Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:46 — 53.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

To create real, deep, broad and meaningful climate action, we must shift Australia from extraction-minded modernity to a life-centred culture, and explore how humanity might recover its sense of wonder, humility, and purpose in relationship with the living world.

→ Transcript

Could this be that ‘holy Grail’ in climate action which humanity has been looking for quite some time?

In this second episode of The Force of Life podcast series, host Mik Aidt speaks with writer, philosopher, and sociologist Barbara Lepani about what she calls enlivenment – a life-centred response to the decay of modern civilisation, recovering a poetic, relational way of being with the more-than-human world, and inviting retired seniors to lead a new season of service to life on Earth.

Barbara is a retired sociologist of technological change, a writer, and a cultural weaver from the Blue Mountains. Building on Episode 1’s “Senior Uprise”, Barbara talks about the Eldership Revolution, indigenous ways of knowing, arts-as-activism, and how a song – ‘The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms’ – became a call to kinship and courage.

Barbara reminds us that the great transformation begins quietly – in gardens, in friendships, in creative networks, and in the way we listen to the Earth. This episode is a celebration of that quiet revolution.

---

“How do we create the nurturing conditions for the imperceptible to blossom? The old order is crumbling, but in the cracks and crevices of the modern world, new shoots of life are growing. We have to water these new seeds of joy.”

The Eldership Revolution

Barbara invites us to reimagine the role of seniors in today’s Australia – not as consumers of comfort, but as mentors and stewards for the generations to come. She wants to kickstart an Australian Eldership Revolution – a rebellion of wisdom and responsibility. As she puts it: “We baby boomers can help the young grow new roots in the soil. Let’s stop cruising through retirement and start leaving life-affirming legacies.”

Woven through the conversation of this podcast episode are threads of deep ecology, Buddhist philosophy, and Indigenous insight. Barbara draws inspiration from thinkers such as Andreas Weber, Bayo Akomolafe, and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, exploring how the “old order” of modernity might be hospiced with compassion while we nurture the seeds of a new, life-affirming civilisation.

Her reflections resonate with the spirit of this series: that the future will not be built by fighting what is dying, but by tending to what is alive. Through stories, music, and poetic imagery, recovering a new way of being in our relationship to the natural world becomes a powerful antidote to despair in a time of cascading crises.

Dictionary

• Enlivenment is a cultural and philosophical alternative to Western rationalism. Enlivenment restores poetics, embodiment, and empathy to our understanding of life on Earth. The Enlivenment Network was started in the Blue Mountains. Across generations, it connects thinkers, artists, and seniors of the Third Age all over Australia.

• The Eldership Revolution is a practical response to ageing, offering meaning through service, mentoring, and local stewardship, reimagining retirement as a time of creativity, connection, and community care
The Enlivenment worldview is challenging all three levels of the dominant western worldview of modernity.

• Ontology is the philosophical study of the fundamental nature of being, reality, and how things relate to one another in the world, focusing on what entities exist and their relationships, ideas about the nature of reality, creation, etc. The modern scientific idea that reality is only that which can be measured by the scientific method is so limited. This view is a form of ideology, scientism.

• Epistemology examines the nature and scope of knowledge, questioning how we acquire, justify, and validate beliefs. The knowledge system based on this central idea: Through imperialism extending into modernisation and global capitalism, the western knowledge systems (epistemology) have achieved global hegemony, particularly through the global university education system, and the role of science and technology.
In essence, ontology addresses what exists, while epistemology concerns how we know what exists. Both concepts are interconnected, influencing each other in philosophical discourse.
There is also a third way we built culture and our worldview: Axiology – the value system we create based on our epistemology, based on both scientific rationalism, normative ideals and religious beliefs. The Enlivenment worldview is challenging all three levels of the dominant western worldview of modernity.

• Caring for Country is an important element of the Indigenous Australian worldview, with multiple levels of meaning both practical and spiritual, and an essential foundation for an Australian enlivenment renaissance.

• Life-centred consciousness is a shift from self-interest to nuturing the commons.

• Hospicing modernity means learning to let go of what no longer serves life, the modernity and coloniality complex that has shaped modern civilisation.

