Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling) on Steno.fm

Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

How will they look in hindsight, these strange times we are living through? Is this a midlife crisis on humanity's road to the Star Trek future – or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? These are the kind of questions which we set out to explore in The Great Humbling. We hope you'll join us and let us know what you think. Ed Gillespie & Do...

Fri, March 14, 2025
"Burnout From Humans" with Vanessa Andreotti
This episode is the podcast version of a live event a few weeks ago , hosted by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, where I joined Vanessa Andreotti – who some of you will know as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – to wonder about what she is up to with AI. To say it came as a surprise when Vanessa mentioned that she had co-written a book with an AI bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea… well, that would be an understatement. Here, she shares more about why GTDF has chosen to work with AI and we puzzle this through with the help of stories. If you’re coming to this without any context, then I recommend checking out the first couple of items in the shownotes before heading further into the episode, which starts with me quoting Vanessa’s alter ego, Dorothy Ladybug Boss: The first thing you need to know about this book … is that it asks you to suspend both belief and disbelief. Shownotes * The Burnout from Humans website – read the book Vanessa wrote together with Aiden Cinnamon Tea and interact with Aiden for yourself. * The Wild Chatbot – read or listen to the essay in which I tell the story of how Burnout From Humans came about and my attempt to make sense of what Vanessa, Aiden and the GTDF collective are up to here. * Landing with the Land Differently – from the GTDF, an alternative to the familiar game of land acknowledgements. * Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism – Vanessa’s previous book. * Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity & Collapse with Accountability & Compassion – Vanessa’s forthcoming book, available for preorder now. If you want to support my work, including the making of Homeward Bound and the Great Humbling, then consider becoming a paid subscriber to Writing Home – where you’ll also have access to the In-Between Videos and live events like the one-off book club on Martin Buber’s I and Thou which we just ran. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.homewardbo
Mon, December 16, 2024
The Great Humbling S6E4: The Consolations of Folklore
As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey. Show Notes * Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road , is available now through Etsy. * Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees . * Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales . * Martin Shaw ’s Westcountry School of Myth . * On three ways of handling the “spiritual gelignite” of myth – retelling, translation and reabsorption/transmutation – Alan Garner’s essay, ‘The Death of Myth’ , originally published in the New Statesman, 1970. * The Owl Service – Garner’s transmutation of the myth of Blodeuwedd. * For more on the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, see Paul Radin’s The Trickster . * Three recent pieces from Mary Harrington – ‘“Woke” Is Not The New Reformation’ , ‘Scrolling Toward The Divine’ , ‘Yes, the “Woke Right” is real’ . * The Levi-Strauss line about “science, which started out by separating itself from myth, will eventually encounter it once again” is discussed in Debi Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World . * James Bridle, New Dark Age . * We’ll talk about D.W. Pas
Thu, December 12, 2024
Five Questions for a Time of Beginnings
My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins , an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Ruins . The original set of tasks goes like this: * Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking with us. * Mourn the good things we have to leave behind – and do this, not least, by telling their stories, because these stories may turn out to be seeds in futures we can’t imagine yet. * Notice the things that were never as good as we told each other they were about the ways we’ve been living around here lately, and the chance we’re given to leave these behind. * Look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story and the chance to weave these back in – the things that have been marked as old-fashioned, inefficient, obsolete, but that might turn out to make all the difference on the journey ahead. In the course of this episode, Jay brings up five questions that follow on from these tasks: * What should we seek to use before we lose it? * What can we produce now, knowing what is coming? * What can we evolve from things we’ll lose? * What are the seeds of the things we mourn – and how do we harvest these? * What do we need to learn and teach future generations? You can listen to Jay’s regular mini-podcasts at Make Kindness Easier! The Stone Paper product is being developed by the folks at Solar Punk Now . He’s @jaycousins on Twitter and here’s his LinkedIn . Show Notes * We mention Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and how she couples the work of hospicing to the work of “assisting with the birth of new, as-yet-unknown, and potentially – but not necessarily – wiser”. * Richard Smith’s review of At Work in the Ruins in the British Medical Journal applies the original “four tasks” to the fields of medicine and public health. * Jay
Tue, November 19, 2024
The Great Humbling S6E3: #DECELERATE
In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like? Shownotes * Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam * Andy Hamilton , New Wild Order * James Kaelan, 999 Years of Peace is “a luddite publication, not for sale”, but you could try sending Cartoon Distortion a message on Instagram to find out more. * Elizabeth Oldfield , author of Fully Alive was talking at The Kairos Club, London this week. Kairos currently has paperback copies of At Work in the Ruins on sale for £10 and some great events coming up with friends of this podcast: * Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (SAFER) with Rupert Read, Tuesday 26 November * A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins , Thursday 28 November * Ece Temulkeran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship * Dougald quotes from R. G. Miga ’s comment on our election day episode * Watching “accelerationism” move over the last decade and a bit: * #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek (2013) * Paul Mason, <a target="_blank" href="https://www
Fri, November 15, 2024
"Maybe I'm NOT a Doomer?" with Isabelle Drury
In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury , author of the Substack Finding Sanity . I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse: I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘ Shall we have a baby?! Shall we move abroad?! Shall we buy a van?!’ Yet every answer felt wrong, because my future didn’t feel wide open. My future felt very small, and like there was only one possibility: the aforementioned end of the world. The thing is, as I heard the words come out of my mouth garbled by tears, I realise I don’t actually believe this. Deep down, I don’t actually believe we are totally, irrevocably, and unequivocally fucked. I’ve known Isabelle for a couple of years, she’s been part of the conversations that Anna and I host at a school called HOME , and one of the themes that’s been coming up for me lately in that work is the difference in what it asks of us when we show up to the trouble the world is in, depending on the season of life we’re in. I want to lean into this further and record some more conversations with folks of different generations who are wrestling with the questions I wrote about in At Work in the Ruins , asking how we show up for each other across the generational differences that Isabelle and I talk about in this episode. I hope you enjoy our conversation – and do check out Isabelle’s Substack. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org
Tue, November 05, 2024
The Great Humbling S6E2: Remember, Remember!
Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament. While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices , starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?” And here’s a line from friend-of-the-show Elizabeth Oldfield that came in after we recorded, but resonates with today’s conversation: We all have would-be tidy assumptions, and need a mess making of them if we have any hope of encountering people and the world as they really are. (from ‘Expanding Eros, Or Why connection is my kink’ ) Shownotes * The last(?) interview with John Berger , shortly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. * “In such a climate, somebody who is actually saying something, who seems to suggest that there may be a connection between what he said and what he will do, such a person is a way out of a vacuous nightmare—even if the way out is dangerous or vicious.” * Ed has joined the Old Glory Molly dancing group and got into trouble for singing ‘The Dog Song’ . * Dougald gives a shout-out to The Climate Majority Project . * There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. * American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by D. W. Pasulka. * Birds, Beasts & Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Derek Gow. * Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene by Kelly Dombroski. * <a target="_blank" href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/the-plan
Wed, October 23, 2024
The Great Humbling S6E1: When the S**t Hits the Roomba
“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.” We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube. Shownotes * Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. * Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin . * Dougald talks about Em Strang’s novel, Quinn . Also her newly launched Substack, Emerging Hermit – and especially the ‘Our Violent Men’ series that she is embarking on. * Ed talks about Simeon Morris’s one-man show, Square Peg . * Dougald introduces a little book called Notes on Nothing by Anonymous. * Also an episode of the Spiritual Teachers podcast called The Hillbilly Sutra , a one-off telling of the story of a Nashville banjo player who had a similar experience – and who, despite the podcast’s title, has no interest in selling himself as a spiritual teacher. * ‘My iRobot vacuum found dog poo and almost created World War III’ * Cory Doctorow’s original post about “enshittification” . * Paul Virilio’s observation that every new technology brings into being a new kind of accident can be found in The Politics of the Very Worst . * Ed talks about meeting Jess Groopman of the Regenerative Technology Project . * Dougald remembers the vacuum cleaner scene in the first episode of Meet the Natives , the 2007 documentary series in which
Wed, October 16, 2024
The Times Into Which We Were Born (Solo Show)
