Planet: Critical Rachel Donald

We belong to our symbols as much as they belong to us. Like the planetary environment, our relationship with language and symbols has impacted our culture, even our biology, argues Professor of Anthropology, Terrence Deacon. Our capacity for interpretation allows us to understand one another and work as a collective mind, explaining the incredible leaps our species has made—and also the trouble we’re in.
Terrence joins me to explain our relationship to symbols and how they evolve with the world. We then discuss what happens when our symbols get stuck, or disconnected, simplifying into ideological constructs which fix our identities.
Planet: Critical is 100% independent and community-powered. If you value it, and have the means, become a paid subscriber today!



Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Whoever controls the energy supply controls the new world order.
Russia and China are deepening their relationship, Western allies in the Middle East are joining the fossil-fuelled BRICS alliance spanning the globe, and the Wagner group is loosening Europe’s grip of Africa. The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting along new fault lines as rising powers focus on securing resources while the old Empire in the West pretends it can decouple economies and energy. The world is at war, but only one side is being honest about what for.
Acclaimed energy expert Art Berman says this is the culmination of millennia of human fallibility. This is a conversation that takes us from 3000 BCE and the discovery of what he calls the most disruptive technology humans ever had right up to today and the energy wars blooming around the world. We discuss our psychological disposition to immaturity, our cognitive shortcomings when examining complexity, the secrets of holy texts and even morality. Art explains how energy is reshaping geopolitical alliances, which leaders understand the reality of our situation, and why technology cannot solve our problems.
Planet: Critical is 100% independent and community-powered. If you value it, and have the means, become a paid subscriber today!




Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies?
Tim Garrett and I come to refer to these as “the holy trinity”. Tim is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, and over two years ago, he joined me to discuss the thermodynamics of collapse, where he explained his research into the behaviour of snowflakes and how you could extrapolate the behaviour of economies and civilization using the laws of thermodynamics. He's back on the show to explain how we use our energy, the necessity of a surplus of energy and how all of this relates to a society's growth and health.
In this conversation we discuss questions like: Will renewables facilitate an increased consumption of fossil fuels? Can we reduce inequality by reducing energy consumption? How can we organise a wave-like civilisation, which grows and decays within safe boundaries? Can we decline in order to recover before crashing completely?


Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

What does artificial intelligence have in common with eugenics?
The first person to float the idea of a "general intelligence" was a eugenicist who was determined to rank intelligence according to race. This is just one of the legacies of A.I., a technology which Silicon Valley vehemently promises will transform the world, but which for now only consumes enormous quantities of energy. Despite the warnings from technologists around the world, for-profit companies are racing to develop A.G.I. no matter the costs.
Artist John Wild has traced the deep history of A.I., finding its roots in disturbing schools of thought which seek to raise the dead. He's also found where these histories are alive and kicking in C-Suite boardrooms. He joins me to reveal the disturbing imaginaries associated with A.I., and how we can begin to reimagine it as an entangled, decentralised, collaborative tool to create new ways of being.
Planet: Critical is 100% independent and community-powered. If you value it, and have the means, become a paid subscriber today!



Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Who takes the initiative when governments fail to ask?
Amazingly, in Denmark, an industry is lobbying its government for much tighter regulations to absolutely reduce emissions in order to meet the Paris Agreement. Stakeholders across the entire Danish building industry have agreed to an ambitious reduction roadmap tafter a team of architects undertook an independent review of government policies. They found that global building emissions must be reduced by 96% to limit global warming, and are currently lobbying for an emissions cap of carbon dioxide kilograms per meter squared.
I'm joined by Dani Hill-Hansen, sustainable design engineer, architect at EFFEKT, and co-author of the Reduction Roadmap. She explains the findings of their research, the ambitious targets of the roadmap, how they got 540 stakeholders across the industry to sign on, and the methodology of "brand activism" they've developed alongside this project to kickstart other industries across the globe to initiate necessary climate action.



Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

What’s the future of food?
Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to George’s own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as “eco-modernist”. George hit back that Chris’ proposal is a “cruel fantasy”.
I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.
Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food.



Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe