SPIRITUALITY & MINDFULNESS - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

Have we entered what Earth scientists call a “termination event,” and what can we do to avoid the worst outcomes? How can a spiritual connection to nature guide us toward better environmental stewardship? What can ancient wisdom teach us about living harmoniously with the Earth? How have wetlands become both crucial carbon sinks and colossal methane emitters in a warming world?

Euan Nisbet is an Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at the Royal Holloway University of London. Specializing in methane and its impact on climate change, his research spans Arctic and Tropical Atmospheric Methane budgets. Nisbet led the MOYA project, focusing on global methane emissions using aircraft and ground-based field campaigns in Africa and South America. Born in Germany and raised in Africa, his field work has taken him around the world. He is the author of The Young Earth and Leaving Eden: To Protect and Manage the Earth.

I am a Christian and I have strong Muslim and Jewish friends as well as great respect for Hindu beliefs. I grew up in Southern Africa and I am well aware of the depth of some Indigenous beliefs. I think that having belief systems does give you a very different perspective sometimes. Now, in Christianity, the concept of the shepherd, human beings are here and this is our garden, our garden of Eden, but we have a responsibility. And if we choose to kick ourselves out of the garden, there are consequences. And that's precisely what we are doing. The garden is there, it's lovely, and we can manage it, and it's our job to manage it. We can manage it properly. We can respect it. It's for all creation, and it's very explicit that it involves all Creation. And that's a very fundamental biblical law that you have to respect all Creation. And if you don't do that, then the consequences—you’re basically throwing yourself out of the Garden of Eden.

Equatorial swamps are major methane emitters

Boreal wetlands like this, often made or enhanced by beaver dams, are very extensive and emit much methane in summer

How do the works of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin continue to influence our understanding of nature, ecological interdependence, and the human experience? How does understanding history help us address current social and environmental issues. How can dialogues between the arts and sciences foster holistic, sustainable solutions to global crises?

Renée Bergland is a literary critic, historian of science, and educator. As a storyteller, Bergland connects the lives of historical figures to the problems of the present day. As an educator, she emphasizes the interdisciplinary connections between the sciences and humanities. A longtime professor at Simmons University, where she is the Program director of Literature and writing, Bergland has also researched and taught at institutions such as Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and MIT. Bergland’s past published titles include Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics and The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Her most recent book, Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, was published in April of 2024. It explores Dickinson and Darwin’s shared enchanted view of the natural world in a time when poetry and natural philosophy, once freely intertwined, began to grow apart.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in December 1859. In the years that followed, he would often be at the center of public debate, subjected to bitter denunciations and  passionate advocacy. At times, his allies' misguided defenses of his ideas would be as excruciating as the condemnations. Darwin would try again and again to explain that the adaptation and change at the heart of natural selection could offer consolation and inspire hope. Darwin had hoped his ideas would be important in scientific circles, but he had never dreamed that they would have such a widespread impact. Indeed, he was startled by his sudden scientific fame. As it turned out, Few aspects of life or death remain untouched by Darwin's thought. His ideas were quickly woven into the fabric of the modern world. Across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson's response to Darwin helped her to write the poetry that speaks to us today. Emily Dickinson loved a wild experiment just as much as Darwin, who was one generation ahead of her. Darwin's remarkable ideas about the natural world would influence her thought profoundly. She did not have the same impact on Darwin as he had on her. In fact, since she published almost nothing during her lifetime, her circle of influence was very small until after her death. But being in the next generation also conferred some benefits. Able to read Darwin, consider his ideas at leisure, and record her responses for posterity, Dickinson usually got the last word. In this account, I have taken the liberty of giving her the first word, too. For me, this book started with the puzzling realization that many of Dickinson's poems seemed profoundly Darwinian. Although she never mentioned Darwin by name in her poems. She rarely mentioned anyone by name in her poetry, so this absence did not rule him out of her important influences. She did name Darwin in two letters, which confirmed that she knew about his work. Still, there was not much to go on. She returned again and again to the topics that fascinated Darwin, but was that enough to demonstrate that she was responding to his thoughts? Did Dickinson write about Darwinian ideas simply because she was his contemporary? Did her writing seem to apply to Darwin merely because she was a great poet whose writings were almost universally applicable? Both explanations are valid as far as they go, but neither goes far enough. There is a stronger connection between Dickinson and Darwin than the proximity of history. Or the universality of literature. They both understood natural science and the natural world in ways that seem strange and somewhat surprising in the 21st century. Their 19th century attitudes to nature and the study of it are so different from ours that when we trace their stories, a vanished world begins to emerge. The more I consider these figures together, the more I feel their world and my world. come alive. Darwin and Dickinson illuminate each other. By reading them together, we can start to understand the interconnected relationships that animated 19th century poetry and science.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Many of us only think of Darwin’s work as being about survival of the fittest, and nature competing for limited resources, but you open this view up. You write about how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. As you go through their writings, they're both talking about the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time striving to preserve the magic of nature. And today more than ever, we too need to reclaim these two discipline’s connections, and our shared sense of ecological wonder, especially as we're on the crest of the Anthropocene.

RENÉE BERGLAND

Yes, absolutely. Probably many geologists and stratigraphers would say that even Darwin and Dickinson both lived during the Anthropocene, that they lived during a time when human activity  had really started to change the planet. But I don't know that they lived during the self-conscious Anthropocene as we do now, where we're suddenly aware of it and we're like, “Oh, no, what have we done?” But they were fascinated, both of them, by human beings in the whole biosphere. 