Midway through last month’s North American tour, the filmmaker Katie Teague sat me down to record an interview. Sometimes an interview happens at just the right moment, when all the work you’re carrying is on the top of your tongue. That’s what happened here – so with Katie’s permission, we’re releasing an audio version of her edit of what I told her that morning. The result is more or less a solo show, since you don’t hear Katie’s questions and my answers come in stories rather than paragraphs. If you haven’t read At Work in the Ruins , then this episode is a good way into it – and if you have, then it will give you a sense of where I’ve been taken by the conversations the book led me into. It also provides some good context for Pockets, Patterns & Practices , the five-week online series that I’ll be teaching next month. Shownotes * Katie Teague’s YouTube channel with other interviews, including Joanna Macey, Jonathan Rowson and more. * Support Katie’s work through her Patreon . * Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps aka “Six Ways to Die” * Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “everything we don’t have to do” * My interpretation of Eno’s definition in The Kitchen Table * At Work in the Ruins now out in paperback * Pockets, Patterns & Practices starts on 6 & 7 November 2024 and runs for five weeks. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org Homeward Bound theme music: ‘Hope and the Forester’ by Blue Dot Sessions Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! This post is public so feel free to share it. Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.or
Wed, August 21, 2024
The Gifts in the Ruins with Dr Ashley Colby
In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast . Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour. * Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat * The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/ Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. We talk about how long it is since I last visited the US. Back then, I was travelling as part of an internet startup, School of Everything, inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society . Among my co-founders was Mary Harrington , who describes her experience the mess of that start-up experience early on in Feminism Against Progress – and it turns out that Ashley also features later on in that book. Chicago is Ashley’s hometown. She talks about how she and her husband moved away, after she got “doom-pilled”, and about their decision to return a few years later. This is partly about getting away from “spreadsheet mind”. It’s important to me to have these urban examples of what “regrowing a living culture” can look like. However much we may be working for what Chris Smaje calls a “small farm future”, there’s also a need for examples of what it looks like when we start from the places where many people find themselves. One example for me is the small community of radical hospitality in south London that Elizabeth Oldfield writes about in Fully Alive . Ashley talks about the retreat she hosted last year with Paul Kingsnorth at the Wagon Box in Wyoming – and how she seems to have fallen into the role of helping Dark Mountain co-founders find their bearings in North America. We discover a mutual admiration for Richard D. Bartlett ’s approach to bringing groups together – and Ashley talks about how this shaped her approach to convening co-created retreats like the one we will be holding. I look back on experiences with the community of Ivan Illich’s surviving friends and collaborators, a way of gathering around the table that is a
Tue, May 21, 2024
Taking Beauty Seriously with Caroline Ross
As the fifth season of The Great Humbling came to an end, we recognised that what we’ve been doing is letting you listen in on a conversation that we would want to have anyway – and this inspired us to expand the podcast, to bring you overheard conversations with other friends, co-conspirators and people who get us thinking. We’re calling this Homeward Bound, a title that started off as the name of the first online series that Dougald Hine taught with a school called HOME in 2020. For a few series now, we’ve used homewardbound.org as the home for The Great Humbling. These are two images that gesture in the same direction: they name a need to come down to earth, to be called back from the fantasies of endless growth and technological progress, to face the depth of the trouble around and ahead of us, to find the kinds of agency that make sense now. We’ll continue to make new episodes of The Great Humbling with Ed and Dougald and you’ll find those here, but alongside them there will also be other conversations that pick up on the themes you’ve heard us speak about. To set this rolling, we’re going to put out the podcast version of the series of “overheard conversations” that Dougald has been hosting this spring over at Writing Home , starting with this conversation with Caroline Ross . This conversation took place on Zoom in March with a live audience made up of subscribers to Writing Home and Uncivil Savant . You’ll hear the first forty minutes of conversation between Caro and Dougald. If you’d like to watch a recording of the Q&A that followed, then head over here and sign up for a paid subscription. As mentioned in the intro to this episode, this week also sees the start of Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture , a five-week online series where you can join Dougald and other participants from around the world to explore the work of becoming realists of a larger reality, starting where we find ourselves and finding the courage to act. Full details at aschoolcalledhome.org . Thanks for listening! Shownotes Follow <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/827056
Thu, February 29, 2024
The Great Humbling S5E8: 'State of the Humbling'
The end of this fifth series of The Great Humbling finds us looking back over the loose ends from earlier episodes, exploring the wider field of “Humility Studies” and asking who exactly we think we’re talking to, anyway? We start with Ed reporting back from The Fête of Britain , the inaugural festival of the Hard Art collective, which took place in Manchester last week, where he found himself hosting a gameshow whose panellists included Clare Farrell, Lee Jasper and the folk singer Jennifer Reid , who specialises in singing broadside ballads to reconnect audiences with the working class tradition of the northwest of England. Other goings-on included our friend Elizabeth Slade of the Unitarian Church leading a “Sunday Service” which included a choir conducted by Brian Eno and a “sermon” from Jarvis Cocker. Ed also describes his late-night outreach in a Salford bar, where “Psychedelic Pete” thanked Hard Art members for bringing this chaos to the city. Among all these adventures, there’s a serious question that we take with us on into this episode, one that’s been put to us by our friend Jamie Kelsey Fry: who do you think you are talking to ? In any of the work we’re doing, are we preaching to the choir, or talking a language that can bridge across boundaries and invite all kinds of other voices into the conversation? And does this matter? Our first answer is: there’s room for each of these kinds of talk, but it’s good to know which you’re actually doing. Dougald chases up a few other loose ends from this episode. He and Alfie have reached the ninth instalment of The Bagthorpe Saga , but despite the efforts of listeners, the elusive tenth book is still out there, so the search continues! (And a reward awaits the finder of a copy of Bagthorpes Battered .) Talk of “burning a million quid” – from our early episodes on the KLF ( S5E3 , S5E4 ) – gets woven into the earlier thread of Making Good Ruins ( S5E1 ), because Drummond and Caughtie’s ritual on the Isle of Jura anticipates the project of using economic resources in ways that make no sense according to the logic within which our economic system imagines them. During a conversation with Chris Smaje and Christopher Brewster, Dougald finds himself scrawling “Let’s burn a billion dollars!” across a page in his notebook. But as Ed sugges
Fri, February 16, 2024
The Great Humbling S5E7: 'Founders Confessions'
In our latest episode, Ed and Dougald compare notes on the experience of being founders – or co-founders – of organisations. What did we learn along the way? And what do humble forms of leadership look like? We were recording on Shrove Tuesday, so the episode kicks off with a discussion of seasonal customs, including the Swedish semla … On a recent Danish tour, Dougald returned to teach at the Kaospilots school , reconnecting with one of the inspirations that set him on the path of kickstarting projects and organisations in his twenties. The last day of that tour was also the first anniversary of publication of At Work in the Ruins . Meanwhile, Ed has been speaking at the annual conference of the UK’s Garden Centre Association, which got him thinking about quite what a significant proportion of the country’s land area is made up of domestic gardens. The association’s chairman turns out to be called William Blake – which takes us back to our earlier conversations about John Higgs ’s brilliant book on Blake , which friend-of-this-podcast C J Thorpe-Tracey gave to Dougald on last year’s UK tour. Talk of gardens also takes us to the importance of domestic gardens within Chris Smaje ’s projections for how the UK could feed itself in A Small Farm Future , and also to Gunnar Rundgren ’s Garden Earth - Beyond sustainability . There’s another thread running through this episode about the deeper understanding of Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday and Lent as a season of reckoning with the places where we are aware of falling short – and a chance to make changes. Dougald talks about taking up the invitation to a Communal Digital Fast made by Ruth Gaskovski and Peco of the School of the Unconformed . He also confesses to having binged the final season of Game of Thrones , be
Fri, February 02, 2024
The Great Humbling S5E6: 'The Low Agreements'
This is the episode where we finally left Skype, which we’ve for some reason been using to record these conversations for four and a half series. Switching off the lights as we go, Ed wonders about other examples of old systems and technologies that are still in use, such as Windows Submarine. Dougald reports back on his trip to Gothenburg – and makes an appeal for help in locating a copy of Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpes Battered , the tenth and final instalment in her saga about the terrible (and hilarious) Bagthorpe family. If you have a copy gathering dust on your shelves or boxed away in the attic, a reward is offered, and you’d also make an eight-year-old boy and his dad very happy. Picking up on last episode’s discussion of populism, Dougald brings in a PhD thesis by the Brazilian scholar Neto Leão, ‘Vernacular Forms of Living: Thinking After Ivan Illich ’. ‘To hell with sustainability!’ Neto declares, echoing Illich's pronouncement, ‘To hell with good intentions! ’ Among the framings that Neto draws from Illich is his emphasis on the necessity of setting social limits: before we even get to ecological limits, our capacity to live well together requires us to make collective choices that include saying no to certain possibilities, technologies and forms of ownership. ‘Natural thresholds are generally crossed after social limits are breached,’ he writes. It’s interesting to set this alongside Kate Raworth’s influential Doughnut Economics , which maps ‘planetary boundaries’ together with ‘social boundaries’. The difference is that, in Raworth’s mapping, the social boundaries are presented in terms of a minimum of basic needs, rather than a limit that it is unwise to exceed. Neto also draws attention to ‘Peace vs Development ’, a talk which Illich gave in Japan in 1980, where he distinguishes the pax populi (people’s peace) from the pax economicum , the enforced peace from above that results from a ‘balance of powers’, as represented by globalisation. Illich presents the pax economicum as the successor to the pax romana of the Roman Empire. There are clues here for the search for good forms of ‘populism’ that we spoke about in the previous episode – while Neto develops Illich’s thoughts by suggesting that the pax ecologica is now offered as the successor to the pax economicum . The contrast between the pax ecologica and the pax populi is refl
Fri, January 19, 2024
The Great Humbling S5E5: 'Make Populism Good Again?'
