While we can’t avoid the inevitable, we can still find agency. When we’re navigating a professional or personal transition, it may seem like we’re living in chaos, and there’s nothing we can do that can make things better.

In his book At Work in the Ruins, Dougald Hine asks a question about the climate crisis: how did we find ourselves in this trouble? Is it simply a piece of bad luck with atmospheric chemistry, or might it be a consequence of the way we have been approaching the world?

This conversation aims to create a little campfire alongside the big path of life to sit with the questions and the uncertainty together. You don’t have to go through it on your own, and not knowing how to act is ok.

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learning, play and friendship.

Uh, kind of three of the core tenets, I believe myself and Laurence kind of hold dearly to our work.

Uh, and with that, um, I wanna introduce our good friend, Dougald.

and I would love for you to begin maybe just, uh, for those who are joining the fireside for the first time and maybe have not heard of you before and your work, um, to just introduce yourself in how you feel is most apt these days.

Uh, and a little potted history of, of, of you

Okay.

Well, thanks Carlos.

I mean, let me see if I can unin intimidate you by being sufficiently silly.

well, once upon a time I was a radio journalist.

Um, I sort of had the very beginnings of a career at the BBC and realized pretty quickly that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in newsrooms.

but that there was something about telling stories that was part of the weave of who I was and what I wanted to do.

And, uh, I sort of set off from there into being part of creating a series of organizations actually.

Um, so I co-founded an internet Startup called School of Everything in 2006 with a bunch of very interesting people who I had met because I'd been part of this email magazine called Pick Me Up was started by a mutual friend Charlie Davies.

And then 2009 I started two things.

One was the Spacemaker Maker's Agency, um, that, uh, began as a meetup group.

I was running in London and then grew into an agency where our first project was taking on 20 empty shops in the indoor market in Brixton and sort of kickstarting the, the regeneration of the, the indoor market at Brixton Village and then going off getting to do lots of other projects that we were actually kind of were closer to our heart off the back of the success of that.

But meanwhile, I'd also started a thing called the Dark Mountain Project with a guy called Paul Kings North, who had been the editor of the Ecologist Magazine.

And we'd met through both a kind of shared engagement with environmentalism, but also a sort of shared disillusionment, a sense of a gap between what some of the kind of leading figures were saying in public and the kind of can-do mentality of it, and the private pessimism that you would hear the same person Express.

Express.

You caught them over a glass of whiskey at the end of the night.

And that sort of gap between the two felt really dangerous to us.

So we wrote a manifesto that was kind of saying, we need to look down, we need a space where we can talk about our doubts and fears and not knowing what to do and darknesses.

And that grew into both, uh uh, kind of.

A literary journal, really a series of books and also a festival that we ran for a few years called Uncivil.

and somewhere in the middle of all that I kinda burnt out and moved to Sweden 'cause I had fallen in love with a Swedish woman.

And, um, I've been able to, you know, take the things that I was starting out with in that work and explore 'em in all sorts of other ways with the Swedish National Theater, with the university in Upsala, near where we are here.

But more and more just doing my own thing as a writer and convening conversations.

And so, um, this year I finally got round to writing a proper book after years of threatening to do it, see if I can hold it.

So it's in shot at work in the ruins, finding our place in the time of science, climate change, pandemics, and all the other emergencies.

But the other side of my work these days is that Anna, who I moved to Sweden to live with and I.

Found ourselves, the owners of an old shoe shop, and we live upstairs from the shoe shop and we use the downstairs as a space to convene people.

But we also do a lot of online convening in the name of a school called Home, where the sort of running theme is, it's a school for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living, living culture, sort of figuring out what's worth doing if we have some of that sort of dark mountain analysis of where we are and where we're likely to be headed, but actually

looking for what agency looks like, what's starting from where you find yourself rather than starting with a kind of blank page in the sort of design mentality of modernity means.

And, uh, yeah, I mean that, I guess that's a really quick counter through the, the stuff that I've been doing and how I ended up here.

I think the, the first point of connection that I'm, uh, curious to explore is this idea of convening conversations.

It's something that I think Laurence and I have been going more and more attracted to, uh, in the way we work.

Yeah, I mean, I think for me there's a lot of trust in a kind of a magic, an alchemy of what can happen when you get the right kind of space of conversation.

I remember trying to say this in a meeting really early on when, um, Indy Joha and a bunch of people were planning this new hub Westminster in London, and they invited three of us in to feed into the process.

And I said, I think what I'd love is if it were a space where really great conversations happen and someone else went sort of like this and, oh God, not another talking shop.

Um, and to me that became really interesting as a sort of polarity that both of those things are real experiences that people have had.

Like we've all hopefully had times where we've been in a conversation where something comes alive, something happens in that dynamic, in that set of relationships that nobody brought into the room, that wouldn't have happened by anyone sitting on their own, being brilliant.

And, uh, you know, we've also, most of us probably had the experience of yet another talking shop, but that, that quality of the, the kind of conversational spaces that I'm drawn to and that I've been sort of learning how to help create.

To me that's bound up with what Brian Eno talks about as seniors, the collective genius of scenes.

And I think I first experienced that when Charlie Davies and Jenny Rainer, um, and friends started the pick Me Up email magazine back in 2004 and they invited their readers to come to the editorial meetings and that was how I got involved in it.

Um, and after that, like I both learned to trust that as something that can be remarkably generative.

Like everyone can end up doing work that's vastly better than the work that any of us would've been doing if we'd still been on our own or in the situations that we were operating in prior to finding that space.

And then realizing that various experiences I've had in my life, not least having grown up around churches, gave me a set of skills or insights that I could bring to, you know, how you gently hold and model the character of a space so that it has a chance of coming alive in that, in that way.

And then over time through kind of reading and thinking and trying things out, becoming increasingly convinced that humans have always known how to create these deeply generative spaces.

And that actually a lot of the baggage we've inherited from recent generations gets in the way of our ability to do that.

