Could the destruction of nature become considered as serious a crime as that of genocide? How does the structure of law shape a civilisation’s norms, behaviors and overarching story?

Today we’ll be discussing international Ecocide law, a massively growing movement that wants to embed the notion of ‘ecocide’ crime at the highest levels of law - at the International Criminal Court in The Hague - and create a powerful deterrent for the further damage to ecosystems and people globally.

Our guest is Pella Thiel, a maverick ecologist, farmer, author and who has co-founded the Swedish hubs of international networks like Transition Sweden, End Ecocide Sweden and is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. Pella was awarded the Swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019.

We discuss:

• Why ecocide law is different & a game changer as compared with other environmental laws
• How it can help create a new moral baseline, shifting global values and mindsets
• Where the tensions or synergies might lie between the Rights of Nature and Ecocide law
• The notion of positive tipping points
• And how an Embassy of the Baltic Sea might play out as a practice center for ecological community building

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Stop Ecocide International : Breaking News page
• End Ecocide Sweden
• Pella Thiel personal website
• Nate Hagens interview with Pella Thiel
• Lifeworlds Resource Page: Ecocentric Law
• Lifeworlds Episode on Rights of Nature
• MA Earth Interview with Jojo Mehta (Director of Stop Ecocide)
• Positive Tipping Points
• Embassy of the North Sea
• The Ecopsychology Initiative

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo credit: Law Statue

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to breathe yourself into your own body? To flow with the out-breath of trees into your own fractaling lungs, to dance ribbonlike into an ancient ceiba’s vasculature, to stitch an ecosystem together as a mycelium highways sparkling with energy? In this episode we explore the transformational potential of virtual reality through the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast, an artist collective that has emerged as a leading VR creators in the last decade.

They exhibited internationally from London to New York, Melbourne to Seoul, their work included in major exhibitions at institutions including the Barbican Centre, Saatchi Gallery, Sundance Film Festival, and SXSW. 'In The Eyes Of The Animal' was nominated for the Design of the Year by Design Museum Beazley Awards and won the Wired Innovation Award (2016). Most recently, the team at MLF won the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Innovation in Storytelling and Best VR Film at VR Arles Festival for ‘TreeHugger, Wawona’.

Ersin Han Ersin is the director of MLF and describes to us how they use dazzlingly aesthetic real-time VR experiences to explore the invisible perspectives of nature’s lifeworlds – and how they are constantly pushing the bounds of what technology makes possible in expanding our ecological sensitivities. I enquire into:

• Who they need to speak to in order to create their masterpieces and translate the umwelts of other species? What other scientists, poets, musicians, make this possible?
• What is it that virtual reality can create that no other medium can?
• What is the building block of a multisensory story?
• What are some of the astounding ways that other beings experience the world that are divergent from the human?
• How could global education be redesigned based on kinesthetic educative tools like VR?

Episode Website Link.

Show Links:

• Marshmallow Laser Feast
• TED talk
• Vimeo of MLF
• Soulful connection with trees: Dartington
• Lifeworlds Episode with Karen Bakker
• Observations on Being by MLF
• AI piece from Berggruen Institute
• Abandon Normal Devices Festival

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo credit: MLF exhibition at AMCI in Australia (photo from their website)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s episode brings us into the heart and philosophy of Zen Buddhism, as practiced by the Plum Village monastic community that was founded in 1982 by the Vietnamese peace activist, monk, poet, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Today it has grown into Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, with over 200 resident monks and nuns, and known as one of the most actively engaged Buddhist communities offering insight on the modern world, and on the climate and ecological crises.

We’ve spoken on the show about fragmented consciousness, a mind that sees parts and not the whole. Meditation and other Buddhist practices are one of the core ways of how we can heal minds and views. And so we will hear from two Plum Village monks: Sister True Dedication and Brother Spirit. Before entering the monastery, Sister True Dedication studied History & Political Thought at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist for BBC News. In the early years of her monastic training, she assisted Thich Nhat Hanh in their engaged Buddhist actions for human rights, religious freedom, applied ethics, and ecology. Brother Spirit began his monastic training in Plum Village in 2008, and before ordaining he studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer, and as such has since composed many of the community’s beloved chants. They both helped to found the international Wake Up Movement, a community of young meditators finding new ways to combine mindfulness and engaged Buddhism.

We talk about:

• the fragmentation of consciousness
• how to hold the perspective of non duality and interbeing within unlikely contexts, and how doing so grants us agency and transformation
• dehumanization, de animation, and what Buddhism teaches about our relationship to other life and other intelligences
• the Mayahana Diamond Sutra (the world’s earliest printed text) and its invitation for us to reconsider four key notions of existance
• how to find and make peace with one’s activism
• the seeds of wisdom that lie dormant in 4000-year-old magnolia trees
• how to hold the suffering of the world and call upon our ancestors for support
• spiritual bypassing, instrumentalising, and get out of jail free cards

Episode Website Link

Show Links:

• Plum Village
• About Thich Nhat Hanh
• Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
• Thay's Poetry / Please Call Me by My True Names (song & poem)
• Lifeworlds Meditation on Food inspired by Plum Village
• Mahamudra: Dr Dan Brown
• Hope in the Dark: Rebecca Solnit
• Global Optimism

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

Photo credit: Plum Village website

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.