The Flourishing Diversity Manifesto (Seminar)

Our colleague Jerome Lewis was one of the originators and facilitators of the Flourishing Diversity Network, bringing Indigenous activists and elders into western institutional settings for 'Listening Sessions'. He will be talking about the Flourishing Diversity Manifesto, written under guidance of Indigenous elders for the future of our habitable planet

---

https://vimeo.com/1141995002

---

Welcome, everybody. We have an anthropologist speaking here in the RCO Institute. Jerome Lewis, he's been for a long, long time, a great friend and part of radical anthropology group, working with us colleagues with all his work on hunter gatherer, of the Congo Hunter gatherers, and recently all the work mobilizing flourishing diversity in starting and getting flourishing, diversity moving.

He's gonna be telling you the most about that, but, he's got so much sort of hot, news about what it was like in Belen, to be at CO 30 and launching the Flourishing Diversity Manifesto.

So I'm gonna hand out.

Okay. Well, thanks Camilla, and, lovely to see you all here, and thanks for coming.

Oops, that was quick. so I thought I should just give a little bit of background to where this manifesto came from.

In 2018, we organized a, flourishing diversity series here, and that was really the outcome of, some difficulties that our partners in Brazil were having to organize anything around indigenous land rights.

This was during the Bolsonaro years in Brazil, and prior to that, we'd had a Newton Fund funded, project where we had, collaborated with Gu, who live in the Atlantic Forest with Ashika who live in the Amazon Forest so that they could share different elements of their different strategies for survival.

And, it is perhaps important and, and less well known that the Atlantic Forest used to be almost as large or as large as the Amazon, but it's lost 92% of its surface cover through land use transformation.

So Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and these great cities of Brazil are all built on what was once the, the Atlantic Forest and the Gu people have found their territories completely, decimated and in many areas, they're still under intense and very violent murderous pressure from the agro industry to take over their last few remaining spaces.

And, and, and it is quite remarkable when you, if you get an aerial photograph of this area, the only places where you'll find, or almost the only places where you'll find the original forest still standing, are in the tiny little bits of territory the Goni have managed to, to keep hold of.

Anyways, part of this project, we did a, the Ashker have developed a, a tree nursery, technique for, for, c creating great banks of indigenous species of trees.

So they, all the indigenous trees that were in the Amazon, and some of those were also in the Atlantic forest.

So they shared these techniques with the gu and the gu shared seeds, because the gu have a whole, idea, around the importance of each of us finding heaven in this life, in this world and so what they do is they try and find areas of forest which have the right soil, the right water, and so on, and they plant these particular food seeds and if you eat those seeds, those foods, and then stainless bee honey and certain other animals, then you solely transform into a, a heavenly state of divine states.

And, and that is the objective of every family of Lanni, is to find that place to, to create heaven on earth in effect.

And, and, and it is actually a very wise recommendation.

But, so we had money.

We, we, the, the projects ended up getting 10, territories demarcated and in that process, it was really a, a very wonderful thing to see how different communities supported one another's.

Those who'd done more of the process, went to communities that hadn't done much of the process and taught them how they could, go, go proceed towards mapping and, and organizing their territories in the way that they needed to, to get demarcation recognized.

To our surprise, the Newton Fund had funded, biotech projects to improve the, genetic selection of cattle and, and all sorts of other things, the really high, big science projects.

But they gave us the Newton Prize for that year, for the, for this project that the go and the Ash had organized and so, they were given 200,000 pounds as prize money and, decided to use it to prolong and continue the project for another couple of years.

But also they wanted to have a conference where they could share the information and then the successes that they'd done, in Brazil with other indigenous groups, but with Bolsonaro in power, that was something that was impossible.

So they decided to come here to UCL instead and so in 2018, we had this wonderful, a great gathering and, and not just the Ash Inca and the gu, but other indigenous groups from, from Brazil, from Australia, New Zealand, from Africa, Southern Africa.

We had a, a Sandman chief, chief, oh, it's been a long time since I've talked about him.

anyway, and so different people from all over different continents.

I think we had 20 different, nation, well to today's modern nations represented, or indigenous people from 20 different nations and they decided what to present and what to talk about, and shared all sorts of very diverse, understandings of humans place in, in the world, and how we can lead our lives together with the other species that surround us rather than in opposition to them and so started this organization called The Flourishing, flourishing Diversity.

It's not really an organization, it's just a, a placeholder, a a a couple of words, which in English sum up actually the, the core things we need to achieve if we want to secure a future.

And, and so, Chris and I have been working on, a, a longer book, which rather ambitiously wants to trace the story of life, through, its emergence in the universe to where we are today and as a, a, a, a way of explaining to people the importance of respecting and supporting diversity in all its forms, because that's how life secures its continuation.

If you look at the different extinction events that have happened in the history of life on Earth, you realize that it's only through the diversity, of living species that you actually get something that survives those calamitous moments and it's those calamitous moments which have much more of an impact on future living than the more regular, predictable things that sustainability seeks to, prop up and continue.

So, this really, and, and, and I should have mentioned, I direct something called the Center for the Anthropology of Sustainability here and all this thinking has come out of that process of consulting different people from different cultures around the world about what they think sustainability should mean, rather than just adopting this, definition from the United Nations, which is about social, political, and economic, sorry, social, ecosystems and, economic sustainability.

But they, they contradict one another and if you look at the sustainable development goals, I think just two or three of them actually deal with ecological sustainability.

All the rest are about economics and money and so on.

So this, manifesto was really a plan, that we hatched in order to try and shift the conversation to stop re relying on technocrats, and governments to solve this problem, and to start to think about what we, each of us as individuals can do to secure the future.

And, and it's something which, which, has now been condensed into this manifesto and beautifully produced by a very nice publishing house in Brazil called s and s specialize in, collaborations between indigenous thinkers and academics and scientists and they try and produce work, which bridges the gaps between, science and indigenous ways of understanding the world.

And, Chris, she's a, a Mexicali and she coordinates something called the Living Schools and these are a set of schools in different indigenous territories around Brazil, where the focus is on the cultural knowledge and the values of those particular groups and how they can transmit them to children and they, they do this in a way which, is of course non classroom based.

and they, they, they examine things in however it happens to be most relevant for those groups of people and Chris, is also an artist and the art that, decorates these books has been done on the one hand by Anna Dante, who's the editor of Ava and, and who, who runs that edit, publishing house, but also by Chris and other artists from these living schools, from these different schools.

So, what's very nice is that, some of these case studies that we use in the book to illustrate different ways of thinking about how to build a future that we would be proud for our children to, to occupy, come from, they're illustrated by the groups that are, featured.

So it's a, it is a collaboration, which for me is very satisfying because we I've spent decades learning how to write and, and share things in words and many of the people whose words I share, can't participate in that and so what's really nice in this case is through their pictures and their diagrams, which, are very, fulsome in their meaning and, and contribution to the, to the dialogue.

it, it is a very nice collaboration.

So that, that's some of the, the, the people involved and Chris came with, me Too, beem, and she helped present the, manifesto in many different spaces and many different areas, as did some other people I'll introduce shortly.

and the, the idea with going to B*****d with the manifesto was that you've got a, a place, one place where all these people come from all over the world and so, what they call, or what the, my Brazilian colleagues call this is an activation session, an activation of the manifesto and I, and I sort of didn't quite understand that, but the more we've been doing it, the more I've understood, what their logic is.

And, and so the idea, we, we go into all these different spaces and we, we present the manifesto, and then we had 1,500 copies to give away free, and 500 of those were in Portuguese and a thousand in English and we managed to give away, I think, 1,250 or so.

So we, it really has spread.

And, and we gave it to people from Papua New Guinea, from Australia, New Zealand, across Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and, and, and east west, south and central Africa and from the tip of, of Argentina, Chile, all the way through Latin America into Mexico, the us and even some ina people who were there, who, who were also participating.

So it is, it is now traveled out, and I dunno what it's gonna do, but, we hope it's gonna activate something, in that process.

So that, that was the objective of, of what we were doing there.

So, here we have, somebody ashika who is, if you read the manifesto, you'll see a very central to, offering, a profound solution about how we can escape from our history.

Because the big problem facing us in the West is that we have historically inherited this system, which is so destructive to life and to the future, that it really menaces everybody on earth and, and many, many species.

And, and the, and the, the thing that most people find so difficult, certainly I found very difficult was how can we escape the system that we're embedded in that we're we're born into, we don't choose it, it's just surrounding us and so what can we do to try and develop alternatives that will have a, a real chance of assuring a habitable future for all? And, and so, Francisco is, the sort of elder of the family who've been very key in, in securing their territory in, in, in, Eastern Brazil.

and, and patience is in charge of a big fund for central African peoples and so I was really delighted that she joined us.

And, and she's, she was very moved by the, the, the, manifesto, which was very nice.

But, we would go and we'd always present together and the idea was that it's all very well talking about the theory behind what flourishing diversity, why we chose those words, why they matter.

but what about having some examples and, and, and the work that, Francisco is doing with, well, where we talk.

