Accidental Gods

Our two guests this week are deeply embedded in the creation of Tiny Homes as a way for us meet the needs of all within the bounds of the living planet. Both are living absolutely at that sharp, bright edge of inter-becoming from which our more flourishing future will emerge.  

Rachel Butler is the founder of Tiny House Community Bristol, Chair of Bristol Community Land Trust and is a member of Bristol’s One City Homes & Communities board. Her root mission is within systems change/paradigm shift: to re-common as much land as practicable, enabling as many people as possible to move back onto and reconnect with this land, by co-creating and co-residing in Tiny House Regenerative Settlements. She believes that, at this critical time of human-created poly crisis, as the current system collapses and composts, it’s also time for the human species to rejoin the web of life, in sacred reciprocity; healing our relationships to self, each other and community; not only human, but of all beings and kinds.

Maddy Longhurst is a director of Tiny House Community Bristol alongside Rachel and, for the last 4-5 years has been helping to create their Tiny House development in Sea Mills, Bristol, as well as another small tiny house community off the radar. Since having to leave her rented home this August, she and her daughter have decided to exit the mainstream housing system so as to no longer be subject to its unethical, exploitative ways, but to live, for now, in the fertile margins until their tinies are created. 

She's UK coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Consortium, weaving relationships between people working in the urban and peri-urban agroecological transition. She is also Studio Coordinator for Constructivist, a regenerative design school for built environment professionals, and part of the Strategy circle for Bristol Commons. Some of her current areas of work are on Reimagining the Greenbelt as a place for regenerative settlements, prototyping Landed Community Kitchens and developing a model for Tiny Homes for land regenerators in the city.

How do we move beyond our myopic focus on carbon/CO2 as the index of our harms to the world?  What can we do to heal the whole biosphere?  And what role is played by water-as-verb, forest-as-verb, ocean-as-verb?

This week's guest is an environmental journalist and author who has answers to all of these questions - and more.  Judith Schwartz is an author who tells stories to explore and illuminate scientific concepts and cultural nuance. She takes a clear-eyed look at global environmental, economic, and social challenges, and finds insights and solutions in natural systems. She writes for numerous publications, including The Guardian and Scientific American and her first two books are music to our regenerative ears. The first is called 'Cows Save the Planet' and the next is 'Water in Plan Sight'. Her latest, “The Reindeer Chronicles”, was long listed for the Wainwright Prize and is an astonishingly uplifting exploration of what committed people are achieving as they dedicate themselves to earth repair, water repair and human repair.

How do we build the local futures we all know we need?  What does it actually take to become a good enough ancestor? Or even the best ancestor we can be?  Our guest this week, Helena Norberg-Hodge, has given her life to exploring the answers, and helping birth them into being. 

Helena Norberg-Hodge is one of the Elders of our culture. She's a linguist, author and filmmaker, and the founder and director of the international non-profit group Local Futures, in which role, she has initiated localization movements on every continent, and has launched both the International Alliance for Localization (IAL) and World Localization Day (WLD).

Here is an Autumn Equinox Meditation to help set you up for the shift from the long days to the long nights.