Episode 141

full
Published on:

29th Dec 2019

#climatepodcase | The RegenNarration — #042 The Most Powerful Solution to Climate Change

This episode is a part of the first annual Climate Podcast Showcase, for more information on this visit www.climactic.fm/climatepodcase, and for more information on this show please visit The RegenNarration.

The first guest we ever had on this podcast, the former Wall St executive John Fullerton, made reference again this week to “John Elkington's product recall“ on a term he coined 25 years ago – ‘triple bottom line’. It reflects, he said, “the growing consensus that sustainability in business is not working. Instead, the chorus for systemic transformation is growing.” Our guest this week is Professor Karen O’Brien, and she has spent decades exploring and assisting people in just this.

“Given the rate, magnitude and speed of the changes we need, let’s go to the highest leverage point. What would that involve to actually loosen the constraints of a paradigm that is, in my view, killing us?”
— Professor Karen O'Brien

Karen is an internationally recognised thought leader on climate change impacts and social transformation. She has been heavily involved in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), and shared in its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. She’s also on the scientific advisory board for Project Drawdown, and is the co-founder and partner in cCHANGE, an Oslo-based company that has become a beacon in the space of social transformation.

Karen’s work focuses on the relationships between personal, cultural, and systems transformations. She calls it exploring the most powerful solution to climate change – people! And she’s decidedly positive about it, pointing out that projections of the future too often exclude the understanding that people constitute the systems and stories we live by. We are the systems. And we have the ability to transform ourselves (read, not others) – deliberately, consciously, deeply. And in everyday life, wherever we are.

Karen wrote an article a few years ago titled ‘Is it time for a quantum leap?’, on the emerging field of quantum social theory. And she sees her work on the ground with cCHANGE and cCHALLENGE bearing out the potential for just that. So how does conscious social transformation happen? How do we engage the highest leverage points? How do we take care of each other in the process? And can this really enable us to achieve the 1.5 degree Paris Agreement target?

Special Guest: Anthony James.

Support Climactic


See /privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Listen for free

Show artwork for Climactic

About the Podcast

Climactic
Here Media Studios
We live in Climactic times. Climactic tells the stories of the people making a difference in the face of climate crisis.

About your host

Profile picture for Mark Spencer

Mark Spencer

Hello!
I'm Mark, and I'm a podcast addict. I've turned my tens of thousands of misbegotten hours binging history, comedy, and everything in-between into being a keen collaborator on audio projects (climate, local stories, place-based audio especially).

I work with passionate people to turn their ideas into published projects, when I'm not working in the renewable energy space in Naarm/Melbourne.