And, Fernando, Fernando is from Peru, and there's a gap in the, forest, which has just been un un, no one lives there.

No one looks after it, but it's at the headwaters of all the rivers that, support the lives of many, many ash inka and other groups, lower down river, river.

And, and, and so what's happening is that drug, the cocaine trade is something that people don't realize is extremely damaging to the forest, because what's happening is that not only do people need to cut, airstrips to, to fly the cocaine across borders, but they also, create monoculture plantations of coa in order to start producing the cocaine.

The manufacturing process for cocaine is extremely polluting.

It uses lots of diesel, oil, diesel, petrol, in order to, burn down the coa and produce the cocaine and the, the market leaves is terrible, the damage it does to communities as these, gangsters start coming in and obliging people to participate anyway, it's a huge problem for the ash Inca and so what they've done is they've gone and occupied these territories that are empty, and they've started to now apply for territorial recognition of these spaces and, and build up new communities so that they can protect the headwaters, that we'll then serve and it's, it's creating like a binational, states across Peru and Brazil and, and is, a really effective way of protecting that forest, much more so than, than it is currently.

So we'd go to, the, the blue zone, and many people don't really understand how the, there's some seats over here and, many people don't really understand how the, cop works and so I'll just briefly give you a little bit of a, an understanding.

I went to my first one in 2012 in Copenhagen, and, at least, I think it's 2012 and it was astonishing because there was this huge hall with about 400 scientists all presenting their wonderful solutions to climate change and, and understandings of how we could, and, and in the next hall were all these politicians.

And, and, and, and it was extraordinary, the creativity, the ideas coming out from all these scientists, but we were completely ignored.

It hadn't a dick to do with what was going on in the discussions with the politicians and of course, there it was all the economic concerns and, oh, well, we need to make more money out of this, and oh, we gotta keep drilling, and and, and, and it was so sort of dispiriting and shocking to me.

I decided I'd never go to the cop again.

Then we had the one in Glasgow, and someone said, well, we should do this and that.

So I said, okay, I'll go again.

So since Glasgow, I, I didn't go to the ones that the, in the Petro states, it just seemed too perverse, to be, conceivable.

but then in beem, because we decided to do this action as opposed to just sitting there getting depressed about the lack of decisions and, and, and the real truth being not spoken and, and how frustrating that gets when you are when you are there, this was a much more satisfying way of engaging with cop.

So you get the blue zone, this is the blue zone, you have to have a special pass.

And, someone like me can't get a pass, or you, UCL has to apply for the passes and even then it was really tough to get passes.

I think we were offered two passes initially, and then, luckily Mark Malin, who, who who's very, got lots of connections, managed to pull some strings and get us other passes, but, but I only had a pass for the first week for the first five days, which was all I needed.

So that was fine. But, just by contrast the Brazilian delegation had 3,800 passes.

Mm-hmm. And you can sort of understand, cause they've got to run all the catering as well as all the security and so on.

So they, they would have more passes.

And, and that was way over anybody else.

The next biggest delegation was the petrol industry lobbyists 1,800 passes.

after that, the, the next biggest delegation was China 700 passes.

So you get a sense of what's going on in these places, just by looking at those numbers and, and thinking, well, yeah, 700 for China makes sense, but 1800 for the oil industry and their, their app at no, that's really not on, and something like this.

And, and so that kind of biases things, and it, the, the way that those discussions go, and I think it was a little bit different this year, but the, in Glasgow, I had a look at how they were going on, and you have these big tables and sitting at the table, you have the negotiators, and these are professionals, civil servants, and they're told by their minister you must agree to this and not agree to that.

And, and then they sit there and there's all the back and forth between the different negotiators promoting their particular lines that they want listed and it really is meticulous. It's line by line.

They go through these declarations and then, then they go, no, no, we, we just, we disagree, and oh, we agree or change that to this, would that solve your problem? And, and then they sort of negotiate like that, and eventually if they agree on that line, then that line's passed and they move to the next one.

And, the ministers or whoever's representing the government sits just behind the negotiators and as things sometimes there is a question that only the government can really make a decision on it.

So the negotiator turns to, to the, to the representative of the government and ask, well, what should I say here? And the government's supposed to give his advice or her advice.

The thing is, of course, that most government ministers and, and people who come to this, they're not experts on the complexities of climate change and environmental management solutions and the very technical things that are being proposed, like carbon trading, ecosystem services, payment for ecosystem services, or, and, and so they rely on so-called experts to inform them and these 1,800, oil, people, who, who come to this, they are the experts sitting there informing the governments, of course and so the governments get this very bias point of view, which, which, is really in the favor of whichever industries are invested in that particular, element of, of the discussions.

And, and that's why these discussions never produce the real things that we want to hear, and that the people need to hear from them, because there are just so many competing economic interests whispering in the ears of these governments who are supposed to make, be making these really important, decisions for the future of life on earth and, and the quality of future generations of our planet.

And, and it was interesting just to hear the head of the UN just said that possibly this, the lack of decision from this cop, in beem will be considered a crime against humanity in a couple of decades time and that's because what's being locked in are transformations to the life system of this planet, which will be devastating, disastrous for all of us, regardless of how wealthy, we are or not.

So inside the blue zone, it's, it's, it's full of these, pavilions they're called.

And, and so one of those pavilions, I think costs about $250,000.

So the, the Saudis here, is right at the entrance.

So it must have even been more expensive, must have spent a couple of million dollars just to have that space and every pavilion is, is, is, is is similarly expensive.

So of course, who has that kind of money is not indigenous peoples.

It's the business, pavilion.

It's the, this, this is all the airlines talking about sustainable aviation fuel.

and, and, and over here you can see the, this great corridor, I mean, it really is hundreds of meters long and off it, you have all these endless little, boxes and inside their, different countries, negotiators have their, their little spaces where they can come together and then they go off upstairs to where the negotiations are happening.

And, and so anyway, you, you walk around there, it's, it's all pretty dull frankly.

and, and, and then you can see these different things.

The, the, the spaces that I find more attractive are the ones where they're trying to bring people in to speak, naturally and the culture is the missing part of the climate talks was one of the more exciting, pavilions where I ended up spending more of my time because people would come and sing and dance and, and express themselves, not, not in a flippant way, but in a, in a much deeper way, a much more humane, way through, using both dance and, and, and speech.

and, and this really is perhaps the most dark, cynical place in the whole place because it was the Saudis that really blocked any discussion of fossil fuels coming out in the, the discussions previously.

It was much more silenced.

They were more ashamed of themselves than they do it through these, supporting these lobbyists who would be the advisors for different government spokespeople now with Trump.

And, and this whole sort of, ah, yes, drill, baby drill, they're much more upfront.

and, and, and they just were in a little block with the UAE and the other petro states just to say, no, we're not gonna sign anything that mentions phasing out fossil fuels, which, is sort of crazy.

but there we are and so maybe that will be the crime, the, the people to, take to court for this, crimes against humanity as the unfolding of those decisions becomes, clearer.

What was very striking about this Brazilian cop was that indigenous people were much more involved than they have been previously.

And, most of it was tokenistic and occasionally there was some real genuine contributions participation.

this is an example of a tokenistic one.

So this is the, Republic of the Democratic Republic of Congo and down in the corner here, you can see they've got some, bamboo, net hunters, preparing.

It is funny, that's a photo on the internet that they've just dragged down.

I'm sure they don't even know who those people are, but there, it's really tokenistic.

It's trying to pander to this view and, and, and presentation, self presentation as we are a caring country.

and, and the actual fact of the matter is, is that they are currently giving away the forest that the BuHi lived to oil drilling and oil and further oil, exploration.

And, and so it's a real travesty when you see those kinds of portrayals.

But, but then on the other hand, I learned another meeting that the next day, the Democratic Republic of Congo, along with a couple of other nations, Belgium and, and someone else were promote promoting the idea of a, an international law, against eco side.

So the, the contradictions are extraordinary.

You within even, it's a huge nation, of course, democratic Republic of Congo, but even within these, these nations, you have very, contradictory forces at play.

And, and of course, within our own, indigenous people's pavilion was a tiny little, rather, shabby, place by comparison to these glitzy, other spaces.

But, but it had lots of events, and there people were really listened to and talked.

but, but they're so small.

I mean, a pavilion space is literally as big as this, area here, so you can fit maybe a dozen chairs.

And, and, and it is extraordinary, the effort that people have made to get there, the cost of buying, renting these spaces, and then you can just talk to 12 people.

it's, it is really strange.

Anyway, chief Rauni here, down on the bottom, 70 years of campaigning for the rights of the Kayapo people, very close collaboration with the anthropologist Terrence Turner and, and, and really, an extraordinary individual for his consistent, resistance against, those systems that are destroying our planet.

anyway, this was a, a very nice Maasai warrior who presented his story of how they came to cop.