So when I was running Space Makers, one of my mottoes was people are really good at being people.

We've been doing it for a long time.

If it's not working, it's probably because something that we haven't been doing for very long is dominating the space, getting in the way, preventing us, being able to show up and do the stuff that I.

Comes naturally to us.

So the, that's kind of part of what the regrowing a living culture language is about for me, is saying we've achieved extraordinary stuff in recent generations and we've also forgotten a bunch of stuff that all of our ancestors until quite recently needed to rely on in order to survive.

But we've been able to get away with not being able to do because we've been supported by this kind of upwelling of oil and colonialism and the rest of it.

Um, and all of that is coming to an end and the consequences of it are coming home to roost.

So part of what's gonna be called for is to relearn some of those skills that you would've learned by the age of eight if you had been born in another time and place that contribute to humans being able to be humans together and solve things and deal with unprotected.

so there's, there's, there's two things that come up.

Um, I think I going to tackle the first one is this idea of, well, well I remember from your book there's a chapter, I think about four conversations that kind of shifted your thinking.

And so I, there's like, a contrast I'm seeing is like these conversations you don't wanna be part of and these conversations you wanna be part of.

and so maybe to illustrate a bit more the, this contrast, 'cause you talk about talking shops and I'm, I'm get this feeling of this circular or even maybe a, people just trying to sort of hammer home an idea or a message versus some other way of having conversations.

I, I mean, it's worth starting from, as you say, that, that chapter early on in the book, which is this set of conversations, 'cause the original proposal for this book, it was gonna be called, why I'm No Longer Talking to People About Climate Change.

And I, for perfectly good reasons, the entire British publishing industry said to me, don't be silly, go away.

And then thankfully I was picked up by Chelsea Green, who a really interesting publisher in Vermont who were like, we really like this book, but you can't call it that.

Um, but it was, that's still part of the story of the book is that at least from the point of doing Dark Mountain onwards, I'd been publicly, actively involved in all sorts of rooms where people were being brought together for conversations around climate change.

And I'd gone through phases of, you know, really feeling that that was quite sterile and, you know, not a fruitful way of framing a conversation and periods like the 20 18, 20 19 climate movements when it actually felt quite alive and quite generative.

But I hit this moment midway through the pandemic, where I heard myself say to my friend, Felix Ard, who started Black Elephant, I was talking to him one Friday morning.

I heard myself say, I think it's time for me to stop talking about climate change.

And as I, as, as the words came outta my mouth, I was like, and I'm gonna have to explain to people why that could possibly be the case, even if it's only the case for me.

And what it's about is kind of what we start a conversation from.

What language we invite people in with determines who will show up.

Determines where it has a chance of going.

And even though I remain as deeply troubled by what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change as I've ever been, I certainly, you know, the book was written out of a moment of going, oh, I think there are a whole new set of reasons why we might have to find other

places to start the conversation from if that conversation is gonna have any life and any potential to turn into something worth doing together.

And so, so somebody who's been really influential on my work in the last five years is Vanessa Ti, who also writes as Vanessa Machado, Dora Brazilian scholar and activist.

And she wrote a book called Hosing Modernity.

And the first time I met her five years ago, she gave a talk where she said, where I come from in Brazil, we have this saying, we say you when there's a flood coming, when the water's up to your ankles.

It's not time to start swimming.

When the water gets up to your knees still no point swimming.

When the water reaches your ass, then it's time to start swimming.

And it's this thing of sometimes things have to get bad enough for something to go from being impossible to being possible.

And in that we were together for three days and Kevin Anderson, the climate scientist, was there, and a bunch of other interesting people.

And at the end of the three days I said, where in the societies that each of us is going back to are the waters deepest?

Because for many of us, especially in the societies that need to change the most, the soonest have a chance of avoiding the worst of climate change.

Climate change is still just around people's ankles right now.

So maybe we need to be looking for the places where the water is deep enough that things stop being impossible and become possible.

And I just made a back of an envelope list, which I have there again in the book, which is like, well, I, I think loneliness.

Mental health problems, especially amongst young people, addiction, including addiction to network technologies as well as to substances like, you know, various kinds of precarity.

These are the places where the waters are already deep enough for a substantial proportion of people around us.

Even in, you know, the rich world that we have.

Uh, you know, there's a chance of acting from there to do things that are meant to be impossible.

And so that's been part of like moving away from one set of conversations that happen very clearly inside the frame of climate and going, you know, because I care about that stuff and because of my read on it, I actually want to try and put myself into a bunch of other conversations that seem like the places where the agency might come from now.

That need for agency, is, well, I feel a lot and sometimes the lack of it because.

What am I supposed to do in, in various different levels of, or different challenges?

what stood out for me before when you were saying something about conversations that along the lines of conversations that allow us to know what to do together.

and it reminded me of a, a conversation I had with Sue Heatherington, I'm not sure if she's on the call live.

I was having, talking to her today.

and this idea of the hero.

the person who will step up and change things.

You know, I'm gonna do things and there's something about being motivated to act and as being motivated to act as a single individual because I believe I got the answer and I can change the world.

I'm gonna tell everyone about it.

And then what I'm getting from what you're just saying is like being motivated as a collective, as a group, as something that you co-create together.

um, yeah, I just wanted to maybe talk a bit more about how, how you see that happening in these conversations that are, um, generative.

I mean, if, if Charlie Davies was here, he would be sort of warning us against the, the kind of easy move into a language of co-creation that begins to blur what's actually happening in terms of agency.

And what I like from Charlie's clear ideas way of talking about this is he's like, you know, there is always a source and the source is the person asking for help.

And that's kind of nice because the, like, the heroic model of agency doesn't say, it starts with the person asking for help.

It says it starts with the person who knows what to do.

And Charlie's like, you do know what to do, what kind of help to ask for.

But you need someone else to help you.

And that's how the thing comes into being.

That's how it comes into motion.

And I, you know, I did a podcast with Ed Gillespie called The Great Humbling.

