Introducing the Annual 2024 - and the official Episode 100 of the Spaceship Earth Podcast.

A reflection of the year gone by with a nod to what it might be showing us about the future that is unfolding.

A curation of the highlights of 2024 on the podcast, it features clips, reflections, insights and learnings from many of the episodes.

It’s not exhaustive, not every guest is featured but I’ve included clips that felt to me to be fertile, wise and vital insights for these times we are travelling in.

So if you are a regular listener I hope this captures some of the highlights for you and you might appreciate the reflections and insights we share.

If you are new to the podcast I hope this gives you a flavour of what we’re doing here and inspires you to dig into these conversations and episodes more deeply and jump into the becoming crew community

We’ve put a lot of time into creating this episode, I recommend putting the headphones on or turning up the speakers.

It's a sonic adventure.

This episode features sections from about 20 conversations across 2024 in just over 2 hours.

I have curated these through the following themes which were alive in 2024 and we are carrying into the podcast and the becoming crew offerings for the journey ahead:

1. The importance and possibilities of non-ordinary experiences through nature based rites of passage and rituals

2. Decolonising and growing post-capitalist realities

3. Practice-driven change for ways through the divisiveness and violence of these times

4. Honouring death, grief and composting our s**t as vital regenerative practices

5. Shifting our relationality, seeing the natural world from transactional to sacred

6. Imagining and Re-membering alternative futures

7. The Future is Local - we can network for the rest

8. Centering the young/Intergenerational by Design

9. Now is the Time for Crews

Finally we'd love to hear your thoughts to help us shape the next year of the Spaceship Earth Podcast.

We want to keep crafting the offering to stay useful and relevant in these challenging and emerging times.

Your feedback helps us to understand where folks are at with the podcast in its current form.

It will take about 10 mins of your time and we'd be so grateful for your feedback.

LINKS

Our listener Survey - We’d so value your inputs in helping us shape the next chapter for the Podcast

Into the Dark - Our Winter Community Adventure - Join us

Two winter offerings for you.

Two invitations to step into the dark.

I am not ready to get back to it - whatever it is.

But just beginning to find some slowness and stillness in my body.

After crawling through the portal of the Winter Solstice and into the festiveness of things.

The last two days actually feel like winter here.

The ground is frozen.

The stars shine extraordinary at night.

I can feel a gentle connection in my body with the land around me.

A slow synching.

I’m just starting to feel an interest in reflecting on what was and what might be.

The year gone by and the one beginning.

Just a stirring of curiosity.

Over the last few years I’ve given up setting new year intentions and goals and in and out lists for the start of January.

It just doesn’t feel true to me.

I’m suspicious of the rush to get going.

It smells colonial.

I am always still full.

Of the year that has been

All the contradictions, confusion, joy, grief and possibility,

They’re still there

Quieter and calmer but not yet examined

And given perspective.

And so needing to create space

For reflecting and composting.

What threads to trust, follow and hang onto this year?

What to let go of ?

Preparing the ground for new emergings.

And that can’t happen fast.

With integrity

It needs time.

As winter does.

I struggle with goals in the dark.

And this is dark time.

So I have two winter offerings for you.

Two invitations to step into the dark

The first is this new Earth Sessions mix:

Into the Dark - a deep, slow, wintery, sonic meander, through ambient electronic melancholy into deep house.

Sounds and tracks that I’m finding connection and curiosity with in these darker, colder times of breakdown, reflection, exploration and dreaming towards the light

Tracklist on website

If you walk with it, run with it, sit with it, drive with it, cook with it.

Dance with it.

I hope you enjoy it

The second offering is an invitation to join our next practice community learning adventure which begins 23rd January

Into the Dark

( notice the theme)

This is the third year we’re hosting this journey and it really is a magical adventure.

Personally this has now become the only way to prepare the ground and surface my intentions for the year ahead.

Info and register

Wherever you are I hope you find some peace in these darker times

Episode 99 is a shorter offering with the wise, wonderful and humble Azul Carolina Duque.

Azul is a Colombian artist and educator. Her artistic practice is about relating to embodied sound as a tool for re-membering ourselves out of our collective denials.

These explorations are informed by her training as a musician, a death doula and a clown.

She is also on the path of relating to music as a living entity, as opposed to a product to be consumed.

She is a member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective, which you may recall from Episode 96 with Vanessa Andreotti - author of Hospicing Modernity and co-founder of the collective.

