technology’ as it is today is marked by a fatal blind spot, which is not only hobbling the productivity of scientific advancement, but even distorting science such that it is currently a massive part of the problem – i.e. of our contemporary meta-crisis – to which it claims to be contributing solutions? This is the rousing claim of a major new book by leading scientists and philosophers of science, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson: ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’ (MIT Press, 2024). But what is this crucial ‘blind spot’? Exactly how does it hold back and twist the scientific enterprise? And what can we do about it?

Join us, in discussion with the decorated physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser, Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College, to explore these key questions.  We unpack the key ways in which we are all harmed by the dominant self-conception of science today as not only self-justifying and in no need of philosophical underpinning, but also a way of knowing that is justifiably focused exclusively on the objective gaze, with no role or place for the first-person experience of consciousness and aliveness. Discussing current challenges and roadblocks in the sciences of cognition/AI and consciousness, we unpack some daunting philosophical jargon that is nonetheless crucial for understanding the existential crisis of our contemporary scientific civilisation, e.g. Whitehead’s ‘bifurcation of nature’, Husserl’s ‘surreptitious substitution’, the crucial error of the ‘amnesia of experience’, and the ‘strange loop’ of consciousness.

In short, Gleiser and his co-authors present us with some bracing and much-needed clarity, posing a challenge to everyone involved in science today: we are at a civilisational cross-roads with existential stakes where either we continue business as usual with the Blind Spot, or we choose to confront it and open up to the ‘strange loop’. Join us to work out what all of this means and what you can yourself can do to tackle the Blind Spot.

It’s been a while since our last episode (apologies!) and much has changed in the interim. In particular, the transition from 2024 to 2025 has witnessed a shift in political mood across much of the ‘Western’ world, with a liberating new sense of fearless truth-telling, including a striking return to serious concern with issues of a more-than-materialist metaphysics and the sacred. Variously termed ‘post-liberalism’ or ‘post-secular liberalism’, this exciting ‘vibe shift’ is attracting active development from a broad spectrum of political and cultural opinion, all committed to a newly self-assured affirmation and reconstruction of ‘civilisation’, including the specific and unique contributions of ‘Western’ civilisation.  And this is a political – but more so, a cultural – shift that has significant implications for our concern on this podcast, regarding a new science for the Anthropocene. 

But is there a snag? A surface glance at much ‘post-liberal’ commentary seems to suggest a reluctance regarding, or even an allergic reaction against, serious consideration of the unprecedented ecological challenges of the present. Moreover, much ‘environmentalist’ politics seems equally knee-jerk in its reaction against post-liberalism.  And yet is there also not a profound opportunity for the opposite outcome here, with post-liberalism underpinning breakthroughs in serious political concern for the environment that have proven long – ever more! – elusive, while grappling with a changing planet presents the key need for a post-liberal transformation?

Joining us to discuss this crucial agenda are two luminaries of their respective worlds.  John Milbank is a leading philosopher-theologian and theorist of post-liberalism, including as co-author (with Adrian Pabst) of the landmark ‘The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future’.  Robin Grove-White is a giant of the environmental NGO sector, as former Director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England and former Chairman of Greenpeace, as well as former Director of the ground-breaking Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, at Lancaster University.  John and Robin discuss the challenges and opportunities of bringing post-liberalism and environmentalism together, including the shared need for both projects of a re-connection to senses of belonging and sacredness in the natural, living world.

(Apologies for a few wobbles in the sound quality at points in the podcast.)

A key challenge for science in – and ‘for’ – the Anthropocene hangs on the extraordinary influence and authority that scientific knowledge now has in shaping public decision-making. Of course, science is needed to develop constructive and adaptive responses to many of the challenges of the Anthropocene. But it is also the case that it is only through science that we can even identify many of the challenges we now need to address, AND that science has been instrumental in CREATING many of those challenges in the first place. In short, then, science and its claims to definitive ‘knowledge’ are now inseparably woven into human lives and societal decisions affecting us all. An inescapable outcome of this, though, is that science now needs to be explicitly engaged with the questions of justice to which it gives rise in wielding that authority; regarding, say, public health guidance, environmental issues or the introduction of new technologies. And this gives rise to a novel form of justice: epistemic justice. In Episode 22, we discuss this crucial agenda with leading expert on question of justice and scientific expertise, Professor Gwen Ottinger. Drawing on her extensive experience working for participatory processes in environmental justice campaigns that have depended on authoritative scientific claims (e.g. to prove harm), Gwen argues that there are deep-seated problems afflicting current relations between science and society, regarding a ‘moral brokenness’ manifest in a ‘scientific chauvinism’ that is the antithesis of epistemic justice.  Join us for a profound exploration of this key challenge for science today, in which we explore crucial ideas of epistemic and reparative justice, ‘careful knowing’, ‘fact-shaming’ and how scientific credentialism is the last remaining ‘acceptable’ snobbery… and, crucially, what