And I, a lot of the moves that I've been trying to speak for and write for in practice are in one way or another, I finding a way beyond a trap in which we have one kind of heroic idea of what agency would look like.

And then if we lose face in that we feel powerless, helpless.

Like, there's nothing worth doing.

And to go, no.

There's a whole space of humbler moves that haven't been valued by the logics of modernity that don't look big enough to matter.

Like one of the, one of the episodes in the series that we just did with the school was called Small Enough to Make a Difference.

And it's that sort of hunt that sometimes like agency is actually about operating at a scale that is small enough that you can do things in informal and human ways rather than requiring structures and bureaucracies.

And very often we are operating in environments where, you know, the whole regulatory environment has been built often with some really good reasons and good intentions to do with damage limitation, but in a way that mitigates against operating at very small agile scales because it imposes sort of disproportionate costs on those who are trying to do things in small and close to the ground ways.

And therefore, we need, starting from the kind of moment we're starting in, we need a sort of trickster element within the approach to agency.

I really love Lewis Hyde's book.

Trickster Makes this world.

Which is all about the kind of trickster figure within, uh, different mythologies in different parts of the world at different times, but also the way in which the artist has been the figure within modern society who embodies some of the aspects of the trickster figure.

And I often tell that story as you know, during modernity, this stuff, this kind of cultural energy, this ability to navigate in the stuff that's hard to measure, this ability to bring new and unimaginable things across the threshold of becoming imaginable.

A lot of that has been kind of enclosed within this pocket of culture.

And the is then kind of parasitized by other parts of the economy.

Um, but when we end of that era.

Then, uh, that stuff needs to be liberated from the pocket that it's been hidden in and sort of set loose in the ways that we do things in all sorts of other parts of the economy.

But it does, you know, I say the tricks to thing because you have to find ways of swimming against the tide, um, in order to make things work because the tide is still running with these legacy ways of doing things that are all about, you know, large scale mass society market or state, um, approaches to agency.

And what we're looking at when we're looking at sort of cultural approaches to agency is stuff that's a bit like being the, the rats running around under the feet of the dinosaurs, in both in terms of scale.

And I would say in terms of where we're at in the timeline, um, compared to the, the established structures that still control lots of the resources and still get to set the rules of the game in lots of the spaces that we're probably finding ourselves operating in.

When you're talking, it reminded me of something that, uh, a friend yev, uh, shares on with our participants of our program when they're trying to do something and, and, uh, create something new.

Is it safe enough to try?

Is it good enough for now?

And what I'm hearing also, is it small enough to act?

Yeah.

And yeah, this idea of the tricks is curious for me is I was always gonna pass on to Laurence here because this idea of creativity and this idea of also, I'm hearing just, just breaking the rules, not having to just conform to the rules, doing things that you might feel, oh, is that allowed?

Well, there's also something about.

It feels like that artist spirit isn't there, this sort of, uh, whether it's a poet or a musician or a sculpture or someone who's got people thinking differently and not necessarily the person that needs to even do the act, but the person who maybe instigates a thought or

a, a starting point almost to, to put words or even visuals or, uh, yeah, even something less tangible to something that's hard to know.

So I think it's so important, um, to have those people really, and I, I like that idea of just the tricks that, you know, someone is with love doing something that maybe seems a bit punkish, you know, a bit, uh, anarchistic almost in some ways.

Um, and I think it takes a leap of faith, doesn't it takes someone who's got that courage to be able to do it.

But, um, yeah, I also like the idea of it doesn't have to be down to them to do it on their own as well.

So that energy that I'm gonna change the world on my own, I'm gonna.

make impact with a big eye that sort of almost is a fast track to burnout, I believe.

Yeah.

And I was thinking as we were talking about the sort of the smallness thing, um, I went back recently and actually edited some clips together that I've put on the school website, but went back to Pam Warhurst who started in

for

Maddon.

I

remember that talk.

Yeah.

I remember seeing her in 2011 at Nesta.

And it was the launch of this compendium for the civic economy that the cabinet office had funded and there are all these London social innovation types.

And then here comes Pam from Tom Maddon.

And uh, one of the things she said that day that I've hardly ever heard anyone say in that kind of environment was she said, Sometimes it feels like we go out mountaineering for the first time and we try and climb the north face of the iga.

Stop doing that.

You know, stop setting out to do the biggest, most impressive thing possible when you are actually a beginner and start looking for the thing that's small enough that you can do it with your own resources, which is telling the story of how they started in Tom Maddon with Incredible Edible.

She's like said, you know, I said to Mary, we're not gonna go and ask people for money.

We're gonna start doing it anyway.

And we'll say to people, when we get stuck, we're gonna ask you for help.

And the difference of the agency between a project that starts with, you know, well, what can we do just by getting a few friends together?

I'm finding an invitation that's welcoming, that's, you know, that's open, that meets people where they are.

And you know, she said, you know, we, we said we we're not gonna ask for permission because we asked the council if we can start growing things in these, uh, uh, places around town.

They're just gonna say no, and then they're gonna feel bad.

And we don't want to make people feel bad.

And anyway, what are we doing?

We're, we're loving, unloved spaces.

So, but just that spirit of, you know, just find something small enough to try.

Yeah.

Something that you can do that, you know has enough life in it, and that you can do off the, the energy that you realistically have.

I often say this with artists and people in the cultural world.

I, there's, there's, um, an artist from Doncaster, Rachel Horne, whose work I love.

And, uh, I was talking to her one time a few years ago, uh, and I was talking about an idea for some events, and she said, oh, Dougle, we did an event the other week.

And she said, you know, it was like organizing a wedding.

I knew exactly what she meant, you know, months day and afterwards, everyone's kind of absolutely exhausted.

And, uh, and I said to her, yeah, Rachel, I mean, how many weddings do you want to have in your life?

On the fingers of one hand.

And, uh, dangerous question, but we, we were like, why does everyone default to the wedding as the kind of event.

I said, you know, well, what is a wedding?

