Accidental Gods

16/07/2025

When people have experienced ways to bring Power to those with Wisdom and Wisdom to those with Power, then they’ll work together to make it a reality at a larger scale.

Our ‘democracy’ is, in fact, a kleptocracy that is not fit for purpose IF that purpose is the continuation of complex life on earth. The sociopaths who have stolen control show no signs of shifting to something that works, so it’s way past time that ordinary people across all walks of life embraced the tools of participatory democracy and wrought the new system that we need – a new House of the People which would, finally, accrue power to those with wisdom and enact governance of, for and by the people and the planet.

To do this, we need people who are intimately aquainted with these tools, who live them, breathe them, find joy and creativity in them and know how to share them in ways ordinary people understand. Our House is a collective that exists to do exactly this and in today’s episode, we’re talking to Katy Rubin and Oli Whittington, two of its core team, to find out what it does and how and why – and, crucially, where it could take us if we all jump on board.

Katy Rubin is a Legislative Theatre practitioner and strategist based in the UK. She is founder of The People Act hub for creative civic practice.

Oli Whittington is the initiator and co-lead of Our House, drawing on his background in participatory design and democracy.

Together, they are working around all four nations of the UK to help bring the tools of participatory democracy to communities of place, purpose and passion. They are helping to facilitate local participatory processes with a view to creating National Charters for each Nation and then bringing people together to decide whether we want a united Charter for the whole of the UK or remain separate.

To me, creating a governance system that is fit for purpose is absolutely essential to our moving forward through the pinch point of the Great Transition. If we can’t find coherent, constructive, compassionate, courageous ways to work together, we’re sunk—and while there might be courageous, compassionate people within the current system, the overall system is not any of these. So I dearly hope that by the end of this, you’ll want to become involved.
And if you’re listening to this podcast as it goes out on the 16th of July 2025, you should know that there’s an online event on the 18th which in an open invitation to anyone, anywhere who wants to start building an open democracy. Please do sign up, there’s a link in the show notes.

https://accidentalgods.life/peoples-charter-for-people-power-with-katy-rubin-and-oli-whittington-of-our-house/

When people have experienced ways to bring Power to those with Wisdom and Wisdom to those with Power, then they’ll work together to make it a reality at a larger scale.

10/07/2025

Hey people

I am honoured to be offering a webinar/workshop with the Work That Reconnects Network

We are living through a time between stories. Narratives of scarcity, extraction, greed and separation are crumbling, while new stories of a flourishing and healthy planet are seeking to be born.

Our call is for participation in creating these new narratives. This begins with building deep connection to ourselves and each other with movements that coalesce around shared values and listening for the stories that arise out of those values.

Saturday, October 11, 2025
10am PDT / 6pm BST (UTC -7)
Check your time zone here.

We will offer a visioning and writing process that invites participants to explore the layers of what they truly value, and how they might express that value in ways that nourish life.

https://workthatreconnects.org/event/thrutopian-narratives-webinar/

09/07/2025

The current system is Not Fit for Purpose - IF that purpose is the continuation of complex life on earth (or, indeed, any kind of reasonable justice for ordinary people)

we need a new system. Urgently.

09/07/2025

So glorious from Tom Hirons

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
[from MOLOK, part 2.]

Who are you,
between your sleepless daybreak nightmares
and the brightest hours of your day?
Who will you be,
between your countless failings
and that highest dream you hold?

What is the cause that called you here,
between biology and what you left in the stars?
What will be your triumph,
between stoically staying the course
and saving everything and everyone
in all ways everywhere?

Who has the answers to these questions?
NO ONE ALIVE TODAY.

What are you, between idiocy and the infinite?
Who knows, but become it.
What do you love?
This, you should know.
TURN TO IT.

06/07/2025

Well... This summer is going to be rather lovely - I'll be on , for the Book Festival at the end of August. If you're around, come along...

Islay Book Festival / Fèis Leabhraichean Ìle
September Publishing

Tickets are now available for Manda Scott: Any Human Power at Bruichladdich Hall, Isle of Islay on Sunday 31st August 2025. Click the link for further information and to secure your tickets now!

