Beyond the Obvious: novel podcasts for enquirers

Our pilot podcast series, Beyond the Obvious, was co-organised by Feasta and the European Health Futures Forum.

The hosts, Seán O’Conláin and Caroline Whyte, explored a range of topics with guests from a wide variety of backgrounds. There are six monthly podcasts of 20-30 minutes, released between March 15th and September 17th 2019. (We took a break in August.) Please feel free to comment below.

Topics include:

• decarbonisation
• decreasing energy consumption
• measuring wellbeing
• reviving biodiversity, which is taken to include local culture and language
• drivers of health
• monetary reform

Our thanks to Laoise …

Where are our motorways headed?

"We are richer when we know our neighbours – human, animal and plant…..when we know the names of the nearest trees to where we live, the most common birds locally, and where the nicest blackberries grow". Elizabeth Cullen urges us to place stronger restrictions on advertising and to take other steps to reduce our consumption.

Anticipating the coming of troubles – envisaging a lifeboat economy

Brian Davey argues that, while there is no point in hoping that the powerful will manage to resolve the multiple crises we're facing, we can still work on developing permacultural designs of local cultivation space and residential areas, and on ways to create soils and grow trees that absorb carbon, so that new forms of living and organising may become possible.