If you look at it from one angle?

Well, it's a church service.

The ordinary version of a church service is the kind that you can do every Sunday, where most of the work that goes into it is fitted in by people in their spare time.

And there's one person who's in a paid role with part of their time to make this thing happen and lead it.

And why don't we default to that as our ways of convening people, our ways of doing culture, rather than the big thing where we have to mobilize lots of funding, do lots of publicity, you know, have the, the big event that lasts a weekend and then after afterwards everyone's, uh, completely in pieces and needs to go, uh, on a retreat or something.

that's what I loved about, what I remember about her talk was she said, I think they hide a hall or something for the first meeting that she did.

And she just said she put like flies in everyone's house and said.

Everyone, you know, 200 people showed up and she just said, everyone just needs a reason to connect.

And chances are, whatever you are thinking, people are feeling or thinking the same thing.

It just needs that first person to take that risk.

And that really hit home to me that idea of, you know, everyone in those houses, they weren't gonna start that on their own, but the fact she did, and then they just wanted to help, they wanted to contribute.

They wanted to live in a great town and make it look nice.

So just those simple actions to, to kind of put herself out there really feels that risk is needed to essentially, you know, step up and, uh, yeah, be the leader even if you are a reluctant leader.

part of this for me is there's, there's some assumptions that we make sometimes.

a, we assume that what's in our heads is exactly the same picture that is in everyone else's heads.

And we assume that what's in our heads is the answer, is the thing that needs to happen.

Uh, and I'm trying to connect it to a bit to our work where.

There's a whole going to the wedding cake with, uh, analogy.

There's the big cake, and then there's the cupcake and, and what's the cupcake version of the thing You're gonna create a because like you say, Dougald, it's small enough to act and make, but BI think it's, when it's thingified made something, something that people can interact to see and experience, then that communicates much more than you maybe just speaking about it.

Right.

And then that invites some feedback, some thoughts, some, um, yeah, some other inspiration because then they now see and experience what it is you're trying to do.

And that's what I'm connecting again to this idea of convening conversations and, and I use the word co-create, and I really take on board this idea.

What Charlie talks about is like, you know.

It isn't about everyone basically making a Frankenstein project by bringing their things to the table.

It is us from, from my perspective, you sharing a thought, an idea, a wish, a desire, a thing, and then around that place seeing who wants to get involved because now they know what it is and it isn't the big, big thing.

It might be connected to the big, big thing, but at least this invitation seems more accessible because it's something people can act on right now as opposed to, oh yeah, when we got funding, or when this thing has got this for stage, or whatever it is that the big things that need to happen that can create a sense of weight for people and inertia for, for them to act.

and I'm thinking as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about Matt, we who you guys went

yeah.

We did space makers with him, right?

That was, that's

right.

Yeah.

He basically took over space makers when I left the UK and has done really amazing things using it and.

One of the first things I remember learning from Matt was the way that he would sit people down and instead of doing the sort of classic analysis of like, who are your competitors?

And so on, he'd be like, draw, draw a map of your village.

You know, what's the village that the thing that you are doing is part of, and how can you contribute to the life of that village?

Uh, and you know, it's always been my approach whenever there's been sort of spotlight on work that we were doing in the early years with space makers, for example, to go, how do we tell a story of this where we are just a part of something else that's something larger that's emerging?

How do we, you know, point towards the other examples of the thing that we're trying to bring into being, or the other things that.

Within this village and we probably need more metaphors than just the village metaphor.

You probably have, you know, a village and you probably have a guild where the guild is more the sort of the other practitioners who might not be geographically near to you, but who are learning and sharing skills and developing practice at the same kind of thing.

And then the village, village is people doing all sorts of different things, but where you have a proximity that is geographical or some kind of equivalent to, to that and just, you know, having those kinds of maps of relationship.

It's like that's the level at which I think the co-creation stuff gets real and concrete for me is that it's not all just about this thing that I can see and I'm asking for help for, but that that exists in a kind of organic relation with a bunch of other things that people around me.

Also bringing into being.

And so sometimes they're helping me and sometimes I'm helping them.

And if we can create the right kind of conditions for more stuff that has these qualities to it, to to come into being, then we end up living in the kind of village we want to live in rather than the kind that we might've been born into.

I'm thinking about a, a shift in approach that is less convincing and converting, but kind of modeling and inviting.

Yeah.

Um, and it reminds me of a definition of community that I heard where communities are prototypes of the world we wish to live in.

And so you talk about this, uh, geographic, uh, proximity, or it might be a conceptual proximity or a values-based proximity.

By sharing our own wishes and dreams and needs, and then attracting the people who think similarly.

And then being in these spaces, these conversations, these uh, environments where we can start interacting and modeling how we want to work together or be together or, or do together.

How then that it starts to help us crystallize a bit more about, oh, what could this be?

How could this, what, how could we then turn this into something?

Or how can we allow this to evolve from our own needs, but still give it some freedom to, to grow in its own way?

Yeah.

I mean, to me it's, it's like, what does success look like?

Does success look like, you know, growing a tree that's so massive that nothing can grow underneath it because it's taking all the light?

Um, or does it look like contributing to there being lots of things?

Growing.

Uh, and also it is like, does it, does it look like contributing to there being lots of things that are kind of franchises of the thing you are doing?

Or does it Mm-hmm.

Look like contributing to there being lots of things that might look different on the surface, but have something deeply in common in terms of the spirit and what matters about them.

And to me it's always been more interesting to try and contribute to, to the latter.

I wanted to rewind a little bit, uh, because you used the word modernity several times.

Um, and so I wanted to Yeah, just give, uh, space for you to just explain a bit more what that word means to you, because there's something here about different ways we contribute and act and think about how we see the world working.

And I'm curious about this idea of modernity and particularly when you start, when you're talking about hospice in it,

right?

Yeah.

So.

I mean, there's, there's a whole chapter in Vanessa's book where she talks about all the different stories that are told about modernity in different corners of academia and so on, which is really good.