Here's a rundown of references from this episode... Leah Rampy, Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos Bill Drummond, 45 David Mitchell, Unruly David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything Jay LeSoleil, 'Green' Elites vs Green Left Populism Avtryck/Imprint – a documentary from the Swedish Transition Towns movement Chris Smaje (from 2016), 'Why I'm still a populist despite Donald Trump: elements of a left agrarian populism' 'Desert' – an anonymous anarchist text, quoted in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World Debbie Kasper, 'Microcosm of Transition' – about the day the cow came home This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org
Fri, December 15, 2023
The Great Humbling S5E4: 'The Forever Project'
Our final episode of 2023 finds Dougald already in his Christmas jumper, as the tiredness of a busy year catches up with the pair of us. Ed opens a window on Sophie Howarth’s Lighting the Dark: An Advent Calendar . We share the Benjamin Zephaniah poems that have been going round in our heads, since the news of his death was announced, ‘To Do Wid Me’ and ‘Rong Radio Station’ and ‘Luv Song’ . Ed’s been reading a doorstop of a novel, The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Dougald has been revisiting the work of Pam Warhurst and Incredible Edible Todmorden , including something he heard her say about finding ‘a forever project’, something that you’ll be working on for the rest of your life. We pick up the story from last episode about the KLF, inspired by John Higgs’s book, The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds . Uncannily, it turns out that the KLF released a new single the day before we recorded our previous episode – here is KLF KARE & Harry Nilsson ft. Ricardo Da Force, Everybody’s Talking At Me . Possibly not going to make Christmas Number One. This takes us back to the zenith of the original KLF era, the video to Justified & Ancient ft. Tammy Wynette. And then there’s KLF vs Extreme Noise Terror at the Brit Awards . One of the striking thoughts from Higgs’s book is about the timing of the KLF moment, coming in the early 1990s, after the events that marked the end of what historian Eric Hobsbawm called ‘The Short Twentieth Century’ (1914-91). Higgs writes about the ‘liminal’ moment of 1991-94 – apparently these are the only years in Wikipedia where the list of things that ‘happened in this year’ gets shorter rather than longer over time. Anyone writing about the cultural history of the early 1990s tends to reference Douglas Coupland’s Generation X – and Dougald points out that the novel ends with three pages of statistics about a generation growing up poorer than their parents. So in its origins, this wasn’t just about a cultural moment or a ‘slacker’ trend, but the beginning of a reckoning with the unravelling of the rising and broadly shared prosperity of p
Thu, November 30, 2023
The Great Humbling S5E3: 'We Used to Have Fun'
We take a different route into our conversation this time around, in what turns out to be the first in a two-parter woven around John Higgs’s book, The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds , which Ed has been reading. It’s the kind of book that detonates in the mind, sparking a million connections. First, though, we start out talking about humbling moments, great and small, prompted by Dougald’s experience of stumbling upon a conversation between two listeners who had very different responses to our previous episode . The KLF conversation takes in George Orwell’s near-death experience off the coast of the Isle of Jura, where he wrote 1984. Also Alan Moore’s From Hell and his understanding of ‘ideaspace’ . We learn about the dream of a yellow wave that haunted Carl Jung in the years before the First World War – and Ed shares his poem, Foxtime , written in January 2020, which came to feel like a premonition of the pandemic. All of this brings Dougald back to something from the last episode, where he briefly quoted from John Berger’s essay, ‘The Hour of Poetry’, something he expanded on in a subsequent Substack post . According to Berger, the purpose of poetry is to connect the separated, and our friend Dan commented that this couldn’t mean ‘the poet/author/artist being imagined as a professional, solitary figure producing a commodity for a living’, it has to be the opposite of this. And as Dougald was sitting with this comment, an email arrived from Ben Eaton of Invisible Flock with a story about how some words from At Work in the Ruins had come to be used in an extraordinary installation in their current exhibition in Leeds, This is a Forest . (Strangely enough, Dougald has also been part of an exhibition this autumn in Västerås, Sweden called Säg att du är en skog , ‘Say You Are a Forest’.) Meanwhile, the follow-up post about ‘The Hour of Poetry’ triggered a fascinating conversation between Roselle Angwin and Richard Kurth, a glimpse of way that words can call us into relation and away from the traps of
Fri, November 17, 2023
The Great Humbling S5E2: 'Words in Wartime'
We recorded this episode on Dougald’s birthday – and Ed starts with the image of him wearing Anna’s family’s Coyote coat , triggering unsettling flashbacks to the QAnon shaman, who is apparently now running for Congress. Welcome to the dark weirdness of 2023. Ed quotes from Paul Mason’s ‘Gaza: Time for Restraint’ , a story brought to our attention by listener Richard Brophy, about a conversation between George Orwell and Stephen Spender during the Second World War. Before we head further into the core themes of this episode, Ed talks about a recent visit to the Time & Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth and the stories he found in Sarah E Doig’s The A-Z of Curious Norfolk . Among these is the story of the first bomb dropped on British soil, from a Zeppelin over Sheringham on 18th January 1915. Moving to the present, Dougald reads from ‘Two Feather Sunday’ , a recent post by Andrew at Bog-down and Aster . ‘I have been in a quiet lately,’ Andrew writes. ‘I think a fair few of us have.’ What lifts him from this quiet and sets the theme for our conversation is another Substack post, from Caroline Ross , ‘Writing a Chalice’ , and her image words used ‘freely, generously,/as though you were passing/the simple birchwood cup you carved/among friends.’ Responding to a reader, Andrew also describes a realisation that the potency of his work doesn’t lie in seeking ‘more likes, more readers, more subscriptions’, but in finding ‘a handful of close readers’ and ‘a small circle of others writing around the same ideas’, where ideas and images start ‘cross-pollinating’. This takes Ed back to Yancey Strickler’s ‘Dark Forest’ theory of the internet , which we spoke about in S3E8 – and he describes a recent encounter with Yancey and learning about Metalabel , a project supporting ‘creativity in multiplayer mode’. Dougald brings in Adam Wilson’s recent post at The Peasantry School, <a href="https://peasantryschool.substack.
Wed, November 01, 2023
The Great Humbling S5E1: 'The Ruined Church'
Welcome back to Season 5 of The Great Humbling! Here are some show notes... The Regrowing a Living Culture series at a school called HOME starts on 7 & 8 November. Ed has been reading Dougie Strang’s book, The Bone Cave . Dougald mentions the cluster of authors who were part of the first decade of Dark Mountain who are stepping out with books of their own, finding their voice and getting the attention they deserve. This includes Dougie, also his wife Em Strang’s first novel Quinn , Nick Hunt’s first novel Red Smoking Mirror , Caroline Ross’s book on pigment-making, Found & Ground , and her Substack ‘Uncivil Savant’ , and Charlotte Du Cann’s mythic memoir After Ithaca as well as her newly launched Substack, ‘The Red Tent’ . Ed has also been reading Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker and John Lanchester’s The Wall . Dougald mentions Lanchester’s essays on Game of Thrones , Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 dystopian novel, also called The Wall , and finally Helen Cresswell’s hilarious The Bagthorpe Saga . Ed wonders what to say to some of the audiences he ends up getting to speak in front of – and this connects to a question Dougald has been wondering about since the roundtable he took part in for Nate Hagens’s The Great Simplification podcast . Is it possible to take Federico Campagna’s call to ‘make good ruins’ (in Prophetic Culture ) and begin to turn this into strategy? This is the starting point for Dougald’s new Substack series, How We Make Good Ruins . There’s a place Ed goes walking, Covehithe, where the locals dismantled the medieval church and rebuilt a humbler structure inside its ruins. It’s the setting for a short story called ‘Covehithe’ by China Miéville (who, weirdly, shared a ga
Thu, September 28, 2023
The Great Humbling: Live at Norwich Arts Centre
In February this year, we took The Great Humbling into a new format, a live conversation on stage at Norwich Arts Centre as part of the UK tour that Dougald made to launch his book, At Work in the Ruins . It's taken us rather a long time to get the recording edited, but here it is at last. For this live show, Ed and Dougald were joined by two special guests. Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. She works as co-director of the Dark Mountain Project and is the author of After Ithaca and 52 Flowers That Shook My World . She has just launched her Substack, The Red Tent , 'a metaphysical practice for collapsing times', in which she writes to pass on the tools that have served her over the past thirty years. Rupert Read is a philosopher and climate activist. This summer, he left his role as a professor at the University of East Anglia, after 26 years, to dedicate himself to his work as co-director of the Climate Majority Project . He is the author of many books , including Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Do You Want to Know the Truth? The Surprising Rewards of Climate Honesty . We'll be back in a few weeks' time with the first episode of our fifth season. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org
Wed, February 01, 2023
The Great Humbling S4E8: 'We Need to Talk About George'
We reach the end of Season 4 of The Great Humbling, though Ed and Dougald start the show with an invitation to a one-off live recording of a special episode with guests Rupert Read and Charlotte Du Cann for those who can join us in Norwich on 20 February . As always, we start off by talking about what we've been reading, listening to, watching, imbibing, or otherwise taking on board in ways that get us thinking. Ed has been reading a book called At Work in the Ruins by someone called Dougald Hine. He's also working his way through Susan Cooper's classic series of fantasy novels, The Dark Is Rising . And he recently rewatched Roy Andersson's black comedy, Songs from the Second Floor . Dougald talks about Gabor Maté's new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture which connects to many of the themes we've talked about in earlier episodes, not least in relation to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's Hospicing Modernity . Then we come to the book that prompted this episode, George Monbiot's Regenesis . If you've not read the book itself yet, we recommend at least reading George's initial Guardian article in which he introduced his argument about the end of agriculture, ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’ . Ed mentions Chris Smaje's Small Farm Future for a rather different picture of the future of agriculture. For direct responses to Regenesis, we also recommend: – this critique by Chris Smaje; – Simon Fairlie’s review of Regenesis in The Land magazine; – Gunnar Rundgren’s ‘In defence of farming’ ;
Fri, November 25, 2022
The Great Humbling S4E7: 'The Missing Episode'