GTDF is a trans-disciplinary multi-generational art/research collective that develops technologies of inquiry through artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being.

GTDF is also about hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us with care and integrity, as well as attention to the lessons these deaths offer, while also assisting with the birth of new and potentially wiser worlds.

This was recorded in my garden in the summer, during a small gathering of West Country crew as Azul was visiting the UK.

This is in my opinion a beautiful taster of the deep, powerful, complex work that Azul and the collective are focussed on with deep humility, honesty and often humour.

Azul speaks to seeing the Earth as a living entity and recognising the entanglement between humans, land and all life.

About the importance of acknowledging and embracing complexity, including the uncomfortable and painful aspects of our current reality and the relational and cognitive challenges we are facing.

She speaks to modernity and colonialism as forces of separation, the dis-ease of separation, urging a shift towards relational approaches developed alongside indigenous knowledge.

Azul emphasises the significance of composting work, both internally and externally, sitting with the s**t so that we process properly and don’t continue to pass it down to the next generation.

She also speaks to the critical role of elders, rites of passage, and the transition between life stages in fostering a sense of service and responsibility to life on Earth.

The conversation also includes some beautiful questions from crew who had gathered in the garden on what was a sweltering hot afternoon.

So I hope you enjoy this, Azul is in my opinion a remarkable human, and a wonderful storyteller as you will hear, carrying vast wisdom beyond her years, and shows up with great humility and compassion and playfulness , dedicating her young life to this work

We are very lucky to have her on board Spaceship Earth.

LINKS

https://decolonialfutures.net/

https://decolonialfutures.net/hospicingmodernity/

Into the Dark - 5 week community winter adventure with Becoming Crew

This episode was from a live panel I hosted recently here in my home city of Bath, UK.

A conversation with a brilliant crew embedded with the lands and rivers who are working to steward, guardian, protect, connect and regenerate life between human communities and more than human ecologies.

This was part of a community engagement day for West Country Bio-Regional project We Are Avon.

We Are Avon is a movement of landworkers, organisations and communities collaborating for regional transformation of our land, river and food systems.

This is a self organising bottom up collective of folks around the Avon River who are collaborating and experimenting to envision a bio-regional future - this is proper roll up your sleeves become the change movement - very much in the spirit of becoming crew.

The panel was focussed specifically on exploring rivers, our relationships to them, the state they are in and why they are such a key connection in a bio-regional project.

My guests were a quite brilliant crew:

Amelia Crews - ocean and river activist, community energy organiser and climate and nature action dynamo.

Eva Perrin - Aquatic Ecologist, PhD graduate in freshwater biogeochemistry, community activator for citizen science and river protection, co-founder of Conham Bathing Group and Rave on for the Avon.

Hamish Evans - permaculturist, regenerative farmer and prefigurative activist - co-founder MiddleGround Growers

Paul Powlesland - river guardian, rights for nature campaigner and activist lawyer.

Four amazing humans serving life, becoming the change, doing difficult yet joyful work.

This is a dynamic conversation, full of insight, provocation and invitation to get stuck into whatever hood/river/forest you find yourself close to.

It’s very much a conversation about entanglements, relationships and interdependence, the future we’re being called to shape is one of new relationships, of learning to relate in new ways to ourselves, to each other and to this more than human world we call home.

And the ways we relate to the wild waters of this Earth is such a fundamental indicator of the health of the human and more than human crew on Spaceship Earth.

What does it look like to see ourselves, not at the centre of a landscape of place, but decentered, in kinship, in relationship with all life that is there ?

What does it look like to step into a way of being that sees us in a place of kinship, as part of a sacred web of life, not above it trying to create power and control over it, but within - in relationship with.

So I hope this conversation inspires you to get out there and find your own way back into this great mysterious entanglement of life, becoming crew on Spaceship Earth.

If you’re in the Avon hood, come and get involved in We Are Avon - links below

LINKS

Join the We Are Avon info and broadcast channel ( no chat)

We Are Avon Instagram

Amelia Crews

Paul Powlesland on Twitter

Eva Perrin

MiddleGround Growers

River Roding Trust

Lawyers for Nature

Conham Bathing Group

Thriving Avon Charter

Into the Dark - Winter learning Journey from Becoming Crew

In deeply mysterious times I can think of no finer human to help us consider other ways of seeing, thinking and responding to the crises than Bayo Akomolafe who we welcome back for Episode 97.

