“A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It”? A Conversation with Ginie Servant-Miklos, Raïsa Mirza, Will Richardson & Manda Scott

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast. Hi everyone, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to this penultimate episode of the year and a special conversation with a collection of completely inspiring people. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. The inspiration for this little end-of-year impromptu gathering came from a recent flurry of collapse-inspired posts and exchanges in my social media. The question framing the This episode is from the subtitle of Ginny Servant-Miklos' recently published and brilliant book, Pedagogies of Collapse. If we are, as Ginny and many others are powerfully describing, living through the end of the world as we know it, what might a hopeful education look like that doesn't shy away from the harsh and unequally distributed realities of this, but also engages with young people's lived realities and imagined futures with care, responsibility, and embodied agency? In this conversation, you'll hear from Ginny, as well as the wonderful Manda Scott, Barayza Mirza, and Will Richardson. As well as a special appearance from Manda's cat, River. And you can find more information with all of their links and full biographies in the show notes. Thank you very much for joining on this rather impromptu gathering to celebrate. Are we celebrating collapse? I'm not quite sure what we're doing, but—

Celebrating collapse and telling happy collapse stories. So, you know, I mean, I think we're in the right frame of mind, right?

Let's see.

Exactly.

So just as a piece of context for listeners, this was coming out of some different conversations with Ginny and with Will particularly, who have both published rather rousing renditions of descriptions of our current moment recently and very powerful. But there was a lot of, yeah, a lot of conversation about collapse and just, I think the question really that I'm kind of holding is what is the thing that is motivating or might motivate people for the radical systems change that I think probably we all agree we need. But there's this question of the how, not necessarily the what, but so what, where's the motivation coming from? And there's some pretty amazing descriptions, um, that you are all painting actually in your various ways of that and the ways through. So yeah, firstly, thank you very much for joining. And perhaps if we may just give a brief intro just to say who you are and where you are, and perhaps just to kind of think about this to start with, how would you describe as metaphorically or literally or poetically as you would like, the current moment that you think we are in. So if you want to take a moment to think about it, what comes to mind as, yeah, the thing that describes where we are at?

A hailstorm has just broken outside my window. I think that is a very good description of the moment we're in. So maybe this is a sign from the universe for me to begin. Perfect. Hi everyone, I'm Jeannie Servant-Miklos. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Erasmus University. I'm also the founder and chairwoman of the Fair Foundation and the author of the new book Pedagogies of Collapse, which is the theme around which Tim and I met a few years ago in the Bildungswerk through the work that I've done in education there. And if I were to describe the moment we're in, inspired by this beautiful hailstorm happening right 2 meters away from me, we're way past the moment where we think we are. So we think we're still in a world that can be gently nudged back into its shape. We recognize that, you know, some things have gone awry and we need to fix this little climate problem that we have and maybe try and bring back a few species and clean some plastic out of the ocean. But we are actually way past that moment. We have already put in motion the wheels of a system change which to us, intelligent primate species that we are, will feel like a collapse of everything that we know. And that wheel that has been set in motion cannot actually be stopped anymore. So no matter what we do, the world as we have known it for our whole lives will cease to exist before you finish paying your mortgage, Tim Logan. And we are in that moment where some people are beginning to recognize that. But the vast majority haven't done so yet. So the moment we're in is a moment of catching up with ourselves, actually, of catching up with the world as it is.

Thank you. Raeesah?

Well, that's a hard one to follow. Hi everyone, my name is Raeesah Mirza. I'm the head of social impact at UWC Atlantic College in Wales, which was the first school that's one of the first schools that started the IB and the first school that started the UWC movement, which is a network of schools that bring young people together across difference, really, for peace and education. And we've been doing that for the last 60 years or so. And as part of that, last year we started a new-ish curriculum called Systems Transformation Leadership for Just Futures. So I support that team and I'm also a teacher in Systems Transformation. I also consult in other things on the side. So I'm an artist, I'm a facilitator, mainly for systems convening spaces around the world, mostly in Africa and Asia. In my career, but I'm currently, I guess, working around education. So I think it's a hard one. I was trying to think about different stories. I agreed with almost everything Jeanie said, so I'm not going to repeat it except for the last part, which is the vast majority don't know it. And I think actually the vast majority do know it. And I think, you know, if you go to a farmer or you go to a fisherperson almost anywhere in the world, they know what's been happening. And actually, collapse has been happening for them and to their communities, to their environments for a really, really long time. And So yeah, I guess I would reframe it to something like, we know where we are at, we're all swimming in the sea together, and there's a few people that are kind of controlling the boat, and we're not really sure how to get— consensus is the wrong word, but some sort of way to kind of think about, hey, we know what's happening, we all feel it, we all know it, we all see it. Actually, what are we going to do about it together? Because there's that captain or whoever out there who's amongst us and who's also convinced us that we need to row in this way when we you really ought to be going the other way or something like that. So that's, I guess, the metaphor that I would start with.

Amazing. Thank you. Will?

Well, first let me say I'm humbled to be here. I mean, these already, the just the answers that the two of you have given have been really profound and provocative. And yeah, I, I'm at a point where I'm not sure what I do right now, to be honest with you. I'm kind of winding down a 40-year career in education and being pulled into this conversation primarily because I have two children, but also primarily because I've reached a level of frustration with my work with schools around the world who are unable or unwilling to engage in any relevant conversations around the future, what the future looks like for their kids. You know, I agree, Reza, that I think a lot of people feel it, but I also think that there are a lot of people that are just pretending and just don't feel it. And that are just blissfully ignorant by choice almost, that they don't want to go there. And I think the really interesting question for me right now is how do we get people to engage in ways that actually make change happen? You know, to me, the kind of metaphor, the feeling is this sense of in-between. I think everything feels in-between to me right now. And that's, you know, jumping off of Zach Stein's work and others. But I don't know that there are any answers to anything right now in terms of what the world looks like in, you know, 50 years, much less 5 years. So how we get people to be okay— not okay, but somewhat comfortable in that not knowing, especially in education, where, you know, the one thing you don't want is to not know what to do for the kids who are in front of you. I think it's a really, really difficult challenge, and that's kind of where my head is right now, trying to figure that out if there is an answer to that.