So, here's what happened – after a long break, we sat down in early October to record the seventh episode of this series, but life got in the way and by the time we got around to editing it six weeks later, the world had changed so much that it felt like a historical document. Britain has (yet) another prime minister, Sweden has a government over which the far-right have an unprecedented influence. But here it is, in any case, 'the missing episode', so you can travel back in time and relive the thoughts that were on our minds earlier this autumn. Some shownotes, then... Firstly, a bow of gratitude to listener Lydia Catterall for her lovely words about the previous episode. Check out Lydia's work here: "Lydia aims to reveal, support and champion the creative people and ideas transforming the make-up of where we live." After mentioning Felix Marquardt's The New Nomads , Ed goes on to talk about Gaia Vince's Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World . He's also been reading Laline Paull's novel, The Bees – 'a thriller set in a beehive, based on real honeybee biology'. Dougald has also been on an interspecies reading trip – he talks about Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis and recommends Sarah Thomas's The Raven's Nest , 'a memoir about resilience and learning to belong, set in the elemental landscape of Iceland's Westfjords', as perfect reading for the dark months of the northern year. Discussing the strange days that followed the Queen's death, Dougald reads from a piece that Diné elder Pat McCabe published on Facebook about praying at the tomb of King Ferdinand of Spain. Ed quotes from Ursula K Le Guin's 2014 speech in which she speaks for the long historical view and being 'realists of a larger reality': 'We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.' Dougald remembers Rowan Williams writing in Lost Icons about the tension between the role of the 'monarch as icon', with its
Tue, July 19, 2022
The Great Humbling S4E6: 'Nice to meet you'
After twenty-nine episodes recorded through screens and cameras, Ed and Dougald find themselves meeting for the first time and sit down for a conversation beside the mill pond in Loddon, in the garden of the Mill of Impermanence. We hear the unlikely tale of how Dougald found Ed’s fiftieth birthday present, a copy of Uriah Heep’s fifth album, The Magician’s Birthday , while en route to a holiday in Great Yarmouth. A chain of serendipitous events leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Yarmouth is the spiritual home of the Great ‘Umbling. This leads to a discussion of ‘serendipity’, the term coined by the novelist Horace Walpole in 1754 , and its opposite, ‘zemblanity’, coined by the novelist William Boyd in 1998 . Dougald explains why he abandoned the article he started writing about all the things he learned from hitchhiking. Ed talks about Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic and we agree that it’s a mindblowing book. Ed makes the connection to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass . Dougald brings in Paul Kingsnorth’s recent conversation with Rowan Williams . Dougald talks about Danny Nemo’s Neuro-Apocalypse</span
Tue, May 24, 2022
The Great Humbling S4E5: 'Belief'
Dougald poses a big question for this episode: what do we believe in? Ed responds playfully and paradoxically with ‘self-delusion’, citing Robert Trivers work on self-deceit that includes gay pornography and erection-o-meters. And lasers. Here's his RSA talk . Dougald talks about the formative influence of spending the first two-and-a-bit years of his life in the grounds of a theological college and what happened when he told his Sunday school teacher that he didn't find Hell 'a particularly helpful concept’. Does it matter more what we believe, or what our beliefs make us do? If there is a throne at the heart of a culture, what do we put on it? Ed shares his own inherited belief from his late father: ‘Brickshit’. A story that entails psychedelic adventures and an uncanny set of synchronicities, a recurrent theme of these conversations. Dougald asserts that he does not believe in coincidences, and expands on the idea of culture’s empty throne in the inter-generational absence of church-going, and the unarticulated loss that results in society. Does religion start as a joke that falls into the trap of taking itself too seriously? If everyone we meet is God in disguise, how might that influence our metaphysical manners? Is prayer a shortcut to ancient mysteries? Ed concludes with some thoughts on ‘interbeing’ and finding magic everywhere amongst the ruins . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org
Mon, March 21, 2022
The Great Humbling S4E4: 'Are we going to talk about Ukraine?'
We started this podcast in the early weeks of the pandemic, talking about the stories circling around it. A crisis had come out of the corner of almost everyone's field of vision and became, within weeks, the only thing in the news. Two years on, something similar has happened, so we arrived at this episode wondering whether or not to talk about Ukraine. Dougald remembers Ivan Illich's short text, 'The Right to Dignified Silence' (in In the Mirror of the Past ), written in support of West German campaigners who refused to enter into a reasoned argument about nuclear weapons, choosing instead to express themselves through public silence. This reminds Ed of the Silent Parade in Manhattan in 1917 to protest violence against African Americans, and also of the wordless presence of XR's Red Rebel Brigade. Ed quotes from Douglas Rushkoff's 'Doing Less to Help Ukraine' : Instead of filling our channels and brains with uninformed opinions, we should stop and breathe. We are not there, we not informed, and we should shut up — except, maybe, to stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings. We can bear witness to what is happening. Instead of adding more conflict and confusion to the crisis, we can help metabolize the trauma of our fellow beings. We are all connected, after all. Dougald reflects on L.M. Sacasas's comment about the impossibility of being silent in online spaces. We either contribute to the noise, or we disappear altogether from view. We wonder about the role played at a moment like this by the kind of quieter online spaces – the 'dark forests' of the internet we discussed at the end of last series – in contrast to the escalatory patterns of social media. Dougald quotes Justin E.H. Smith on how social media turns protest into 'upvoting' and 'downvoting' options like creating a no-fly zone , with terrifying implications. Ed speaks about the 'onion layers' of history that leave us all weeping, and we discuss Brank
Mon, January 31, 2022
The Great Humbling S4E3: "Remapping Lava"
We’ve been listening back to the first episode we made , almost two years ago, in the early weeks of the time of Covid. Maybe it’s the influence of revisiting those early episodes, or maybe it has to do with Dougald turning up to our January recording with a glass of bubbly in hand, but we find ourselves ranging freely – and at some length – in this conversation we’re calling ‘Remapping Lava’. Before we get onto the main theme of the discussion, we bring back the tradition of asking each other what we’ve been reading or listening to lately that’s got us thinking. Ed talks about Bewilderment , the new novel from Richard Powers, whose last book was The Overstory . Dougald has been discovering the joys of Tintin and gives us his Captain Haddock impression. He also talks about David Cayley’s book of interviews, Ideas on the Nature of Science , based on the epic CBC radio series, How to Think About Science . Ed reads us a little from The Owner of the Sea , Richard Price’s retelling of three Inuit stories, and tells us about a serendipitous connection with Lucy Hinton’s poem, Singing Bone . Talk of Inuit poetry takes Dougald back to Taqralik Partridge ’s challenge to consider the pandemic as the ‘warning shots’ of a larg
Wed, December 22, 2021
The Great Humbling S4E2: "The Commonplace"
This episode starts with a little reflection on our new more-or-less monthly schedule, and in the course of this episode, we talk about a few other podcasts: Ingrid Rieser's Forest of Thought Per Johansson & Eric Schüldt's Swedish-language Myter och mysterier Ed's other podcast, Jon Richardson & the Futurenauts The Sacred , a podcast from the think tank Theos presented by Elizabeth Oldfield We talk about COP26 and Ed mentions his recent TEDx Kings Cross talk, 'How We're Going to Solve Climate Change' where he refuses the frame of solutionism. To lead us into the theme of this episode, Dougald quotes Mary Harrington on the old rhetorical idea of 'the common-place'. Ed leads us through the etymology of 'commons' and, after a brief diversion into Simon Pegg's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, we reach Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' paper and the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom who demonstrated that commons don't tend to fail in the way Hardin imagined. Dougald brings in another strand of thinking about the commons, starting from Anthony McCann's old website Beyond the Commons and his paper Enclosure Without and Within the Information Commons . This connects to Ivan Illich's Silence is a Commons , where he distinguishes 'the environment as a commons' from 'the environment as a resource'. The smörgåsbord of the Swedish hotel breakfast buffet gives us a 'common-place' with which to talk about not seeing the world as made of resources. Dean Bavington's history of the Newfoundland cod fishery collapse, Managed Annihilation , also gets a mention as a book that complicates the 'tragedy of the commons'
Wed, November 03, 2021
The Great Humbling S4E1: 'Confessions'
The Great Humbling is back for a fourth series of conversations between Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie, now as part of the wider patchwork of Homeward Bound. Our theme for this first episode is confessions, but we start by looking back over the summer that's gone. Ed offers us Carol Campayne 's seasonal map of responsible leadership with questions that follow the turning of the year: Spring: What's emerging? What are the new green shoots? Summer: What's blooming? What's in floral technicolor? Autumn: What do I need to give up, relinquish, let fall away? Winter: What can I see clearly now the leaves have dropped? Dougald talks about the experience of voicing the audiobook of Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (who regular listeners may know as Vanessa Andreotti). Ed introduces Nova Reid's book, The Good Ally , and the uncomfortable memories of his own childhood that it brought back. Confessions often involve the revelation of personal facts that we would rather keep hidden. Ed recalls his experiences taking the Earthly Sins Confessional Booth to Glastonbury. Dougald talks about unexpectedly finding himself in a European airport this summer and the pervasive advertising for a future of fossil-free flying and ubiquitous 5G drone-facilitated 'easy'-ness. Ed's been listening to Tyson Yunkaporta yarning with Adah Parris about 'Cyborg Shamanism' . And we close with Raimon Panikkar's definition of a person as 'a knot within a net of relationships' . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://www.homewardbound.org?utm_medium=podcas
Thu, May 27, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E8: 'Now...breathe!'