They had to walk for 21 days through the, the, the, the, the Savannah where they live, in order to get to a place where they could, take some transportation to come to Cop and he made a song about it and, and, and sunk his song.

And, and, and, and that was a really nice, intervention.

But, but mostly, indigenous people aren't being listened to.

So we had a, a number of different, I, I didn't realize the, maybe I can move it down, but, yeah.

So, we had a, a, a, a whole range of different presentations we did within the Blue Zone, because nonetheless, you have lots of influential people there.

So the idea is that you can hopefully, cause some ripples or cause some waves.

And, this was in the Ford Foundation, pavilion, so they had lots of money so they could make a nice big space and what was very interesting was the range of different indigenous people that were attracted.

So this is a Welsh indigenous lady, and very fiercely Welsh.

this is a Mexican indigenous lady.

These are the in indigenous ladies from, the Arctic, this lady's from Lapland.

and you go around, I think she was from Chile, and, and various different Argentina and, and different places and then of course, some who were there to present their, this is that territory I was telling you about, which is being, that they're occupying in order to protect it.

And, and, and that really is so important that when you talk about flourishing diversity, you understand the practical actions that people are taking to promote flourishing diversity.

and so what is the, the idea of, flourishing diversity and why we put it like this? Well, if you understand any ecosystem, this is a tropical forest, and you have the light eaters that are absorbing light, and, and that's making their bodies, strong, and they're taking the nutrients from the soil, and those nutrients give their bodies form.

and then you get plant eaters who eat those light eaters and their bodies become strong and, and take form.

and then of course, those plant eaters get eaten by meat eaters, and the, and, and their bodies get strong.

And, and then eventually, of course, they all die and as they die, bacteria and, viruses, sorry, bacteria and fungi will, and other organisms will, will decompose those bodies and release the nutrients that were trapped in them back into the soil and then new light heaters will come and use those nutrients to, to grow and that system works really effectively to maintain extraordinarily diverse complex ecosystems.

But when you cut a deep road, a big road across that ecosystem, or you build a huge plantation and break it up into smaller segments, you start to break up those flows of, minerals and energy that sustain that ecosystem and so, you weaken and you fraternize that ecosystem and perhaps if it's just a few roads of just a couple of plantations, the ecosystem can manage, but if they become too great, then the ecosystem starts to become vulnerable to collapse and currently, according to some of my climatologist colleagues, the Amazon is, has passed the tipping point of collapse.

And, and that will be catastrophic for a whole series of major, weather systems and, and, and ocean systems that actually maintain, Europe, for instance, the, north Atlantic amor current, which, keeps Britain warm and why we don't have really cold winters, is likely to collapse because the Amazon is in the process of collapsing.

It's because you've got these, soybean and other monoculture crops coming in, cutting down such large areas that they are, breaking up the forest into these small units that can't maintain that circulation in a healthy way and the result is that, it's drying up and the Amazon, for some reason is extremely vulnerable to drought and those forest fires that keep ripping through it are destroying millions and millions of hectares of forests, as well as producing loads of more CO2, of course.

And, and we're causing this negative cycle that really does require very drastic action in order to, sort it out.

But that action is not coming from carbon trading schemes, payment free ecosystem services and so on.

which, which will have the very, they're super technical, can any of us get involved in carbon trading? Well, not really, no. Which is, or, or payment.

We can actually, for payment for ecosystem services, if anyone wants to talk to me about that, there are some groups in, in different parts of the world who are offering their care for landscapes to be supported by outsiders as a way of supporting those landscapes to continue as they are, rather than being transformed.

Yeah. so the web of life, oh, there was a map that, thank you.

Oh, here, it's, the, the web of life is the interlinked.

So what I was talking about there with, with the plants, the animals and things.

But what we forget is that we, humans as omnivores, are part of that web and it's really important to appreciate that it's not by separating humans from the rest of life that we're gonna solve any problems.

It's actually about thinking about how do we integrate humans into those webs in more sustainable, manageable ways that don't just destroy.

And, and that's really what, flourishing diversity is trying to, to contribute to.

So the web of life is the interlinked diversity of living species, languages and cultures and it is so important to understand that our cultural diversity is a key part of the web of life.

The fact that we use resources in different places differently, or even in the same place, this two different cultures, will use the same resources differently, contributes to enriching those spaces.

So, where I work in the Congo Basin, you have hunter gatherers that spread out in the interior of the forest, and they hunt and if they can hunt big males, they prefer to hunt big males.

And, and that selective hunting of big males opens up more opportunities for those species to flourish.

the, and, and when they collect wild yams, they put, so the roots back in so that the, it actually enriches the wild yam patches and, and other animals.

Many other animals enjoy those wild yam patches.

The, the farmers who live by the rivers, they tend to fish and then they do splash and burn agriculture where they cut down small amounts of forests, and that opens that forests to new growth, to, to regeneration after they leave at fallow.

and so many new species can start to, to grow up again.

And, and that in effect renews the forest as well and it's very important for small animals, particularly to have access to those open areas, where they can find more food.

So tho those different ways of using the same forest actually contribute in different ways to enriching, enhancing the biodiversity of those spaces and this is something which happens across the world.

And, when you map, the, biodiversity with cultural diversity, you get cor a correlation right across the world.

So from the Pacific Islands and Papua New Guinea, all the way across, all these regions, you, where you have lots of cultural diversity, you also have very high levels of biological diversity and this is not accidental.

this is because cultural diversity and biological diversity support one another.

so, so the, the cop goes on and people discuss all these other things about economic incentives and how we might, financialize nature to make it more valuable.

of course, when you financialize things, what people forget is that the most powerful tend to control control of them, and the most powerful tend to, use that to their advantage, to manipulate them and sy and, and structure the system so that they remain in power and so, for instance, the carbon trading, we, I pollute.

I have a factory, which makes lots of pollution in, in London.

So I want to find somewhere in the world where I can say, well, I'm protecting the carbon there so I can carry on polluting here.

That's the, the basics of carbon trading.

It does nothing to solve the problem.

What it does is it creates a whole new problem for the people living in the forest that I'm protecting.

So I can carry on polluting here.

And, this was something that came up two cops ago when the United Arab Emirates bought up the carbon stocks in huge areas of Tanzania and Kenya.

And, in buying up those stocks, the, the Kenyan government, was asked, so what are you gonna do to protect by carbon so it doesn't get damaged? Oh, well, we'll kick all the people out and then, and then we'll fence it off, and that will make your carbon safe.

And, and so tens of thousands of people were kicked off their lands and destitutes with nothing in return so that the UAE could carry on pumping petrol and that was why the UAE was, sort of thought, ah, we've got a good strategy now for hosting this cop, which is, of course, a travesty to have a petro state hosting cop.

and Brazil's a petro state too, of course.

And, and so, the people and were, were, were outraged.

And, and, and there was a big campaign by Survival International, various other groups called Blood, carbon, to really drum home that this carbon wasn't something that was just a, like a sensible way of trying to, solve the, the carbon deficits of polluting nations.

It was actually, an awful abuse of, of human rights and people's rights to, to live on their land as they so wish.

So a number of different indigenous groups and the mku were perhaps the most, effective in this, decided to, to, to, to show, that they weren't happy about this way of framing the solutions to, the climate crisis and the night before this event, they had actually stormed, the, the, the cop, and, and it was done very cleverly.

So the, there was women leading, and as they got to the doors, the women opened up, and these really big guys came through, kicked down the doors, and went steaming in and took the security completely by surprise.

cause it was seven o'clock in the evening, and there was no one normally goes in at seven o'clock in the evening.

And, but they were very clever that they, they were forceful and confronting coming right up to the security.

But, and you could see the security were like, oh, let's have some boxing, and, and were getting really excited about it.

But these big warrior guys were just like, no and they were just pushing them back and, and preventing it from escalating into something very violent.

So it was, it was very well managed, I thought.

And, and of course it emptied the building and it was all a big hoo-ha.

And, but then the next morning at 4:00 AM they arrived, the ku and, and they blocked the entrance to cop.

And, and I didn't know, and we all arrived to do our sessions.

We had some sessions that morning, and, and then we were just standing there baking sun.

cause for about a kilometer around cop, you can't take any cars.

You just have to walk to get there.

And, and, and we were just completely, we, we had no idea this was going on.

I, I pinched this photo off the internet.

but what they were really, and, and, and that was the, also the thing, they, the only banner they had when they stormed in the evening was, our forests are not for sale.

Yeah. And, and, and that's really referring to these carbon trading solutions.

cause what's happening is governments are then trading, selling rights to forests, to polluters in other countries.

And places like Brazil, and, and many other countries, have lots of forests.

So it's a, it's a, an off a big thing.

But at the same time, they wanted to revoke a decree, which is allowing a big iron or mine to be created on their territory without their, their, consent.

And, and they want their lands demarcated and actually, when you look, and there's been global studies of this land, occupied and controlled by indigenous people and local communities is much more effective at preventing the damage caused by, biodiversity loss in climate change.

and, and four times more effective actually than government managed.

s So there really is, I mean, the demarcating lands really is at the heart of, of how we can protect, the future and what's, and no more carbon credits, which is a, a very wise thing.