Amazing. And Amanda?

Thank you. So I would like to echo that it is an absolute honor to be here. And, and yes, I think we're all agreed on where we are. So I started off my life as a veterinary surgeon, and my teaching input, such as it is, was that I ended up teaching in academic veterinary clinical work. So I was teaching final year veterinary students how to anesthetize horses for the first 10 years of my professional life. I'm now a novelist and podcaster. And at the moment I'm doing my utmost to create the genre of Thrutopian writing in largely in fiction, but in novels and also in television, film, drama, whatever we can do. Because yes, I think we're all agreed we're at an inflection point. Ilya Prigozhin is massively overquoted, but I think his concept that when a system reaches maximal complexity, there is a bifurcation point and it either collapses into chaos and extinction or it emerges into a new system. And I think we're at that bifurcation point. And collapse into extinction is obviously a possibility. I don't think emergence happens if we in our Western culture don't learn how to, to grow up, really. Bill Plotkin has the concept that humans go through 4 stages: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, and that our culture is locked in early adolescence. And that seems to me those who have just stolen the wheel of the bus. I have a metaphor where we're all on a bus that is barreling towards the edge of the cliff, and there are a few people who have their hands clamped on the wheel and their foot on the gas, and the rest are largely in the back of the bus arguing about what color we should paint the wheels. And I think human creativity is astonishing. I think, however, that the toddlers who are currently clasping onto the wheel of the bus are not the best people to be guiding the bus. And so changing the narrative, I don't know anyone who thinks the current system is working, but I meet very few people who understand that total systemic change is both necessary and possible. And so for me as a writer, as a creator, my job is to create the narrative routes through from where we are in all of its extraordinary potential and potential for devastation through to a future that we would actually be proud to leave behind. And I don't see a way to do that that isn't at heart a spiritual change first, a change in our value systems, because anything else is just painting the wheels on the bus a different color. But getting out the necessity for that, and here's how you do it. Here's how if you're a single mother with 3 kids under the age of 10 on the 10th floor of a high-rise trying to manage 3 jobs, here's how you do it, and here's why it matters, and here's why your life will be different if we can build the communities that we need to build, if we can create the clean air, clean water, clean soil, better ways of living that we need to do.

Thank you so much. I mean, yeah, I am equally humbled to be with you all having this conversation. The thing that I think, you know, what has been said in many ways is many people are seeing something, different perspectives on something, but as you said, Will, how might we engage people in those conversations such that they might make changes themselves or, you know, in whatever realm of influence they have. And seeing all of the collapse, you know, conversation, to be perfectly honest, left me with the kind of question of, is that, is that just too much for people? I mean, as I shared with you beforehand, you know, does it alienate more people than it actually galvanizes in the sense of, yes, potentially. Probably, definitely, insert whichever you would like. The future is highly, highly problematic on the trajectories we're on, but it's not clear to everybody that that's a definite, right? And so I'm, yeah, I'm just still really struggling with the question of if we recognize that change is needed in various sectors, ways, places, how might we invite people into that? In a way that brings them in and doesn't send up the shutters because they can't cope with the bleak dystopian nightmares that people are presenting to them, or equally, you know, dismiss the thing that's being said as hopeless optimism and, you know, just completely naive. So that's where this is coming from for me. So, you know, yeah, I mean, are we alienating more people than we are galvanizing with all of these collapse conversations, or is it necessary realism to have to invite people into or out of their comfortable naiveties.

I think just really fast, one thing that's been interesting since— and Ginny may be experiencing this too— but since I put out that manifesto, um, a couple weeks ago, is that I think it just depends on who you are as to how you get attached to this conversation, right? I think some people will read something like that and feel this kind of sense of foreboding and go let's go, right? And stand up. And what do we need to do? Let's, let's get in the fight. I think other people will run and hide. And so you need to treat them differently. You need to approach them differently. And I think that's what the— that's what makes this so complex right now is that I was looking through some of the notes that I've been keeping about exactly this, you know, what people are saying. Some people say we have to scare people because it's only when we really are fearful or in despair that we take action. Other people will say, no, no, no, that's the stupidest thing you can do. You have to build hope. You have to build people's ability to imagine a better future. You have to make that tangible for them. And then someone else will come in and say something else, right? So this is the, I think, again, the really hard question because I think people respond to this differently based on who they are, where they are in their lives, how they've been brought up, how they've been educated, all of those types of things. Unless it actually hits home where you are personally in collapse. I think for others to try to intellectualize it or act on it without that, that real personal hardship is really tough. I will say though, it does start with, I think it has to start with some type of sense of feeling and emotion, right? It's not, this is not an intellectual kind of thing. You can argue that all day long, but until people feel it, Vanessa Andriates, feel it in their bones, right? I think that that's really where it has to start.