25/06/2025

How can Bioregionalism supplant the nation state as the natural unit of civilisation?
This week's guest on the , Joe Brewer is living, breathing and teaching the ways we can work together with each other and the natural flows of water and life.
How do we build ways of being that reunite us with the web of life, create new/old ways of letting value flow and become what humanity has been and could be: stewards of that massive, magical, heartbreakingly beautiful living system that is the web of life?
Joe Brewer works at the leading edge of these ideas, testing out answers on the ground in communities of place, purpose and passion around the world. Joe is a trans-disciplinary systems thinker and Earth regeneration designer who has worked in everything from agroforestry work in Bioparque Móncora to starting a Waldorf Forest School (Sueños del Bosque) to co-founding a territorial foundation called Fundación Barichara Regenerativa and starting a trust to bring more local land into the commons. He was founder of the Earth Regenerators study group, which became Design School for Regenerating Earth, and is the author of The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth.
Increasingly, he’s becoming a leading global voice on the ways we can return to a way of living that is, as you’ll here, how we have lived for over 99% of human history. It’s the way that makes sense, that can heal our relationships to ourselves, each other and the living web of life. The question, always, is how we make this happen? How do we shift our entire culture out of a world where lines drawn on maps are more real than the flows of a river, back to a place where clean air, clean water, clean soil are our priorities, the non-negotiable baselines from which everything else arises? How do we shift our concept of value flows away from the accumulation of stuff in a zero-sum game to a place where human needs are trusted and met? Joe has such heart-warming, inspiring examples of how this is happening around the world: on all 5 inhabited continents, there are groups making this happen. As Joe says, this is the work of now. It’s urgent. It’s also the single most inspiring thing we can do.
https://accidentalgods.life/sit-with-the-river-breathe.../

How can Bioregionalism supplant the nation state as the natural unit of civilisation? Joe Brewer is living, breathing and teaching the ways we can work together with each other and the natural flows of water and life.

22/06/2025

Also in totalitarian states

so when you have a totalitarian state declaring war on another nation, be prepared for a lot of un-truth...

21/06/2025

Here is a for the Solstice – the moment when the sun stands still.

It is suitable for both the summer and winter Solstice (northern and southern hemispheres respectively)

You don’t have to do this at the exact moment of stillness: it’s the connection that counts, the marking of the turning point from days lengthening to shortening (or vice versa if you’re in the southern hemisphere). This is a moment of reflection and a re-affirming of our connection to the web of life.

You don’t have to limit yourself to one pass through – please feel free to explore this more deeply than one single iteration.

https://accidentalgods.life/solstice-meditation-2025-sun-stands-still-by-manda-scott/

Here is a meditation for the shortest night of the year - the time when the sun stands still. It doesn't have to be at the moment of the solstice, it's the connection that counts, the marking of the day. And you don't have to limit yourself to one pass through - please feel free to explore this more...

11/06/2025

How close are we to the edge of Zero Day when no water comes out of the taps? Scarily close. But Tim Smedley has a whole host of ways we can restore our water cycles.

If you listen to this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know that I believe the way forward is predicated on our finding shared values—I’d go for integrity, compassion, courage and generosity of spirit as the baselines—and then a suite of clear asks in the outer world and needs in the inner world. In logistical terms, at an absolute baseline, we need Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Soil. These are non negotiable and the fact that we currently have none of these is a grim indictment of how much we live in an economy that sucks the life out of everything rather than a society that grows. But we do have people who are working flat out to change the narrative on exactly these topics and this week’s guest, Tim Smedley, is one of these.

Tim is an award-winning sustainability journalist who has worked with the BBC, the Guardian, Sunday Times and Financial Times. He is also a celebrated non-fiction writer. His first book, Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution, was shortlisted for the UK’s Royal Society Science Book Prize. His latest: The Last Drop: Solving the World’s Water Crisis was a Times Book of the Year and has been described as ‘Smart, Sobering and Scholarly’ which it certainly is.

This is one of those books that’s both terrifying, utterly compelling and—I’m glad to say—ultimately inspiring. Yes, the world’s water is in a desperate state. Yes, it has been horribly mismanaged almost everywhere by the kleptocracy that masquerades as a democracy in our modern world. But yes, we do have responses that will work, they have been carefully explored and water is one of those unifying elements that brings people together across tribal boundaries. We all need clean water and getting there means we need to find common principles by which we can live. Spoiler alert: turning water into a for-profit commodity is not a part of the solution. Regenerative agriculture, re-Wilding our waters, beavers (yay!) and sane water saving/sparing practices definitely are.
Tim is so knowledgeable and his books are both brilliantly researched and utterly personal. He goes to the places he writes about and his first-hand experiences are priceless. I have put links in the show notes for both of his books, plus the Medium article on DeGrowth which is where I first came across his work. Please do explore afterwards.

https://accidentalgods.life/rewilding-our-water-from-rain-to-river-to-sewer-and-back-with-tim-smedley-author-of-the-last-drop/

How close are we to the edge of Zero Day when no water comes out of the taps? Scarily close. But Tim Smedley has a whole host of ways we can restore our water cycles.