And, and, and this really is the point of while in local people's control, the forest or territories remain abundance when they get given over to companies or to, governments, they start to diminish in their abundance and it's, it's a really simple thing.

It's, it's so obvious to, to anybody who looks at it from an academic or research point of view, but yet because of the power of these lobbies to say, things in different ways, it's not getting through into the discussions that really determine our future and what's particularly, particularly, striking is this division of the climate crisis as separate from the biodiversity crisis.

And, and that's a complete artifact, artifice.

It, those two things are intimately conte, connected, one with the other.

And, unless we start thinking about them holistically, we're not gonna have any real chance of, of solving this problem.

And, and local people think about these things holistically, and they care for their landscape and the other species that, that exist on it much more effectively than, than the governments or, or companies and so that's why right across Cop and all the other events that were going on at the same time, it really was this, consistent message from the indigenous groups and these weren't just Brazilian, and these are, but they weren't just indigenous groups from Brazil, but indigenous groups from across the world, all with the same message, demarcate our lands, make sure our territories are, are safe and why do they need demarcation? Well, because modern capitalism is a colonial enterprise, as it, finds spaces to start to, find things to exploit it, it, it destroys them.

It turns them into monocultures, monocultures of dirt sometimes.

um, but it's not just monocultures of places that they're doing, it's monocultures of minds.

The, the attractive seduction of capitalism is a master, of, for, it's a master at seducing people into wanting more.

And, and, and that wanting more, there, there are all these goods, these glittering things that you can have a Porsche, Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a, a beautiful, husband or wife or whatever it is.

but, but actually for pretty much 99% of the population, those things are outta reach.

Um I'm never gonna get a enough money for a Lamborghini or a Porsche.

And, and actually, I'm not interested in one, so it doesn't matter.

But, but, but the thing is that capitalism plays on this there are all these things that, oh, yeah, but, but they're never actually, you never have the means to obtain them.

and it's, it is, it's an ideology, but it's very seductive, and it works to seduce people right across the world.

and, and funnily enough, soap operas are a really powerful mode for popularizing capitalism.

particularly Brazilian soap operas, which is sort of really go for this huge, excessive consumption type approaches.

But, capitalism is colonialism.

The it's, it is what's replaced colonialism, and it's now done through the manipulations of, of big companies, on national governments.

And, there's a whole sort of consequence to that.

When you destroy a large forest, you're not just destroying a large forest.

You are denying the opportunity of that forest to process the water and the weather.

That's, lots of other people around that forest depend on the soiler farmers cutting down the Amazon are actually destroying their own futures, but they're so focused on that immediate profits of that next year's, income that they don't care that they're, that they're willing to, to, to, to, to dispense with their future.

So it's no wonder that right across the world, it has been children and young people who've been the most efficient at alarming, sounding the alarm and waking everybody up for the serious of this problem and it's to do with these externalities.

the, the, when, when, when I, when I buy petrol at the petrol station, put into my car and drive, I pay a, a certain cost to the petrol company, the petrol station gets a bit of money, and I get to drive.

but then that gas that's escaping from my exhaust pipe and all the pollution that was created in, in drilling that petrol in the first place and getting into the petrol station, that's not covered in the price.

That price is being born by the landscapes of which had happened.

The people who live nearby who are getting cancers and other weird illnesses from the pollution that that's causing in their waterways, the CO2 coming outta the, the back of my car, is going to contribute to this steady warming of the temperature and someone's gonna have to deal with that.

We see what happens. Imagine a typhoon hits London and, and blows the house, the roofs off just say 5,000 houses.

Are there even enough builders to fix 5,000 houses? I imagine in my street, if the roofs were to be blown off, there would, we would just all have to be, as people do in Africa and other places climbing up ladders and just getting our plastic, coverings and, and trying to do what we can to fix it, because there just isn't that, that kind of support here to do, the level of, of, recovery that would be required if we do start and when we do start these extreme weather events hitting big, urban sensors like London.

So children really are have a point, and it's a, an undeniable point, because they are the inheritors of those problems when they are my age.

They're gonna be dealing with the consequences of our inaction today.

And, and it really is, something that is unconscious, unconscious, unconscious, all unconscious, all.

so the, and, and it is now absolutely clear, when we, so this, this area here is the safe operating space for planet Earth, and if we stay within that area, then the planet is actually a, a lovely, beautiful place.

It is our paradise.

in 2009, they had sort of thought there were seven boundaries, and they noticed that we'd crossed three of them, the, biosphere integrity as this big one over here.

and that's really this breakdown of, of ecosystems through plantations, roads, and urban developments.

climate change was beginning to be a problem, but it, it, it wasn't so, wasn't quite as bad as biosphere integrity and then these nitrogen flows, biochemical flows, and this is of course, the, all the, fertilizers we use in agriculture, leaching into waterways, polluting, creating algae blooms, killing fish, and so on.

they reassessed in 20 15, 6 years later, and we'd crossed four boundaries, phosphates.

Now also very, very serious problem and land system change and so that's where entire landscapes have been converted into, other uses, mostly, urban, spaces, but also, monocultures, plantation economies, and of course, climate change and bio-diversity, integrity.

Then in 20 23, 8 years later, they reassess and they understand actually there are nine boundaries.

There aren't just seven, and that we've actually crossed six of them.

So despite all the understanding of how serious, how much we are threatening life on earth and the health of life on earth, we continued, to, make things worse.

novel entities is one of the, and that's all these weird compounds that are being produced in factories to make things more sticky or, or luminous or, or whatever it is.

3M is, is, is, is, is a, one of the major producers of these, but then also fresh water use that we are now running outta fresh water, or the fresh water that we do have is becoming polluted from all this leaching of nitrogen and phosphates.

So, each time they reassess and what's astonishing now, just two years later, we've now crossed a seventh boundary ocean acidification, and that's to do with all the carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere being dissolved into the ocean.

The ocean is absorbing huge amounts of that carbon dioxide, and, and it's acidifying and so all the calcium based life forms are, under very serious threat, from that.

So we really are entering a period of knowing, damage.

It's, it's not that we can disguise or hide this, this, this really is what's happening, and yet we're not challenging the systems that have brought us to the brink.

you can find it online, it's very easy.

but, but these systems really are today 75% of humanity eat five animals and 12 vegetables.

Uh and that is all we eat.

and it is astonishing what producing those five animals and 12 vegetables does to entire landscapes that are just put into service factory farms, and plantations and we really have to challenge those systems.

You know, think about where you are getting your food from, how it's grown, what, are you contributing to the problem or are you trying to create something different? And, and, and that's one of the themes of the manifesto.

and what, what, really, oops, sorry, I'll just get this.

what was really clear was that the real conversations that were really thinking about this, that were talking, the speaking the truth, were not in the cop building.

They were outside it and so there was this wonderful global peoples march where, people from all over, indi indigenous local communities, rubber tappers, Colombo, the former slave escape communities in, in, in Brazil and other parts of South America, all came together and the message was clear, stop, extractivism, stop these plantation economies.

They are the ones who are really saying what needs to happen, in very clear language.

But, but of course, people don't listen and one of the, I, the future is ancestral.

And, and what they mean by that is not that there's some, we've all got to go back to some archaic way of living, that actually the solutions to how we should be living are already present in our, in our ancestors have been doing it for, for generations and we've got to start thinking about that hard, seriously, how can we hybridize our lives so that instead of just being caught in the system, we start to make those ancestral futures relive again in, in our day-to-day.

and, and hybridization, I think is a very important concept to, to grasp for, for how we can start while we are trapped within the system, experiment with alternative ways and there are a number of, descriptions of how that might be conceived in the manifesto.

But what was striking, and there, there was this wonderful, the highlight of my cop with the flotilla, and we got, we were very lucky to have been, on chief the Kayapo Chiefs boat and there were just so many different groups from Colombo, rubber taps, as well as different indigenous people, and they had a full of 50, 60 meter, deck.

And, and each group had the opportunity to speak, and, and they wouldn't just come up like me and start speaking.

What they did is they would all prepare themselves beautifully, and then they would dance and sing up to along the boats until they got to the place where everyone gave their talk, and then they would give their talk, and it would have such an energy, such a power because of that, integration of the song and dance into it and then after everyone had spoken, this wonderful band, Culumbo, and, and other people just all sort of got together, and then they just started playing music and we danced and it was just a lovely morning, just really thinking, hearing the truth, hearing people speaking, those sorts of solutions that really are the solutions to our problems, and then dancing to celebrate them.

And, and that really, if everyone did that in the cop building, it would be, it would turn things on their head.

And and, and this, research just came out from Oxfam, just, just before the, move it down, trace it down, we, we can probably then.

So, when we think about climate change as a global problem, it is not actually a global problem.

The richest, no 0.1% of humanity produce more carbon pollution in one day than the entire poorest.