I feel like I should maybe explain my choice of having collapse on the front cover of my book, since, you know, I had some conversations prior to its publication of people saying exactly what you're saying, Tim Logan, like, aren't you worried that using this term collapse will immediately shut off certain people? The subtitle has a hopeful education. I do promise hope, but there's two sides to that. The first is that I was very careful and spent an entire chapter in a book which is ostensibly about education defining the physics and the political economy of collapse. So like we can agree on the basic reality of things. And here's the science, there's 149 references in the first chapter on the science of collapse. And I think that that was really important to agree to a common definition of reality, first off, that is based in the best science that we have on collapse. And I promise I won't quote Slavoj Žižek more than I need to, but I've just finished reading his new book, Too Late to Awaken. Where he says the best thing we can do at this point is to accept that the collapse has already happened, and that frees us to imagine something new. I talked about in a slightly different way in the book. I related to Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Kundera says, you know, the unbearable lightness of being must be mitigated by practices of creating heaviness, attachment to the world. And what I said is actually, I think we may be in an epoch where it's okay to reconnect with the lightness of being. And I said, because I grew up Christian and I related it to that, you know, in the Christian religion you have this promise that if you behave in certain ways and you go to confession— and well, that's a very Catholic thing— but that all your sins will be forgiven. And I said, collapse makes the definitive promise that all your sins will be forgotten, because in the coming collapse in the future, nobody will care about all the mistakes that I made along the way. And personally, I find that incredibly liberating. And I was having some struggles, you know, in the past couple of weeks with just the practicalities of running the Fair Fight Foundation, of running the Build and Climb School. Imperfect solidarity is a really difficult thing in practice because you have to work with people and people are hard. And I was like, you know what, Ginny, at the end of the day, it's not going to matter. Nobody in 100 years is going to remember the mistakes that I made. Because we'll be too busy rebuilding the world after. And I find that I've reappropriated the concept of collapse from the collapsologists and gone, let's make that our weapon to free ourselves from the shackles of the things that already exist by assuming that they will be gone anyways. So I do think it is about how we present it to people. And it is really important for me that we present it in a way that the people who are on the ground, and I think I'd love to hear what Riza thinks about this. You were talking about the communities of people who live from fishing and farming. Like, those are the people I want to have the collapse conversations with, the people in the communities I work with in Africa, the people with the communities I work with in the working-class areas of Rotterdam. I'm not interested in having a conversation about collapse in the intellectual left bubbles of the universities. That is not interesting for me. And I see that if we talk about more existential questions, fundamental questions of meaning and being together, And why is it that we're alive, that those conversations you can have with people in the Chibolia township in Lusaka, that you can have with people in the Mekong Delta in the jungle, that you can have with people who work at the dockyards in Rotterdam, and none of these people have ever told me, "Don't talk to me about collapse." So I think there's a few different things, right?

Like Will was saying, it depends where you are at and how much you're able to handle at this time. And, you know, in Nutmeg's Curse, I think. Amitav Ghosh, thank you. He talks about basically speaking with Bengali migrants, you know, in sort of the Sunderbans and thinking about migrants and following them into sort of Middle East, for example. And he talks about how the climate migrants know that they're migrating because of climate change, because of economic justice, because of class issues, and et cetera. You know, they understand all the layers of complexity there, just as, you know, any student that I have here, even when they're 16, they understand the complexities they're coming from. And they also understand, for example, how much class privilege they have, or they might not, but they can feel it right away. So I think there's, I don't know, collapse. If you bring in religion, you know, collapse exists in apocalypse, it exists in every religion. And actually, Amanda was talking earlier about spirituality. There is something interesting about the different books that you can read about collapse and apocalypses where if we take them as myths, as maps, then they are kind of showing us what kind of qualities a leader should have during apocalyptic times, or what kind of communities are needed during these times. You can take them super literally or not, but if we take them as stories and narratives that communities are taking, we've been warned again and again by this. I live in When I'm not here, I live in Newfoundland in Eastern Canada, which is an island that faced collapse actually. When you talk to communities there in rural communities where I live, in 1994, the cod fishery was closed down and communities collapsed. 60, 70% of all working class people left the province. Communities were in decay. The ecosystem was completely collapsed as a result of that. And that itself has a long history of colonization and why Europe first came to the New World was around the banks of Newfoundland, et cetera, et cetera. If you keep digging, there's a ton of stories and narratives around that. Did people in the early 1900s think that the cod fishery was ever going to collapse in the North Atlantic? Absolutely not. But those communities feel it, and those grandparents that you talk to can feel it. So again, I think, yeah, of course, wherever you go, no one will question that there's collapse because many times, again, their environments have collapsed. But of course, we know that this is happening getting faster and faster and more rapidly at a pace that no one knows before. So I wonder if there is something there around the stories, the throughway into the future, but also the throughway into the past. Jeanine, I think, was it you? You were mentioning you're doing research sort of on rock and roll, which I think is super interesting around what are the stories that our grandparents and other people have told us about collapse, Indigenous people have told us about collapse, so that the stories aren't just throughlines to the future, but actually they're throughlines to the past as well, so that we can guide ourselves from people who've already kind of experienced not this type of collapse that we have now, which is different and existential 100%, but also that have stories of how they faced it together. And I think communities have done this in wild and interesting ways. So I don't know. Sorry, Tim Logan, I think you asked about like, is it useful to use the word collapse? Sure, use the word collapse. I think it just depends on like the story you decide to attach to it. And like Will said, who's taking the story and have they lived through collapse or not themselves in some ways or another?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, there's, yeah, nothing that really connects. I wonder what your, um, because I shared in the email before, uh, the quote from Adam Curtis, the filmmaker, quite a strong statement. I mean, he uses the word cowardly, right? To use stories that frighten people, basically. So he's saying it's a, it's a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, we're all going to die. It's terrible. That's not the way to change the world. In fact, it frightens people. So yeah, I mean, I, I just wondered what your response is to that, whether, because obviously he's referring there to bourgeois greens, and I think that speaks to some of what you're speaking about, right? So in terms of the privilege somehow to not really be affected so directly by collapse. I don't know. It, it, yeah. Again, that was another one of my wonderings. Is this like some kind of privilege to pontificate about collapse because, you know, the people who are really experiencing it are not writing books about it or just having nice podcast discussions about it.