My way of talking about is to say, you know, the reason for talking about it at all is to try and name this sense that there are things that used to work quite recently in societies like ours that aren't working as well anymore.

So this sense of living at the end of something that, people have lost some, lost some of their faith in, um, and what is that thing?

Well, it's kind of, it's a story, uh, at least I, I would describe it as a story.

It's a story in which, how close we are to the future is what defines us.

People have always known that in some sense they live after their ancestors rather than before them.

But it's only at a certain point in, you know, cities like Paris and London, that there's new ways of thinking and speaking.

And writing came into being, which began to identify with being modern.

And that identification is a sense of what matters most about us, what's best about us.

What defines us is that we live nearer to the futures and all of those poor people who live before us.

So it's got this kind of engine of progress at the center of the story of the world.

And that's part of, you know, part of where we find ourselves now is that that's kind of hollowed out.

Um, it stopped being convincing quite a while ago for increasing numbers of people and in fact, majorities of people In most of the, you know, the developed societies by 2010, you can look around and you get surveys year after year showing that majorities two or three or four to one, that people say, you know,

today's young people are gonna struggle to have a life their parents had, rather than today's young people are gonna have a better life than their parents.

So at that level, people's perception of the intergenerational journey of progress had broken down in the early years of this century, if not earlier.

And some people think, well, that's a mistake, either it's a misunderstanding, and we just need to educate people to see that actually things are still getting better and better and better.

Or they think, well, yeah, something's gone wrong and we need to fix it by electing Jeremy Corbin or, um, you know, unleashing the forces of the free market, Al Liz trust, or whatever it is.

But my kind of take on it is no, like that feeling, that perception people have isn't wrong.

That's a, that's a gut level read on where we are.

And so then what do you do?

And this is, there's a, there's um, a philosopher, Federico Campania, who I've been getting a lot out of this year, who, he goes, you know, sometimes you are born into the ending of a world.

This is a thing that happens and the ending of a world is the point at which its story has run its course.

It's happened to other people in other times and places.

Sometimes it's just end of the world o'clock and what's worth doing if it's your discernment that you were born into the ending of the world you were born into.

He says, well, first.

Stop worrying so much about needing to make sense according to the logic of the world that is ending.

And second, look for ways to make good ruins.

And what I've come to understand from that second bit, the making good ruins after talking about it a lot, is it's about releasing resources from within the systems of the world that is ending.

So you literally, you can find now various examples of foundations that are spending down their endowments.

Now, that's a most literal example of stopping making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending.

Because according to the whole logic of the way that we do finance, the whole point of an endowment is that you spend the returns on it and the endowment sits there so that you can go on in perpetuity, being able to fund the things that your organization funds.

So when you get, whether it's the vCAN Rasmussen Foundation in Denmark or Lan Kelly Chase in the uk, you know, either saying, right, we're just gonna spend down our endowment over 10 or 15 years, or we're gonna redistribute all of the assets that we hold in our foundation.

That's kind of, that's a clue to, you know, what the conditions for making good ruins look like.

You're taking resources from within the game of the existing economy.

And you're saying we have sufficiently little faith in that game that we're not gonna use these resources in ways that make sense according to that logic.

We are gonna use them in ways that look foolish, but that have a chance of contributing to the, being other games worth playing in the times to come.

And so that's sort of, since writing this book, that's one of the things that's come over the horizon for me is, alright, how do we join up some thinking around what making good ruins as a strategy.

Looks like how do we map the things that are worth doing with resources that are being freed up from the obligation to make sense according to the logic of a world that is ending?

And how do we put them into the possibility?

You know, the, the line that we kept coming back to in the Dark Mount in manifesto that Paul and I wrote 15 years ago now is right at the end where it says, the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

Full stop.

So modernity is the world as we know it.

It's all of the things that, you know, if we want to say un sensible, we are meant to say and believe in.

And it's not that there was no truth in any of those things, like when you watch Hans Rosling's presentations of how things have been getting better and better and better.

Not that there's no truth in there.

It's about all of the things that have to be pushed outta the edge of shot in order to make it sound that simple.

Those things that are out of the edge of the shot have got so big that they call the question that you can see inside that frame.

Fundamentally, they, they call that story into question now and are undermining the conditions of its viability and its possibility.

And what hosing modernity is about from Vanessa's work is it's not trying to save modernity, not trying to prove that there's no problem.

It's not trying to organize a revolution and overthrow it or speed up its ending.

It's about trying to give it a good ending, both in terms of limiting the damage that is done during the ending phase, but also allowing it to hand on the good things that it's carrying.

The achievements that we would not gladly lose out of the strange bundle of everything that we discovered how to do and everything that we forgot how to do over the last seven generations or whatever.

It's.

Whew,

mind blowing.

So the first thing that sprang to mind, so selfishly, like, why am I doing it?

My mortgage,

what, what?

Why am I paying money into this thing that, anyway, that,

well pension, which don't have much of, don't have.

The other thing was this sprang to mind?

It was, I dunno, for those of you who are old enough, there was a program called Tomorrow's World and it was always this bright future of technology and breakthroughs and things that would make our lives better.

Um, and also I'm thinking of Flash Gordon.

I'm thinking of Star Trek, these stories about this utopia in the future that technology is gonna make our lives this beautiful place.

Which is a story that I got hooked on.

Definitely love that story.

And then, and this is a bit of a weird tangential thing, but I just wanna try to illustrate a point.

I'm gonna talk about James Bond.

I watched James Bond, I used to watch James Bond, I think, oh my God.

A magnetic watch, a pen that did some words of a car that went under the water.

And the more and more, I've watched it recently, it's like, yeah, I've got that on my phone.

That, that technology that, yeah, it's not great.

There's a Tesla outside, there's nothing here that's new that's telling me that the future is so much more different than the present.

So just like a kind of a very facetious, for me example of like actually how much close, what is this future that I'm trying to get closer to?

That's so amazing.

