Tag: audio

  • The Great Humbling

    What does it mean to be humbled? Perhaps it’s to lose some pride, to feel less important. Even a little defeated. From the Latin humus, soil: to be brought down to earth, to bite the dust, to be laid low. In that sense maybe a humbling can never actually be welcomed in as ‘great’? We would never wish for this encounter with mortality on a planetary scale. But here we are.  

    In early 2020, I’d begun a conversation with Ed Gillespie, futurist and founder of the environmental communications agency Futerra. The Covid-19 pandemic reached Europe that March and it was against that background that we decided to put this conversation we were having into a podcast.

    Our first series of eight episodes was published between April and June. You can find it in all the usual podcast places, or listen in the player on this page. (Use the Menu link at the bottom right of the player to select episodes.)

    Check out the show notes for each episode on Libsyn for references and links to the people, projects, books and articles we talk about.

    We’re planning to record a second series in the autumn of 2020.

  • The Great Humbling

    The Great Humbling

    It’s too soon to tell the story of this event – and it will still be too soon when it starts to be too late.

    Earlier this week, Ed Gillespie and I recorded this conversation, a back-of-an-envelope map of the stories already forming around the Covid-19 pandemic and it’s effects, and a way in to a longer exploration of what it might mean to talk about the moment we’re living in as a time of humbling, being brought down to earth.

    Join us in the weeks ahead, as we puzzle through the links between this crisis and the larger planetary predicament around and ahead of us.