We begin with some listener feedback from last week’s ‘Get on your knees!’ about prayer… Before Dougald introduces our final instruction of the workout… Now Breathe! We talk about the beautiful, simple pleasures of a degree of lockdown emergence, how Build Back Better went from a call for a radical progressive alliance to seize the moment of the pandemic, to a slogan on Boris Johnson's podium, and Sam Conniff saying he fears our generation's greatest regret will be that we failed to seize this moment Ed notes Philip K Dick’s ‘Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’. .. Dougald talks about ‘escape variants’ and the risk of totalitarianism stemming from this and what weak centres of resistance, what practices, what moves we need to practice, how we attend to those fragile, ‘seemingly weak’ threads of relationship. Ed talks about Bayo Akomolafe asking what if hope isn’t the answer? And more importantly what does not having hope allow us to see? Dougald refers to an article by Caroline Busta , developing the idea of the dark forests of the internet and L.M. Sacasas – ‘Your attention is not a resource’ and ‘Minimum Viable Presence’ on social media Ed talks about cancel culture and being cancelled from your own organisation in his experiences at Futerra Dougald talks about culture wars and the “weak man fallacy” and a piece by Melissa Phruksachart ‘The Literature of White Liberalism’ Ed references Alan Watts’ ‘the backwards law’ - wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience Dougald wraps up series 3 appropriately with a poem Rashani Réa’s
Fri, May 21, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E7: 'Get on your knees!'
Ed talks about Martin Shaw’s new book ‘Smokehole - looking to the wild in the time of the spyglass’ and the line ‘The mess out there is because of a mess in here’ Dougald discusses the difference between privilege, entitlement and the ‘work that is mine to do’ and references Alastair McIntosh’s four questions: "Does what I do feed the hungry?" "Is it relevant to the poor or to the broken in nature?" "Does it contribute to understanding and meaningfulness?" "Does it give life?" And there’s something else I’ve heard Alastair say, that our work starts from the place where our own needs meet the needs of the world. So maybe that’s a little clearer than the way I’ve spoken about these things before. Dougald introduces this week’s instruction which is ‘Get On Your Knees!’ Because we’re going to be talking about prayer. Beginning with a story about a Sufi traditional blessing, it’s one of the names of God and it translates as ‘The door is open!’ and you say the name seven times and each time you put your hand on your heart and lift it outwards. And asks the question “have there ever been humans who did so little blessing as they went about their lives, who had so little literacy of blessing?” Ed shares a Shamanic healing with Suzy Crockford from lockdown one last year and the ritual offerings he was invited to make afterwards in gratitude. Dougald talks about Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the emperor with no clothes – and coins the phrase ‘the empire has no prayers’ and maybe it’s also true to say ‘the empire hasn’t got a prayer’? Dougald talks about Bible and Empire and and how something has died or gone rotten in the kind of prayer that can do that, referencing Dara Molloy’s The Globalisation of God how the institutionalised church extinguished the local hybrid traditions such as Celtic Christianity, creating the prototype for colonialism and globali
Thu, May 13, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E6: 'Small yourself up!'
Dougald references a long essay by David Cayley, ‘Gaia and the path of the Earth’ and Bruno Latour’s book, Facing Gaia , contradictions ‘must be endured and sustained, not resolved or overcome’ and Vanessa Andreotti on ‘layering’ Ed talks about his first paddle upstream from the Mill and introduces this week’s instruction: ‘Small yourself up’?! via Jamaican buses and Antarctica. Dougald talks about the privilege of taking up space, whether that’s man-spreading on the tube or being quick to jump in and say whatever comes to your mind in a meeting. Ed refers to the Findhorn New Story Summit and how the over eager crowd were encouraged to self-police their own contributions by asking themselves whether they would add more to the gathering than a moment of powerful collective shared silence. Dougald talks about the app ‘Is A Dude Talking?’ and how if you put this podcast through the Is A Dude Talking? app, the answer is 100% yes. Ed discusses how looking or feeling small is usually associated with humiliation, insignificance or stupidity but how the proverbial roots of ‘small’ often work the other way. Bringing in E.F.Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’. Dougald introduces something the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers says , about making the case for slowing down and the 1905 San Francisco streetcar footage, used as a music video by Air for La Femme d’Argent and how Illich talks about “the speed-stunned imagination. Ed wonders whether the pandemic and the reclamation of road space for outdoor and al fresco hospitality and physically distanced mobility might actually help us tune back in to our speed-stunned imaginations and reconnect with Illich’s sense of human scale streetscape conviviality? Dougald goes back to Alan Lane from Slung Low Theatre and a post of his from the autumn , on whether it’s the job of arts org
Thu, May 06, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E5: 'See Double!'
Dougald realises how his work these days has come to orbit around the future and discovers he’s accidentally became a futurist Ed shares his journey to accidental, reluctant, futurism Then Dougald introduces this week’s instruction is ‘See Double!’ Ed talks about Double Vision or Diplopia - the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object that may be displaced horizontally, vertically, diagonally - both vertically and horizontally and how its often voluntary. Ed references Thundercats ‘Sword of Omens’! ‘Give me sight beyond sight!’ (a first for the podcast) and the 2002 movie ‘Double Vision’ about a serial killer who impregnates victims with a black fungus that causes hallucinations, compelling them to kill themselves (don’t do these kind of shrooms!)...based on a Taoist belief that to become a ‘Xian’ (enlightened immortal) one must endure the 5 sufferings… Frigid Hell, Fire Hell, Disembowelment Hell, Heart-Extracting Hell, and Tongue-Removal Hell Diplopia can also be one of the first signs of a systemic disease, particularly to a muscular or neurological process, and it may disrupt a person's balance, movement, or reading abilities. Is our double vision a systemic disease?! Erasmus derived proverb ‘In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is King’ Ed talks about one-eyed Norse God Odin and his exchange of an eye for knowledge and wisdom, and he huge symbolism around perception Dougald quotes from William Blake: Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me; Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision and Newtons sleep!
Wed, April 21, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E4: 'Do shrooms!'
Dougald shares Lucille Clifton’s poem ‘Blessing the boats’ And this week’s instruction is – ‘Do Shrooms!’ Ed introduces one of the inspirations for the episode Merlin Sheldrake’s book, ‘Entangled Life - How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures’ Dougald talks about his fly agaric birthday cake. For his fifth birthday. And then references Alan Garner’s book Strandloper and a collection of talks and essays called The Voice That Thunders before sharing the story of how he knows and first met the author. Ed does his etymology thing relating how pioneering psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond asked Aldous Huxley in 1956 to suggest a word to describe the therapeutic use of hallucinogens, Huxley proposed ‘phanerothyme’ - from Greek for ‘manifest’ and ‘spirit’, writing... “To make this mundane world sublime, Take half a gram of phanerothyme” To which Osmond replied: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, Just take a pinch of psychedelic” Psychedelics…Greek ‘mind manifesting’ or ‘soul revealing’ ‘Entheogens’ - from the Greek ‘to be made full of the divine’ – a term coined in 1979 by a group of mythologists and ethnobotanists Ed introduces Michael Pollan’s ‘How to change your mind’... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Change_Your_Mind And mentions the John Hopkins Psilocybin Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KWf8H2pM0tlVd7niMtqeU?si=_P3Xi61wQrmrWcU__M8Lgg curated by researchers to accompany the experiences of their subjects in their research on treating severe depression We
Wed, April 14, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E3: 'Be like water!'
Dougald talks about Campfire Convention https://campfireconvention.uk/ Ed introduces this week’s ‘New Move’ instruction: Be Like Water Dougald tells a story about meeting Cindy Crabb on a North Sea ferry and receiving her zine, later compiled as the Encyclopedia of Doris , a review at Zine Nation says ‘it’s not an overstatement to say that it’s one of the most important and influential fanzines ever written’ and his own zine ‘Learning How to Drown’ Ed talks about the etymology: Old English wæter (noun), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch water, German Wasser, from an Indo-European root shared by Russian voda (compare with vodka), also by Latin unda ‘wave’ and Greek hudōr ‘water’. Intriguing that the Russians have vodka/voda - like the Gaelic ‘Uisge beatha’ - ‘water of life’ for all our lyrical libations... Ed acknowledges Bruce Lee...on ‘being like water’ and the Hong Kong protests. Dougald brings in the Dao De Jing – and his old friend Charles Davies who made a version of it called ‘I thought I was on the way to work, but I was on the way home’ – his version of chapter eight starts like this: water knows the way. it can flow anywhere without trying and it gives life to everything. it ends up in the lowest places and brings them life Ed quotes the poet Mary Oliver... “It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.” Dougald goes deep into Taoism with the artist and tai chi teacher <a hre
Thu, April 08, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E2: 'Move your ass!'
Let’s get ready to humble! This episode’s instruction is ‘Move Your Ass!’ and Dougald finds himself saying words that have literally never come out of his mouth Dougald talks about finding a place to call HOME. Ed talks about moving to a three hundred year old wooden Norfolk water Mill and horse skull floors. As always we explore the etymology: ‘Move’ from Latin ‘movere’ (move, change, exchange, go in/out, quit) via the old French ‘moveir’.... Change of house or business Go in a specified manner, change position Make progress, develop in a particular way, maneouvre or plan Influence or prompt to do something Propose for discussion/resolution at a meeting Empty your bowels (!) Dougald discusses Felix Marquardt, The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place and how we need something like an Alcoholics Anonymous for a whole culture, an admission of the depth of the mess we’re in, a surrender of our fantasy of control. And how elite responses are like having a fire brigade staffed by pyromaniacs! Dougald quotes Martin Shaw: “Whatever myth has to articulate right now must include migration, peregrination and elucidation. There’s many cultures on the move; some elegantly, some not so much. Now I’ve written before about digging into a place, and I stand by it, but I’m not naive enough to presume we all have that luxury.” Ed talks about Ai Wei Wei’s film ‘Human Flow’ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Flow ) And how the average time spent in a refugee camp is over a decade: https://blogs.worldbank.org/dev4peace/2019-update-how-long-do-refugees-stay-exile-find-out-beware-averages Dougald talks about spending a night in a beer hall in Tallinn with Kilian Kleinschmidt, who became somewhat famous for his role in running the Zaatari Camp in Jordan, one of the largest refugee camps for people escaping the war in Syria. <
Wed, March 31, 2021
The Great Humbling S3E1: 'Keep it foolish!'
