Planet: Critical

Doubt as a Weapon of War | Marc Owen Jones

It’s one rule for Israel and her allies—another for everyone else.Israel’s allies can turn a blind eye to its genocide of Palestine—as long as some of the war crimes are denied. The settler state received unequivocal backing from the vast majority of Western leaders whilst it committed war crimes under the Geneva Convention, including cutting off electricity, water and food—everything the EU decried as war crimes when committed by Russia.On Tuesday night, a spokesperson for the Israeli government confirmed an Israeli airstrike hit the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, killing 500 sick, wounded and refugees. But hours later, the statement was retracted and Israel began sowing doubt about the origins of the strike, pointing the finger at Palestinian Jihadis. Hamas denied the claim. Israel released footage showing the “misfiring rocket” but Twitter users pointed out the videos either had the wrong time stamp, or were clips from 2022. But by Thursday morning, Western journalists were running with the story that both sides were blaming the other—despite the fact that Israel had called the hospital and ordered it to evacuate because of planned strikes.Marc Owen Jones, Associate Professor at HBKU researching disinformation and digital authoritarianism joins me to explain how Israel weaponises doubt to allow its Western allies enough plausible deniability to continue staunchly supporting the regime, the West’s closest stronghold to the largest oil reserves in the world. Marc also explains the relationship between Israeli propaganda and Western media, revealing why so much coverage of what campaigners are calling a genocide against Palestinians only portrays Israel as the victim.Watch Bassem Youssef's amazing interview.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project by becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

The Interconnected Grid | Nafeez Ahmed

“All of those sectors are rapidly changing and the incumbent industries in those sectors are going to collapse. This is being driven by economic dynamics. It's going to happen.”What if the only viable future is a better one?Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: tomorrow’s world will not look like today’s. We could see fossil-fascism in which nations hoard their fossil reserves (coal and gas) for accelerated use at the expense of international collaboration. We could see eco-fascism after an unplanned recession which crashes the financial system and slashes demand. We could see a descent into madness in which we run out of fuel to heat, to eat, to survive.We could also see degrowth, eco-socialism, renewable sharing and governance reimagined to meet human rights. No, this isn’t utopia—it’s laid out in the policy plans of many scholars around the world as one of the only paths to navigating the planetary crisis.Systems theorist Nafeez Ahmed joins me to discuss the interconnected grid—a piece of renewable infrastructure which, by its design, would change our economic system, our geopolitics and our relationship with one another. Nafeez debated Simon Michaux a few months ago, and I highly recommend listening to these episodes as a trio: Nafeez, Simon, the debate.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Oligarchs, Media and Markets | Peter Jukes

“We found more undocumented meetings between senior newspaper editors—especially his real boss, as Dominic Cummings called Boris Johnson's former employer, The Telegraph,—than any other industry by far. What do they get? What does the political class get? Boris Johnson's got one million pounds per year at The Daily Mail. That's what he gets. They get cover. They get support from these papers. What do the papers get in return? We've documented it. At least 200 million in covid subsidies through this advertising, which was only given to members of the News Media Association, which includes the Guardian and The Mirror and The Independent. The Independent takes money from Saudi, so it’s greenwashing. You ask them to comment on it, they won't touch it because their salaries are being paid by it.”Oligarchy has infiltrated media—but the elite invited them in.Keeping up with the revolving door between media, politics, intelligence and corporations would make anyone queasy. There is an elite class of people with access to power, wealth and influence, and they trade that power, wealth and influence between them to keep it in the family. The press would like us to think they’re the independent watchdog above it all. It’s the greatest story they’ve ever spun.Peter Jukes is the cofounder and executive editor of Byline Times, the British media outlet created to expose corruption in media and write the stories the establishment won’t. In this episode, he explains how oligarchy took over the markets after 2008, the reality of the press ecosystem, how it’s unravelling, and how to create a forum for ideology.© Rachel DonaldPlanet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Patriarchy and Pasture | Nikki Yoxall