50% of humanity, 4 billion people produce in one whole year.

Yeah. That, that really should what it is.

You know, catastrophic climate change is not just a technical problem, it is a moral problem.

How can we put up with these people causing so much damage to our future and to our children's future? Why do we put up with it? It really is astonishing and, and what we really need to aim for, and this is what the, the, manifesto is trying to help us find parts to do.

So from the experiences of indigenous people who have escaped their history, who have managed to reconstitute themselves after the devastation caused by that colonialism of extractivism, colonialism, of, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, how can we create a space where a pple reverse of possibilities is allowed to flourish? Where instead of everyone being taught that the same values and the same ways of learning, which is what's happening in so many schools, and thank goodness universities are the place where that can be challenged, but, right now, the, the way UNICEF is, is, is spreading education across the world.

It's producing all these same sorts of people who have the same needs, the same desires.

They want salaries, they want to be able to buy the stuff they see in supermarkets, feed themselves from that.

And, and, and that is the problem, that really is at the heart of, of, of, of how we might reimagine the future and so what we did was we made sure that we did lots of activations of the manifestos right across beam in all the different spaces where people were meeting, and there was some much more interesting spaces.

there was the people's cop, in the university, right on the banks of the Amazon, and, with a Papapa, and, Chris and Max and myself, we, we stood there and, just people wandering by and then we started talking, and each of us gave different talks about flourishing diversity and slowly, we had a big crowd of people, moms and dads and their kids and rubber tappers and, and, and different, pescado fishermen's associations very big over in Brazil with all that water and so on.

And, and, and after we talked, we gave, gave out copies of the manifesto to everybody and, and extremely effective the people's embassy.

We did work there. and, and that was a, a place where, particularly the rubber tapper communities, what they call sustainable traditional communities in Brazil, they were leading and these are extraordinarily courageous people because they're very often the people who get targeted by the agro industry first in these outrageous land claims.

And, and then they do kill a mother and her three children just to get a hundred meters of land.

I mean, as a regular thing, it really is appalling when you, you learn about the, the degree of violence, people suffer there and then you have the green zone, which is the, the public space for people who are interested in getting a cop experience.

So it tends to be very commercial, lots of people selling their products.

I mean, you see things like plantations of, of a tree, which is really good at storing carbon, and people are encouraged to plant this tree and plantations, and that's just not, that, that's part of the bifurcation of climate change with biodiversity crisis that creates non solutions that, are, are not.

And, who's a leader, very powerful lady.

She came to London in 2018 and spoke beautifully here, and it was lovely that she, she happened to be passing by, and so she just joined us and, and participated in, in our presentation there.

so it was, it was, and those were the really rewarding moments.

And, and the, the message the key message is to understand that life cannot exist just based on individuals and because we have these sort of nice houses and bedrooms, and we can sit in our bedroom and sit in our house all by ourself and exist, and we think somehow we're existing autonomously, and, and we fetishize the individual meritocracy.

The system that runs in these universities is all based on individualism.

but actually, if you look more carefully at what life is, you start to realize that that's a, it's an ideological, myth or mystification.

The reality is, is that my body actually has more bacterial cells than it does human cells.

I've inherited from my parents.

And, and those bacterial cells aren't just one single ecosystem.

They're multiple ecosystems.

I have one bacterial ecosystem on my skin.

I have another one in my airways.

I have a different one in my stomach, and they are vital for my health and my development.

a mother, breastfeeding, her child has one set of, of, nutrients in her breast milk, which is for her child to help it grow and there's another set, which is just for the bacteria that will direct the growth of that child in a healthy way.

Their immune system, their, their, their, their, their brain.

the bacteria are crucial.

We are co-living with bacteria and, and viruses and in fact, there are even more viruses than there are bacteria in my body and some of them are very crucial to, its, its, fundamental functioning.

So this idea of the individual, somehow autonomous from all these other species around it is a myth.

It is so untrue. Life is symbiosis and if we forget that, we lose sight of the real challenge that faces us all is how to re re step into those symbiotic relationships with care and detention to them and for them.

and, and, and that really will be a key to the future and so what flourishing diversity is really, an invitation is for each of us to, to stop waiting for governments to b******t around the place and, and not come up with the solutions.

But to understand that we have power. Each of us has power.

And, if you acknowledge yourself as an active contributor to that beautiful, interwoven web of life, then actually, because we are very numerous there are billions of us on this planet, if enough of us do that, we really can turn things around.

We can, we can transform the future and, and make it into one.

We would really be happy for our children to inhabit.

And, and sorry, because I, I've used all the same size I was using in Brazil.

Uh life depends on diversity to produce the energy necessary for its functioning.

So if you just think, what, when we eat, we have to eat lots of different things and those lots of different things we consume and they give us energy for life.

So we can do stuff. And then when we, next morning go to the loo, that's all that diversity of things has been turned into this, u useless sort of, mush of sameness, that we just flush away because we can't do anything.

Other organisms and creatures can do plenty with it, but we ourselves can't.

And, and that is how every organism survives by consuming a diversity of different things.

and then those different things provide it with the energy for life.

So in effect, the interface between all these different organisms is being alive.

the experience of being alive is that collaboration we have with all those different organisms that we need in order to exist and traditional peoples across the world aren't like, Monsanto or these other big corporations producing monoculture.

They love diversity in their gardens and indeed, some of the most diverse gardens gardeners are in the Amazon region, and, and they cultivate diversity.

There. There are groups in some parts of the Amazon who have hundreds of varieties of manc that they grow in their, in their gardens, and, and those each, each, strain or, or, subspecies, they'll know who gave it to them, where it came from.

and it traces out relationships as women marry, they get given, different, strains that they then grow in their gardens and they remember the people who gave them to them and that sense of the beauty of diversity is something that people cherish and indeed, of course, we you've, you've probably all experienced it, whether you've had a pet or a child or, or even just a house plant, when that that thing that you are looking after flourishes and grows, well, we feel joy.

It, it makes us happy. We're hardwired actually to do that.

So why not base our resistance to capitalism on that joy? Why not base our resistance to this extractive system on the joy we get from watching others flourish? and, and that will sustain us much more effectively than, than anger.

We need to be angry too, but anger is exhausting.

So recognize yourself in this moment.

Can you choose a different path? And we can build a world of abundance, but we need to provide the opportunities for life to flourish in its diversity, and that will, restore the world.

There really is an opportunity for us all to be contributors to restoring the world.

It's not something that, is beyond our grass.

So think about the spaces you have influence over.

Maybe they're just a, a, a balcony and a council flag, but that can be a space of diversity.

You can plant things that will feed the bees so that they can carry on pollinating or, or feed yourself or, or just make it beautiful.

So you can invite your friends in and you can start to, to have conversations and, and think about things.

Um each space is important, and it doesn't matter how small it is.

Every space matters.

And, and some people will have more space and they can do more.

But, but whatever your space is, take pride in seeing it flourish.

Encourage it to flourish, and it will help you not just to flourish that space, to start flourishing other spaces too, because the joy that happens from that is something that's contagious.

So the invitation is that we still become flourishers, in our, in our own ways and each of us is a creative being.

Each of us has the potential within us to imagine a different way.

So tap into that.

It's not that there should be one way of doing it.

There should be millions of ways of doing it and then if we are in that space, then we really can solve this problem.

We really can get out of it, but we've got to stop waiting for other people to solve it.

We've got to stop waiting for those technocrats or politicians to come up with some new, system to do it.

And, and really if, if we all do this enough, then planet Earth can be our paradise and we really need to fight for that, it's really something worth fighting for.

Marvelous ending. Thank you.

So just as a, there are lots of copies.

This is also an activation of the manifesto in the way that we've been doing it in beem.

And, and so you're welcome before you leave to come and pick up a copy.

I hope we've got enough for everybody, but I think we might, we might do.

And, what we've been doing, so people have been activating it all over Brazil.

So the Chenin, when they went back to their territories on the way they activated it in, ra, which is the regional, capital of ri or that part of ri and, and so we've been sending photographs so that we can all see how it's activating in different places.

And, so it'd be very nice if towards the end, before you all leave, we can take a little photo, so I can share it with all the other people who are doing their activations of the manifesto in different parts of the Work. That's nice. Plus you can take the zoom as well, so you have an activation of the zoom.

Yeah. are, are there gonna be any questions and discussion? Yeah. Well, I'm very welcome. If anyone Have any questions, anybody here would have any questions or points or thoughts or anybody on Zoom? Sorry, go clap. There's over here. Go.

Good. Yeah. Yeah.

First of all, thank you so much for a inspiring, so thank you.

It's very moving. Same.

I had a question about kind of the distribution of the manifest.

You mentioned that you put in English in Portuguese as well.

what other languages is it? Has it translated into the, is like a ongoing project to translate into as many languages? It's ongoing project translated into as many languages as possible.