The reason that people responded to Darwin as if he were theologically radical was because his vision of the great tree of life was not a ladder. It was not hierarchical at all. His metaphor of the tree has lots of intertwined branches and roots. There's not a single apex to a tree, and the way that Darwin described humans, they were not the top of the whole chain, the whole ladder. That was an insight that was upsetting to many people. It seemed humiliating for humans not to be the very best living creature. And that was one of the reasons that many people reacted negatively to Darwin. But for Dickinson, that idea was just liberating and exciting and fascinating, such that in many of her poems about the natural world, she blurs the human and the animal and the plant. One of the poems of Dickinson's that I think explains Darwin the best starts out, “There is a flower that bees prefer / and butterflies desire.” She's talking about the clover, and in that poem she describes the clover and the grass as kinsmen. They're related to each other, but they're contending, she says, for sod and sun. They are competing to see who can get the most soil, the most nutrients, but she calls them “sweet litigants for life.” And that interpretation of Darwinism, where they're sweet and they're struggling, but they're both actually litigants for life, they're both arguing for the biosphere and advocates—that takes us back to the first lines of the poem. “There's a flower that bees prefer / and butterflies desire.” The way that the clover and the grass compete is by trying to see who can be more beautiful, who can be more brightly colored, who can smell better, who can lure  more pollinators, more insects and birds and collaborate better with them, and have a better chance of  surviving. That is certainly a version of survival of the fittest, but it's not a dog eat dog violent version. It's a version where the way you get a generational advantage, and perhaps have more little clovers following in your footsteps, is by collaborating better, by making yourself more beautiful, more alluring, and more inviting, inviting pollinators to work with you. That's straight from Darwin. Darwin's very clear in On the Origin of Species that when he talks about the struggle for life, he's primarily talking about co-adaptation and collaboration between species that can learn to work together. He's the one who actually, as he explains the struggle for life,  says it's nothing like two dogs fighting over a bone. That's not what it is. But unfortunately, a lot of that co-adaptation language got lost in the popular imagination. And that's one of the reasons that turning to Dickinson can help us understand—because she so beautifully depicts a Darwinian world where, yes, there's death, but there's more than anything, there's life.

The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health?

Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your book Spinning Out is a beautiful exploration and elucidation of the links between the climate crisis, mental health and social change. Reading your book is an uplifting experience and one I'd recommend to anyone interested in finding agency. As a young, leading climate change activist, you emerged from, as you describe in your book, a month long coma with some powerful realizations about the way climate chaos fuels mental health problems and why our information culture isn't adequately set up to support people in the distress which you write about so eloquently in your book. Can you take us back to that day in 2019 when you were consumed by anxiety and despair and things became too much to bear?

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old. It began with a deep passion for wildlife. I started taking up litter and telling off my schoolmates, eventually I set up a green council when I was about 13 or 14. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling and interconnected it was, not just with nature, but with the oppression that exists within human society, I started getting more involved and impassioned, getting involved in protests, marches. When I was about 15 years old, I helped shut down an airport for a night. I eventually started going to the UN climate talks. I went to Davos and it started to become my everything. I felt like I was doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also felt a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality. I felt like no one else was feeling the sense of urgency and emergency that I felt. I started to get incredibly anxious. In 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six storey building. My memory has blacked it out, but I spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. The five years since have been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind in the way I did. I try to find some of the gifts in that madness, what it was pointing towards in terms of the unbalance of the ecosphere and how human civilization has begun to operate completely out of step with the ecosphere. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, it’s really important to hear those ways that you connect. I wanted to go back a little bit too, because there are gifts that come with a heightened sense of awareness of impending danger that is almost primal. As you say, madness can be visionary. And when you write about those visions, of being stalked by a wolf, it’s a foreboding, almost like a warning of impending danger. As you know, many Indigenous societies have dream theories and interpretations that reveal a philosophical order about the nature of the universe, and visions within  many cultures are taken very seriously. Visions are seen as actually real. There's a reason for them. And, it made me reflect a lot about, if you pull back, to that time you saw a wild wolf stalking you in the street. This is a kind of metaphor for how we're treating the ecosphere, and the rest of the creatures that we share this planet with. It really calls into question who is more mad. Is it  the kind of collective blindness that refuses to see the way we are behaving towards rest of the creatures we share the world with and pretending that our disrespect for the very planet that provides us with food, water, and shelter can go on being abused and sucked dry. Like the 300 million years it took for fossil fuels to form in the Earth has been depleted by humans in under 200 years.

HERTZOG YOUNG

Yeah, I mean there's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it, and completely unable to do anything about it. That's not me saying that being depressed is the only objective kind of indicator for reality, but it's quite easy for the human species to underestimate or discount quite how significantly dangerous our situation is and people with depression are more able to see that with eyes unclouded by biases.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We do deny reality and the climate emergency, justifying our bad behavior by telling ourselves, “Oh, we survived this and that, so we'll survive this, too.” Of course, with climate change, it's completely non-linear. It goes up to a certain point and then, out of nowhere, a year's worth of rain falls in a day bringing flooding to your front door. Wildfires break out suddenly. These extreme climate events are a wake-up call, but it's often too late to do anything if you lose your home. So it’s really about rethinking capitalism and our extractivist relationship to the planet.

I spend a long time, as you do, I know, talking with students and teachers and unlike in the past where we'd talk about career paths or being anxious about exams and job choices or the future of work, students today are concerned about this underlying fear of the future because they can see that it's just overshadowing everything. The storms and the heat waves and the flooding and all these things you've described. I think that all young people would benefit from reading your book because you have been at the front lines since your early teens. But how do you feel we can overcome the apathy and inaction that is going on today?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think it's very easy for this stuff to be paralyzing. I used to be in a space where I felt that as soon as I wasn't devastatingly ill, I had to hurl myself back at the problem of climate change or something to do with new economics or a new kind of politics. I would end up very quickly burning out. While I do think that it's deeply important for us to engage with these issues, it's really important that we engage with them in a way that isn't trying to approach them with an internal sense of emergency. I often get letters from people who have read my book or one of my articles saying, thank you for naming not just the phenomenon of eco anxiety, but some of the interiority of it, and saying that they feel seen. It's quite upsetting that it's not something people tend to feel safe just having as a normal topic of conversation. People are worried that they'll bring down the mood and so that puts us in these silos and that's a real problem. Only by opening up can we start to build a deeper sense of connection and potentially collective action. Another problem is that eco anxiety is often considered to be a predominantly Global North issue. In researching my book and speaking to people in the Global South, I did a lot of my work in Pakistan looking at the impacts of the floods. The WHO estimated that one in five people affected by things like massive flooding, hurricanes, heat waves, or droughts, are likely to experience some kind of severe mental health impact. Speaking to doctors in Pakistan, that number is often far higher. It's just not seen as a mental health issue because it's often interpreted as inevitable suffering. It's an extension of the kind of othering that is already visited upon the Global South that people's psychological distress doesn't count, because obviously people will be having a hard time if they've experienced a natural disaster. So organizations like the WHO fly in to deliver medication and then helicopter out again. And local doctors say it's no solution at all.  You've got to be working with communities, asking people what their needs are, what their pillars of care were prior to a natural disaster, and how to try and restore those again. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yeah. It’s terrible the way that is. Some people are expected to just take that burden of suffering like it's an act of God, when it's an act of our abuse of this planet. I've had conversations with people like Bertrand Piccard who has said we have to put it aside. He's not denying the eco anxiety, but says you have to work within the capitalist systems to give people the solutions so that then they don't have that despair too. So I think we have to not deny that it's there, but then also provide those solutions. And I hope that all these solutions come up at the speed they need to take place.

HERTZOG YOUNG

One of the most promising and surprisingly effective on the first try solutions that I came across while looking at this stuff was from a doctor Dr. Asma Humayun who works in Pakistan. Prior to the flooding, she was already working on a massive nested mental health and psychosocial support program. What they were doing was, within a month, they managed to train a thousand people in psychological first aid in the community. People who were not just doctors and nurses, but also teachers, social workers, people who had high contact with people in the community. They trained people to look out for psychological distress, learn how to respond with mental health first aid, and also look after their own mental health. That network of a thousand people then linked in through an app that was very low bandwidth so it could work even when there wasn't good internet so they could link in with people who were slightly more trained to provide people with the care that they needed. So an area of 1 million people that previously only had one psychiatrist was fully networked with a nested system where people were not only able to get support, but also able to build their own networks of support and new practices of support. That has now been taken on by the Pakistani government and is potentially going to be mapped out across the nation as some kind of iterative feedback response for communities to build on that already existing resilience and that already existing knowledge, rather than just relying on these very brittle old systems of having one specialized person with a massive, massive population of people who have really high needs and usually never even go to a psychiatrist because they wouldn't think that they get help or that their condition is something that could be alleviated. One of the really surprising outputs is that 50 percent of people who are referred to services and use them came back, which is an astronomically high proportion in this field. So it's one example of how you can work within a capitalist system, but also start to bake in community resilience and empower communities to do things together.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I think that that's so important to hear. Often in these moments of crisis, we’re lucky to be around this community of friends, but sometimes they don't occur when we're close to those that we trust and we feel safe with. Maybe the racing thoughts come at an unexpected moment. What are some of those ways that you can pull back from that, so you can be gentle on your mind and not focus on what lies ahead?

HERTZOG YOUNG

There's a whole section in my book about tips and advice. Not just of mine, but of many people who are similar to me and have been doing this stuff for a long time. One of the ways that I try to maintain a feeling of safety while also not collapsing into a state of passivity, and it's taken a very long time for me to learn this, but it’s being forgiving with myself. One of the people who I write about a lot in the book is Jennifer Uchandu, a Nigerian climate activist and mental health activist who sets up an organization called The Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project. She talks about needing to remind herself constantly. Her test is not whether she's doing enough, it's whether she's doing her best. And doing her best doesn't mean doing as much as she possibly can, it means having the right balance of self care and action. Recently I've been really struggling with insomnia because I've still got quite bad nerve pain from my surgeries. And it sounds so simple and I used to get annoyed at these things, but just breathing. You know, deep breathing and kind of breathing into my back. Spending time in nature is also helpful. It can be quite hard for me because my mobility isn't always great on my prosthetics or if I'm in a wheelchair, but I swim a lot. And I draw a lot. One of the things that's been really amazing is that over the last few years, me and my friends have gotten into the habit of calling one another as first points of contact, not just in crisis, but if we've had a tricky day.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I don't believe in the silver bullet of AI or technology that will solve all these problems, but I have mixed feelings and perhaps you do too. I just wonder about your reflections on AI in terms of helping us balance the energy grid or solve the climate crisis. We also know that it consumes a lot of energy, so how do we navigate those risks and potential benefits?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think that certain kinds of AI can be really helpful for, as you say, balancing the grid or by relieving humans of certain kinds of manual repetitive labor arduous labor, so long as that actually transfers into people having more time. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that we've had enough of a rise in productivity that we could be working 15 hour weeks and have the same amount as people had decades ago. However, because of the structure of the economic system, that productivity rise has not transferred into more free time. I'm slightly scared about utopian visions about AI freeing humans from work, because I don't think we have enough of a social and political infrastructure to actually reap most of the gains if that were to happen. I think deeper down, I'm concerned because we call it “artificial intelligence,” but we don't even know what organic intelligence is. We have a very limited and very brittle understanding of what intelligence is, what the mind is, and we see this first hand over and over again in medical circles. There's a very circuit-based treatment of the human mind, and mental health issues are often treated as a glitch. When we've got a deeply flawed and frankly quite infantile understanding of what intelligence is, we're going to build something that is not in any way linked in healthfully with the ecosystem. I do think that there are some useful, utilitarian, appropriate uses of it, but they should be really kept limited. I'm worried that AI will serve those interests that have already subjugated and dominated because of the kinds of intelligence it chooses to put central to its way of operating. There's also a certain amount of arrogance implicit in the way that AI is talked about, that it is somehow, not just superior to any single human mind, but it's come from a superior kind of human mind. I think it's the same kind of human mind that has got us into the problems that we've already experienced. And the same kind of thinking is unlikely to be able to solve those issues.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Exactly. Let's not duplicate our mistakes through another hyper-industrialized system. And just so in closing, on a optimistic note, as you think about the future, the future of education, the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think I'll answer it from a slightly different tack, which is the thing that was most important to me as a young person in learning about these issues, but also feeling a modicum of safety and direction, helping me really pursue the things I was curious about, and have a more intimate relationship with my values. The thing that was important to me was having mentors. And I would really recommend that young people take a bit of a risk and ask people they want to learn from whether they can spend time with them and listen to their stories to learn from their experiences. I think one of the most promising things is rebuilding intergenerational relationships. This fight is one that has been going on for generations upon generations. It is a fight that is as old as human civilization. And so one of the main things I'd like young people to know is that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. They can reach out to those that they want to emulate and trust those relationships.