Bayo is a philosopher, writer, post-activist, professor of psychology and executive director of the Emergence Network.

Bayo was guest in Episode 66 and this conversation was recorded live in a Becoming Crew online learning event in June this year .

As we witness mythic scale events unfold almost weekly, this conversation feels more timely now than it did 5 months ago when it was recorded.

Bayo’s words and thinking continue to ferment in such profound ways.

Having sat on it for a few months, we’ve added some Spaceship Earth sonic love and I feel this is a really potent and helpful offering for this moment .

Bayo is without doubt one of the most important thinkers, writers and speakers in these times of unravelling and one of the most humble, kind and funny humans with it.

The rarest of combinations.

He invites us to see and notice differently, to consider things which often feel invisible, beyond our individualised ways of seeing and yet perhaps, might be critical noticings for finding ways through our collective stuckness.

But only if we’re prepared to venture into the cracks as Bayo might say.

We invited Bayo to come to this conversation to help us explore and better understand the terrain of ‘whiteness’  - whiteness not as skin colour but perhaps as the invisible controlling logic of the systems, structures and deeply engrained ways we act out everyday enmeshed in the pervasiveness of capitalist modernity.

We cover :

- The terrain of whiteness

- Desensitisation and grief

- Moving towards cracks and openings

- The limits of systems theory

- Post-Activism

- Cultivating different ways of responding to these times

- How alternative solutions often continue to serve dominant systems and infrastructure

- Learning to live well with loss and uncertainty

This is a deep, rich, creative and vulnerable conversation about the trouble we are in as a species, brimming with provocation and insight to sit with in this moment.

I’d suggest this is essential fertiliser for heading off the highway of modernity and making new moves.

This was a live online session with our community and includes some beautiful questions towards the end which Bayo responds to.

We play out with a new song from Natalie Fee called Winter.

Is it possible to create thriving, liveable futures without doing the work to acknowledge and process the destructive systems, stories and behaviours that are causing so much devastation to life on Earth today ?

- To understand how these logics run deeply through us and our dominant ways of thinking, seeing and relating.

- To create space to collectively compost these ways to ensure we do not continue to perpetuate the same destructive patterns as we co-create responses and pathways into the future.

- To recognise the urgent need for intergenerational responsibility, to connect across generations for collective processing, learning and healing and cultivating moral responsibility for future life.

Personally I don’t believe we can avoid this work for much longer if we are serious about meaningful change and my guest in this episode Vanessa Andreotti has dedicated her life work to exploring how the dominant knowledge systems of modernity and ways of relating to ourselves, to each other and to the Earth are deeply entangled with the growing violence, divisiveness and declining health of all life on this planet - human and more than human.

Vanessa is Dean of Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, Author, of the groundbreaking book - Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism and Co-founder, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.

Vanessa’s life work has been in education and learning, her practice is rooted in relationality, indigenous knowledge and centering our entanglement with the living Earth.

She has worked extensively across sectors internationally and is a leading voice in global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergencies.

If you haven’t read Hospicing Modernity, you may find some of this conversation challenging.

Hospicing Modernity is not a comfortable read, it proposes that colonialism, racism and other toxic divisions and cultural supremacies that inform the systems of Modernity that we all inhabit run deeply inside us  - perhaps neuro-biologically - it invites readers into an uncomfortable unlearning journey, of noticing, letting go, composting and unmaking ourselves from the violent ways of seeing and being that modernity and industrial consumerist society has created.

We explore:

The challenges we are facing on Spaceship Earth

Responsibilities and challenges in education systems

Hospicing Modernity: The context today

The dis-ease of separation

Intergenerational responsibilities

Composting W.E.I.R.D s**t - Western, Entitled, Individualistic, Reductionist and Delusional.

The role of education, humour and metaphor in addressing complexity

The gut as a site of learning and vulnerability

Embracing entanglement

Healing our fractured relationship with Earth

Supporting the young

The role of elders and rites of passage, transitioning through grief

Time for some tunes.

Time for moving.

As Autumn unfolds

I offer you another Earth Sessions mix

Falling

A gathering of tracks that have been looping heavily of late for me.

A deep, cosmic, organic house vibe.

I hope they move you in some way as things fall.

If you enjoy this, check out the artists, producers and labels in this selection, they are all exceptional creators with stunning offerings to dig into.

More conversations coming soon.

Right I’m off to see Sasha and Digweed.

Wishing you peace wherever you are.