About Barbara Lepani

Barbara Lepani is a sociologist, author, and cultural philosopher based in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. She began her career in education and social planning before moving into research on the social impacts of technology. With a Master’s degree in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Wollongong, Barbara worked across government and academic sectors, including the NSW Cabinet Office, the Australian Centre for Innovation at the University of Sydney and as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

She is a long-time practitioner of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, having completed a three-year retreat in France. Her life and work now bridge spirituality, ecology, and cultural renewal. Barbara is the author of ‘Tulkus, Tertons and Turmoil: East Tibet 1855–1955‘, ‘Call of the Dakini’, and ‘The Regenesis Journey’. She is the co-founder of the Enlivenment Network, a collaborative platform aligned with the New Economy Network Australia that brings together artists, writers, and community leaders exploring new ways of living in service to life on Earth.

Barbara’s writings

Across the past seven years, Barbara has published an extensive catalogue of essays on enlivenment.network and affiliated collectives. Her work traverses ecology, philosophy, spirituality, the arts, and post-capitalist culture, weaving inner transformation with societal change. Recurring threads include Indigenous knowledge and decolonisation, spiritual ecology, creative praxis, regenerative economics, intergenerational renewal, and thoughtful engagement with technology and AI.

Representative pieces such as The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms, From Collective Trauma to Enlivened Living, and Towards a Relationalist Economy invite readers to move beyond despair into participation – to recognise ourselves as part of the living web and to cultivate a culture that serves life.

---

Episode snapshots

• Naming the shift – Enlivenment.
Borrowing from biologist Andreas Weber, Barbara contrasts the extractive prose of policy with the ‘biopoetics’ of life. Enlivenment asks us to restore the mythopoetic dimension of culture, and to re-seat consciousness in relationship — ontology, not just utility.

• Eldership Revolution.
A spirited invitation to baby boomers to re-imagine retirement as service – “leave life-affirming legacies,” help younger generations root into place and purpose. Building on Episode 1, we connect Tor Nørretranders’ Senior Uprise grounded in awe, peace of mind and legacy to Barbara’s call for an Australian Eldership Revolution grounded in responsibility and connection with the natural world.

• Kinship, not control.
Stories of learning from First Nations teachers: recovering respect for Country, totems, and the ethic of co-belonging – a modern, regenerative kinship, not a nostalgic retreat.

• Song as praxis: “The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms.”
A lyrical ‘story-room’ becomes a choral call to life, stitched with Jane Goodall’s reminder that every being matters.

• Best-case dreaming, here and now.
Opening up futures thinking while facing fire seasons, heatwaves and news cycles that still avoid naming causes – and why that has to change.

---

Why this conversation matters for Australia

• It reframes prosperity. From ‘productivity’ to enlivened living, grounded in wellbeing economies, commoning and ecological regeneration.

• It centres retired people as enablers. With superannuation, time and skills, our Third-Age cohort can seed the cultural turn – mentoring, place-based projects, and intergenerational repair.

• It braids wisdom traditions. First Nations relational ethos and Buddhist practice meet contemporary science, arts and community organising.

• It activates culture. From choirs to classrooms, from local festivals to citizen projects, art becomes a civic technology for courage and care.

---

New song about The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms

An original piece woven into the episode – inspired by Barbara’s October 2025 essay – giving voice to Ocean, Sky, Freshwater and Terrestrial ‘kingdoms’. It’s a call to step out of spectatorship and into kinship. Listen for the turning lines and Jane Goodall’s refrain: every being has a role to play.

The episode ends with the song ‘Return Again’.
→ More songs here

---

“Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living…”
~ MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, speaking during the Second World War, youtube-clip

---

Biophilia – our deep, biological love of life

Why nature heals

We’re not meant to be disconnected – from ourselves, from each other, or from the Earth. There’s a reason a walk in the woods feels like exhaling. A reason your nervous system softens when you hear the sea or touch the soil.

This is biophilia – our deep, biological love of life. It’s not just poetic. It’s primal. We’re wired to connect with the natural world because it’s where we come home to ourselves. – Kimberley Stone

Three graphs that triangulate on Jorge Wagensberg’s principle: “Nature is the outer part of our innermost being.”

