Accidental Gods - The Thrutopian Podcast

“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”  Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary

We know that the current system is not fit for purpose. We know that we're hurtling to the edge of the 6th mass extinction, blowing apart all of the predictions about the speed and scale of ecosystem breakdown.  And still we listen to politicians argue about whether GDP has gone up by 0.1% and if so, who is to claim the credit?  They plan for war without understanding that there are no armies, no nations, no people - or any complex life - on a dead planet. 
What good are science and rational persuasion if no one is paying attention? The climate crisis deepens with terrifying predictability. Meanwhile, the courageous young campaigners who seek to wake us up to the truth of this, through peaceful direct action, are silenced and stuck in prison.
Daniel Knorr is one of those young people.  He was 22 years old at the time the book was published, and had previously studied biochemistry at Oxford with a view to engineering plants to be more resilient to extreme weather conditions.  As you'll hear, he realised this was no longer where he needed to be, and joined Just Stop Oil, whose ethos and grounding question is: what does it make to be a good person in this time of collapse - or perhaps transition?  I'll let him tell you his story, but—like the stories of the other 25 young people in the book—it's humbling and inspiring in equal measure. 
Jonathon Porritt is well known to anyone in the Green or eco-campaigning community in the UK.  He was formerly Co-Chair of the Green Party (1980-83) and Director of Friends of the Earth (1984-90). He was a Board Member of The Southwest Regional Development Agency between 1999 and 2008. He stood down as Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission in 2009, after nine years providing high-level advice to Government Ministers, and served a ten-year term as Chancellor of Keele University (2012-2022). He was awarded a CBE in January 2000 for services to environmental protection.
Together, we discuss Love, Anger and Betrayal, which brings Jonathan's experience as a long time campaigner into juxtaposition with the experiences of young people one third his age who are doing their best to make the world a better place. Theirs is a generation systematically betrayed by politicians. And by all of us who allow this to continue, on our watch, year after year.  What comes across in this book, though, is that while Jonathan feels the kind of white hot rage that consumes many of us, Daniel and those around him are focusing on embodying love for each other and the planet. 

‘We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.’
-António GuterresLet's explore what we can do, shall we? 
Links
Love, Anger and Betrayal website
Jonathan's website
Jonathan's short film about the book
Better Coalition
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

In the midst of the polycrisis - or the meta crisis, depending on your point of view - what is the key to the inner change each of us can make that will help us shift our perspective so that we can begin to create the total systemic change we need? 
In this solo podcast, Manda explores the Three Pillars of the Heart Mind laid out in the Accidental Gods modules - Gratitude, Compassion and Joyful Curiosity…and then adds a fourth: Honouring all aspects of the Web of Life. How does it feel to honour everything: the things we take for granted, the things we judge as being bad or wrong, the things that disturb us, as well as the things whose loss we grieve so deeply? 
Manda explores the idea that shifting to a place of honouring can transform our entire worldview and help us to find meaning and purpose in a world on fire.

"The ecological movement is the largest movement in human history, yet it is fragmented because it is using the "tools of the master" for coordination, resource sharing, and conflict resolution...While many technologists have created social networking technology, they have not succeeded in creating good coordination because social networking tools do not address enough of the primary coordination mechanics for scalable trust."  Grace Rachmany: Sideways Earth on Github
Friend of the podcast, Grace Rachmany is a mother, a tech industry trouble shooter, author of over a hundred white papers and co-author of the book, 'So you've got a DAO: Handbook for Distributed and Connected Leadership'. She's Executive Director of the Decentralized Identity Foundation and it's this that we're exploring today. 
It's long been established on this podcast that the old paradigm is not fit for purpose and is, in fact, in the process of disintegrating beneath our feet. 
We know we need to create communities of place, purpose and passion - but if we can do this, how do we find other communities to link with so we can:
Scale from community to region. (based on shared action)
Keep one another accountable for behaviors that reflect what we say our values are (people are also squishy when they say the word values). 
Scale behaviour change beyond a closed or Dunbar-number community to multiple communities.
 Scale actions and collaborations to regional levels without a hierarchical coordination structure. 
Coordinate actions and behaviors based on the commons we share, whether or not we share "values". 
This is the missing link that is often overlooked as we craft a way forward to a world that works, and I'm so glad someone with Grace's outstanding intellect and depth of heart is exploring this.  
And that she's willing to come here and talk about it. 
So here we go: a wide, deep, full conversation on the missing link of scaleable trust.  Enjoy! 

Links
Grace's website
Grace on LinkedIn
Decentralized Identify Foundation
Grace on YouTube - co-creating the third attractor
Sideways Earth Website
Sideways Earth on Github
Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Governing a Commons
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

"The Possitopian approach to future thinking expands the cone of the possible future, draws on geophysical realities and data, and also applies imagination to help you imagine future scenarios which are potentially worse or better than you might allow yourself to think." 
So says this week's guest, Bridget McKenzie. Bridget is an artist and regenerative thought leader working to engage people with what she calls the Earth Crisis -which is a new term to me but feels a much better fit than MetaCrisis or Polycrisis. Her career includes being Tate’s Education manager and the British Library’s Head of Learning. In 2006, she founded Flow Associates, a research consultancy in cultural learning. In the past decade, she has focused on the intersection of culture and environment, and has developed training, collectives and campaigns pushing at the radical edges of this field. This includes founding Climate Museum UK, a creative collective putting the Earth Crisis in context, and Earth Talk, a community of practice for Earth Literacy. She co-founded Culture Declares, a movement of cultural workers declaring a planetary emergency. She experiments with creative activism in her city of Norwich.
And creative activism is what we're all about - how do we stretch our imaginations beyond the bounds of what we believe to be true now, to what might be true if we can only lay the foundations for something utterly outside our current capacity to imagine?
This was such an inspiring conversation with someone who thinks deeply about the nature of art, creativity, culture - and the ways we can engage ourselves and each other at the deepest level.
Links
Bridget's Website
Earth Talk
Climate Museum UK
Possitopia on Medium
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

How do we make a peaceful transition to a wholly new system when the old one is sustained by those who profit most from the self-terminating zombie of predatory capitalism?
Our guest this week has spent the past decade devising an answer to this most central of our questions. Remzi Bajrami is co-founder of Common Planet Foundation and creator of Creditism, which is his answer to our dilemma. 
In his words, Creditism is—
- a new economic system designed around life instead of debt. Credit flows to people because existence itself has value — it circulates through life, then clears. It supports living without becoming a permanent claim on the future.
 - a non-debt economic system designed to replace extraction with flow, scarcity with access, and coercion with coordination. Where today’s money is largely created through debt and accumulated as power, Creditism reframes money as credit: a shared unit of access created through existence, earned through contribution, and dissolved when used.
 - the gateway to a global economy that is cleaner, fairer, and more life-aligned — one that supports human potential, community self-governance, and planetary regeneration.
Creditism is the economic architecture for a species that wants to survive.

There are still some unanswered questions in this, but there are always going to be until we get moving with something, test it out and reinvent it on the fly.  What Remzi and his colleagues have done is to set up a system that you can join now - or at least in early August 2026 - and become a part of a network that will test this out.  in the meantime, Remzi has written a series of Substacks which lay out in straightforward terms how the current system is predicated on power over, how money works - because we can't hear that one too often - and how creditism could work instead. Enjoy!
Links
Common Planet website
Remzi on LinkedIn
Remzi on Substack
Creditism 1
Creditism 2
Creditism 3
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.