Track Listing on Site

What does one do when everything in our world feels so unhinged ?

As the planet becomes swamped this week with flooding and hurricanes, climate protest as we know it, in the UK at least, carries an increasingly high chance of arrest and conviction.

Politics even with a new administration feels as stuck, exhausted, divisive and non-participatory as ever.

As the polycrisis intensifies, the systems of governance and ways of organising ourselves become more ossified and brittle, and we can see how woefully unfit for purpose they have become for a complex uncertain future.

Now must be the time to accelerate constructive, people-powered participation, for more of us to begin to practice, rehearse, prototype and birth the new moves and the new systems that will put life at the centre.

Because ask yourself - if we’re not doing it - is it going to happen from the top down - led by Govt, Media and Corporations ?

Do you still trust that putting an X in a box during an election is going to do the job, to tackle all the things that keep you awake at night about the future and the rapidly unravelling and violent present ?

My guest in this episode is active citizen - Clare Farrell.

With a background in sustainability, fashion and more recently climate activism as one of the original Co-founders of Extinction Rebellion.

As a designer her work has expanded beyond clothing and material products and into experience design and participation design, strategic communications and strategies for positive social change. 

Clare has been focussing her energies and creativity of late towards constructive forms of social and cultural transformation in the UK.

Manifesting through work with The Humanity Project - a platform focussing on grassroots, participatory democracy via innovative local citizens assemblies

and

with Hard Art Collective - with artist and activist Brian Eno - an artist led ‘feel tank’ exploring how we might weave new cultural contexts that put care and solidarity at the centre.

We explore:

* Grassroots Democracy and Intersectional Issues

* The Power of Collective Imagination

* The Role of Non Violent Protest and Civil Disobedience

* Legal Systems and the Fight for Justice

* The Importance of Disruption in Social Movements

*  Imaginative Capacity and Hard Art

* The Role of Artists in Cultural Change

* Participatory Democracy and Cultural Networks

* Designing Spaces for Interaction and Engagement in people led change

Ultimately to build a connected, resilient society based on care, compassion, freedom and love is going to need big numbers of people actively participating in local assemblies and community organising in the places they live and through the networks and influence they hold.

Citizens not consumers as my friend Jon Alexander puts it.

Becoming Crew on Spaceship Earth as we like to say around here.

Play Out Song

Seeds - Olivia Fern feat Carrie Tree

Episode 93: Ode to the Futures

Recorded in the summer, this 6 minute immersive story is both a framing of the context we find ourselves in

And…

A sonic orientation towards the future - of this podcast, and the offerings and invitations of Becoming Crew.

It’s an expression of the spirit of the ongoing inquiry of this work, the intentionality, manifested through the podcast and the action learning collective and practice community of Becoming Crew.

I hope it speaks to you in some way, and that it might serve as a curious invitation to join us, to dive into the many podcast conversations past and future, to participate in one of our future gatherings and events online and onland.

To collaborate or entangle with us in some way.

If it brings something up for you, please comment, drop us a mail or DM we’d love to hear from you.

May you find peace in these mysterious times.

One for the headphones.

______________________

Words and voice Dan Burgess

Sound design Charlie Shread

Episode 92 is a conversation with three very smart, courageous and thoughtful humans from new regenerative venture with a massive ambition - Nature 2

Gail Gallie, Jay Lipman and Patricia Zurita are co-founders who between them represent highly experienced operators and practitioners across worlds of campaigning and mobilisation, ethics driven finance and global conservation.

Nature 2 is a collaboration that seeks to connect, build and scale systems to urgently drive finance into protecting and regenerating the natural world globally.

At this moment in time there is a funding gap around nature, biodiversity and ecosystem protection and regeneration of approximately 830 billion dollars (gulp!)  - something they call the ‘nature financing gap.’

Nature 2 are on a mission to close that gap. Seeking to catalyse the finance and investor communities to commit to directing 2% of managed assets towards nature based solutions.

We explore:

* Nature 2: A new mission - how this idea emerged, how it works and the roles within this collaborative venture

* The role of finance in nature conservation

* The importance and complexity of shifting destructive subsidies towards regenerative practices

* Navigating capitalism and conservation

* Balancing big company action with local farmers and land based communities

* Mapping the most urgent places on Earth for nature conservation and regeneration

* Philanthropy and capitalism and the entanglement of todays economic system design with climate and ecological breakdown

* Stories and communication to engage funding and investor communities

This conversation was recorded in spring 2024.