As opposed to actually, um, yes, there's a Tesla outside and this, I got this from you, I think from listening to your work.

Yes, there's a Tesla there doesn't use fossil fuels, but uses loads of other, um, natural resources are basically extracted from the ground in order for that thing to make.

So this, I think there's a, for me this is, and this is quite confronting given that we're trying to help people start businesses and living in this economy that is based on capitalism and make money and do good and be happy, but do good and be happy seems to be in conflict with this thing about making money.

So other than the revolution to just smack the money system and say, oh my God, what am I gonna do with my mortgage?

It's like this curious question about how do I live in this idea of hosing what we are at the moment, and then what is this image of a new way?

What are we mid wifeing as I think you talk to in terms of new way of living and working and how, how do I become part of that?

What does that mean and how do I, what are the stories that I need to shift in myself to be, I was gonna say be comfortable, but to accept it, maybe to be able to transition?

so I think part of it is that, the new way looks like the answer being different depending on where you are.

Whereas the old way has been much more, you know, one answer to rule them all, or one answer to fit, because that's been like, that's been what success looked like.

so, in terms of like operating in this kind of liminal space of, still needing to have one foot in a system, even if you no longer believe the way that you used to do in the promises and the logic of that system, but it's still there.

It still controls lots of the resources.

It still sets lots of the bounds on what's possible, what's legal, et cetera, for you to do.

You need to operate with one foot in it.

I think if we are lucky, then we have a chance to build things that, make enough sense to be viable within the world as it is just now and look like they have a chance of continuing to make sense.

Quite a long way down the curve.

As we used to say, when I was part of the, the Institute for Collapse Genomics with Vinne Gupta and a bunch of other lunatics in London, sort of 2009, 2010, we used to talk about this thing of like, how can you design stuff that makes sense now?

But that also has built into it rehearsing for things that will still make sense when lots of stuff we're currently taking for granted doesn't work anymore.

And so part of my reason for doing the Spacemaker work was because all of the projects that we created in my era there were bringing people together in a way that had a lot in common with what Power and Co were doing with Incredible Edible.

We created a community owned and run street market in West Norwood, and it was because it was a way of practicing the skills of people coming together, making things happen for reasons other than because they're being paid to, or being told to by someone who has power over them.

And you know, those two things, I'm doing this because I'm being paid to do it, or I'm doing this because someone who has power over me can say that I have to.

And I have no immediate say in that.

Those are the logic of the market and the logic of the state, which have dominated modern societies.

And so part of the bet here is that, you know, as things unravel at varying speeds.

There will be a need for other ways of people coming together and doing things in the way that human societies and communities have always relied on.

And we're outta practice at a lot of that stuff.

So if you can build something which has some economic viability to it, um, within the world as it is just now, even if it's not maximizing the amount that you could earn, if that was your primary goal and motivation for the choices you were making and which has built into it, practicing and building capacity at things that are still gonna

be needed in most of the situations we could imagine ourselves in, in the future, then you begin to have something that has that quality of having a foot in both worlds.

I'm a big fan of the work of Chris Sm, who, uh, wrote a book called A Small Farm Future.

He has a blog of the same name, small Farm Future, and uh, you know, he's really honest about the fact that right now.

There's virtually no way of making a living doing the kind of small scale agriculture that he does.

Like you have to be doing that and something else, but you can choose the something else wisely.

You can find the combination that makes sense for you and for the place that you are.

And in doing, in the way you go about doing the agriculture part of what you are doing.

You can also be, you know, constantly looking to the practices and the building up of skills and capacity and community that contribute to being able to spread that knowledge and that practice at the point where the big systems that are so profitable at the moment on such thin profit margins that they make it impossible to do more viable ways of growing food, like as they begin to fracture.

Then we're gonna need to fall back on the skills of people like Chris.

And so, you know, it's possible to build out a lot of that capacity at community level before we were at the point where it has anything resembling economic viability.

And then that becomes a bit like the net that we find ourselves falling back to as things that we're currently taking for granted breakdown.

Making me think I need to go and do some bush crafting skills.

Um,

I, I, I, I'm gonna, this, I hope this isn't too contrived, but I just want to, uh, somehow connect it to some of the personal journeys that people in our community might be going on.

' cause this whole idea having, a foot in two worlds, I was even thinking head in two logics.

You know, there's a, there's the logic of being employed, earning a salary, just kind of very well set out path of what it means to lead a successful life.

And then for many of us in our community, in our circles, wanting to step out of that because they want more agency, they want more feeling, more meaning, impact.

But then just to drop everything is just too scary.

And so, what I'm getting from this, if I was gonna talk to the journey of someone starting a new business, a new way of working is there's this transition of acquiring the skills that you need for once you take your foot out of one place, while at the same time accepting that you will have to still play this game in some way.

one distinction that might be helpful that I got from from Vanessa Machado Dora from Hospice Modernity, is she talks about the difference between divestment and disinvestment.

And what she means by that is she says, you know, when it comes home to you, like how deep the mess we're in is.

You can try and divest.

You can try and go off grid.

You can try and, find a way of not being implicated in this, like escaping from your responsibility for the mess we're in, escaping from your dependence on the systems that are implicated in it.

To the extent that you succeed at doing that, usually that's a sign of your privilege within that existing system.

She says, uh, the other move might be to disinvest, which is that at least to begin with, you stay in place.

You stay where you are, but you withdraw your, uh, emotional, psychological narrative, investment in the promises of the system that you've been within.

And you see what changes.

You see what you notice.

You see what looks worth doing, having made that first move.

And so, you know, then as you say, it might well look like.

Building up capacity, like listening.

I often say, you know, listening for the place where what calls to you most deeply meets what feels most urgent, most hungry, most alive in the world.

And finding the place where those two things connect.

And then there's also something about, you know, giving it time.

Like we've realized this 'cause we've been, you know, been doing these online series with a school called Home for three and a half years now.

And we have the Long table, which is our ongoing membership.

And we've got people who've been on big journeys in terms of things that they've done in their lives over those three and a half years within the membership.

And we did a new series.

There's also people who turn up to a series and they're like, I read your book a week ago.

And realized I needed something where I could talk to people about this or, you know, I've spent six months going out of my mind because it suddenly came home to me that none of this stuff that I've been working in for 30 years is, doing any good or going to be around for my children's generation.

And I, and one of the things that we realized is people need permission for it to take time.

Like, yes, the situation is urgent, but as my friend Bio Kamala says, the situation is urgent, we must slow down.

That's kind of the, the paradoxical principle.

Like, you cannot, cannot rush your way through, allowing yourself to be changed.

And if you don't allow yourself to be changed, then you'll try and fix it all from the person you were before you knew any of this.

And that won't help, and it might well make things worse.

You know, that's the basic argument that I'm making in the book about why a lot of talk about climate change is likely to lead us into more trouble rather than help us find ways through or ways of staying with what's called for as a result of the trouble we're already in is, you know, if we try and act and from the people we thought we were before this news came home to us,

then we'll be trying to save something that's unsavable and we'll be missing the things that are actually worth doing given what we know, given who that's going to make us heading forwards.

So, yeah, but you know, I've been working on this stuff for a long time and I've been alongside a lot of different people on a lot of journeys with it.

There it's possible to come alive in the face of what's around and ahead of us.

It's possible to find, you know, paths of livelihood through this.

They will often look like having a foot in both worlds.

And again, people who know lots about this are artists because how many artists, are able to make all of their living from doing the part of their work that they love?

You know, one way or another, you also have to take responsibility for the infrastructural side of it, or you also have to have the day job or whatever it is.

I think there are a lot of clues in the strategies by which artistic lives and livelihoods have been made that can be helpful for figuring out how to live with something that really matters to you, and that is invisible according to the logic of the, you know, the mainstream, the dominant order of society.

And, you know, keep your head above water, which is not to say, um, be in the most comfortable position all the time, necessarily.

Thank you.

That's, that's, well, that's a really helpful answer for me.

Yeah.

Um, I wanted to sort of acknowledge Danny was, uh, saying how to move from hosing to mid wifeing mode and build new capabilities.

I think that captures some of what you were saying there.

before we draw to our close, I just wanted to give an opportunity as well.

Um, you talked about your, the work with a school called home.

I was curious about this, this term of regrowing a living culture.

Mm-Hmm.

um, it was a phrase you, you've probably lots of, you have experienced this like on the journey of bringing something into being, there's particular bits of language that come along and you notice that they kind of resonate deeply for you and for others who are drawn to what you're doing.

And really early on, when Anna and I started to take our work out under the name of a school called Home, we found ourselves talking about this thing of, you know, it's a school for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

And there are lots of bits within that.

This idea that there's work that can contribute to it regrowing the idea that, you know, there's something which has existed in different ways and that we need to do again.

Which is not to say, to go back to the way it was ever, because that's not what something that's living looks like, living culture.

Part of that is to name.

The sense that there's something lacking for all of the kind of prosperity and all of the measurable achievements of modernity.

There has been something lacking around here, even before we get to the ecological consequences that are coming home to roost and that, you know, it's a kind of a life or a morbidity or, uh, paradoxically, one that's often I think connected to an inability to be in relation to the reality of death and mortality.

Like our societies have been kind of in denial about that.

Stephen Jenkinson is the guy who has taught lots of us a great deal about that.

But so the work of regrowing a living culture, a lot of it is kind of practicing on smaller and larger scales, but often smaller scales.

This being human together stuff.

Noticing the places where it still is there, but being overlooked or undervalued or poorly described in the language that we use.

But keeping everything going.

I mean, I always liked David Grabber's phrase about the everyday communism that subsidizes capitalism, where if everyone actually behaved according to the logic of the market, everything would grind to a halt.

It's because we are constantly actually engaged in these acts of relationship and generosity in our families, in our workplaces, et cetera, that anything actually ever continues and gets done.

Um, and so just making more room for that, you know, practicing like finding stuff that you can do in the places where you are that has some of that quality of.

Whether it's like incredible edible Todd Midden or the West Norwood Feast, which was that community owned street market or the, which is still going in West Norwood or the, you know, the kind of small scale growing that lots of the people who are drawn to the community around Chris s MA's blog are talking about, or

the kind of skills that, you know, artists like Rachel Horne or Caroline Ross or lots of the other artists who we've worked with at the school, um, are practicing.

It's like there isn't, well the, you, you can, you can begin to make a map and begin to make a map of what are the kinds of skills that we're actually gonna be grateful for having around, somewhere further down the line when some of the things that look likely to go wrong have gone wrong.

And you can kind of gravitate towards those.

But there's a multitude of things that fall within that.

I mean, I'll give you one more example.

We have, um.

In, in the back of the book, in the final chapter of at Work in the Ruins, I uh, list out these kind of four kinds of tasks that make sense in the time of endings.

And it's like you can be trying to, you can be working to salvage the good stuff that we have a chance of taking with us from what is ending.

You can be mourning good things that we're not gonna get to take with us.

And part of the work of mourning is telling the stories.

And those stories can travel with us and they might turn out to be seeds in times ahead.

You can be doing the work of discernment, noticing the things that we're 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 being given to walk away from some of those.

And then the work of picking up the dropped threads, noticing the things from earlier in the story that have been treated as old fashioned, inefficient, obsolete that might actually make all the difference and that you can pick up and be part of the practicing of and the bringing the carrying forward of.

What amazed me when the book came out was firstly, it got a really in-depth review, like a four page review in the British Medical Journal by the former editor of the BMJ Richard Smith.

But secondly, in the final page of the review, what he did was to take those four kinds of tasks and apply it to like his 50 years in the field of medicine going right.

Here are the things that I think are good, that we have a chance of taking with us.

Here are the things that we need to be ready to mourn.

Here are the things that were never as good as we told each other they were.