I think I inhabit a different world from the rest of you because where I live there is nobody who, other than my partner, she's completely, but even she doesn't want to talk about it. But I live in rural Shropshire, so it's the least populated county in England, and I have a smallholding, so I'm surrounded by farmers, not one of whom room is aware of collapse in any sense other than it's terrible that the migrants are doing whatever the Daily Mail said the migrants are doing. And I am holding conversations. I had quite an interesting series of conversations yesterday with television producers who wouldn't say exactly what Curtis said, but they're definitely, "We would really like you to create scripts that explain the climate emergency to people." And my response to that is, "You understand this isn't this isn't all about the carbon, right? This is not a climate emergency. We need total systemic change. And the response is, you can't say that, it's too frightening. So that would be part one. But where I come from, so I live in, I inhabit clearly a different intellectual space, which is, and it's really interesting listening to you guys. In my world, the West, Western educated, industrial, rich, democratic, weird culture is the trauma culture. And the trauma goes back 10,000, 12,000 years. We have inherited a lot of trauma. We have then exported it in deeply traumatic ways. And someone else mentioned Vanessa Andriotti and her indigenous grandfather said, the core trauma of colonialism is not the taking of the land and the killing of the people. These are deeply traumatic, but these are epiphenomena of the core trauma, which is the belief in separability, not even the belief in separation, the belief that separation can happen. Whereas indigenous peoples understand that separation cannot happen, that we are an integral part of the web of life.. And so for me, I would want the through line to go to those who understand that separability is not a thing through this moment of extraordinary inflection towards a future where we understand that separability is not a thing, but we are evolving a culture in which we are totally connected to the web of life and we are moving from heart-mind rather than head-mind. And I, on the back of reading Ginny's book, which was a really interesting read, I then spoke to Audrey Tang. Who overnight changed the education system in Taiwan to be focused on agency, interaction, and the common good. And that was 5 years ago, and they are now generating an entirely different cadre of peoples, which I find fascinating. But I'm also reading The Bigger Picture by Alexander Beyner, who was one half of Rebel Wisdom for a long time. And I just wanted to read out a bit because this for me speaks to where we're at. But just before we get there, so I'll read that in a second. I did the master's in regenerative economics at Schumacher. I wrote my dissertation on the neuropsychology and neurophysiology of language. And I think what Curtis was speaking to, generally speaking, and this is a broad generalization, people when offered any kind of information that hits at a limbic level, which is most of it, have a fight, flight, or freeze response. There's bits of fiddle about and fawn and things, but mostly in this, the level of this, we are not equipped to deal. We are equipped to, is there a tiger outside the window or not? Not do I need to do something. We still have the Paleolithic emotions. We don't have the capacity to deal with great big existential, we're all going to die. And giving people that without giving them a sense of agency, being, belonging, movement, some sense of opening. I think Curtis is right. It's another form of bullying. If we don't give agency, then what are, what are people going to do? If I tell my neighbor, sorry guys, you know, basically collapse is happening. We are all Wile E. Coyote. We have run so far over the edge of the cliff, but they can still go to the supermarket, they still have to pay their mortgage, they will still be arrested if they decide they're going to throw yellow-painted, orange-painted picture. It doesn't feel like collapse here, and that may be privilege, but it's still a reality. Having said all of that, I think this from Alexander Buener is really interesting. He says, we have little choice but to go in and through the big crisis. As Terence McKenna put it, our only option may be a forward escape. This means diving deeper into the messy, chaotic swell of modern culture. We have to understand how culture moves and breathes, how it adapts and changes, and how to dance with it in just the right way if we want to change the tune. And we need to drop the question of "what should we do?" because if we knew that, we would have done it. Instead, we can ask, "What kind of people do we need to become?" And this means doing the one thing that seems mad when we're surrounded by chaos. We have to close our eyes to listen to the sounds around us, to make ourselves achingly vulnerable to uncertainty, to let go for a moment of everything we think we know and everything that has made us feel safe. When we let go of our maps, we are forced to come to our senses, to focus on our direct experience as a human being breathing the world around us. So that for me helps to anchor me in my body me in my connection to the web of life? What can I see?

What can I hear?

What can I feel? What is the red kite singing outside the window? And then I can unfold that. That gives me a sense of connectedness while knowing everything is collapsing.

Beautiful. Yeah, that's beautiful. And if I can, what that makes me think of, Ginny, is the, um, exploring the sounds around in the Building Climate School in Rotterdam, right? That's exactly what I— where I went when I listened As we've discussed.

I was actually thinking about the Bildung Klimaschule when you were talking about that. Absolutely. The reason that I'm doing the Bildung Klimaschule is because it's not only true on an intuitive level what you're saying, Manda, but I actually did research on this. So I published a couple of papers doing research on how students that were exposed to the reality of what's going on in the world reacted. And what I found were deeply unhelpful coping mechanisms. Like delaying action, blaming other people, falling into doomerist despair. So all these ways of not doing anything, not really changing things, and it didn't lead to any kind of significant action or change in the world. So I built the Bildung Klimaschule together with Rutger because we wanted to tell the truth and then take appropriate action now, which are two of the principles of the Pedagogy of Collapse. You have to go and do something. And in the Climate School, the first thing we do, it follows the experimental pedagogics model. So we start with the brain and with the body. So we start with, okay, what we're going to learn here is going to be stressful for you. So we're going to start with how do we regulate our nervous system? How do we use dancing, martial arts, breathing to not fall into system shutdown? And all my work in communities in India, in Zimbabwe, in Zambia with the martial arts, with the karate, my work work with the School of Applied Sciences. I used to work for the RASL, the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab, which was a combination of music, dance, and liberal arts and sciences. And I brought all of that together in the Bildung Klima School. And I was like, we need this foundation of personal resilience before we can start to talk about these things. So I had this exercise that I did that was really transformative for students. One of my students talked about it at the book launch, Pedagogies of Collapse, how that really changed her world. Where I showed them a 10-minute video of the heatwave tearing through India and its multifaceted consequences on people's health, the economy, the fact that they have to choose between keeping the data centers open and like keeping the aircon on for people. And students came out of that really stressed. It was 10 minutes. And then together with a colleague of mine, Susan Tunca, from the CodArts School of Performing Arts in Rotterdam, we did an exercise called Double Skin, Double Mind, which is an intuitive intuitive body exercise of movement with kind of sounds of drums and, and nature sounds of really moving intuitively. So it's not a choreographed dance, it's really what is my body, where does it want to move, just let the body free. And we do that for about an hour, and then we came back together, and the student says to me at the end, she's like, like, I could feel myself letting go of the stress, and I couldn't deal with that because I felt so guilty. About having the privilege to be able to let go of that stress. And I said to her, look, if we give up on dancing, then we give up on the very things that we're fighting for. If we don't have dancing, art, and music, then there's nothing here left to save. And that's kind of the rock and roll part of the research. The rock and roll part stands for that, you know, what is it that gives human lives meaning? And I've been to funerals in Zimbabwe and to occasions that were less than joyful, and everyone's dancing. And I've just come back from Zambia, and Zambia has actually properly collapsed in the last 12 months due to climate change dried up the Kariba. 90% of the power was coming from the Kariba Dam. So there's no more power. So sometimes there was 2 hours of power per day, sometimes none at all. So industrial output collapses. So the whole of society along with it. So You have mass unemployment, so you have people doing alcohol and drugs, not the nice kind of drugs, but we still get together around the idea that it's still important to dance, it's still important to have music. And we were in this outhouse in the bush with the girls from the Fair Fight Project who come from the poorest, most crime-ridden, drug-ridden slum in Lusaka, and there was no light. So we were in the dark with like a Bluetooth speaker powered by a massive anchor battery that we charged up with a solar charger playing songs that we downloaded onto a phone on the Bluetooth speaker, and everybody was dancing in the pitch black outside. And it was wonderful and so emblematic of everything that we're going through. So yes, for me, you don't tell the story of collapse without involving the body in a way that allows it to literally process that information. And that is the heart, the core, the foundation of the Build time at school.

