Accidental Gods Accidental Gods

Today we're blowing open a route towards energy security, reduced carbon footprint and saving money - all in the way we make, distribute and use power.  If each of us could minimise our own power use, we'd be a step on the way to reducing our overall carbon footprint: more, we'd be changing the ways we think of ourselves as separate from the web of life.
This week's guest is long time friend of the podcast Howard Johns. Howard is an activist, author, and serial entrepreneur in the field of energy generation - of how we power our lives, keep the lights on and keep ourselves warm.  Howard is now CEO of OneZero energy, a team of energy experts and digital nerds with a shared passion for getting homes off fossil fuels.  One of the biggest climate actions anyone can take is to retrofit their home with four components: Solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and insulation The combination of these makes homes more comfortable, but more importantly, it saves significant amounts of money and massively reduces the carbon footprint - weaning us off fossil fuels.  
Howard himself has founded and led an award winning solar business, a pioneering community-owned energy company, and written a guide book to help others to do the same. He's given a TED Talk, occupied a coal mine and campaigned on energy and climate issues from inside parliament and atop treehouses, and until recently ran a large fleet of solar projects across the EU and UK.
One Zero https://www.onezero.energy/Howard's website: https://www.howardjohns.net/Howard's book: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/energy-revolution-your-guide-to-repowering-the-energy-system-howard-johns/706009AG Episode 89https://accidentalgods.life/power-to-the-people/
Indenture Hemp Insulation https://www.indinature.co/Homely Heat Pump Controllers https://www.homelyenergy.com/
Any Human Power (Manda's book) https://linktr.ee/anyhumanpower

Our guest this week is Richard Smyth, author, crossword designer, cartoonist - and father of two young children Richard writes features, reviews and comment pieces for publications including The Guardian, The Times LiterarySupplement, The New Statesman, and New Scientist. His crosswords – both cryptic and quiz – appear regularly in New Scientist, History Today, and BBC Wildlife. He's part of the team that sets questions for BBC Mastermind, and he's a cartoonist: Private Eye, New Humanist and Claims magazines have all featured his work.
He's the author of five non-fiction books of which the latest is The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell which is one of those captivating works that is both memoir and eulogy of a dying world. It brings together Richard's passionate love of the natural world with his care for his two young children. It's a captivating read that shuttles back and forth along the time lines, weaving Twitter comments from 'Average Dad' with items from the memoirs of old Victorian naturalists who tasted bird's eggs and considerations of how we help the generations that come after us to fall in love with a world that is going to be so, so different from when we were young - however old you are now, whatever your memories. 
So this is one or our more reflective, peaceful, contemplative podcasts, a paean to the worlds of our youth and a hope for the future.  Enjoy!
Richard's Website Richards books at Hive 

in this second election special, we talk to Natalie Bennett (or Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle if we're going to be forma - but she said we didn't need to be) - one of two Green Party members in the House of Lords.  Natalie is author of the Book 'Change Everything: How we can rethink, repair and rebuild society' - one of the essential books of our time that outlines in detail how we can create the total systemic change we need. Natalie will be back in the autumn to discuss this in more detail, but in the meantime, we had a broad, deep conversation on the UK election - where it's going, where it could go and how each of us can help move a progressive, radical, thoughtful, compassionate, useful, climate-and-meta-crisis-aware agenda so that an incoming government will listen to us.  As she says, 'The Tories are Toast', but there's still a lot we can do to elect as many Green MPs as possible.
Natalie Bennett website: https://www.nataliebennett.org/Natalie's Book: https://unbound.com/books/change-everythingNatalie on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GreenNatalieBennett/Natalie on Twitter https://x.com/natalieben

Our guest this week is Dr Deborah Benham, Biomimicry Educator, Transition Town Co-Lead Link and Deep Nature Connection facilitator - which puts her in a place to really unpick what it will take for us to depart the crumbling remains of late-stage capitalism and build a world based on connection, coherence and community. 
From her early days as a Marine Biologist, through her PhD on sea otters (I am not remotely envious of someone who gets to study sea otters for 3 years!), to her time in a community near Findhorn and now in a co-housing community in Dorset, Deborah's life has been oriented towards holding a vision of humanity as a helpful species on this planet. 
As you'll hear, she's the co-Lead Link for Transition Network, the charity which supports the international Transition towns movement; she's a trained Biomimicry Educator and with a background in Jon Young's Deep Nature Connection work, Deborah brings a practical, experiential lived and living toolkit that she shares and teaches - of how we can build thriving human societies, cultures, communities and businesses, designing with and as nature, creating mutual benefit for all life, using tech in life affirming ways, and uplifting justice, kindness and cooperation. 
We often reach an impasse where we know roughly what needs to happen, but don't have the conceptual or practical tools to bring it into being. Deborah has both - she's fully grounded in the theory of how communities of support, practice and place can come into being and she's teaching and living the practice. In fact - she's one of the core team creating the Nature Connection Camp from 4th - 10th August near Bedford in the UK so if you're around and want to experience the many ways we can weave the four threads she talks about, please hit the link in the show notes.
Nature Connection Camp link for Tickets  - https://natureculturenetwork.org/connection-camp/  USE THE DISCOUNT CODE MandaConnection - VALID TILL JUNE 14TH 

