Planet: Critical Folgen

“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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit planetcritical.substack.com

“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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit planetcritical.substack.com

“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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit planetcritical.substack.com