Amazing. Yeah. I mean, it, thank you. Really also speaks to what I love when you talk about regularly, Amanda, about heart-mind and body-mind, right? And I, I feel I've had many conversations on the podcast in the last 2 years increasingly about how disembodied education has been for hundreds of years and how desperately problematic that is and how we have to do something really significantly about obsessed with the brain-mind, right? And it just, it feels so insufficient now to me.

Yeah, if I could hop in there. Amazing. Yeah, stories and conversations, lots of things thinking. But one of the things that I've found really difficult, because I, in the last few years I've really tried to kind of support my own somatics, but I come not from an educational background and I've been only teaching for 2 years. What's been interesting is trying to educators to get into the somatics when there's an exam looming in 2 years' time, or with all the good intentions, you know, we do the, the breaths and the, the bodywork and whatnot for 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes at the beginning of something, and then, okay, well, okay, we have to get to real work. And it's been such a process, even in myself, you know, last year I was kind of a facilitator of the teachers who are going through the Systems Transformation Pathway project. This this year, I am a teacher, and myself I've changed, you know, from last year being like, no, we really need to do this, because I was kind of outside of the classroom and not holding the students who have to graduate. I was like, okay, this is really important, and kind of come in and do, do all the somatics. But now that I'm a teacher and I'm responsible for students graduating, you know, it feels very stressful to actually stop and do that. Or, you know, last month I got all the students to go outside because there's such a beautiful sunrise. Like, it was beautiful sunrise. We live in, you know, this amazing forest overlooking this amazing ocean, and they were all giggling, and they were just like, you know— and that was fine, the giggling was, was great, but they really enjoyed it, you know. They're like, oh, we should do this all the time. And so the next class, I'm like, shall we go say hi to the sun? They were I'm like, no, like, not really. And so it's this interesting sort of tangential dance, I want to say, around when we become part of a system, how hard it becomes to kind of move away from the structures that are already there. And also coming back to, I think, what Jeannie was saying, you know, that discomfort in the body, trying to get them to understand that it's okay, not just the students, the teachers as well, and administrators as well, that, yeah, this feels really weird, but it's okay. We're gonna do it, we're gonna get through it together, we're gonna laugh together. And actually, that's the type of relationship we need to build in order to get through this together. So I think the quality of the relationship does change with that. But I wonder if any of you have suggestions or experiences like that where when you become part of a system, you kind of start to enact it as well.

I don't know that I can respond directly to that, but I just wanna say that what I'm feeling in my body right now is just extreme frustration. Because these conversations are not happening anywhere in schools, at least not in it at any depth. And I think that, you know, that again, I think as much as education contributes to many of the issues that we're faced with right now, I also think that education is a place that can help to begin to ameliorate some of this to whatever extent that's possible at this point. And it is just very frustrating to go into schools and help them with their 3 to 5 year plan hands and not talk about any of this at all, but talk about let's do 3% better on our student achievement rates. Let— you know, the, the conversations are relevant, they are surface. There's no depth to the ways in which people in education talk about the future of education and schooling, by and large, right? That's obviously not 100%, but, you know, and just really fast, Tim, going back to that quote I can't help but when you were talking about it, you know, get a picture of the Titanic in there, you know, and it's just like some people understand what's happening and other people just want the orchestra to keep playing and, you know, they just want to just continue to feel those comforts for as absolutely long as they possibly can. And if it's not something that is recognizable at this point, I don't know what's going to make it. And obviously my experience is with schools who are not in collapse.

Right? Full stop.

You know, the perspective that I have comes from working with a lot of independent schools, international schools, and a fair number of public schools, but none of whom are really experiencing this. And I, again, I just wonder the extent to that they can really begin this work without experiencing it in some way.

Yeah. So the thing that I find really interesting personally as a reflection, like, I've seen— I've been running the podcast now for 4 years, more than 4 years. And the last 2 years, I could probably chart my own personal trajectory of learning and becoming more into this stuff physically in my body, but also just the ideas, right? Talking to Vanessa, talking to Nora, talking to many people in this space. The podcast has gone from being about education and as you say, well, the kind of superficial innovation stuff, which where it started probably in 2020 to now being about predominantly ontologies, epistemologies. I mean, like it's gone way deep into, because, you know, as you were saying, Rhys, I like the incentive structures pushing everybody back into their brain-mind in education spaces goes so deep because we don't take seriously the way of knowing of our heart-mind or our body-mind, right? We, we, we, sorry, really problematic. But when I say that, I mean in a weird since we have been conditioned. I'm saying this really profoundly as a personal reflection of my own kind of journey over the last 5 years. We are conditioned to ignore that because it's not real. It's not real knowing. It's like nice to have, as you say, right? Whereas at the beginning of a lesson, or, you know, it's nice to do some breathwork or it's nice to, but it's not the real work. The real reality, the real knowing is the brain stuff. And that feels to me like part of my journey. Will, I feel like I've seen you go through that as a friend and visibly publicly reflecting as you've learned, as you've engaged with Vanessa and all of those, all of that work, Ginny's work. It's a whole process, right? But it goes really deeply into these major questions. What, like, how do we, do we really take seriously these other ways of knowing the world?