1️⃣ A few days ago, The Guardian published a study on 61 nations and their inhabitants’ connection with nature.

Among its highlights:
“Nature connectedness is a psychological concept that measures the closeness of an individual’s relationship with other species. Studies have found that people with higher levels of nature connectedness enjoy improved wellbeing and are more likely to act in environmentally friendly ways. Low levels of nature connectedness have been identified as one of three major underlying causes of biodiversity loss alongside inequality and the prioritisation of individual, material gains.”

“Nature connectedness is not just about what we do, but how we feel, think, and value our place in the living world,” said Richardson, who admitted he was not surprised that Britain languished so low in the nature connection league table.

“We’ve become a more rational, economic and scientific society. That’s obviously brought some fantastic benefits but it’s how we balance them with the unforeseen problems,” he said. “How do we reintegrate natural thinking in our very technological world? It’s obviously very difficult to change cultures but it’s about mainstreaming the value of nature, making it integral to our wellbeing, so it becomes respected and almost sacred.”

2️⃣ About 10 months ago, I created this infographic about different pathways for navigating this meta-crisis. The main one was to reconnect, not only with Nature, but also with the wisdom of indigenous peoples. These two complementary paths would create ripple effects in the others.

3️⃣ Kimberley, creator of this infographic and Naturally Mindful, has other interesting infographics on her website, as well as two downloadable ebooks:
🟢 “How to be more Mindful in nature.”
🟢 “Mindful Nature Connection Activities for Families.”

📨 If you want to see ‘Life’ from three perspectives (triangulation), take a look at my newsletter, “Creating Meaningful Synergies”

~ Jesús Martín González, anthropologist

---

Transcript – Force of Life Episode 2

MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, speaking in the 1940s:
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.

Female voice:
The Force of Life.

Star Wars – A New Hope, Episode 4:
Remember The Force will be with you. Always.

Joseph Gelfer: (00:21)
Historically unprecedented change. That is what is required. And the I like to use is, you in service to life on Earth. If you’re not in service to life on Earth, you don’t deserve to be in business.

Barbara Lepani: (00:37)
This is the journey we’re on. How do we create the nurturing conditions for the imperceptible to blossom? In the cracks and crevices of its decay, all these new shoots of life are growing. And we have to but water these new shoots of life because the old order is actually crumbling. And instead of trying to prop it up, we have to hospice it like an old and dying patient with love and compassion as we water the seeds of joy in the new.

Buckminster Fuller:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Mik Aidt:
Welcome to this, the second episode of the Force of Life podcast series, where we talk about how we can be at service to life on Earth, and we explore what a good life looks like.

Monty Python movie clip:
You seek the Holy Grail? That is our quest. Our quest is to find the Holy Grail. Yes, it is. And so we’re looking for it. Yes, we have been for some time. Ages!

Mik: (01:55)
Seeds new shoots of life are growing, networks are growing, and there’s like a major shift in consciousness happening all over the world, in case you haven’t noticed – a life-centered consciousness. And today I’ll be talking to someone who’s even got a name for that big shift, that new understanding of our way of being, a different way of being in our relationship to the natural world.

Her name is Barbara Lepani. She’s a sociologist of technological change. She’s a very busy blog writer, a change maker – and a thought leader, I would say – from the Blue Mountains.

Barbara:
New roots are spreading and I find these new roots all over the place. So I think the Eldership Revolution, it’s the job of we elders, the baby boomers, to help the young people grow these new roots, these new plants in the soil. So how about we reimagine the whole meaning and purpose of retirement? Put new seeds in the soil of the retirement world and give up this stupid, stupid quest of endless overseas journeys on ocean cruises to faraway places and start to make a life in this world, in this country where we live for the coming generations. Leave life-affirming legacies should be our mission.

Mik:
In the first episode of Force of Life I spoke with the Danish author Tor Nørretranders, who took up the baton from Joseph Gelfer’s idea about ‘revolutionary politics rooted in service to life on Earth’. And Tor added this extra element, you could say, in our exploration: He talked about what he called the Senior Uprise – the Senior Uprise among people who are over 65 to 70 years old. A rebellion of responsibility, of wisdom and of awe – in service to those… all that life and all those people who come after us. A revolt guided by stewardship and responsible leadership.

