Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Rupert Read.
Rupert Read is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and co-director of the new Climate Majority Project. He authored several books, including This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future, and Why Climate Breakdown Matters and has been many times on the Today programme, QuestionTime, Newsnight, Politics Live, Al Jazeera, and more. He is co-author of Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still Just Possible, with Morgan Phillips and Manda Scott.
How bad is it going to get? This is the provocation Rupert makes in a recent keynote—and one that I found to be an excellent way to jump into our conversation—though it’s a bit of a decoy. It gives way to a deeper, more nuanced conversation about how we ultimately survive and even thrive in complex emerging realities. Because let’s face it, the circumstances are scary. The past year has demonstrated that climate change is real, and that extreme weather events are becoming part of a cascade of new normals. Meanwhile, the late capitalism train chugs along, incapable of slowing even incrementally—even when the stakes are life and death for our species on this planet. And that’s leaving aside the volatility in Washington, which is all so alarming I honestly am having trouble processing it.
Get your copy of Transformative Adaptation here.
So how bad is it going to get? As Rupert elaborates, referencing data and peer-reviewed studies: quite bad. But this isn’t cause to throw your hands up—quite the opposite. Another world is still just possible. That “another world” only emerges if we adopt transformative adaptation, a holistic form of adaptation that recognizes how dire the circumstances are, emphasizes relocalization, and advocates for a reorientation of our value systems away from those we’ve inherited from capitalism. Given what we now know, it would be foolish to think we could reverse the harm done to the planet enough to return to a previous version of normal—but that doesn’t mean our only option is to prepare for dystopia.
Instead, through transformative adaptation, we might bring about “thrutopias.” Will we have all our modern conveniences and material abundance in a thrutopia? Probably not. But could we build meaningful lives, in which we deeply connect with each other and experience a shared sense of purpose, while endeavoring to realign our species with the patterns of nature? We can—that world is still just possible.
Find this alongside a discussion of moderate vs. radical flanks; deep adaptation and strategic adaptation; the role of philosophy in ecological crisis, and much more, in this conversation with Rupert Read.
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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with environmental toxicologist and mycologist Danielle Stevenson:
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