The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health?

Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your book Spinning Out is a beautiful exploration and elucidation of the links between the climate crisis, mental health and social change. Reading your book is an uplifting experience and one I'd recommend to anyone interested in finding agency. As a young, leading climate change activist, you emerged from, as you describe in your book, a month long coma with some powerful realizations about the way climate chaos fuels mental health problems and why our information culture isn't adequately set up to support people in the distress which you write about so eloquently in your book. Can you take us back to that day in 2019 when you were consumed by anxiety and despair and things became too much to bear?

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old. It began with a deep passion for wildlife. I started taking up litter and telling off my schoolmates, eventually I set up a green council when I was about 13 or 14. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling and interconnected it was, not just with nature, but with the oppression that exists within human society, I started getting more involved and impassioned, getting involved in protests, marches. When I was about 15 years old, I helped shut down an airport for a night. I eventually started going to the UN climate talks. I went to Davos and it started to become my everything. I felt like I was doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also felt a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality. I felt like no one else was feeling the sense of urgency and emergency that I felt. I started to get incredibly anxious. In 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six storey building. My memory has blacked it out, but I spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. The five years since have been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind in the way I did. I try to find some of the gifts in that madness, what it was pointing towards in terms of the unbalance of the ecosphere and how human civilization has begun to operate completely out of step with the ecosphere. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, it’s really important to hear those ways that you connect. I wanted to go back a little bit too, because there are gifts that come with a heightened sense of awareness of impending danger that is almost primal. As you say, madness can be visionary. And when you write about those visions, of being stalked by a wolf, it’s a foreboding, almost like a warning of impending danger. As you know, many Indigenous societies have dream theories and interpretations that reveal a philosophical order about the nature of the universe, and visions within  many cultures are taken very seriously. Visions are seen as actually real. There's a reason for them. And, it made me reflect a lot about, if you pull back, to that time you saw a wild wolf stalking you in the street. This is a kind of metaphor for how we're treating the ecosphere, and the rest of the creatures that we share this planet with. It really calls into question who is more mad. Is it  the kind of collective blindness that refuses to see the way we are behaving towards rest of the creatures we share the world with and pretending that our disrespect for the very planet that provides us with food, water, and shelter can go on being abused and sucked dry. Like the 300 million years it took for fossil fuels to form in the Earth has been depleted by humans in under 200 years.

HERTZOG YOUNG

Yeah, I mean there's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it, and completely unable to do anything about it. That's not me saying that being depressed is the only objective kind of indicator for reality, but it's quite easy for the human species to underestimate or discount quite how significantly dangerous our situation is and people with depression are more able to see that with eyes unclouded by biases.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We do deny reality and the climate emergency, justifying our bad behavior by telling ourselves, “Oh, we survived this and that, so we'll survive this, too.” Of course, with climate change, it's completely non-linear. It goes up to a certain point and then, out of nowhere, a year's worth of rain falls in a day bringing flooding to your front door. Wildfires break out suddenly. These extreme climate events are a wake-up call, but it's often too late to do anything if you lose your home. So it’s really about rethinking capitalism and our extractivist relationship to the planet.

I spend a long time, as you do, I know, talking with students and teachers and unlike in the past where we'd talk about career paths or being anxious about exams and job choices or the future of work, students today are concerned about this underlying fear of the future because they can see that it's just overshadowing everything. The storms and the heat waves and the flooding and all these things you've described. I think that all young people would benefit from reading your book because you have been at the front lines since your early teens. But how do you feel we can overcome the apathy and inaction that is going on today?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think it's very easy for this stuff to be paralyzing. I used to be in a space where I felt that as soon as I wasn't devastatingly ill, I had to hurl myself back at the problem of climate change or something to do with new economics or a new kind of politics. I would end up very quickly burning out. While I do think that it's deeply important for us to engage with these issues, it's really important that we engage with them in a way that isn't trying to approach them with an internal sense of emergency. I often get letters from people who have read my book or one of my articles saying, thank you for naming not just the phenomenon of eco anxiety, but some of the interiority of it, and saying that they feel seen. It's quite upsetting that it's not something people tend to feel safe just having as a normal topic of conversation. People are worried that they'll bring down the mood and so that puts us in these silos and that's a real problem. Only by opening up can we start to build a deeper sense of connection and potentially collective action. Another problem is that eco anxiety is often considered to be a predominantly Global North issue. In researching my book and speaking to people in the Global South, I did a lot of my work in Pakistan looking at the impacts of the floods. The WHO estimated that one in five people affected by things like massive flooding, hurricanes, heat waves, or droughts, are likely to experience some kind of severe mental health impact. Speaking to doctors in Pakistan, that number is often far higher. It's just not seen as a mental health issue because it's often interpreted as inevitable suffering. It's an extension of the kind of othering that is already visited upon the Global South that people's psychological distress doesn't count, because obviously people will be having a hard time if they've experienced a natural disaster. So organizations like the WHO fly in to deliver medication and then helicopter out again. And local doctors say it's no solution at all.  You've got to be working with communities, asking people what their needs are, what their pillars of care were prior to a natural disaster, and how to try and restore those again. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yeah. It’s terrible the way that is. Some people are expected to just take that burden of suffering like it's an act of God, when it's an act of our abuse of this planet. I've had conversations with people like Bertrand Piccard who has said we have to put it aside. He's not denying the eco anxiety, but says you have to work within the capitalist systems to give people the solutions so that then they don't have that despair too. So I think we have to not deny that it's there, but then also provide those solutions. And I hope that all these solutions come up at the speed they need to take place.