Promo short video - https://youtube.com/shorts/924rR_uZtdA?si=DfbMMEIdg7PSNCwt
Video channel with testimonials from previous camps - https://www.youtube.com/@NatureCultureNetwork
Facebook event page - https://www.facebook.com/events/1338787930132432
Resource List 
Connect with Deborah
Deborah's website www.deborahbenham.com
Deborah on Linked In 
Deborah on Instagram - Nature’s Guide to Thriving 
Websites
Biomimicry 3.8
Biomimicry Institute
Nature Culture Network - UK
Living Connection 1st / 8 Shields
Transition Network
Bridport Co-Housing
Events, Courses, Online materials
Introducing Biomimicry to your community
Biomimicry - Ask Nature 
Learn Biomimicry Course
Capra Course
Gaia Education
Nature Culture Connection Camp August 2024
Nature-Based Village Building (enquire directly to Deborah to join the prototype 2024 membership)
Projects

Bonn im Wandel 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru2pywGzsH0Liege Food Belt
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jul/16/the-good-life-in-liege-the-start-of-a-food-revolution
Research and Books

Aldrich, Daniel -   social ties in disaster recovery 

Bregman, Rutger (2021).  Humankind: A Hopeful History

Macdonald, Miriam Kate (2022).  Emergent: Rewilding Nature, Regenerating Food and Healing the World by Restoring the Connection Between People and the Wild. 

Pedersen Zari, M.; Hecht, K. (2020). “Biomimicry for Regenerative Built Environments: Mapping Design Strategies for Producing Ecosystem Services.” Biomimetics 2020, 5, 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics5020018  

Young, Jon, Ellen Haas and Evan McGown (2009).  Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature.

Zelenski, J.; Warber, S.; Robinson, J.M.; Logan, A.C.; Prescott, S.L. (2023).  “Nature Connection: Providing a Pathway from Personal to Planetary Health.” Challenges 2023, 14, 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/challe14010016

Buy Manda's book here
Our first Election Special with friend of the podcast, Neal Lawson.
Neal is Director of the progressive campaign group, Compass and co-host of the Compass podcast ,called It's Bloody Complicated. Neal is a long-time progressive campaigner and a tireless advocate for Proportional Representation as a vehicle for radical progressive change in the way we do politics.  In this swift half hour, we look at the circumstances of this utterly unexpected election and Neal explains the practical steps we can take between now and polling day  with the aim of brining about what he calls a progressive 'Pitch Invasion' that will fundamentally upgrade and update the way we arrange our governance structures...
Neal Lawson on Twitter https://x.com/neal_compassCompass https://www.compassonline.org.uk/Neal in Episode #150 https://accidentalgods.life/charting-a-progressive-route-through-the-political-maelstrom/https://accidentalgods.life/charting-a-progressive-route-through-the-political-maelstrom/

This week's guest, Jessica Bockler is one of those people who sparks every fire in my being - and i hope in yours, too. 
Jessica is an applied theatre practitioner and transpersonal psychologist who co-founded the Alef Trust a globally-conscious non-profit organisation offering online graduate education programmes, and open learning courses for people who want really to step into what Indy Johar so beautifully calls the emergent edge of Inter-Becoming. Jessica is integral to the Nurturing the Fields of Change Programme that brings people together from diverse walks of life to create an emerging community of practice around change - and she's Programme Director for the Trust's academic programmes in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology.
She teaches on a range of topics, bringing spiritual perspectives to activism and social change - so you can begin to see why I find her work so enthralling. She stands at that nexus where transpersonal psychology meets shamanic practice, where being and becoming are an art and a practice in themselves, grounded in modern science - not the reductive, Head Mind science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but twenty-first century science where complexity and systems thinking lie at the heart of all we do, where we recognise that only by becoming fully present in the moment, can we access the whole, vast intelligence of the All That Is and find what is ours to do.
Jessica brings all this into being in social prescribing programmes, in theatre, in change facilitation, in the MSc at Liverpool John Moores University and in her daily life and she shares it in the conversation you're about to hear - including a clip of one of her own practices, that is solid podcasting gold.  If you're interested in finding out how we can access our own inner intelligence and build with others to co-create the foundations of that more flourishing future we'd be proud to leave behind, then this is the podcast for you. 
ALEF Trust  https://aleftrust.org Nurturing the Fields of Change https://www.aleftrust.org/alef-applied/nurturing-the-fields-of-change-programme/MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology https://www.aleftrust.org/academic-learning/masters-degree/Live Event: Healing Humanity, 1st June 2024, Broughton Sanctuary, Yorkshire eventbrite.co.uk/e/healing-humanity-imagination-embodiment-and-community-tickets-887551710057 Workshop: Embodied Imagination for Social Change, 2nd & 3rd September, Oxford eurotas2024.com/pre-post-conference-workshops/towards-emergence-embodied-play-and-sourcing-for-transformation Conference, 4 – 8 Sept, Oxford: Creative Bridges: embodied consciousness, psyche & soul in research and practice eurotas2024.comNational Academy for Social Prescribing https://socialprescribingacademy.org.uk/Inner Green Deal  https://innergreendeal.com/