Absolutely. so far just Portuguese and English, but, my, my cousin is actually, he's proposed to translate it into French and while we were at the, corporal deport the, the, the people's cop, there was a very nice Chilean couple who, work in the university as geography professors there in Chile, and they want to translate it into Spanish and so, one of the things Ava do is they have a, a translation group.

And, and they is because they're very interested in translating between indigenous and science, that it is very challenging.

As Chris will remember in our various discussions with the editorial group as we prepared the manifesto it really is challenging when you are faced.

You you're talking about the origins of stars and, and from a scientific perspective, and they're talking about the origins of stars from a fashion Inca or AWA perspective.

And it's, it's pretty far apart.

So how you bring those together is something which does require quite a lot of thoughts and so they have a translation group on the Ava website.

And, and, and, if you, if anyone or you are interested, we can talk later about how you might connect up with them and, and, and think about translations, because we'd love to translate it as many languages as Possible.

So Chris, and then this lady, I just must say today I feel so bothered and proud to be part of all this.

I think it is such an ing, impact evidently that all your colleagues such an England and all the others had in a, in, in, in, in, in that awful otherwise awful event.

I mean, headline news on the new over here, when, when, when the indigenous people, oh, it, you have KU and The kay. And it's just, and of course just now your talk is just so, so, so absolutely beautiful and inspiring and marvelous and I just feel very, very, very honored to have been invited to collaborate with you and putting this thing together.

I have to say for everybody, this was overwhelmingly work.

I did a bit of changing of style and a few suggestions, elements of the politics in there, Owen's.

But I mean, I mean, it's absolutely wonderful.

so my, I've just got a question.

Do any more now about how often this might be updated? Is, would it be the, would it be possible a policy to do in advance of each copy that happen more frequently, less frequently? Because I imagine, I imagine this isn't the final word, this, it's not gonna be static, is it? It could be activated with versions of this over time, right? yeah, I mean, this, this, so yeah, I'm very naive in the world of publishing and I've been, brutally awoken to some of the things.

So for instance, the, I had an assumption that we could just find a publisher here who would publish it, but the fact that we've published a thousand copies in English in Brazil and handed them out for free has meant that the publishers who I was, who were interested said, oh, no, no, no, we don't wanna publish it.

No. So actually I've got a problem of how to get it published in the uk.

and there are various solutions, but does Look prior to the longer version.

Well, so no, what it means is that in each country where we do a translation, we need to get a local publisher to publish it.

And, and so that's something which I'll have to work out, and I'm only just sort of getting my head around now.

but, but yeah, it's, it is something which is evolving.

And, and one of the things that say if we do find a publisher in the UK for it, they probably will want to do their own edition.

So then you'd have know there would be opportunities for adding to it changing and of course, this is an evolving situation, so there will always be more to add and bits we could strengthen and, and, and, and, develop more or reduce to make it less.

I mean, the feedback which I've had so far, and, and that was the beauty of doing it at Cop Yeah.

Was that I got feedback from, from Central Africans, from, people in, in Chile, just right across the world and the artwork it resonates with everybody.

It's just so remarkable. Yeah.

Indigenous groups, would, would pick it up and they like it, love it too.

And, and then your whatever stuffy professors and others would, oh wow, that's really wrong.

Beautiful. And, and so, and, and I thought it's very clever of the, the, they do this, they mm-hmm.

They make things so beautiful that seduced to open them.

And, patients who's these Cameroonian lady running this big fund for, for youth and forest people, she said, oh, Jerome.

cause she had a terrible time getting to bell em from, from Cameroon.

And, and so she was really out sleep and she had to do all this Trump.

I was lying in bed and I couldn't stop telling the pages the judgment of how much text to put on a page and then the attractiveness of each of the images that you come across as you turn each page just kept her telling said, and it was one 30 in the morning, and I just said to her, I've got to stop.

But, but I couldn't stop. It was just so, it was so lovely.

And, she wants to start a whole, ah, this man, he's the minister, he is my very good friend.

He would love this. And so I had to write him a little, medication that's going off to camera and we've got these youth groups.

We'll take a chapter at a time, each group, and as you're already planning a whole thing.

So this activation is, is now traveling out, and it's gonna be really Yeah.

Waiting though in time.

I guess I get more of the, so there was a question in the middle, and then we'll get to you.

Yeah.

Most impactful thing like me to do that would resonate with what's being asked, like of these different communities, what they want us to hear do, Right? So from these communities point of view, they want us to support them in their territorial struggles. Yeah.

What do we do? We, So there are different things to do.

It depends. I mean, if you're in London based Survival International, for instance, have currently got a campaign to protect the territories of Uncontracted people.

And, they just, just before cop actually, they launched their new report on uncontacted people around the world whose territories are now being the new extractive fund frontier.

So you've got groups who, who, who don't want to have anything to do with the outside world who've deliberately withdrawn from it, but they're now being just forced into it by these huge bulldozer tractor things coming in, carving roads.

So that would be one way, for instance.

But, maybe there are other ways you can think about it.

So, I mean, What they is what my question Was, Sorry. Yeah.

But what they're saying is immediate.

Yeah. So demarcate our land, and so there are different ways of engaging in those struggles, but, but at the same time, what they're also saying is that we've got to take responsibility for ourselves.

And, and that's where thinking about your space, how can you invite different people in so that you create new conversations.

So you start to think about new solutions at the end of the book, the who, whose lives were devastated, destroyed by rubber, by, cattle ranchers and loggers, recovered themselves and in that process of recovering themselves, they, they have mapped out a pathway, for how each of us can start to think about our own situation and map out a pathway to recovery.

And, and that's really the last chapter of the book, which is the invitation to all of us.

and what I took when I was talking about each of us is a creative being.

So put your creativity to service of the earth, put your creativity in service to all those other species that should be surrounding us.

How can we support their lives as well? And in that we'll find much joy and, and solace.

I, I wonder, I was in good one with we, and what they told me the same slow down.

Mm-hmm. It just rushing around, like, and it looks bizarre.

It looks insane to them. I just wrote Yeah.

Factors in, . But yeah, There's a lovely quote from Camilla.

We've got slow down, get down to turbo capitalist times.

That's focus the something to do with the moon. Can't remember the quote, But yeah, it slowed down from that super speeded time.

Think about the moon.

Yeah. Just lunar time.

Think lunar type with your body. Yeah.

No, Camilla is a lunar. Yes, yes.

We have a plan.

So we have a question here, and then we have a question from, There's someone who question. Oh, Because I was wondering how one can, or which, which organization is best to contribute to financially to support the work? well, I think my advice would rather than go for organization, start informing yourself about the struggles of different peoples around the world.

Yeah. And then maybe one of those struggles will resonate with you and make it something personal.

So it's a relationship that you build.

So choose one struggle.

Well, it depends on your means. Particular Age depends rather than a global thing.

I mean, maybe there's a, a global organization, but, but generally organizations are always one step removed.

But now with the internet, you can actually look at the struggles and, and, and then start to build a relationship with those people, and make it personal and, and then it becomes much stronger and it will be much more fulfilling for you.

So it's rather than just a check you send to some organization, then Yeah.

Who knows where it goes. Yeah.

You, you are directly helping, a particular community.

So that would be my advice.

And, and, depend, perhaps start by whether you care more about the Arctic or, or forested regions.

And, and then you can start looking if you are concerned about Africa.

The Maasai having terrible tax mass.

They, they were large, they were large victims.

This UAE carbon credit, terrible.

The blood, the blood carbon scandal.

and they lost huge amounts of land and they continue to the EK who live up in the mountains of the horsing in Masai, another group.

You have various hunter gather groups from Central Africa who now organizing themselves to start to try and claim territories against great odds.

So there are, there are numerous.

So start informing yourself and Do anything about Zimbabwe? I don't, I'm afraid. No. Enough.

but, but anyway, worth looking into and, and seeing, oh, sorry.

Well, no go, but come back on. Alright. After.

We'll go. That's the question.

in an age of where I consume, therefore I am, we must and cannot under power of especially us, these bonds, economies of our money and where it might not go in the future with directed action, linked to, the needs of certain, when we talk about monocultures, et cetera, et cetera.

I think I see a future where, what we choose not to buy extremely so forth.

Mm-hmm. That's something that I just Wanted to mention. Yeah. I think food is really vital even though it does cost more to buy organic and biodynamic and so on, try to, because you are supporting people who are part of the solution, eat less eat too much, we waste too much.

so really try and think about your food choices and what Think about those species as well.

Diversify with lots and lots of plants and only barely, and occasionally a bit of sometimes where you can get plant and protein plants.

Can, online.

Cia, do you want to say anything? You had this question about the planetary checks, boundaries or boundaries.

Did you wanna say anything? I was just one, I was wondering whether these checks take into account the effect, the impact of warfare and considering how, how much of that is going on at the moment, and whether this is fed into it.

Because I, I heard somewhere that military, the effects of the military aren't included in a lot of these, calculations.

I dunno if anything about that, Impact of warfare.