And here are the drop threads that we've excluded from western medicine that we're gonna need to pick up and weave back in.

And so now when I'm looking at like foundations that are spending down their endowments and going, well, what would be really good to do with that?

One of my working answers to that is, well, you bring Richard Smith and a bunch of younger people from medical and community health together, and you look at, well, what would barefoot doctors for the 21st century look like?

You know, starting from that kind of back of an envelope map of the tasks worth doing, like how could you apply that to a field like medicine?

And then you think, well, where are all of the other things that we rely on can use vin a up to six ways to die.

Simple critical infrastructure mapping tools to just look for what are all the things we depend on to keep us alive.

But then the, the bit that I'll always add when I invoke that stuff is to say, and we depend on culture.

We depend on meaning.

There's never been a human society in which we have prioritized efficiency over meaning in which we've prioritized, uh, the measurable outputs over the fund that is had along the way in the work.

In the way that has been necessitated by the economic logic of industrial modernity in both its capitalist and its, uh, communist forms.

So we have to, uh, as we are going to very likely have to make lives work under harder conditions than our parents generation, and that that's gonna continue to be the pattern for some way to come.

Um, and, you know, we can take some comfort in the recognition that most people around us are already in one way or another, on board with that as a proposition.

As we do that, we're going to need to relearn how to weave meaning and beauty and joy and playfulness through the tasks of meeting our and each other's needs in a way that has been marginalized by the logics which work and life has been organized by in recent generations.

Waiting for the word happy as well.

But anyway,

um, for, for those listening to this who are curious about a school called home, um, do you wanna share a bit more about how they can get involved and, uh, maybe Yeah.

Support, you could be part of it, learn from you.

Yeah, so firstly, like the best way to get tuned in to my work and get the news about whatever else is coming up is, uh, to sign up for my substack.

Uh, if you're moved to support my work, you can become paying subscriber there.

Um, but it's, that's kind of the channel through which I share the invitations and the news these days.

Um, and two or three times a year we do a new invitation to an online series, five weeks with the school.

Um, so that's the way that you get on board and each time it's something slightly different because we take whatever's kind of on the front of the conversations we are bringing together around our kitchen table here and open that out and invite people into it.

And there's always a bunch of people who are part of the ongoing community who show up for those series, but it's usually like, you know, 20 or 30% people from the existing community.

And then the rest newcomers and everyone who's been part of one of those series is then welcome to be a member of the, the Long Table, which is, it's free to anyone who's taken part in one of our series.

That's the ongoing community where we're sort of co-creating together and learning how to, how to support more of this kind of thing.

Um, in the places that we're starting from.

So the Substack is, um, just google substack.com.

It's called Writing Home.

So, yeah, I suggest find me there.

And then, um, that's also a great place for conversations because attracted a really interesting mixture of readers over the last year or so that I've been doing that.

lots to, to think about for me now.

Uh, particularly like those four points that you shared.

Um, making things a real pleasure

to, to be with you guys and with everyone who's been, um, watching and listening.

And I suppose the other thing to say is that I am, you know, I'm up for conversations with people if there are places where this Connects to things that you are involved in or tuned in with.

and, you know, I'm always looking for ways to connect people up and, um, do more work around this.

So, uh, really up for seeing if there is, there's anything that's been sent outta today's conversation as well.

So, uh, in the meantime, would like to end with is what are we taking away from this conversation?

Oh, so much, so much.

Um, I think I need to listen to this again and it feels like we need, as with all these, all the good, uh, episodes, uh, uh, round two at some point because there's so much more we could cover.

I guess when you were talking before about.

what, what skills do we need as we sort of transition to this new story?

Um, that's one thing that stuck with me, particularly in terms of our work.

Like what, what skills can we arm ourselves with and our mother with that will be useful many years from now, not just right this moment.

Um, so that's one thing.

I love the idea of the drop threads.

I think he's described the four.

You know, the four things that, again, was useful, I saw a bit tangential, but a documentary yesterday about, um, is it called Square in the Circle about, uh, the duo behind some of the amazing artwork of the seventies and eighties, like bands that, uh, they create the graphic design covers, like Led Zeppelin, pink Floyd, and some of these albums.

And there was something there about progress in terms of music, like, you know, no Gallagher was talking about what is the cover for an album now it's just like a tiny little square on Spotify.

Whereas before it was part of the work, it was progress.

And so this come back to vinyl, coming back to.

Just the spirit of art and the spirit of music was really something that stuck with me.

And, and again, that progress is, Spotify progress is CDs, but actually we're kind of realizing that some of these stories aren't true.

Artists suffer.

So yeah, there's something there for me about just understanding what do we wanna take forward and what we dropped along the way.

it's been so great to take this book into all sorts of different spaces and different conversations over the course of the year.

And to realize that, to realize that it comes alive in a lot of different settings.

And part of what I've realized today being in conversation with you guys and within the frame of your school is there's a place where it becomes possible for me to weave in some of the bits of the story that you wouldn't read about in the book, some of the other parts of what I've been doing over the years.

And that maybe part of what I need to be doing next is.

You know, bringing the lessons from the spacemaker years and the other things that I was part of in that era of my life into telling some of these stories about what the work of regrowing a living culture starting from here looks like.

So I think you kind of fed into what I might find myself writing about in 2024.

Looking forward to reading that.

Thank you.

Um, was it the, do you use the word disinvesting?

Is that what you

Yeah, that's, it's Vanessa who has this distinction between divesting and disinvesting.

Yeah.

I think I'm taking away that word more than anything else.

And what that means more specifically is simplifying what is it and nothing related to those questions.

What, what, what can I start just letting go of what is not necessary.

on that.

Um, thank you very much for your time and attention.

Looking forward to stepping into 2024 disinvested a little bit more or a little bit less, I don't know how to put it, disinvested from some of the things I might not want needed anymore.

Uh, and yeah, looking forward to seeing what it creates.

until next time, take care everyone.

Thank you, Google.

Yeah.

Take care.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.