Much of the ‘science for the Anthropocene’ that we explore on this podcast focuses on the ‘cutting-edge’ of research and new knowledge. But there is another whole side to science that merits our concerted attention: education, or the transmission of hard-earned knowledge and ways of thinking from generation to generation. Our guest in this bumper summer episode, Dr Zachary Stein, has literally written the book on this agenda of ‘Education for the Anthropocene’, and much else besides. Discussing his hugely insightful work, we unpack how a system and vision of education – or a ‘paideia’ – is actually the very core of a flourishing civilisation… and how profoundly and urgently we need to attend to and revive ours; not only in order to meet the unprecedented complex challenges of our time, but also even just to avoid a ratchet in the other direction, towards accelerating civilisational implosion. Join us for a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation in which we explore the centrality of education, the (dark and techno-fetishist) default futures of education continuing along existing trajectories, what the sciences of learning have told us about the stages of learning and how we need to revamp our education systems, the (seemingly counter-cultural) importance of ‘teacherly authority’, the crisis of elite higher education, the ‘growth to goodness’ fallacy and much more.

In Episode 20, we continue with our theme of the planetary boundaries (PB), turning to perhaps the most perplexing of them: so-called ‘novel entities’, or the release of things that are ‘new’ into the environment, including chemical pollution, but also new life-forms, pharmaceuticals, radioactivity or nano-particles. As the notorious case of CFCs and the Ozone layer has shown (eliciting a planetary boundary all of its own!), the mass release and accumulation of such novel entities can have negative, and potentially irreversible, global impacts that take us entirely by surprise. Yet we continue the relentless development and release of ever more, and ever more complex, chemicals and technological entities. It is thus little surprise that the latest assessment of the planetary boundaries (as discussed in Episode 19) concludes that we are well outside the ‘guardrail’ for this issue. But the current state of play is, arguably, the least of our worries. More troubling is a seemingly inescapable conundrum regarding the very epistemic predicament to which the novel entities PB awakens us: namely that this is problem of fundamental ignorance and with the highest of stakes. To unpack this crucial and unprecedented challenge for science and environmental policy, we are delighted to be joined by two of the key scientists who have identified, formulated and explored this challenge and what we can do about it: Professors Cynthia De Wit and Matthew MacLeod. Across a wide-ranging discussion, we go into the challenges of doing science on issues characterised, by definition, by irreducible ignorance; the key issue of time, and hence the parallel challenges of rate of release and rate of (effective regulatory) understanding; how the ‘novel entities’ PB reframes and reinforces the precautionary principle; and much more…

The new planetary condition summarized as the 'Anthropocene’ is very much NOT limited only to the (still undeniably crucial) issue of climate. But how can science offer of more definitive characterisation? One of the most high-profile answers today to this key question is the emergent framework of the ‘planetary boundaries’, which clearly enumerate 9 (or 11, depending on how you count them) specific planetary-scale processes that are crucial to maintaining the extraordinarily stable conditions on Earth that have enabled the take-off of human civilisation over the last ten thousand years or so – hence the only conditions we have known as a species as hospitable to such human flourishing. First devised and published in 2009, and with several highly-cited updates since then, the good news that we have some level of understanding of these key processes is quickly matched by the bad news regarding the current state of the majority of them due to (ongoing, even accelerating) human impacts. To discuss this crucial framework, how it is illuminating our current predicament and how it is changing science itself, in Episode 19 we are joined by the one of the trio of world-leading scholars who conceived it, Katherine Richardson. Drawing on Katherine’s expertise on the crucial issue of the oceans regarding a number of these planetary boundaries, including especially phytoplankton’s impact on both ocean acidification/climate control and marine biodiversity, we also discuss the mind-bending challenges of understanding across scales as divergent as these vast watery worlds and the microscopic lifeforms that shape their planetary impacts.

A science FOR and IN the Anthropocene needs a fundamental shift of orientation towards prioritizing the cultivation of situated, strategic, ethical wisdom, or ‘phronesis’ – or so we argue (and have argued in previous episodes) in this podcast. But what does this rather abstract and programmatic statement mean? What is phronesis, in practice? And where, or which institutions of science and higher education, are going to support that cultivation? In Episode 18, we discuss these key questions with Ioan Fazey, Professor of the Social Dimensions of Environment and Change at York University, UK and a teacher of shamanic practices. In particular we explore the potential – and, conversely, the current inadequacies – of seemingly the pre-eminent institution of ‘science’ in our current culture: the modern university. Identifying a crisis in the university across three over-lapping dimensions of increasing levels of abstraction – the ‘manifest’, the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘existential’ – we unpack the likely futures of science and the university, the prospects of the latter changing without major disruption, and how coming ‘back to our senses’ is going to be a key element of constructing better ways forward, including for and within science.