Yeah. Well, it's a, it is an excellent point and it is absolutely, a huge, con, impact of those awful actions that people are taking against each other.

funnily enough, I, I wanted to try and talk to, rto the guy who did it at cop, but, as soon as he was free from the previous person, someone shoved a phone in his ear and then he didn't take it off for about 40 minutes.

So I, but, but, but I, I would've thought, I mean, because I, I've talked to him on, on a number of occasions that he's the sort of person that would want to include that kind of information in the planetary boundaries calculations, but, but I'm not ab absolutely, certain that they do.

I I haven't checked, but, but it would, I would be surprised if they didn't let me put it like that.

Think that, oh, Ian Wats Ian, do you want to say something? Picking holes in what J was presenting Ian? Yeah. His story. Ian Wats You gonna speak? Yeah.

Okay. Very, very, it is a very minor historical quibble, Just not, not to present capitalism as following on from early colonialism.

I mean, the example when, when you, when you talked initially about the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, the, in the initial mass destruction of the forest was mm-hmm.

The sugar industry. After they'd ripped through first Madeira, then San Tome, then it was the Atlantic forest.

So this was the classic example of early extractive capitalism going back to the 1450s.

Yeah. So there, from the outset, it is part and parcel of colonialism.

They're not historical stages. Yeah.

Okay. Sorry, I didn't capital to present it like that.

They are, it, it is, my point was really capitalism is the new form of, well, not the new form, but it's the form colonialism takes in our times, perhaps starting with a good, a better word, capital.

Can I also be a little bit political if I'm allowed to? But, and it is that what struck home to me was this talking about even no matter how small a space you have, so you, you may be able to do something by bringing somebody into that space or growing those plants in your, I don't even have a alchemy of mind that word, but, of course the amount of space people have is the absolute index, particularly in archeology in almost any assess social science assessment of human politics.

The amount of space you have is an index of, of, of inequality, of equality or inequality.

and if we are to think of the Congo hunter gatherers and, and other African hunter gatherers, we know that egalitarianism and the insistence on equality is so fundamental for our species.

So if we are gonna challenge the system, we've got to be doing something in terms of demand share, in terms of saying, actually this isn't right.

That some people have vastly more than other people.

It's gotta be absolutely something much more than radical, obviously, or obviously celebrating what we can do and creating the, the networks and links and relationships Yeah.

In every way. But yes, that is so fundamental.

I mean, it's just so fundamental that, that this tiny percentage of utterly selfish, completely destructive part of humanity is destroying the planet for the vast the rest of us That Yeah, it's Incredible.

Yeah. I, I, I think, so I, I've been thinking about this a lot and essentially what we're seeing in our current time is the breakdown of the holocene regularities that enabled farming to become something.

those holocene regularities are the, the, the period we we're still in the Holocene technically.

I mean, there are arguments about whether we're in the Anthropocene capitalocene or plantation ene orine or whatever, but, but actually bombing depends on regular seasons and we are now entering into the period where regular seasons are not something that we can rely upon.

The consequence for farming is dramatic, and I've seen it.

We've, we have a research project, extremists and science, we've been trying to develop systems to support farmers to better predict the weather.

So combining local indigenous ways of spotting different insects or birds, combining that with satellite images of clouds and winds to try and improve their ability to predict the weather.

cause it's so crucial to so many farming activities, whether it's gonna rain, whether it's not gonna rain, and so on.

And, and already we're seeing the prices of food going up and, across the world.

And, and, and that's ju and that's when, that's not even radically destabilized, but in the next decade or so.

And, and yeah, much will depend on the permafrost frost.

So as this, layer of frost that's over the arctic regions and sub arctic regions starts to melt, it's gonna release meth, methane, methane.

Now, methane is a, a greenhouse gas, which is much more potent in terms of its heat, generating, consequences on the weather systems of the world.

the only advantage it has over carbon dioxide is that it breaks down more quickly.

So its impact will be more radical and powerful than carbon dioxide, but it will have dissipate from the atmosphere more quickly than carbon dioxide.

The problem with carbon dioxide, we're locking in these, transformations for, thousands of years, whereas with methane it's, it's decades or hundreds of years.

So as the permafrost melts, and it does seem that the science is showing that that's happening much more quickly than they had anticipated in the previous models and one of those scientists I was talking to says everything is actually happening much more quickly than we anticipated in our models.

They were too conservative. Yeah.

And, and so, we're quite likely, sorry, we will get to you.

we're quite likely to, to get to a point where, the, the sorts of regularities on which the industrial scale farming depends are, are gonna be destabilized and in that context, we are gonna see food prices going up and one of the things in if you look at history and civilizations, in their coming and going, when wealth inequalities become extreme as they are today in our society, that is one of the key indicators for collapse.

and then the second one is the collapse of farming systems and when people get hungry, they get hungry, hangry.

And, that hanger is, is, is a very potent force for political transformation.

So just to respond to you, Camilla, I think that it is inevitable, but that is happening and who knows exactly when it'll happen.

But, those, those forces are in act being reenacted and from history, we know that, they are inevitable. Well, I think it's, it is enormously important to take the leadership of all these indigenous peoples who have gone through this terrifying catastrophe to some extent already.

They've met it and confronted those challenges and been able to come through that. So, And, and that's why they're saying the future is ancestral because we've got to absolutely learn from those and, and we try and share some of those in, in the manifest. Sure.

Yeah. Sorry, those are a key question.

It's okay. Lots of people, the indigenous people are thinking about what to do so that the, the regime world, the poor or the people are thinking, the question seems to be that if you've got 1% of the, the world's richest doing everything and not giving a damn, to be honest, isn't it? The question you have to find some means, be it legislative or from a large entity say, look, we're gonna tax the hell out you if you don't do something because people are, don't seem to care.

But watching I look at what's happening in the states, temporaries don't care.

They just, and it seems as if they are going, well, well Bill ideal prayer bubble Go to bars and So to some mechanism, because I I, what worries me is I don't think they're gonna listen and don't really carry, the 1% are just gonna carry on.

So there has to be maybe some way that these people could be dealt with or in tap in some which, where they feel pain in the pocket. I see.

Yeah. I mean, just imagine if Elon Musk started to pay proper taxes.

Yeah. We could have universal basic income across the world, ? Yeah. it would just be I mean, there are, there are alternative transition towns, a universal basic income, where you spend the money you get for your uni is just, you can spend it within a 50 mile radius of where you live.

So you start to create local economies that are much more resilient to the vagaries of international, trade.

and, and, some of them, I mentioned the degrowth movements is an obvious one.

but, but yeah, I mean, it is an absolute, shocking scandal that these people are allowed to take home the monies.

We've got a minimum wage, we should have a maximum wage, ? Absolutely. From what, what, what can you do with so much money? You just start meddling in other people's politics, You know, how much does the must really need? Well, yeah. Not what he has. How much do we need? So most, yeah, I, anyway, I mean, one hopes that, good sense will prevail and there are of course, many dystopian ways we can think of the future, but I think a lot of these things are self-fulfilling prophecies.

so when you look at the way that a lot of Hollywood movies imagine the future, it's very dystopian.

It's these roots with lots of guns shooting each other up, and and, and that is your way of creating a future.

If that's what every American thinks the future is holding, then they all arm themselves and they get ready for it, and then poof off it goes, and they will start destroying themselves.

Whereas if we can start to imagine an alternative future much more based on what these indigenous groups who reconstituted themselves after the devastation, where you are thinking much more positively, it was, we had a very nice discussion in the house with some of the, different groups, and they said, look, when you are coming in, when you are facing a situation of great, horror and pain and suffering, um you can become inquisitive and like, yeah, I'm gonna get rid of you and then, and, and, and, and that's, something which will just lead you to violence.

It will lead you to more suffering and you won't be able to sustain it for long War is really hard to sustain for a long time.

And, but what we do is we, we take the path of sweetness and beauty.

So you need to cultivate sweetness and beauty in your space.

You need to cultivate joy in your life, and it's that which will sustain you in those times of great difficulty.

So take the path of sweet sweetness and joy and not the path of acquisition, defensiveness and, and violence.

And, and then we have a hope and so if enough of us are cultivating our little path of sweetness and beauty, then that will sustain us through these difficult times in a way that, the protective violence and arrogance will not Got another one.

You mentioned that children and young people are really good ambassadors for this.

Are you able to get into schools impacting the curriculum in this country? Well, that's a whole new, project.

Um I, I have very limited, abilities and time, so I can do, I, I've been doing what I can do, but if you are in schools or anyone's in schools and would like to help, I'd be happy to support it and do whatever I could to support it.

But, right now, here I'm in universities. Yeah.

I mean getting, getting young people, school children themselves to, because we saw the young people take it with their, I don't actually know that would be the way To, yeah, exactly and so, next summer we're trying to organize something called earth calling.

And, and this is going to be something where we're gonna have a daytime event, which will be for school, children and schools, and then an evening event, which will be a big concert.

