Caroline Whyte and David Somekh of the European Health Futures Forum speak with Davie Philip about Communities of Practice. Davie is a community catalyst, climate coach and facilitator at Cultivate, the Sustainable Ireland Cooperative. Since 1997 Davie has been active in Ireland promoting sustainability, community resilience and cooperative approaches to meeting our needs. He was…
Editorial by David Somekh , Director EHFF We’ve waited some time to send out a Newsletter since our end of the year 2021 offering. We’ve been scanning the horizon as ever, and there’s a lot going on! The world is if anything even more turbulent than before, which provides a backdrop, a context to the…
Problems of US climate politics (and maybe some solutions) Our guest this month is Professor Theda Skocpol, who is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and the founder and director of the Scholars Strategy Network. Professor Skocpol has extensively researched the social and political dynamics that can bring about major…
UK-based smallholder Chris Smaje speaks with Seán and Caroline. Topics covered include agroecology, the need to balance different forms of property ownership, and the globalism/localism debate. Chris is based in Somerset in the UK and worked as an academic sociologist and anthropologist for some time, but then changed focus to the practice and politics of agroecology.…
To kick off our 2022 series, Caroline Whyte of Feasta and David Somekh of the EHFF spoke with Isabel Carlisle, the director of the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon in the UK. Isabel spoke about her earlier career as an archaeologist and in the art world, and how she became involved in the climate movement…
Caroline Whyte and Seán Ó Conláin speak with Gerry McGovern, who is a specialist in identifying and reducing digital waste and the author of the book ‘World Wide Waste: how digital is killing our planet and what we can do with it’. Gerry has written eight books about digital design and has appeared on numerous…
Dear friends and colleagues from the EHFF Community. This year has been one of Zoom and Microsoft Teams burn-out for sure. Very sad we’ve not had the chance to meet face to face. Nevertheless, despite the constraints, it seems a lot has been accomplished. As you can see from the features page on the website (or our YouTube…
Symbiosis and system change: potential lessons from mycology Bill O’Dea, a specialist in mycology, talks with Seán Ó Conlaín and Caroline Whyte about the immense contribution that fungi make to the biosphere, their nutritional value, the threats they are facing, the complex symbiotic relationship which they have with each other and with other species, and…
In this podcast we look at potential ways to get beyond the time-consuming, and sometimes quite heated, arguments between those who believe that aggregate ‘green growth’ is possible and those who believe that environmental constraints will oblige us to adopt a different economic goal. Beth Stratford, an economics researcher who is a fellow at the…
This podcast continues with the theme of transformation catalysts which we also explored in last month’s Seán Ó Conlaín interviews Steve Waddell, who is the lead steward of the global Bounce Beyond movement which accelerates initiatives working to make regenerative, life-centered economies realizable at scale as “next economies” communities. Steve has a Ph.D. in sociology…