Episode #5: Resilient Heart

This live recording is the final part of the series, and invited all those involved through downloading, listening, sharing, or coming on the guided walks, or anyone who wants to find out more, to participate.

The conversation began with Rebecca Huggan (NewBridge Project) and Laura Coleman (ONCA) discussing the role of arts organisations in building response-ability towards climate change, and invited all participants to consider how we can relinquish unsustainable habits, build resilience in our bodies and communities, and restore old practices that can lead to greater earthly flourishing.

The purpose of Deep Adaptation thinking is to connect our practices, individual and societal, to the challenge of climate change. We’ve built resilience at home, and inside our bodies. Now it’s time to restore old practices of living in balance. This episode invites activists, artists, and those working in environmental roles, to share with us ideas of how we can become a climate resilient community.

According to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation, we may have only 60 seasons of soil left. If we don’t care for the earth – literally, the earth we can feel between our fingers – then as a global society we will collapse, and our species will die out before our grandchildren reach old age. This podcast looks at what we can do locally as well as globally, and what better ways of living we can practice if we want to restore the earth on which we depend for our food.

Changing our habits is hard; they become part of who we are, wired into our ways of being. So if we need to change how we consume, how we relate, and who we want to be, then we have to take the inner journey too. This episode weaves together narratives of writers, artists, yoga teachers, therapists, academics, facilitators, and friends to reflect on journeys into resilience.

If we’re going to live in balance with the world, not use more than our fair share of resources, and build more resilient communities, we’re going to have to change how we live at home. In fact, with climate change, we might have to challenge what we think a home can be. This episode of the podcast asks you to take a journey around your home. A mix of narrative and interviews with artists, zero waste activists, academics, home-dwellers, and home-makers, guides you to spend time with everything from your food waste to your washing basket, asking if there are better ways to restore a connection with the spaces and places in which we have come to create our homes.

Is it even possible to relinquish our humanity? Would that make us in-human? Wouldn’t that just make the crises we face such as climate change worse? Aren’t our exceptional language, building and thinking skills the hope for how we might reconfigure a more stable, resilient, safe and healthy future? Or is it the belief that, as humans, we are somehow exceptional, more important and valuable than all other beings, the thing that has gotten us into this mess? This episode of the podcast asks what it means to be human today, how humans thrive, how we live with nonhuman others, and if ideas of “posthumanism“, discussed widely in academia, are finding their way into our everyday conversations to help us reconfigure how we live our lives in balance with the world around us.

If we want to tackle contemporary crises, then we need to talk about the ways women are sold an ideal of beauty, and how an ever more environmentally damaging fashion and beauty industry exploit that ideal. This episode weaves together a narrative of women's voices working within fashion, beauty and business enterprise, with interviews from academics, artists, feminists, activists and community leaders. The podcast encourages you to challenge your thoughts on beauty, taking a walk through Newcastle-Gateshead looking at the city through a gendered lens, engaging with how place shapes our lived experience.

If we’re really going to change the habits that have brought us to the brink of mass extinction and societal collapse, then we need to talk about men, masculinity, and the patriarchal culture on which our cities and communities are built, from the founding stones up. This episode weaves together a narrative of the ways that masculine culture has come to threaten the contemporary moment with interviews from over a dozen academics, writers, feminists, activists and community leaders. The podcast also encourages you to follow a route through Newcastle and Gateshead, to bodily engage with how place shapes our lived experience and embeds our everyday choices in the broader currents of climate change, social inequality, and the changing nature of human identity. The podcast asks: is masculinity a stuck place of damaging patterns? Or can it become a fair and sustainable identity we can use to bring forth resilience and restoration?