HERTZOG YOUNG

One of the most promising and surprisingly effective on the first try solutions that I came across while looking at this stuff was from a doctor Dr. Asma Humayun who works in Pakistan. Prior to the flooding, she was already working on a massive nested mental health and psychosocial support program. What they were doing was, within a month, they managed to train a thousand people in psychological first aid in the community. People who were not just doctors and nurses, but also teachers, social workers, people who had high contact with people in the community. They trained people to look out for psychological distress, learn how to respond with mental health first aid, and also look after their own mental health. That network of a thousand people then linked in through an app that was very low bandwidth so it could work even when there wasn't good internet so they could link in with people who were slightly more trained to provide people with the care that they needed. So an area of 1 million people that previously only had one psychiatrist was fully networked with a nested system where people were not only able to get support, but also able to build their own networks of support and new practices of support. That has now been taken on by the Pakistani government and is potentially going to be mapped out across the nation as some kind of iterative feedback response for communities to build on that already existing resilience and that already existing knowledge, rather than just relying on these very brittle old systems of having one specialized person with a massive, massive population of people who have really high needs and usually never even go to a psychiatrist because they wouldn't think that they get help or that their condition is something that could be alleviated. One of the really surprising outputs is that 50 percent of people who are referred to services and use them came back, which is an astronomically high proportion in this field. So it's one example of how you can work within a capitalist system, but also start to bake in community resilience and empower communities to do things together.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I think that that's so important to hear. Often in these moments of crisis, we’re lucky to be around this community of friends, but sometimes they don't occur when we're close to those that we trust and we feel safe with. Maybe the racing thoughts come at an unexpected moment. What are some of those ways that you can pull back from that, so you can be gentle on your mind and not focus on what lies ahead?

HERTZOG YOUNG

There's a whole section in my book about tips and advice. Not just of mine, but of many people who are similar to me and have been doing this stuff for a long time. One of the ways that I try to maintain a feeling of safety while also not collapsing into a state of passivity, and it's taken a very long time for me to learn this, but it’s being forgiving with myself. One of the people who I write about a lot in the book is Jennifer Uchandu, a Nigerian climate activist and mental health activist who sets up an organization called The Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project. She talks about needing to remind herself constantly. Her test is not whether she's doing enough, it's whether she's doing her best. And doing her best doesn't mean doing as much as she possibly can, it means having the right balance of self care and action. Recently I've been really struggling with insomnia because I've still got quite bad nerve pain from my surgeries. And it sounds so simple and I used to get annoyed at these things, but just breathing. You know, deep breathing and kind of breathing into my back. Spending time in nature is also helpful. It can be quite hard for me because my mobility isn't always great on my prosthetics or if I'm in a wheelchair, but I swim a lot. And I draw a lot. One of the things that's been really amazing is that over the last few years, me and my friends have gotten into the habit of calling one another as first points of contact, not just in crisis, but if we've had a tricky day.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I don't believe in the silver bullet of AI or technology that will solve all these problems, but I have mixed feelings and perhaps you do too. I just wonder about your reflections on AI in terms of helping us balance the energy grid or solve the climate crisis. We also know that it consumes a lot of energy, so how do we navigate those risks and potential benefits?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think that certain kinds of AI can be really helpful for, as you say, balancing the grid or by relieving humans of certain kinds of manual repetitive labor arduous labor, so long as that actually transfers into people having more time. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that we've had enough of a rise in productivity that we could be working 15 hour weeks and have the same amount as people had decades ago. However, because of the structure of the economic system, that productivity rise has not transferred into more free time. I'm slightly scared about utopian visions about AI freeing humans from work, because I don't think we have enough of a social and political infrastructure to actually reap most of the gains if that were to happen. I think deeper down, I'm concerned because we call it “artificial intelligence,” but we don't even know what organic intelligence is. We have a very limited and very brittle understanding of what intelligence is, what the mind is, and we see this first hand over and over again in medical circles. There's a very circuit-based treatment of the human mind, and mental health issues are often treated as a glitch. When we've got a deeply flawed and frankly quite infantile understanding of what intelligence is, we're going to build something that is not in any way linked in healthfully with the ecosystem. I do think that there are some useful, utilitarian, appropriate uses of it, but they should be really kept limited. I'm worried that AI will serve those interests that have already subjugated and dominated because of the kinds of intelligence it chooses to put central to its way of operating. There's also a certain amount of arrogance implicit in the way that AI is talked about, that it is somehow, not just superior to any single human mind, but it's come from a superior kind of human mind. I think it's the same kind of human mind that has got us into the problems that we've already experienced. And the same kind of thinking is unlikely to be able to solve those issues.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Exactly. Let's not duplicate our mistakes through another hyper-industrialized system. And just so in closing, on a optimistic note, as you think about the future, the future of education, the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

HERTZOG YOUNG

I think I'll answer it from a slightly different tack, which is the thing that was most important to me as a young person in learning about these issues, but also feeling a modicum of safety and direction, helping me really pursue the things I was curious about, and have a more intimate relationship with my values. The thing that was important to me was having mentors. And I would really recommend that young people take a bit of a risk and ask people they want to learn from whether they can spend time with them and listen to their stories to learn from their experiences. I think one of the most promising things is rebuilding intergenerational relationships. This fight is one that has been going on for generations upon generations. It is a fight that is as old as human civilization. And so one of the main things I'd like young people to know is that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. They can reach out to those that they want to emulate and trust those relationships.

How can we show more kindness, respect, and love to the animals we share this planet with? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature?