And now that’s where Barbara Lepani comes in – with an idea of ‘Enlivenment’ and a call for an Australian version of an Eldership Revolution.

Monty Python movie clip:
I have seen the grail!
Good for you.
I have seen it! I have seen it!
But there is one small problem.

Barbara: (05:04)
‘Enlivenment’ is actually a word I stole from a German biologist called Andreas Weber, and he calls it ‘The recovery of poetics in the study of life in biology’. So he sets up this contrast between the sort of extreme utilitarian rationalism that came out of the Western Enlightenment tradition towards the recovery of that sort of excitement and strong identification and love of the natural world that drove many biologists. And he calls that ‘biopoetics’.

And my own background is I’m a sociologist of technological change and I have been a sort of technological optimist in the past, but now I have much more reservation about what the constant technological innovation is doing to our inner spirit, if you like, that we’ve lost what I call ‘the mythopoetic dimension of life’, the ability to think poetically. And we now only think in terms of sort of abstract policy prose.

So I love this idea of enlivenment because one of the things I’m very conscious of is this underlying all of the crises that we confront like the climate crisis, the environment crisis, the militarisation crisis, the wealth inequality crisis – underlying all of that is epistemic, it’s the way we make sense of our experience in the world. So we have to come back to a word that many people in the English-speaking world are not familiar with, the word ‘ontology’.

And that’s our understanding of the very nature of reality, our way of being. So this is what this shift in the seat of our consciousness is the sort of preoccupying idea of my time. I mean, the enliven… So we’ve set up the Enlivenment Network as an arts and culture hub of the New Economy Network Australia.

And before that, we were the same group of people involved in something called the Regenesis Collective. So we were tapping into this big investment at the moment about regeneration. You know, it’s no longer about sustainability, it’s about regenerating not just the Earth, but also culture, the human spirit, so that I’m trying to link these sort of policy concerns of environmental repair and climate change management with an inner spiritual journey.

And I guess that steps into another part of my life journey, which is that for very many, many years, in fact since 1985, I’ve been a practicing student of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, including undertaking a three-year retreat in France between 2006 and 2009.

So I’ve combined my journey in the sociology of technological change with a parallel spiritual journey in Tibetan Buddhism, which is very much a mythopoetic tradition. So it’s been a wonderfully rich journey, because these two threads have informed my life.

And the enlivenment network also pays strong tribute to Indigenous culture. And that also feeds into my personal background. When I was young, I met and married a man from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea when we were both students at the University of New South Wales. So I went with him and lived in Papua New Guinea during those years when it transitioned from self-government and then independence.

And of course, what happened to me then is that although I was a member of the colonising power, White Australia, I was actually… By marriage I became a member of the indigenous culture.

And I had that experience of being the stranger in someone else’s land where I couldn’t, all of my fancy education was kind of useless at the village level. So it was a humbling and confusing, but very rich experience. So all of that comes together in this idea of enlivenment – that we, people of the privilege, white people of the Western world, if you like, the inheritors of the Western enlightenment have so much to learn from the First Nations people of the world in terms of recovering a different way of being in our relationship to the natural world and that one of the great treasures I think of life in Australia is even our Prime Minister acknowledges that that is our cultural foundation.

We pay respects to elders, past and present. We constantly say, ‘We now acknowledge on whose land we’re living.’ So even though we can’t reverse the processes of colonisation, we can acknowledge that this is their country, this is their land, and this is where we’ve made our home. And now we must put our roots down in this soil, we Europeans of the West, this is the soil we must grow in. And to do that, we must pay respect and homage to its deep, deep mythic presence and learn how to sort of feel that in our bones, in our bloodstream, so that it enlivens our spirit, not with guilt, but with hope. That’s my story of enlivenment.

MUSIC

Barbara: (10:39)
The Enlivenment Network itself is a group of many different feathers, if you like. We’re artists, we’re storytellers, we’re thinkers, we’re podcasters, we’re musicians, we’re an open network that anyone can join. We’ve got people from Brisbane, from Gippsland, other parts of Victoria. Many people here in the Blue Mountains where I live on the land of the Gundungara and Darug people.