31/05/2025

We are honoured to bring to Accidental Gods, a recording of three of our generation’s leading thinkers in conversation at the in Sheffield, hosted by Opus Independents.

Kate Raworth meets Indy JoharJohar and James Lock

This is an unflinching conversation, but it’s absolutely at the cutting edge of imagineering: this lays out where we’re at and what we need to do, but it also gives us roadmaps to get there: It’s genuinely Thrutopian, not only in the ideas as laid out, but the emotional literacy of the approach to the wicked problems of our time.

Now we have to make it happen.



We are honoured to bring to Accidental Gods, a recording of three of our generation's leading thinkers in conversation at the Festival of Debate in Sheffield, hosted by Opus. This is an unflinching conversation, but it's absolutely at the cutting edge of imagineering: this lays out where we're at an...

28/05/2025

The only way through the crises we’re facing is to rekindle a deep, abiding respect for ourselves, each other and the living web of life. So how do we make this happen?

The future rests upon us building heart-grounded, spirit-led communities that link humanity to the Web of Life. We know that the key to this is building reciprocal relationships with our food and the land from which it comes. Doing this is…harder.

So this week, we’re speaking with Abel Pearson of . Abel is a friend of the podcast – we last spoke in the depths of the pandemic when he was farming 3 acres and beginning to feed the local community in ways that helped the people in a ten mile radius really to connect with the spirit of the land on which their food was grown.

Now, Abel and the team are farming 138 acres of National Trust property, and still producing food for people in the local area – but so much more than that, they are building communities of place, passion and purpose, centred on the land and the cycles of the seasons and the ways we can build authentic relationship, full of reverence for the many, many layers of life in, on and under it the soil. He says that everything he does now is for his young son and the children to come, in the hope that they might yet enjoy abundant foodscapes, clean rivers and regenerative cultures.

https://accidentalgods.life/farm-as-church-land-as-lover-community-farming-and-food-with-abel-pearson-of-glasbren/

The only way through the crises we're facing is to rekindle a deep, abiding respect for ourselves, each other and the living web of life. So how do we make this happen?

14/05/2025

Our world is more magical than we know – more than we can know. Increasing numbers of us are realising that the ‘citadel theory of mind’ where we see ourselves as isolated units within the boundaries of our own skulls is not how the world works. But if it isn’t, then how do we make sense of the worlds beyond consensus reality? How do we engage with the web of life and all that’s around it in ways that are respect, reciprocal and generative?
Robert (Bob) Falconer is a long time practitioner and trainer. He is the author or co-author of many books, including Many Minds, One Self which he co-wrote with Dick Schwartz, who is credited with founding Internal Family Systems Therapy. For me, this is the form of therapy that leans closest into spiritual work, particularly into shamanic work, and Bob’s book, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind and Spirit Possession is a ground-breaking work that blows open the fallacies of the citadel mind model and opens us to a wide spectrum of other realities in other cultures, all of which acknowledge the existence of non-human, non-embodied energies that have at least a degree of agency and that can interact with human beings in ways that are either to our benefit or our detriment. Very few are neutral.
So as we hurtle towards the edge of a cliff, pushed by our culture’s endemic inability to engage with our own traumas, talking to Bob seemed pretty much essential. We talk quite a lot about IFS, which is Internal Family Systems therapy and at the start, we open up more of what that’s about, though I do encourage you to read the book Bob co-wrote with Dick Schwartz. We also – and this is a trigger warning – explore some of Bob’s own life history of harrowing sexual and physical abuse so if this is likely to trigger parts of you, then please only listen when you’re feeling grounded and well resourced. Beyond that, we range far, wide and deep across the boundaries where science meets spirituality and philosophy meets psychotherapy, all of which is squarely in the area that I think needs most work, for all of us.

Our world is more magical than we know - more than we can know. Increasing numbers of us are realising that the 'citadel theory of mind' where we see ourselves as isolated units within the boundaries of our own skulls is not how the world works. But if it isn't, then how do we engage with the web of...