Can regenerative farming fix our food systems?One relatively effective action for an individual to combat climate change is going vegan. Industrial agriculture is razing the Amazon rainforest, facilitating endless suffering, and causing a health crisis. However, regenerative farmer Nikki Yoxall says whilst these things are all huge problems, going vegan doesn’t treat the root of the problem—capitalism.Founder of Regenerative Women On The Land, Nikki joins me to discuss the patriarchal thinking embedded in our economic systems which trickle down to our food systems; the importance of accepting and celebrating death; the disconnection between humanity and nature; and the necessity to understand that animals—including farm animals—are a critical in healthy and functioning ecosystems. We discuss agroecology, the homogenisation of food, the disaggregation of food from our land supply, and Nikki ends by imploring us to invite farmers in to understand the complexity of the challenges we face rather than ignoring the generational wealth of knowledge, concern and connection held by the industry, many of whom are working to regenerate a healthy society from the ground up.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Leveraging Pensions to Force the Transition | Ian Edwards

“You can't go off and get growth. That's not the foundations of a pension, especially a public pension as a public good. It is about quality curating, stewarding a future for these people. And the reason why I get jazzed about this is because the money, the scale of mone—30 to 50 trillion dollars globally—if we started to move that money for just the beneficiaries, we fix it for everyone. Because that is a lot of money to move.”What if we bought the fossil fuel industry?The value of pension funds in the world is a staggering amount. Unlike other funds, pensions have a fiduciary duty to their beneficiaries, a guarantee to act in the best interest of those who depend on these funds for their retirement. Ian Edwards, Founder of the Bank of Nature, says fiduciary duty encompasses guaranteeing a healthy planet—without a world under 1.5 degrees, there’s no retirement fund to pull from.He joins me to explain the history of fiduciary duty, the role of pensions, and the difference in returns necessary for pensions funds compared to other investments. This lower return means we could use pensions to start leveraging the market and force a green transition. One way, he says, is buying up the fossil fuel industry to retire it. This is about the 99% recognising their combined wealth and power, and shutting down the very system which threatens us all.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Creating The Alternative | Pat Kane

“If the internet was based on a kind of commons, an almost scholarly freedom, then we need to pressure the people who are regulating the virtuality of our digital lives and say we need an early internet-like space and zone in this, where people can, for example, test out realities, test out new kinds of economy, prototype things, take those prototypes into reality, see if they work, take them into the virtual world again.”“I think the destruction of the biosphere is baked in and therefore the social disruption is baked in as well. So we need some kind of continuity of civic space on the virtual realm that is potentially before us. We need a civic stake in the specific continuity between being in the streets and protesting and literally having to quarantine because of the next biospheric disruption.”Imagine is a world beyond our wildest dreams...“A life beyond your wildest dreams” is promised to those entering Narcotics Anonymous, a decentralised, collectively-run program for sobriety in which fellow addicts help one another get and stay clean. The promise doesn’t make sense when you first hear it—it’s only after months, even years, of becoming someone different that you realise how limited your imagination was made by addiction. I think of our global relationship to capitalism very similarly. It’s difficult to imagine life without it, and thus a better world, but that doesn’t mean such a world isn’t possible. So how do we unleash our imaginations and creativity to create a culture and a world beyond our wildest dreams, one in which we look after one another and the more-than-human world? How do we code for care? This is what Pat Kane joins me to discuss. Pat is a writer and musician, an activist, and a futurist. He writes a column for The National in Scotland and is also the co-founder of The Alternative, a media organisation embedded into community resilience and imagining alternative ways of organising. Pat to join me to discuss culture—how to understand it, how to code it, how to change it. We explore the possibility of the internet as emergent collective consciousness and a tool for creativity, resilience and connection. We discuss the importance of play: the psychology of play, the impact of play, and how play as resistance reveals the absurdity of the human systems that we are forced to interact with. We meander through this and more on love, truth, cosmology, resilience, difficulty and imagination. © Rachel DonaldPlanet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Fighting for Freedom in West Papua | Jeffrey Bomanak