Ingrid Newkirk is the Founder and President of PETA, actively leading the organization and advocating for animal rights. PETA is the largest animal rights organization in the world with more than 9 million members and supporters globally. Under her leadership, PETA has achieved significant victories, such as ending car-crash tests on animals, pushing major fashion brands to go fur-free, influencing Ringling Bros. to become an animal-free circus, and helping pass a law that allows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve new medications without conducting cruel tests on animals. Ingrid has written 14 books and has been featured in major publications like The New Yorker and The Guardian, and was the subject of HBO's documentary I Am an Animal and was named one of Forbes’ “100 Most Powerful Women.” She joined One Planet Podcast to reflect on her 75 years as animal rights advocate.

INGRID NEWKIRK

They’re not human traits. They’re all shared traits because, of course, we all love. We all love our families, or not. We all grieve if somebody we love disappears or dies. A family dog, perhaps. A grandfather. We all feel loneliness, we all feel joy. We all really value our freedom. And so I think, if anything, looking into the eyes of the animal, even online, you see a person in there. There’s a someone in whatever the shape or the physical properties of that individual are. And that lesson is that I am you. You are me, only different. We are all the same in all the ways that count…Any living being teaches you– Look into my eyes. And there you are, the reflection of yourself.

So we need to learn from the animals how to live more gently and consume less and be more thoughtful and look out for each other in this great circle of life.

About the Founding of PETA

We formed a little group of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to show people exactly what goes on behind the scenes. Places they'll never see. They only see what's in the forefront that looks all happy and joyous and available. And then with that group, we don't want to make people sad. We don't want to make people just angry. We want to empower everybody to be an important, conscientious consumer. And through their actions and what they buy and do, they are helping animals every single day, many times a day.

On Animal Communication

We definitely know that all animals have language. They talk to each other, they understand each other, and they have interesting ways of communicating that only recently have we figured out even in part because rhinos use a breath language, fish use luminescence, squid can actually send different messages, one on one side of their body, and one on the other side of their body with color and light and patterns, so they can ward off an enemy on one side by looking very fierce, and on the other side, they can be greeting a friend. So, we do know cows have facial expressions that are so subtle you can't really notice them, and that cats and horses use their ears and their tails and their whiskers, and so on. Animals communicate with sounds, too. And we know that elephants rumble and they purr and they almost growl but they do it subsonically under the ground. And you need instrumentation to capture that sound. Humans can't really get the nuance of it. And it's not just sound. It's that a mile away, another herd of elephants hears that they don't just think oh, there's a herd over there making a noise. They know that that means there are people with guns threatening our children, or we have found water, come over here and enjoy it.

So yes, all animals have language. Birds have amazing language, and you have to sometimes capture it and slow down the recording to find all the notes that they're using in between, like dolphin clicks, that you can't hear with the human ear.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Just looking at some of your protests. You've been arrested after running in front of hunters to free pigeons before they were slaughtered at the Hegins Pigeon Shoot. You've been photographed hanging naked from a meat hook at a meat market next to the bodies of pigs for the ad for the Go Vegan campaign. So you've really created these powerful images that people can't ignore. Can you discuss some of those campaigns and how they resonated with people?

NEWKIRK

I think things do change because of agitation. So agitation is vital. I mean, nobody who is in a cause should be there to win a popularity contest, whether you're working for children or the elderly or working for peace animals, it's all against nonviolence, aggression, domination, and needless cruelty and suffering. It's all for respect. So you have to be vigorous. You have to use your voice. You can use it politely, but if people don't listen, at PETA, we escalate. So we always start off with a polite letter, a polite entreaty. We always try to, as I say, do the homework. So we have the options that we put out on the table to say, look, instead of doing this, you could do that, and we will help you transition to that.

And when we began, which was 1980, there was no internet. We started by handing out leaflets on the street, having a banner at national parades, which could be seen on television, doing undercover investigations like the Silver Spring Monkey case, which made the front page of The Washington Post. And in the beginning, you could actually go on a talk show and spend an hour discussing things in depth, seriously, showing photographs, having facts and figures. Today, it's the era of the soundbite. And so very few people get a very serious look at the issues. And so you have to adjust as the media has adjusted. And that's why sometimes we use gimmickry, because just having the facts, sadly, isn't enough. You can't give people just solid facts. It's boring to them. So you have to create a ruckus and make them have a look. I mean, sometimes we're like a car crash. Nobody can avoid turning around to see what it's all about. And that's why we've used sensuality and sexuality, and we've used humor, we've used all those things, with everybody voluntarily getting in on the act to say, "I want to do something to make people aware of the reality, the horrors that animals are enduring." So that's how we've adapted.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

As you think about the future, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?

NEWKIRK

I would like them to know that if they care about being kind, then please look at the smallest animal, the biggest animal, and look at them all as your brothers and sisters, really, or your friends. They're not food. They're not shoes. They're not living test tubes. They're not here for you to be entertained by. So when you look at anything that contains an animal, their hair, their flesh, anything...a parrot on someone's shoulder that somebody says, "Do you want to have your picture taken with that parrot?" Just think, are they volunteers? If I were in their shoes or their paws or their claws, would I want to be there? And then you will know, your heart will lead you, your head will lead you as to how you should conduct yourself. And please know that if you become a vegetarian, that the mother cow whose baby ends up as meat, so please do not eat dairy, and please do not wear shoes made of her flesh. So there we are. That's my message to young people today.

How can computational language help decode the mysteries of nature and the universe? What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? How will AI affect education, the arts and society?

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. He received his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech by the age of 20 and in 1981, became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Wolfram authored A New Kind of Science and launched the Wolfram Physics Project. He has pioneered computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM

In modern times, it's popular to talk about artificial intelligence. The term has been around since the mid-1950s, and it's gone through a variety of different meanings and levels of popularity.

Much of what I've done in building computational language and tools can be seen as related to an earlier version of what people thought artificial intelligence was and would be. However, in modern times, the real point is about letting computers automate more things for us. There's a particular twist on the notion of artificial intelligence that has to do with tasks that are very human-like, such as generating human language. These tasks have only recently become really accessible to computation. As we move forward, we can expect to see more and more things in the world get automated.