How to Solve the Issues of the Head Mind? So it seems to me that the only answer to that is to get out of our head minds and into our heart minds and ask the web of life. And I realize this is, you know, basically what I say all the time, so I'm becoming a bit of a one-trick monkey. But if we address the issues of head mind from our head minds, we're going to hit a brick wall. No problem is solved from the mindset that created it. And that too is another cliché, but that doesn't stop it being true. This is River, who always gets a bit focused on me doing this.

Web of life intervening.

Yeah, web of life coming to comment. And so then my question is, because I live in a world where citadel mind is not a thing, where the porous mind is a thing, and actually most people, we exist in a world where everybody— Gabor Maté's myth of normal. We all maintain the myth of normal. Well, everybody knows that in their own individual case it's not true. So my question then becomes, how do we talk to the web of life and break the myth of normal? Because we're all, you know, the kids, the young people— I spoke to a couple of 20-somethings last week and they were incandescently angry at the education system and the, what they called, miseducation that had been promoted. And they're going through schools that are preparing them for 2.5 kids and a golden retriever mortgage and bigger payments on the car, that they know is not a thing. And the people teaching them know is not a thing, but the system still maintains that it's a thing and everybody has to agree with the system. And how many of us saying, I'm sorry guys, the emperor has no clothes. How many of us saying that out loud does it take before the general chorus says, emperor's got no clothes, but look, we have better emperors over here who don't need clothes. I don't have an answer to that, but it seems to me that if we address that with our head minds, we're going to hit a brick wall. We need to come into our heart-mind, ask the web of life and engage the energetics. I think Ginny addressed this in her book, and as far as I understood it, Ginny, you are completely familiar with swimming in the energetic space of the world, that where I am in my heart-mind changes more of the environment around me than what I choose to say. Than the logic that comes out of my head. And what happens if we engage enough people in a shift in heart-mind? Will that begin to unclothe the emperor? Does that make sense, or am I just moving off to the edge of woo too far?

Yeah, I did talk about that in the book and how I managed that in my personal journey through depression and anxiety and, well, let's say personal collapse. The ways in which I coped with it are not necessarily for everybody. I did share them in the last chapter of Pedagogies of Collapse, that for me, I used the practice of martial arts, and I used gardening, like doing a kind of permaculture design, and I used psychedelics, and I used alternative forms of human relationships like ethical non-monogamy as ways to, like, spiritually connect with other people in the world in a different way. Some of these practices are really out there for some people, so, you know, I will talk about it more in my next book, the subtitle of which is Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll and Climate Justice for All. But I do want to resonate with what you're saying about the spiritual change that has to happen in the world. And at the same time, I hear you, Will, and I hear you guys and I hear you, Tim Logan. But this is where collapse is actually the fact that confronts us with that things are going to have to change. These international schools will collapse. And it's going to hit them out of nowhere because they didn't prepare and they didn't see it coming. We've got this in the country where I live now in the Netherlands. I think it's already more than a year ago, a far-right populist government was elected and they have now elected to cut €1 billion from higher education and science. And none of the universities saw this coming. And the thing is, in the work that I do, where I talk to a lot of people who don't have a university education, who've gone gone through the worst end of the very highly segregated Dutch education system, where if you're working class, if you've got a migrant background, you're sent to go work with your hands at the age of 11. And there's no coming back from that. I've spoken to kids who were 15 years old who were sent to work in a factory here in the Netherlands, who were like, what am I doing with my life? And so these universities, which are— it's not true that they are, you know, left-wing elite. Like, the university where I work, Erasmus University, is notorious for its neoliberal I mean, we're at the House of Rotterdam School of Management and the Erasmus School of Economics, all of which have extremely neoliberal philosophies. But it's true that the universities were spectacularly out of touch and were hit around the back of the head with the surprise of, yeah, all your budgets are going to get cut now. But I saw this coming. And I had been trying to say for at least 5 years that sustainability doesn't mean having vegan food on campus. It means making sure you still have a university in 30 years. And I said, none of you are preparing to still have a university in 30 years. And now I'm looking at the timeline, I'm saying, if we make it in 5 years, that's already good. And so that's why I created the Bildungsklimaschule in a third space, which is beautiful. The students of the Bildungsklimaschule picked up on that in the interviews we did afterwards. They said, oh, the climate school was like a third space for us. So for those for those who don't have the context, the Bildung Klimaschule is a program that combines the vocational, applied, and university students together. It's— Pedagogies of Collapse laid the foundation, and then I was like, right, time to roll my sleeves up and go do something. So Rutger Engels and I built the Bildung Klimaschule, where these students come together all through this embodied learning, holistic, artistic, spiritual expansion program to learn about the real state of the world. Deliberately, even physically, it's not located on the university campus. It's located in a municipal building that's been reclaimed in the south of the city. So right at the heart of where the working-class areas are in the city, right behind it is a community garden. So I had a background in political economy at some point in my life, as is obvious to anybody who read the first chapter of Pedagogies of Collapse. And there's this great historical anecdote from the field of political economy where in the 1970s, when Keynesian economics collapsed, basically neoliberalism took over, not because it was a better idea, but because they were ready for the collapse of Keynesian economics, because they had been investing for years since The Road to Serfdom, basically since Hayek wrote his book, which was 1944. So, you know, decades earlier, they had been investing and preparing for the collapse of Keynesian economics. And as soon as it happened, boom, they were in been there. And I'm like, we need to learn from that playbook. So I am investing now in being there, being ready. So when these schools finally hit the wall, I'm like, hey guys, how about an alternative in which we go back to places where we use our hands, where we grow food, where we're able to build communities, where we use our bodies. And I'm gathering, I'm not just doing it, I'm gathering data on it. So we have a research program running alongside the Build on Climate School. And that an integral part of what we do. And I'm very thankful to Václav Engels for being like the research director and the research mind behind this. But he brings that like academic thoroughness to like, let's measure everything. So I can already tell you because we have the measurements that the Billem Climate School significantly reduces eco-anxiety. And having that data means that when the collapse hits everywhere, as it's already happening in many places, as Raisa also pointed out, and people are like, oh no, what do we do? I'm like, hey, 'How about this?' And we have the data to show what happens when we do this. So it's a bit nerdy, but it's also essential to have a model that is— that you can show as an alternative. And that's, yeah, that's what makes me get up in the morning.