“From the 1963 up until today, they can't kill our ideology. They can't kill our philosophy. They can’t kill our fight. Because we believe what we fight for. We fight for our right, freedom, dignity, and truth. So, you can come with any number, you can come with any intelligence equipment, you can come with any kind of technology, you can come. I will fight you.”What can be justified in the name of self-defence?Ranging across the vast territory of West Papua, 34,000 guerilla soldiers fight the 700,000 strong Indonesian military controlling their sovereign land. In February, these rebels took a New Zealand pilot hostage, threatening to kill him if the Indonesian government ignored their demands for independence. But in this exclusive interview, Jeffrey Bomanak, Chairman of the Free Papua Movement, promises Philip Mehrtens will make it home alive. After negotiating their freedom with their Dutch colonists, West Papuans discovered the United States had used their land to bribe Indonesia into joining the capitalist economic order in 1963. The Free West Papua Movement (OPM, Organisasi Papua Merdeka) sprung up in resistance and has been fighting ever since. Jeffrey explains how their land was used as a pawn in a battle between world orders, the “genocide” of Papuans at the hands of the Indonesian government, and why organisations like the UN ignore the desperate plea of the Papuan people to maintain their colonial oversight. © Rachel DonaldPlanet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Overshooting Earth’s Boundaries | Bill Rees

Humankind’s footprint threatens to squash life under its heel.Our impact on the planet cannot be understated. We have thrust Earth into a new geological period, destroyed the majority of the world’s wildlife, razed her forests, and rendered innumerable species extinct. We are expert consumers with no limits to our appetite, it seems. Unless the climate becomes so unstable our own systems break down. This, of course, is what we’re already seeing.Bill Rees, bio-ecologist, ecological economist, and originator of the ecological footprint analysis, joins me to discuss this breakdown—how we got here, where we’re going, and why he has little hope for humankind to make it through. We discuss systems change, potential outcomes, and how to create “lifeboats” in a crisis. We also go head-to-head on the framing of some of these issues before finding common ground towards the end of the episode.“Half of the fossil fuels ever used on planet Earth by human beings has been consumed in just the last 35 years. This is the power of exponential growth. So hugely important things have happened in 50 years, including the first book that warned us of limits to growth. We've seen the evidence before the US Congress on Climate Change. We've had 27 COP meetings on climate change, a half a dozen formal agreements to reduce carbon emissions. There's been several formal scientists’ warning to humanities. This has all taken place in the last 50 years.“Yet, during that past 50 years, the pace of negative change has accelerated. So, despite the best of our science, despite the best evidence you can possibly come up with in terms of climate activity and so on and so forth, the mainstream has not budged.”Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Religious Naturalism | Ursula Goodenough

“There isn't likely to be a future where all critters have no interest in themselves and are only interested in the collective. That's not gonna work. But to temper those two directions so that there is self maintenance, but also a self that joins the community, is, I would say, the goal.”What if religion wasn’t about God—but about each other?Religion is a divisive topic at best and the cause of war at worst. It has been used to control, dictate, punish and destroy people throughout the ages. Yet faith, it seems, is a critical aid in humankind’s individual and collective existence. I have always believed that faith is an act of imagination where religion is an act of dogma. That’s why I was curious when Ursula Goodenough, Professor of Biology Emeritus, emailed me a copy of her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, suggesting we discuss “religious naturalism”. During the episode, Ursula introduces the topic as a grand story to unite humankind. We go on to discuss humankind as a symbolic species, the necessity and beauty of symbolism, how we evolve with symbolism, and how we can use story to anchor our existence. We discuss language and mindedness, consciousness and the brain, community and individuals, and the relationship between mystery and knowledge. Ursula also gives her insight into what separates religiosity, spirituality and religion.© Rachel DonaldPlanet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Mainstreaming Behaviour Change | Bill Ryerson

Human population is a problem—tackling it through education isn’t.We need to slow our global fertility rate to 1.5 children per woman if we’re to lower our population to a sustainable level of around 3 billion. That decline is already happening in many post-industrial nations, to the chagrin and panic of their leaders. However, many cultures around the world still prize large families. But in a world of increasingly scarce resources like water, limiting family sizes remains the main driver of some campaigners, including Bill Ryerson.Bill is an ecologist and founder of the Population Media Center, an initiative which creates mainstream entertainment in many nations around the world, pushing the needle on cultural practices to drive behaviour change on population and even gender violence. PMC produces telenovelas and radionovelas which have seen fertility rates decline in nations they’ve been shown.Bill and I spend the first half of the episode talking about the population problem, the policy problems, the history of population growth. He then introduces the concept of the demographic dividend, which showed that small families actually lead to economic growth, before explaining the successes and heartwarming stories of the work PMC has done around the world.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe