Shift and Signal

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 shape contemporary life with interviews from over a dozen academics, writers, feminists, activists and community leaders. The walk engages 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 you: is masculinity a stuck place of damaging patterns? Or is masculinity already changing into a fair and sustainable identity we can use to bring forth resilience and restoration?

Ideas of being good enough are central to the Western lifestyle that says it’s okay for each of us in the UK to individually consume four planets’ worth of resources each year. That is clearly unsustainable. If we’re going to live more ecologically-sound lives, in touch with our resources and our communities, a number of things need to change. While the previous episode went right to the root of the problem in examining patriarchal masculinity, this episode challenges the concepts of beauty, fashion, and how we present ourselves to others through mass consumerism. With a focus on how images of beauty are used against women (Naomi Wolf) to limit their lives, this podcast takes a walk around consumerist Newcastle, and is interwoven with interviews from academics, feminists, women working in fashion, and those tackling patriarchal capitalism, to ask how and if we can ever relinquish beauty?

Is it even possible to relinquish our humanity? Would that make us in-human? Wouldn’t that just make the crises we face worse? Or is it the belief that, as humans, we are somehow exceptional, more important, more fundamentally valuable than all other beings that has gotten us into this mess?

This episode of the podcast asks what it means to be human today, and if ideas of “posthumanism“, discussed widely in academia, can find their way into our everyday conversations, and if thinking of ourselves as posthuman can help us reconfigure how we live our lives in balance with the world around us.

If we are going to live in balance with the world, not using more of our fair share of resources, and building stronger and more resilient communities, we’re going to have to change how we live at home. In fact, it might even challenge what we think a home should be. This episode of the podcast asks you to put on your own walk and evening performance–in your own home. The podcast, a mix of narrative and interviews with artists, climate change activists, engineers, poets, home-dwellers, and home-makers, will ask you to take a tour of your living space, and spend time with everything from your air vents 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.

All change is bodily change; that’s the lesson we’re learning from neuroscience. That’s why changing our habits is hard; they become part of who we are, wired into our ways of being. So if we really do need to change how we live and behave–what we consume, how we relate, and who we want to be–then we have to take the inner journey too. This episode talks to psychologists, embodiment researchers, artists, and people who have experienced change, to consider the questions and practices we need to ask of ourselves to relinquish bad habits, build resilience in ourselves, to be able to restore our connection with others and a sustainable planet.

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 your 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.

Only Donald Trump and those who make their millions from the fossil fuel industry continue to deny climate change is happening and driving our planet to a sudden, watery, chaotic grave. The whole purpose of Deep Adaptation thinking is to look at connecting our practices, individual and societal, to these great challenges we face. We all know, deep down, that recycling isn’t enough. We need to give things up–such as masculinity, fashion, our sense of human exceptionalism, even perhaps our beliefs in human ingenuity. We’ve built resilience at home, and inside our bodies. Now it’s time to restore old practices of living in balance with our world–beginning with soil, and now looking up and around us, to the climate. This episode invites climate engineers, refugees, activists, writers, artists, and those working in environmental roles, to share with us ideas of how we can change our home into a resilient city.

This live recording was the final part of the series, and invited those involved via downloading, listening, sharing, and coming on the guided walks, to participate. The conversation began with Rebecca Huggan (The NewBridge Project) and Laura Coleman (ONCA) discussing the role of arts organisations in building response-ability towards climate change, and invited participants to share discussions and ideas to relinquish unsustainable habits, build resilience in our bodies, and restore practices that lead to earthly flourishing.