In this final episode for Season Seven, co-hosts Mark Allen and Michael Bayliss catch up for a short, freewheeling conversation to wrap up a busy year. In June 2025, Michael and Mark participated in a community consultation weekend on the future development of North Albany. Michael later presented his observations at the Albany Community Environment Centre forum ahead of the City of Albany elections in September. His presentation explained to prospective councillors and fellow environmentalists why urban planning matters for both social wellbeing and ecological resilience. It also invited attendees to reflect upon the long‑term consequences of unchecked growth for the city’s future. For this episode, Michael reads out this talk for posterity, which can also be read on the PGAP blog HERE. This prompts an open discussion with Mark around issues such as: Albany’s growth pains and the impact this has for future planning, housing security and the natural environment; How face to face community consultation, including Citizen Assemblies, can encourage cooperative debate and discussion, in contrast to the divisiveness which is so common in online or social media debates; How holistic approaches to debate can ensure that everyone can find common ground and navigate difference of opinion across many critical issues, including overpopulation; The importance of including post-growth thinking into our conversations, to encourage people to think about the bigger picture and act proactively as well as reactively; Finding the time to be in a space outside of language and narrative. An article, written by Michael in 2023, argues why the pursuit of growth makes this all the more difficult. Link HERE; Election fatigue in which it seems to be a case of the trees voting for the axe at federal, state and local levels, and: Finally, on a darkly humours note, we imagine what kind of apocalypse we face when world coffee stocks run out. As we draw a close to season seven, we reflect on a very good year for PGAP. This has been our longest season to date, beginning as far back as November 2024, when we broadcasted the radio documentary ‘Rethinking Sustainability’. Since then, Season Seven has covered many topics across fifteen episodes, such as steady state economics, techno dystopia, regenerative agriculture and a panel discussion on Degrowth at the University of New South Wales. This year, PGAP was recognised by the site MillionPodcasts as being in the top ten global podcasts that covers overpopulation and in the top fifty podcasts on Sustainable Living. This is very encouraging news to hear as we take a break over the festive season and plan for season eight. While we are on our break, we encourage you to share this and other episodes of PGAP with your friends, family and networks. We are grateful to anyone who takes the time to review and rate us on Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast platform. We are also appreciative when people take the time to contact us directly with feedback and suggestions for future episode topics or guests. Many of our interviews this season came about from community suggestions or from prospective guests who emailed us. Reaching out is so important, not just for building connection but for helping us to broaden our range of episode topics and guests. Last, but certainly not least, we extend our gratitude to Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), which has supported PGAP since its inception in July 2020. This season, we also bid farewell to John Coulter, a long-time leader of SPA and the wider post-growth movement in Australia who sadly passed away last year. We welcomed SPA’s new patron, Anne Poelina, and spoke with Isaac Kabongo, the Ugandan CEO of the Ecological Christian Organisation, who has represented SPA at COP events. You can learn more about SPA here.