Looking across human history, many things are just the same now as they ever were. The human condition and the way people are have been very much the same for a very long time. However, the one thing that's changed in the course of human history is the developments in technology and the increasing automation that we can do. This is something we can expect to continue. Automation shines a brighter light on the question of what you actually want to do. As a human, you determine the direction things should go, and automation can support that progress. However, the AI or computational system has no built-in sense of what it should do. There are an infinite set of possibilities. There's something we kind of learn from my efforts in studying the computational universe: there's a lot out there. Most of it are things that we humans, at least so far, have not cared about, and sort of the story of the development of things tends to be what do humans decide that they care about? In what direction do they want to go? What kind of art do they want to make? What kinds of things do they want to think about? What kinds of objects do they want to produce? There's an infinite collection of possibilities, but it's something that's a matter of human choice, which of these infinite things do we actually choose to pursue?

And, then our AIs, our computational systems can help us to be as effective as possible in pursuing those directions. But I think as there is more automation, there is more kind of emphasis on this question of our choice. What do we actually want to do? In what direction do we want to go? And in a sense, there is in the computational universe of all possibilities, there is sort of infinite creativity. There's all these different possibilities out there. But our kind of challenge is to decide in which direction we want to go and then to let our automated systems pursue those particular directions.

Early Years and Path to Physics

I've been fortunate to be able to sort of alternate between doing basic science and building technological tools, so far about five times in my life. And it's sort of an interesting thing because you build up kind of intellectual ideas in basic science, then you apply them in technology. Then that technology lets you come up with new ideas in basic science. And it's a cycle that can continue. But in terms of my own trajectory, you know, I got interested in physics when I was pretty young, maybe 10, 11, 12 years old, and started studying it intently, discovering this amazing thing that you can just read books and figure things out. It was a time when physics was in a very energetic phase in the mid-1970s, with lots of things that were being discovered in physics.

I had the chance to kind of turn computers in the direction of the computational universe and see what was out there. And what I discovered was a lot of things I certainly didn't expect. In particular, that even when you had a very simple program, very simple setup for the computer, the actual behavior of the program, the actual patterns that you generated, could be very complicated. And I sort of realized that's something that seems to be the secret that nature is using to make all this complexity that we see and so that got me very excited about kind of applying the idea of computation to things like basic science. And somehow in the middle of all of that, knowing more about the essence of computation, let me kind of understand more about how one could build tools based on computation to kind of work with things in the world.

Philosophy and Computational Language

My mother was a philosophy professor in Oxford, and when I was a kid, I would always say, if there's one thing I'll never do when I'm grown up, it's philosophy, because how can one be serious about a field where people are still arguing about the same things that they were arguing about 2,000 years ago, and there's no kind of apparent progress. But actually, the exciting thing has been that both in my kind of work in building computational language, and in my work in understanding the computational foundations of physics, that it turns out that a bunch of those things that people have been arguing about for a couple of thousand years, we can actually say some real things about.

Creating Wolfram Research, Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram Language

It's a funny thing because I've spent my life sort of building this big tower of science and technology and, every so often, something comes out of that tower that people say, "This is a cool thing, we're really going to be excited about this particular thing." For me, the whole tower is the thing that's really important. And in the future, that's what the tower that I've tried to build is certainly the most significant thing I've been able to do. And it's something that, you know, I've been able to see now over the course of half a century or so, kind of how various ideas I've had and directions I've gone have actually played out.

What is ChatGPT doing and how does it work?

ChatGPT is something that was not of my creation that I didn't really expect was going to happen at any particular time. It was being able to get an AI neural network system to be a fluent producer of human language. And that happened in late 2022 with ChatGPT.

Nobody, including people who worked on it, really sort of expected this to work. It's something that we just didn't know scientifically what it would take to make something that was a fluent producer of human language. I think the big discovery is that this thing that has been sort of a proud achievement of our species, human language, is perhaps not as complicated as we thought it was.

It's something that is more accessible to sort of simpler automation than we expected. And so, people have been asking me, when ChatGPT had come out, we were doing a bunch of things technologically around ChatGPT because kind of what, when ChatGPT is kind of stringing words together to make sentences, what does it do when it has to actually solve a computational problem? That's not what it does itself. It's a thing for stringing words together to make text. And so, how does it solve a computational problem? Well, like humans, the best way for it to do it is to use tools, and the best tool for many kinds of computational problems is tools that we've built. And so very early in kind of the story of ChatGPT and so on, we were figuring out how to have it be able to use the tools that we built, just like humans can use the tools that we built, to solve computational problems, to actually get sort of accurate knowledge about the world and so on.

Exploring Computational Irreducibility

I think one very big example of this phenomenon is the computational irreducibility. This idea that even though you know the rules by which something operates, that doesn't immediately tell you everything about what the system will do. You might have to follow a billion steps in the actual operation of those rules to find out what the system does.

There's no way to jump ahead and just say, "the answer will be such and such." Well, computational irreducibility, in a sense, goes against the hope, at least, of, for example, mathematical science. A lot of the hope of mathematical science is that we'll just work out a formula for how something is going to operate. We don't have to kind of go through the steps and watch it operate. We can just kind of jump to the end and apply the formula. Well, computational irreducibility says that that isn't something you can generally do. It says that there are plenty of things in the world where you have to kind of go through the steps to see what will happen.

In a sense, even though that's kind of a bad thing for science, it says that there's sort of limitations on the extent to which we can use science to predict things. It's sort of a good thing, I think, for leading one's life because it means that as we experience the passage of time, in a sense, that corresponds to the sort of irreducible computation of what we will do.

It's something where that sort of tells one that the passage of time has a meaningful effect. There's something that where you can't just jump to the end and say, "I don't need to live all the years of my life. I can just go and say, and the result will be such and such." No, actually, there's something sort of irreducible about that actual progression of time and the actual living of those years of life, so to speak. So that's kind of one of the enriching aspects of this concept of computational irreducibility. It's a pretty important concept. It's something which I think, for example, in the future of human society, will be something where people right now will think of it as this kind of geeky scientific idea, but in the future, it's going to be a pivotal kind of thing for the understanding of how one should conduct the future of human society.

Reflections on Science and Spirituality

I have grown up in the kind of Western scientific tradition, so to speak. And what's interesting to see is that some of the questions that we get to ask now have sort of grown out of the Western scientific tradition, are things that have also been asked in quite different traditions. So, a thing that I didn't think we would ever have anything scientific to say about is a question like, "Why does the universe exist?" But that's something that now we can make some scientific statements about. And those statements have a lot of resonance, I think, with things that people have come to from very different kinds of ways of thinking about the world.

It's sort of interesting that, when you describe the convergence of science and other kinds of things, when I was a kid, people would talk about sort of at a religious level, they would talk about souls and so on. And one would say, "Well, that just can't be anything scientific." I mean, you know, what does a soul weigh? Anything that exists must have a weight; that sounded reasonable from the point of view of the narrow way of thinking about science at the time. Now that we understand this idea of computation, we understand that there can be a thing that is real and meaningful, but it doesn't have a weight. It is merely an abstract thing, a computational thing. And when we think about souls, that's, I think, the idea that what is going for is this kind of computational representation, this computational engram of what's in a brain, for example. And we now have a much better understanding of what that sort of engram, what that abstract, it has no physical weight or anything like that. It's just an abstract thing that can be rendered in a brain.

It's sort of interesting to me that there are things that people have an intuitive sense of and have for a long, long time had an intuitive sense of that sometimes in science, there's been a tendency to say, "Oh, no, no, no. We have a particular way of thinking about things in science and that doesn't fit with it. So let's lock it out," so to speak. So an example of that, well, for example, animism; you mentioned this question of where are their minds? Is it reasonable to think of the weather as having a mind of its own? Is it reasonable to think of the forest as having a mind, so to speak? Well, in these kind of computational terms, yes, it does become reasonable to think about those things. Now if you say then, one comes to that idea from a place of formalized science, but nevertheless, it relates to sort of intuitions that people have had for a long time about that come from that didn't come from that particular kind of branch formalized thinking.

Can we really end the climate crisis in one generation? What kind of bold collective action, technologies, and nature-based solutions would it take to do it?

Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. A leading voice in the environmental movement, he has founded successful eco-friendly businesses, authored influential works on commerce and ecology, and advised global leaders on economic and environmental policies. As the founder of Project Regeneration and Project Drawdown, Paul leads efforts to identify and model solutions to reverse global warming, showcasing actionable strategies. His pioneering work in corporate ecological reform continues to shape a sustainable future. He is the author of eight books, including Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.

We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.

– Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

Can we really end the climate crisis in one generation? What kind of bold collective action, technologies, and nature-based solutions would it take to do it?

Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. A leading voice in the environmental movement, he has founded successful eco-friendly businesses, authored influential works on commerce and ecology, and advised global leaders on economic and environmental policies. As the founder of Project Regeneration and Project Drawdown, Paul leads efforts to identify and model solutions to reverse global warming, showcasing actionable strategies. His pioneering work in corporate ecological reform continues to shape a sustainable future. He is the author of eight books, including Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.

We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.

– Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation

How can we learn to flourish because of who we are, not in spite of it? What is the sensory experience of the world for people with autism and ADHD? How can music help heal trauma and foster identity?

Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AuDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

There are some things that don't need to be explained. It's helpful to have a label or labels that show that there's a wide variety of experiences in this world, but then it's also nice to have those unspoken artistic experiences that are other pathways for healing and understanding.

MATTIA MAURÉE

One of the things I think about a lot is this. I vividly remember the desire throughout pretty much most of my twenties and certainly my teen years to be a famous artist and win big awards. And when you dig down into what you actually want from that, it's connection. The teen brain, in particular, is extremely geared toward connection and gets different brain chemical payouts for different things than adults. So certainly, when I think of like teenagers, I think of that drive for connection and fitting in and being accepted is so strong. And that was a part of my artistic output or desire as well was like, okay, if I write, you know, something world-changing, like then it could be like a really well-regarded composer and get that respect. Or if I go more of the songwriting and film route, I can be beloved or have people love my music and have this emotional experience with my music. There were all these dreams that I had that I think largely boiled down to just wanting to be accepted. And you can get that outside of your career and outside of the arts.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How do you make that time for your art? And how do you come to a good place where you have a relationship with your unconscious so that it can solve some of these things that perplex us?

MAURÉE

So for me, it just kind of removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.

How can we learn to flourish because of who we are, not in spite of it? What is the sensory experience of the world for people with autism and ADHD? How can music help heal trauma and foster identity?

Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AuDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

There are some things that don't need to be explained. It's helpful to have a label or labels that show that there's a wide variety of experiences in this world, but then it's also nice to have those unspoken artistic experiences that are other pathways for healing and understanding.

MATTIA MAURÉE

One of the things I think about a lot is this. I vividly remember the desire throughout pretty much most of my twenties and certainly my teen years to be a famous artist and win big awards. And when you dig down into what you actually want from that, it's connection. The teen brain, in particular, is extremely geared toward connection and gets different brain chemical payouts for different things than adults. So certainly, when I think of like teenagers, I think of that drive for connection and fitting in and being accepted is so strong. And that was a part of my artistic output or desire as well was like, okay, if I write, you know, something world-changing, like then it could be like a really well-regarded composer and get that respect. Or if I go more of the songwriting and film route, I can be beloved or have people love my music and have this emotional experience with my music. There were all these dreams that I had that I think largely boiled down to just wanting to be accepted. And you can get that outside of your career and outside of the arts.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How do you make that time for your art? And how do you come to a good place where you have a relationship with your unconscious so that it can solve some of these things that perplex us?

MAURÉE

So for me, it just kind of removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.