Yeah, if I could hop in, I think, uh, Amanda— was it Amanda who asked a question also in the chat around the time frame is shorter in the finance? But so before I came to Wales, I was working as an associate director for the Tamarack Institute in Canada, and we had— we were leading a project called Communities Building Youth Futures, which is a 5-year Government of Canada project looking at basically educational innovation through a government lens. But what was really cool was, I mean, I had some funding to be able to give to communities. We worked with 20 communities, rural and small and medium communities across Canada, Indigenous communities, northern communities, and it was a 5-year program. And the way that it worked was we didn't take the school out of the context of the community., right? And so young people in those communities came together to describe what kind of youth futures they wanted for their own communities. And then we assembled what we call tables around those priorities that the young people had. And, you know, of course, it's a Government Canada project, so it was around education centrally. But what that allowed us to do was for young people in each of those places to say how other things connected to education in that place, right? So it could be health, it could be housing, it could be, you know, all kinds of things depending on the context and depending on the school and the community. And then it allowed for allies of organizations and allies of adults to come around them to say, hey, we want to help you build this future for our community, right? And we built these table of partners and this coordination opportunities around collective action principles, which was really extraordinary, honestly. You know, we thought we were going get a few partners, but most of the communities ended up getting 15, 20 partners. So that, that was one innovation, I guess, in the system where it was the community level. But we did a similar thing at the provincial level and the national level, right? So there was then the, you know, positive deviance or whatever you call them at the provincial level. So what other communities are doing innovations around education, around community building, and bringing them together. And same thing at the national level around foundations, but also interesting people doing that work. What that allowed was connect all the levels together and for anything that was happening at the community level to then be disseminated for public policy work. But what was really cool was that I got to— Tamarack had some money as part of innovation fund, so we were able to give $50,000 to communities if they wanted it, up to $50,000 per year, and it had to be youth-led as an innovation. And it was extraordinary. It was really, really cool what came out of some of the work there across the country. And there's a report that came out earlier in the year around that. But we, one of the things that came out really strongly was that communities really wanted, and young people wanted these diverse pathways to credit, right? So they all agreed that yes, education is important, but how I attain that education is different, right? And whether you're in Eastern Canada or Northern Canada, that will look different for you because it'll depend on your pathway. Through that research, we discovered, for example, that a young person at 14 in some of the northern communities, mostly Indigenous, had to make the decision to leave their community entirely and go live in a completely different city in order to pursue any education. That makes no sense. Like, how nonsensical is that as an educational system? And so some of the funding allowed for teachers to build curriculum that were community-based. So especially for students that were were maybe not going to graduate in the traditional sense, it allowed them to, you know, take part in museum studies or work as a construction worker in their community or get their first aid certification, food prep certifications, etc. And some of the communities that did these alternative pathways or community-based impact pathways saw, you know, graduation rates increase 20-30% within a year with just $50,000. And, you know, an allyship and coaching from the Tamarack Institute and support from all of the community around a roundtable, right? $50,000 in a community like that is no money at all if you think about it, right? It's because a lot of those kids who don't graduate end up costing— I mean, let's not go into evaluations. I won't go into that. But it really opened up a ton of life pathways for these young people and actually opened up life pathways for these communities.. And it also opened up these opportunities for teachers who'd been seeing these problems in their community, seeing the environmental, socioeconomic problems, to say, hey, I am not only a teacher, but I'm also a community member. And it allowed those, like, relationships to form in a more governed and other ways, right? So anyway, that was a really cool thing. We came out with a toolkit around, you know, teachers and people who want to promote diverse credit pathways as one possible solution to do this, because that's what we need, right, is people who see the problem, who can analyze it, and then we want them to take action. Often they don't know how to take action. And so some of them will include, you know, building a table of partners. Some of it will include policy work and advocacy work. Some of it will include storytelling. And actually, you need sort of a coach. You need someone to kind of support you through that and building a peer network. So I, I think there— the money aspect is really interesting to me. So right now I teach at like this elite-ish institution, although we're 60% of our students are on scholarship, come from all over the world, and working, you know, on a government project. And I was at the Hakuba Forum last year on educational leadership. There's a lot of momentum for change. I'm just wondering, like, what is stopping this? I'm curious with Jeannie, you know, like, where is that click? Like, we're ready. I think there's some people who are ready for the collapse, but, you know, where is the investment going to come from is a really interesting question to me. Because these things are working, but they're not being continued. You know, the program, the Communities Building Youth Futures program, was defunded after 5 years despite amazing, amazing work, despite, you know, thousands and thousands of partners and relationships built at community level because of the lack of, I don't know, data of some sort, I suppose, or like government priorities. But for me, I'm like, if that's not a government priority to like shift the education system towards that kind of community-based model, place-based model, What is the government priority? You know, what is the priority of philanthropy or anyone that's in the system?

I think that's a really interesting question. Who's in government and what is their aim? Is, you know, for me, the current system is not fit for purpose. This is staringly obvious. How do we change the governance system is exactly what I wrote the last book on. If the hard right is in ascendancy around the world and Musk, you know, we have the best democracy money can buy in the weird countries and Musk about BIDEL. Is shutting down higher education that connects people to their communities a deliberate act? What— I, and I don't know the answer to that. I'm really interested in, Jenny, in why the hard right in Holland has decided to defund all the universities. What are they saying is the reason, and what's the actual reason? And then, to Raees' question, how, how do we spread it anyway? Because it seems to me there's quite a lot of philanthropic money out there that isn't attached to hard-right ideologies that, you know, right, $50,000 is small change that could transform communities and connecting people together presumably becomes quite a high priority as we head into collapse awareness. But Gini, I would be really interested to know why, what happened happened.

Oh, they were quite explicit about it. So I don't know if you know much about Dutch politics, but the head of the PVV, so which is like the Trumpian party of the Netherlands, basically built a platform on saying that universities are bastions of woke leftism, which will not surprise you at all. And that basically, it's this weird paradox where they are saying in their government, we have this thing called the Regierungsakkord, which is the coalition agreement, where the word innovation appears 85 times. And yet they've cut all the innovation funds, all the science funds, all the research funds. It's basically the way the electoral system works, which is on a 4-year rolling election timescale. So their best bet to stay in power as long as they can, which is their ultimate goal, and how they use that power, what we have seen from the experience of seeing them in power, for instance, in the European Parliament, is a lot of the time it's to line their own pockets. But so how they stay in power is they promise working-class people, well, what Trump does, you know, we're gonna stop immigration, we're gonna cut taxes, which they are cutting taxes, taxes, but the people who are benefiting from that are the upper middle class, because they're changing the tax bracket for the middle income earners, not lower income earners. And so basically, the Netherlands was in an exceptional economic position in the EU in that it's one of the only countries that in the first half of this year did not have a deficit. So is it deliberately— it's not like France where they're really with their backs against the wall with like astronomic debt and terrible financial situation. The Netherlands is in a good financial position. So it is completely an ideological choice to say we don't want to invest in higher education anymore. And instead, we want to like grease people's palms by giving tax cuts to large corporations and middle class and upper middle class earners. It's some kind of cynical calculation to stay in power. And they're not even hiding it. This is one of the astonishing things of politics in 2024 is that people are literally saying what they're doing. And there's this kind of almost like, "Oh, it's such a relief to hear people actually say what they mean." I'm like, "Yes, but are you hearing what that actually means?" And that's quite terrifying. And I'm very well aware of the issues that Reiza is raising about financing because the Bildung Klimaschule, well, is financed or has been financed so far through trust funds, the Erasmus Trust Fund, fund through, so it was funded through strategic money that had been put in place when Rutger was the rector. And that strategic money is now wiped in the budget cuts that have come. They've closed down the sustainability platform. They've closed down the education innovation platform and all the money that was associated with that. And so we're now going to private philanthropy and private money to try and shore up the Bildung Klimaschutz school. We have also applied for government funding. But the chances of that are always, you know, it's super competitive. There's a 20% chance at the start. Going through the private philanthropy and private money, there's always the question that these people made their money within a system to which they are very much attached because they have been very successful in the system. And so I'm always told, I get told this all the time, yeah, can you tone down the activism? Can you like make it more entrepreneurial? Can you focus like on entrepreneurship skills? Can we throw some artificial intelligence in there? And I have many conversations about AI with Zak Stein, none of which are very reassuring. Can we, can we like talk about sustainable AI? Mm, you mean we want to talk about the contradiction in terms? And it's difficult and it's frustrating, but to me, if I think back to the history of the Folks high schools in Denmark, And I also am so inspired by urban farming in Detroit. And even though Cuba is in full collapse now, they— yeah, so Cuba, the grid has collapsed and like everything's gone haywire in Cuba. But in 1991, when that first happened, everybody turned to producing food to prevent a famine. I dream of a school model, and I actually saw this in Zimbabwe. So I'm very excited because I actually saw this happening in Zimbabwe. The school we partner with, with the Fair Fight Foundation, has its own permaculture garden with chickens, with rabbits, with— they basically feed their whole staff off the land on the school. And to me, that is one possible avenue for making at least part of the costs of running the school coming from the actual production of the school. Are we connected with producing food, with producing things with our hands, with repairing things. I would see in the future that that could be, especially when collapse hits everything and we have food chains. I mean, you saw what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine. There wasn't any sunflower oil anywhere in Europe. And during COVID various supply chains. And we're going to start having supply chain issues all over the place all the time. So the more we can include producing the basics for our survival, which is like food, repairing things, building repair repairing solar panels, etc., within the context of the school, that's also super inclusive for working-class kids. Because let's say to make the building of a climate school attractive to them, there had to be concrete skills attached to how they could keep food on the table. And so I think we can build that into the education models. And Raisa is asking the question about food safety regulations. I think that when we're on the brink of starvation and collapse, that's not going to be so much of an issue. That's my personal—

it's a complete facetious question because I contend with this all the time where I keep trying to get schools to build their own gardens, but it's wild. The amount of food safety regulations in especially these weird countries is out of this world where I just am like, I honestly wanted to like start an innovation fund just to figure out how can we get over food safety regulations in institutions as a way to like get over collapse, because that's a real issue.

Amazing. I'm conscious of time and I know like people have lives and Will wants to get to sleep after an all-night flight, I think. But this is beautiful and I just so, so appreciate it. I— there's so much more. I have a thousand questions and I would love to explore more. I know we will in various ways, in all sorts of other ways through Topias. Manda is just a— it's such a powerful idea that I think maybe warrants its own podcast, perhaps we could follow up. I think that would be amazing. But my own personal reflection would be we started pontificating about these big ideas of collapse and actually where we've ended up is about action, is about what are people doing? What have people been doing for years? What are people doing now? How do we fund it? There are amazing things happening all over the world and I really, really, I see I see it and I believe it and I want to, you know, share it as much as possible. It is happening, this readying, but it's nowhere near as much as we need. And Will, I feel your frustration, man, in terms of the people not having these conversations. This is the inspiration for this, but I just love where we've ended up. This is, that to me is what it's all about. It's why we run the Festival of Hope. It's like hope is action, you know, how do we do while keeping talking? But thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just so appreciate all of you.

Thank you for the invitation. This was such an inspiring conversation.

Thank you.

Tamara, thanks. So glad it's happening.

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