Welcome to series three of the Great Humbling – ‘New Moves’. And given that we’re returning on the 1st of April, which is obviously no accident, your first move is… Keep It Foolish! “A deliberately non-sensical parting farewell, popularised in the TV programme 'Nathan Barley'. It approximately means 'see you later' and 'don't take life too seriously'.” ‘Totally Mexico! How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true’ by Andrew Harrison – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/feb/10/nathan-barley-charlie-brooker-east-london-comedy We catch up on what we’ve both been up to... Ed saving ‘The Locks Inn’ www.savethelocks.com , publishing his poetry collection ‘Songs of Love in Lockdown’ and his ‘other podcast’ Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts – ‘How to survive the future’ Dougald references John Paul Davis - Small Magic – https://johnpauldavis.substack.com Dougald’s got a book just coming out with the glass artists Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin, Walking in the Void, mentions an extract running on the Dark Mountain website and a new Homeward Bound course starting in early May Dougald reading Vanessa’s book, Hospicing Modernity, which is coming out later this year https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675703/hospicing-modernity-by-vanessa-machado-de-olivera/ Dougald talks about Resmaa Menakem saying I don’t bring white bodies and blac
Wed, November 11, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E8: 'State of Limbo'
We start with a reference to Kenny Rogers to ‘see what condition our condition is in? Then in the context of the US election this clip: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1158569576168402945?s=21 from Professor Eddie Glaude of African American studies at Princeton ‘White Americans confronting the danger of their innocence’ Dougald talks about Alan Garner’s Boneland and what would it actually do to you as an adult to have been through the kind of things that happen to a child in a fantasy novel? Ed explores the etymology of ‘limbo’… From the medieval latin ‘limbus’: hem, border…edge, boundary…(‘limen’ = threshold, ’liminal’...) Dante’s ‘first circle of Hell’ for virtuous pagans (is that you and I Dougald?!) who inhabit a brightly lit and beautiful - but somber - castle which is seemingly a medieval version of Elysium, its the ‘lip of Hell’ An uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution; an intermediate state or condition A state of neglect or oblivion Dougald shares a review in the Economist of Rod Dreher’s new book, Live Not By Lies – that draws out something very interesting, that people from quite different places politically have in common a sense of a time to retreat . <span s
Sat, October 31, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E7: 'State of Jeopardy'
In the week before the US election we finally do an episode where we talk about American politics and how it fits into this larger conversation about what it means if we’re living in a time of great humbling. ‘Jeopardy’ was originally used in the 14th century in chess and other games to denote a problem, or a position in which the chances of winning or losing were evenly balanced. It’ss the exposure to or imminence of death, loss, or injury. The danger that an accused person is subjected to when on trial for a criminal offense... We reminisce about 2016, the Brexit vote, Trump, being ‘election junkies’ and where we were when we were ‘up for Portillo’. Dougald talks about Anthony Barnett & Adam Ramsay piece at openDemocracy – ‘Behind Trump’s lies is a hard truth about the US – and under Biden’s truths is a lie.’ And Ta-Nehisi Coates’ related argument a year or so after Trump’s election in ‘The First White President’ – what defines Trump’s voters isn’t that they are downtrodden, but that they are white. Followed up with an extraordinary blog by Anne Amnesia, The Unnecessariat – https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/ : “From where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.” Dougald talks about ‘when the maps run out’ his letter from th
Thu, October 22, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E6: 'State of Play'
Do grown-ups play? What’s been playing on our minds this week? Ed talks about the House of Beautiful Business - ‘The Great Wave’, hislove letter to the ocean ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5MvdgAZThw&feature=youtu.be ) and ‘Wild Solo’...and their playful silent hour farewell...the embodiment of playfulness...mime, secret notes, hugs, smiling with your eyes... Dougald talks about Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane , a children’s book for grown-ups and Gaiman’s lecture ‘What the [very bad swearword] is a children’s book anyway?’ and Robert Westall ( The Wind Eye , Urn Burial ) Is there something that’s gone missing from our ways of being grown-up, a thread that we drop from childhood? Ed outlines the etymology: Old English pleg(i)an ‘to exercise’, plega ‘brisk movement’, related to Middle Dutch pleien ‘leap for joy, dance’. Proto-West Germanic *plehan (“to care about, be concerned with”) and Proto-West Germanic *plegōn (“to engage, move”). Old English plēon (“to risk, endanger”)‘State of Play’ is peculiarly British (and actually usually implies precisely the opposite!) and ‘To be played ’...to h
Thu, October 15, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E5: 'State of Anger'
“If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention” Dougald pays to get emails from a very angry man – Mic Wright’s Substack, Conquest of the Useless (which he picked up via Chris T-T’s The Border Crossing newsletter) Ed shares his ‘Twitter Hate-storm’ story! ( https://mashable.com/article/covert-photos-strangers-going-viral-twitter/?europe=true ) From the hottest day ever recorded in the UK - 38.7 degrees in July 2019 and worryingly there’s something of a fairly linear relationship between rising temperatures and rising anger (and violence Ref: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/global-warming-and-violent-behavior - increased aggression, heightened threat perception, raised hostility and escalating violence) Dougald references John Michael Greer’s ‘Hate is the New Sex’ , comparing the treatment of hate as an emotion to the treatment of sex in the 19th C: “If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.” Ed refers to the ‘Anger Iceberg’ where anger is the visible reaction, but beneath the surface are potentially many other feelings of being afr
Sat, October 10, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E4: 'State of Tension'
Here we are in a state of tension… What have we been reading? ‘The Precipice - Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precipice-9781526600219/ Revisiting The Road by Cormac McCarthy Paul Behren's brilliant The Best of Times / the Worst of Times Balance these with voices that straddle different scales. Three that Dougald is finding helpful just now: Chris Smaje's blog (and forthcoming book) Small Farm Future – https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk ‘Who Will Feed Us’ by the ETC Group is the source for the figures about the contribution of industrial agriculture to the world food supply – https://www.etcgroup.org/whowillfeedus Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, and particularly their contribution to the openDemocracy debate around Deep Adaptation, with the reminder of how the narrative of a trajectory of civilisational progress threatened by climate change looks from elsewhere. Tyson Yunkaporta’s “Sand Talk” Bayo Akomolafe </
Thu, October 01, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E3: 'State of Panic'
We start as is traditional with what's been getting us thinking this week... Ed talks about the film My Octopus Teacher and Nick Cohen in the Observer on ‘Sweden as the right’s fantasy land’ . This leads us onto some memorable Swedish expressions: ‘there is no cow on the ice’ (= don’t panic!); ‘Now you’ve really shat in the blue cupboard’ (another Swedish expression!). Phoebe Tickell’s Medium post, ‘Hall of Mirrors’: https://medium.com/@phoebetickell/hall-of-mirrors-4b505367243 You think you will find a magical “leverage point” that will magically change everything. You sound like those who became sick looking for the elixir of immortality. You are sick with how desperately you want to save the world. And it’s not a bizarre response at all. You have every right to feel desperate to make this world better… The systems of oppression you are complicit in by being alive are hellish. But this desperation is also what is leading you to be trapped in dissociated loops of pseudo-change. Alastair McIntosh, Riders on the Storm: https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-review-riders-storm-alastair-mcintosh-2930368 Nick Hayes’ ‘Book of Trespass': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/10/the-book-of-trespass-by-nick-hayes-review-a-trespassers-radical-manifesto
Thu, September 24, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E2 'State of Grace'
We start with Adam Ramsay, ‘Queer Eye’, Jordan Peterson and the Battle for Depressed Men – https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/queer-eye-jordan-peterson-and-the-battle-for-depressed-men/ Do we really have to choose between Carl Jung and archetypal psychology on the one side and Antonio Gramsci and the analysis of hegemony on the other side? We reflect on whether the West Country School of Myth ’s visceral, transcendental and universal approach touches on the really deep recognitions we all have for human dilemmas, experiences and patterns of behaviour. And we reference a scene from Ivan and the Grey Wolf Dougald introduces the latest of John Michael Greer’s weekly essays at his blog Ecosophia – a useful summary of Jung’s theory of synchronicity – including the origins of the theory of archetypes in the study of animal behaviour, and then Jung’s observation working with his patients that, in dealing with these deep patterns, you seem to trigger strings of meaningful coincidences – synchronicities. We talk about dreams of Scarlet Johansson. W.B.Yeats described as the sense that “ “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ‘A Farewell to Uncivilisation’ – the synchronicitous downpour in the last moments of the last Dark Mountain festival! <!--
Thu, September 17, 2020
The Great Humbling S2E1: 'State of Alert'
We call these conversations the Great Humbling because we start from a sense that this is a time of being humbled, brought down to earth, and we want to ask what happens if we approach the moment we’re in on those terms? In this second season each week we’ll be taking a state of mind that seems to be part of the mix of being alive just now. So this is the Great Humbling: Season Two – Altered States - States of being, states of consciousness and of course the literal alteration of our nation states. And this is episode 1 - 'State of Alert' Dougald introduces some of his summer reading: a critique of Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper and a piece from the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective that was published under the title ‘Preparing for the end of the world as we know it’ Ed reflects on a 'Guide to Eco Anxiety' that he wrote the foreword for, Nick Hayes 'Book of Tresspass' and Martin Shaw's 'Wolferland' We explore the meaning of a 'state of alert', quoting Susie Orbach on these times: “How the outside impacts on the inside is something that people like me think about all the time. But now we are seeing it on a grand scale. The pandemic has been a prolonged assault from outside on our community. The state of uncertainty and unsafety it has created is new and utter
Fri, September 11, 2020
The Great Humbling Season 2 Trailer
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org
Thu, June 04, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E8: 'How's your humbling?'