And, the, the, the rough structure we're still building this idea is to, offer grants out to young creative people to do something that expresses earth's calling and, and then give out those grants and then they'll produce whatever artistic things that they produce, whether it's music, sculpture, or installations, whatever it might be and then during the day, everybody comes and visits those.

Or in the evening, if we get a few big names to headline the concerts, then the other musicians who've, who've developed their stuff, we'll also be able to, so we are trying to do it much more through culture, through joy, through dance like the indigenous people do there.

So rather than it be this rather depressing, which school curriculum, which I've been merging on in this talk that it is quite catastrophic what we're heading towards and that's depressing. So how do we deal with that? So if we follow the path of, beauty and sweetness, then it's about dancing and it's one of the things in Africa, which has always struck me how brilliant Central Africans in particular are they, they have some song and it's, like, oh, they came and they killed all my family, and now I'm just all by myself.

But they're singing with such joy and abandon, and, and, and you sort of think, Yeah, Okay, actually, how do you survive someone doing such a terrible thing to you when you have to be able to find some joy at some, moments to sustain you in, in resisting that.

Mm-hmm. So, I I think that there, if we can start to move into the joy space in this, then that becomes much more attractive than, than the suffering space.

Thank you. Yeah. Catch isn't, I'm Curious about this relationship as well.

I think what you said before is really important, actually have, if you have the needs to get to a place to meet people, the needs to get them here.

But it just makes me think about kids having relationships with each other, that being so, Yeah. And, and there are some wonderful organizations that already do this.

Yeah. And, and how can we support them? You know, maybe that's somewhere as well to think if you can support, um porous schools and, and various other ways that get kids together to, to, to think about their multi-species relation and the joy that that brings us, That really In the back and it'll country.

I'm just wondering actually, well, thanks.

I've heard this several times.

Every time, beats the soul.

but I'm wondering, whilst you at the core, did you manage to get the manifesto in the hands of anyone who might talk like it, like the Saudi ation or some, the big shell representatives quite like it, 10 of, not like this, but Lula, That's Lula getting the manifesto, so getting the manifesto.

Okay. so, this is Antonio Noble, the, one of the top climate scientists, on the Amazon.

these are, this is Louis, from, Kenya, Louis Lumumba, who works lot in DRC and campaigning.

These are from Ben, I can't remember his name. Elizabeth.

She's also from Kenya. Mm-hmm.

This is one of the great Mark, great heroes, Angela men, the daughter of Ko Mende, who basically launched the whole resistance with Chief Rowney and, and David Awa to protect the Amazon, I mean, extraordinary and even though he was murdered brutally, she has fearlessly stood up for his, what he was saying, and continued to, and with so much love and, and generosity of spirit, remarkable human being.

He is a wonderful example of how you can recover.

His group were, missionized by some very radical American missionaries for about 20 years.

and they forced him to produce cash crops to all go to school, to wear western clothes and pray in the church.

And, and then suddenly, of course, they got old and they had to go back to America and so they just abandoned this community.

And, and there they were like, whoa, whoa, where are we now? And, and, and there were three women in the community who were like the mothers of everyone dearly loved and they started to get these weird moments of possession where they would start attacking other people really violently and everybody was so shocked, how on earth could these loving mothers suddenly become so violent and aggressive? And, and so they went to see one of the ash, Inca Shamers called Benke, and they said, Benke, can you come and, and help us sort out these, these ladies? cause they're really, we don't understand what's going.

So he waits and they did lots of ceremonies.

And, their way of explaining what was happening to these women was that the ancestors had possessed them because the ancestors were so angry that they'd abandoned all their ancestral ways and so then they started to do ayahuasca ceremonies together, the whole village, the whole community, men, women, children, and everybody and in those ceremonies, they started to recover, the, their, their traditions and, and re remember and reenact.

And, and so, we, is now the leader of his community and, and the shame of his community and they have just reproduced themselves through this vibrant world of they've, they've got into really sophisticated agroforestry around the community.

So they've got loads of food, nothing for the cash crop markets, but all the things they need to eat for themselves.

So that's really translate, translate this lovely lady.

She's from, the Arctic.

She's part of the, land back movements in, in, in, in, yeah, in, in Alaska and she saw one of the posters, actually the yellow one that's on the door and it was just Trump who was, had he posted, signed, and I don't follow all this orange one and stuff, but he posted something about diversity of funding or whatever, and, and they were so appalled because it was obviously, something that was just gonna promote his interests and then, then they saw our, our posters that were up in one of the camps, about diversity and so she started photographing them and did a whole series of posts to respond to, the orange van.

And, she said, and now she found us, and she was there at one of the, the activations.

Oh. And, and she was, I was in tears when I saw those posters.

They gave you so much hope in the future and she and Chris got on like a house on fire. Oh.

And, it was very, very touching. That's wonderful.

Francisco pca Ko, this, this extraordinary pioneer for the Ashkar, from this was the, Maasai who had to walk for 21 days to get to a place where he could get on the, boat and planes or plaintiff, claralise, another of these extraordinary sheroes who, has just stood up for the truth and for justice fearlessly against the most appalling violence that's been meted out.

You know, several members of her family have been murdered, in the most brutal way, but she has nonetheless resisted and organized all her community to stand up, most effectively against these, very nasty, greedy people.

So, and then of course, Lula, who's I, I, I sort of told you actually the backstory of the ku, what happened.

so Lula he presents himself as this left wing guy, but, and he's a union man, that's clear.

But as a union man, he also supports industry and he does support Extractivism and his head of, cabinet, who's the one who makes a lot of the decisions about what gets done and doesn't get done is a real industry man and he supports oil and, and gas and, sorry, and, plantation economies, soiler and so on, and, and mineral mining and gives, what gives out these different, things.

So Lulu is the sort of front man of the caring, I, I'm concerned about indigenous people, but then the behind him is this other guy who's doing the opposite.

And, so the, when they, did these two very effective interventions, so there they are blocking co.

So the presidents of cop comes down and says, Ooh, how am I gonna do it? He knows the cameras of the world are on him, so he can't just beat them up and, and cut them off.

So he is saying, I'm in a trap. So he is got to let them in.

So of course they say, we want to participate in the negotiations with him.

Okay. So they come upstairs and, and, and you've got this big boring table with these lots of boring people sitting around talking English, which of course KU don't speak.

And, and, and discussing things which hardly anyone in the world actually can follow properly and understand.

And, and so the Mku hang around and, okay, alright and they go around, they look at cop and they, they, they check things out, but then when they go home that night, all these brutes, they wear these sort of rubber armor uniforms come and surround, kettle them into their camp so they can't leave.

So from then on, they were just kettled and they weren't allowed out if they camp and then of course that noise started to get out.

So in order to smother it, Lula very intelligently and this was perhaps the, for me anyway, the best thing that came out of cop was he, he gave 40, he, he recognized 14 indigenous territories and they were demarcated and accepted as law and so that 2 million hectares of forests, this very big area and is now protected properly by the people that live there.

So Lula is this sort of you historic please everybody all at once.

And, which is what improvement scenario, slight Improvement, I just say it's quite important to Yeah.

Distinctions. Distinctions, Yeah. Some of them have crimes against humanity. And So, so Chris was, she was awarded a, a medal for Educational Excellence.

and so suddenly she just told me while we were sitting on boat, now I've just been given this medal, I'm gonna go to receive it from Lula tomorrow in Bia and so I'm gonna take the manifesto.

She came and she got her medal. She, And, and that was when she did, did this photo.

So she's getting her medal, Fantastic Whatever excellence in education for her living schools.

Brilliant project. She LA mentioned 70 years in the struggle and still going strong.

Absolutely remarkable man. Antonio.

Anyway, so those are just some of the people.

So we really got the man, I could have three or four pages of these things, but it's got all over the world That, that is, inspiring photograph and to tell us the backstory of all these heroes and sheroes and so on.

that may be a good place for us to end off and give, yeah, give Jerome a break or I lost, I dunno if I've lost Zoom at the moment.

Oh dear Zoom. No, you're okay. Hello? Is any Zoom? No, I've lost, we're here. We're here here. Oh.

Oh, where are you? I can't find you.

Okay. Some people here are grabbing copies of the, I'm saying to zoom if anybody's able to come on the next two rags.

We have two more weeks of Rag for Zoom.

if anybody can get here, probably Chris will have some up with us.

Mike Jerome gives you some, you'll have some.

Oh, okay.

yeah, but just to say to Zoom, it is myself and Chris next week on the Bunches, the Living with Mom and then after that we are going to have, Chris doing the Christmas fairytale.

We are changing the talk on December the ninth.

Please notice because our speaker, Monica Finnegan, is very unwell and we are doing her talk next term.

So there's two more Zooms coming up December the second and December the ninth.

So please do come back if you can make it.

Thank you very much. And we are gonna say goodbye.

So Pete will fight over the copies of the Flourishing Diversity Manifesto here.

Thank you. And you much a great, thanks Camilla.

Thank you very much for all your help. Thank you for.