Why we’re recording this final episode of Series One at night, as our children sleep Reviewing the journey we’ve been on together since late March... Mapping Lava...where are we now on the emerging sensemaking and stories? Can we afford an economic recovery? Towards a language of longing… Bestiary of metaphors World turned upside down As deep as culture Cultivation of conspiracy David Fell’s Eleven More Thing s: ‘WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS’ “There are ways of identifying the things that really need doing; and these things that really need doing need to be done by people who we can call key workers. If we don’t look after them, we are in deep s**t: there’ll be no food, or no power, or no money, or no houses, or no healthcare, or no families, and there certainly won’t be any of the comforts and luxuries we’ve come to expect. Do you remember that time in 2020 when everything nearly fell apart? When all those people died and the only people who kept going were all those key workers? We must look after our key workers.” Storytelling adventures with Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ and Ernest Callenbach’s ‘Ecotopia’... Alan Lane, artistic director of Slung Low, a theatre company who relocated a few years ago to The Holbeck,
Mon, May 18, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E7: 'The cultivation of conspiracy?'
Conspiracy literally means 'to breathe together'. What is causing us to inhale such a complex mix of vaporous ideas right now? Are these 'voodoo histories' being written wilfully or are they a perhaps understandable response to fear and uncertainty? And how do these 'double binds' of inextricable impossibilities influence the way we receive information and shape our intention? As always we begin with what caught our attention this week Ed - The House of Beautiful Business - The Great Wave and their principles of Intimacy, playfulness and surrender…’Only those who let go have both hands free’: https://livingroomsessions.house/previous-sessions Collective Psychology Project: ‘This too shall pass: Mourning Collective Loss in the time of Covid-19’ the world’s biggest psychological experiment https://www.collectivepsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/This-Too-Shall-Pass.pdf Exploring ancestral wisdom (why, uncomfortable truths, ways forward) r.e. Apocalypse (unveiling), Restoration (rupture) & Emergence (birth of the new) myths… 8 lessons about grief: embrace it, it will get worse before it gets better, more collective grief to come, grief is not an equaliser, we need to grieve together, learn how our ancestors grieved, new rituals & practices, loss is natural...telling stories... Dougald – Simon McBurney & Complicité’s The Encounter , available for streaming until Friday <sp
Thu, May 07, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E6 'As deep as culture'
We start with Martin Shaw’s hare-piece (hair piece?) - ‘A Hare’s Leap or a Rabbit’s Hop?’, a typically stirring offering from Dr Shaw that bristles with energy and soul, and backbone... “Culture is being forced to leap at this moment, but we run grievous risk of a rabbit hop back to safety not a hare leap into the deeper life.” “[Hare] nags, and pulls and bites until something vast is happening to us. We are dragged into the presence of strange angels and so pathetically grateful we can only weep in this Chapel Perilous. For Hare, the Chapel Perilous is the fecund state of that changeable dimension we gesture to and dimly call our heart. Perilous is it, when the animal presences are absent, when there’s no sweet stink of the low bellied spirits. Hare will clamp his buck teeth straight into the beating organ, swinging back and forth like a lunatic pirate on the rigging in the most Machiavellian storm of most trembling imaginations till we are out the door, into the night, into the storm, into the rain.” As Martin says - ‘Artists are waiting to get LEAPT’ We explore the Vasteras hares and our mutual observations of magpies this week. Ed listened to a great interview with Margaret Atwood by Cheryl Strayed in her new podcast ‘Sugar Calling’. Atwood is known for her environmental activism, and mentioned Barry Lord, co-founder of Lord Cultural Resources, an international Museum Planning Consultancy… His book ‘Art & Energy - How Culture Changes’ describes how the dominant energy system of the day defines the culture, it’s actions and values - and that energy transitions are by their very nature - therefore culture wars: Wood - access to land, forest, feudal Coal - culture of production and the industrial revolution (massive manpower) Oil and Gas - production to consumption <span style="f
Thu, April 30, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E5 'A world turned upside down'
Introducing ‘A World Turned Upside Down’ , an old english ballad ‘a brief description of the ridiculous fashions of these distracted times’. ..coined in protest at Parliament’s attempts to make Christmas a solemn occasion (not a traditionally english raucous one) David Fell - The Economics of Enough - and his piece: Eleven Things So Far – manages to be the most random and one of the most thoughtful things Dougald haas read among all the hundreds of thousands of words written in and about this crisis – close to the spirit of these conversations. He quotes Bill Bryson’s list of things done by 19th century vicars with economic security and a lot of time on their hands – “Never in history have a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.” List includes: George Bayldon compiled the world’s first dictionary of Icelandic Laurence Sterne wrote ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom Jack Russell bred the terrier that bears his name Octavius Pickard-Cambridge became the world’s leading authority on spiders William Shepherd wrote a history of dirty jokes “Not one of these people disappeared up their own arse in the belief that they had achieved some over-privileged insight. And why? Because at least once a week they had to stand up in front of a group of perfectly ordinary people and talk to them in terms they understood. They were forced to stay grounded.” David Fell then talks about all the people “talking about all the things they want to see different ‘afterwards’.”:
Fri, April 24, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E4: 'A bestiary of metaphors'
In this episode Dougald and Ed explore the ‘bestiary’ of metaphors stalking this time, the creatures of our imaginations, we are walking with beasts – black elephants, green swans, impossible hamsters – and nightingales. ‘Will there be singing in the dark times. Yes, there will be singing about the dark times’ Bertolt Brecht 1939 We begin by revisiting a quote from Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees in 2015: ‘ It is imperative to guard against the downsides of such an interconnected world...The magnitude of the societal breakdown from pandemics would be far higher than in earlier centuries. English villages in the 14th century continued to function even when the Black Death almost halved their populations. In contrast, our social framework would be vulnerable to breakdown as soon as hospitals overflowed and health services were overwhelmed—which could occur when the fatality rate was still a fraction of 1 per cent .’ And note that in these supposedly ’unimaginable futures’, Wimbledon Tennis Tournament has been quietly paying a £1M annual pandemic insurance premium for 17 years which has just paid out £100M This week’s negative oil prices reinforce the idea that almost every day these days is another previously unthinkable ‘thought experiment’. As Lenin said ‘There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen’ Dougald takes us back to 2011, when it was “kicking off everywhere” – the giddiness of those times when it was felt that what might lie ahead “can’t be any worse than going back to normal”. But Vinay Gupta warned ‘A much, much worse world is possible’. We look at ‘supply chain weirdness’ and the vuln
Fri, April 17, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E3: 'Framing a language of longing'
In this episode we explore the framing of a potential 'language of longing', beginning with the usual reviews of our recent relevant reading: 'Eco-Anxiety' by Anouschka Grose (which explores pertinent themes: anxiety, trauma, grief, immortality systems and death denial - as well as their counter-points joy, wonder, awe, imagination, wild generosity and radical friendliness) for Ed, as well as Martin Shaw's forthcoming book 'All Those Barbarians' - the 'grimoire' of the School of Myth, which introduces us to the story of the Gordian Knot, and the idea of timeless and time-bound stories. Dougald then explores a statement from the editors of degrowth.info And this piece: ‘The Pulsation of the Commons: The Temporal Context for the Cosmo-Local Transition’ by Michel Bauwens with Jose Ramos Which takes us into a fascinating conversation around the work of Hungarian-American Peter Pogany and the 'staccato' version of societal change that requires chaotic periods between stable interludes. We then talk about the need for 'believing our eyes' in the sense of the rapid rewilding we can't unsee. The Venetian dolphins might not be real. But the idea of them is something we obviously desperately want to believe. Dougald then introduces Ivan Illich's ideas around 'conviviality', which we combine with Julia Watson's 'Lo-Tek: Radical Indigenism' and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective which asks how we might be ‘hospicing modernity and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser’ . Or what Jay Cousins calls ‘Upcycling the system looks both among the rubble and the not-yet-fallen towers, and then takes what it needs to leverage a kinder future’ We
Thu, April 09, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E2: 'Can we afford an economic recovery?'
You can hear the rising chatter: the bubbling of ‘back to normal’, the stimulus packages, the business resurrection plans, the recovery that everyone is longing for, and at the heart of it the sense that economic growth is the answer. But is it? Perhaps the biggest sacred cow, so deeply embedded culturally as to be unquestionable, is ready to be de-pedestalled? In this second episode Dougald and Ed hold a conversational space around challenging the idea that whatever form the recovery takes it has to ‘sound like growth’. Time Codes We start by reviewing some of our respective reading of the last week: ‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M.Forster - a prescient parable from 1909 in which humanity resides underground, it’s needs met by an all powerful machine, which then stops, with destructive and transformative consequences (1.40) ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer - the (literal) grassroots sleeper hit that became a New York Times best-seller, celebrating science, soul, soil, indigenous wisdom and spirit. Especially the idea of ‘The Honourable Harvest’ (4.52) ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’ by Rebecca Solnit - compelling stories of post-disaster communities recovering with joy and in unexpected collaborative ways, versus Hobbesian views of people and ‘elite panics’ (10.11) 15.44 ‘Is green growth possible?’ Can 3% annual growth ever be sustained? The virus has pushed us where we never expected to be with a third of the economy gone, it will require a huge effort just to get back where we were. The problem of ‘Jevon’s paradox’, the choice between a post-1918 pandemic that led to the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the terror of the thirties, or the post-1945 settlement of the social contract that created the NHS, Arts Council etc? Or is this ‘Death Star Economics’? Growth does not mean security and wellbeing, we are revaluing societal roles radically. 23.44</
Sat, April 04, 2020
The Great Humbling S1E1: 'Mapping Lava'
How will they look in hindsight, these times we're living through? Is this a midlife crisis on the road to the Star Trek future, or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? With Covid-19 calling into question the ways we have been living, Ed Gillespie and Dougald Hine set out to explore what it means to be humbled. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.homewardbound.org

Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

"Burnout From Humans" with Vanessa Andreotti

The Great Humbling S6E4: The Consolations of Folklore

Five Questions for a Time of Beginnings

The Great Humbling S6E3: #DECELERATE

"Maybe I'm NOT a Doomer?" with Isabelle Drury

The Great Humbling S6E2: Remember, Remember!

The Great Humbling S6E1: When the S**t Hits the Roomba

The Times Into Which We Were Born (Solo Show)

The Gifts in the Ruins with Dr Ashley Colby

Taking Beauty Seriously with Caroline Ross

The Great Humbling S5E8: 'State of the Humbling'

The Great Humbling S5E7: 'Founders Confessions'

The Great Humbling S5E6: 'The Low Agreements'

The Great Humbling S5E5: 'Make Populism Good Again?'

The Great Humbling S5E4: 'The Forever Project'

The Great Humbling S5E3: 'We Used to Have Fun'

The Great Humbling S5E2: 'Words in Wartime'

The Great Humbling S5E1: 'The Ruined Church'

The Great Humbling: Live at Norwich Arts Centre

The Great Humbling S4E8: 'We Need to Talk About George'

The Great Humbling S4E7: 'The Missing Episode'

The Great Humbling S4E6: 'Nice to meet you'

The Great Humbling S4E5: 'Belief'

The Great Humbling S4E4: 'Are we going to talk about Ukraine?'

The Great Humbling S4E3: "Remapping Lava"

The Great Humbling S4E2: "The Commonplace"

The Great Humbling S4E1: 'Confessions'

The Great Humbling S3E8: 'Now...breathe!'

The Great Humbling S3E7: 'Get on your knees!'

The Great Humbling S3E6: 'Small yourself up!'

The Great Humbling S3E5: 'See Double!'

The Great Humbling S3E4: 'Do shrooms!'

The Great Humbling S3E3: 'Be like water!'

The Great Humbling S3E2: 'Move your ass!'

The Great Humbling S3E1: 'Keep it foolish!'

The Great Humbling S2E8: 'State of Limbo'

The Great Humbling S2E7: 'State of Jeopardy'

The Great Humbling S2E6: 'State of Play'

The Great Humbling S2E5: 'State of Anger'

The Great Humbling S2E4: 'State of Tension'

The Great Humbling S2E3: 'State of Panic'

The Great Humbling S2E2 'State of Grace'

The Great Humbling S2E1: 'State of Alert'

The Great Humbling Season 2 Trailer

The Great Humbling S1E8: 'How's your humbling?'

The Great Humbling S1E7: 'The cultivation of conspiracy?'

The Great Humbling S1E6 'As deep as culture'

The Great Humbling S1E5 'A world turned upside down'

The Great Humbling S1E4: 'A bestiary of metaphors'

The Great Humbling S1E3: 'Framing a language of longing'

The Great Humbling S1E2: 'Can we afford an economic recovery?'

The Great Humbling S1E1: 'Mapping Lava'