But we’re just an open group that welcome everybody with us, and constantly I’m finding new groups that are on the same journey. People like you, Mik, you know, with your ‘Force of Life’. I’ve since found there’s a ‘School of Being’ set up by two women who were exploring this idea of the change of consciousness. There’s a group called the ‘Centre for Reworlding’, which is in Victoria, which is indigenous led. And I love this idea of ‘reworlding’ because it is about re-understanding the nature of the way we live in this world.

So and then one of my young friends in the Enlivenment Network, Saskia Clark, she just sent me a link to something called ‘We Are the Great Turning Point Podcast Club’, which is exploring the work of Joanna Macy, who’s a Buddhist person involved in deep ecology.

So there are many, many threads to this story of enlivenment that’s occurring now here in Australia, and all over the world. So I think it’s, you know, it’s very encouraging to see this.

And on that note, one of the things I’d like to share with your listeners is a quote from Bayo Akomolafe. He’s a Nigerian philosopher and psychiatrist that’s been a huge inspiration for me because he cuts through the sort of old romantic leftist idea that you need a sort of revolutionary clean sweep to get rid of the old before you can do anything.

But as we know revolutions are violent and destructive things. They’re not to be lightly entertained, and instead what Bayo Akomolafe says in his he runs something called the Emergence Network. He says:

“What I feel called to do along with others is to trace out theoretical breaks or cracks that allow us to extricate ourselves from the stranglehold of the familiar.”

And this ‘familiar’ that he’s talking, about is our worldview, the Western white worldview that we’ve imposed on the rest of the world. He says:

“This is what politics means to me, not the seemingly tired and tautological practices of electing new messianic figures every four years but the Earth-wise practice performed by cordyceps, lichen, tree, gut microbiome, murmuration, human and stone. Of creating the nurturing conditions for the imperceptible to blossom.”

So for me, you know, this is the journey we’re on. How do we create the nurturing conditions for the imperceptible to blossom? And in the cracks and crevices… And I often have this image of a huge four-story building with concrete and steel, and it’s gradually being eaten away by concrete cancer. But in the cracks and crevices of its decay, all these new shoots of life are growing. And we have to but water these new shoots of life because the old order is actually crumbling.

And instead of trying to prop it up… I mean there’s a wonderful First Nations thinker called Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti who works at the University of Columbia and she’s written a book, ‘Hospicing Modernity’. So instead of trying to tear modernity about it is itself changing that we have to hospice it like an old and dying patient with love and compassion as we water the seeds of joy in the new. So to me, that’s what ‘enlivenment’ means.

Mik:
In our first episode of the Force of Life series, I talked with the Danish author Tor Nørretranders, and he talked about a ‘senior uprise’. He’s actually written a whole book about just that, a ‘Rebellion of the Elders’. And I’ve got the sense that that’s something that speaks to you, Barbara, because it didn’t take long before you wrote an entire blog post about the topic of a ‘Rebellion of the Elders’.

Barbara: (15:12)
Yes, or what I call it: ‘The Eldership Revolution’. Because here in Australia, we have to be careful about this use of the word ‘Elder’, because First Indigenous cultures call their custodian keepers ‘Elders’. I mean, it’s an English word that they’ve adopted to signify who those people are.

So, but what I’m trying to say is that Eldership also has an ancient and long history in European culture, particularly back in village culture, where it was the responsibility of the older generation… Of course in those days they didn’t live a long life, but when, they were to pass on the culture, to look after the young, to take care of the sustainability of the village to look after the transmission of knowledge.

So within the Australian context where now 75 per cent of us in this country come from an Anglo-European cultural heritage – and where I live in the Blue Mountains it’s actually more than 95 per cent of us – so, you know. We need to find the threads of this back in our own tradition so that we’re not simply appropriating something from First Nations culture.

And of course, like your friend in Denmark, Tor, I’m also of that generation who were rebels of the 1960s and 1970s. We fought against the Vietnam War. We led that Western cultural revolution that led to so much social change in the West that was really driven by humanistic passion for social justice. And many many laws were passed, particularly in this country, in Australia, which began you know with the Whitland government but continued on.

So for me, I loved his idea that, Yes! We are the ones who rode that wave, we had all the privileges of a world when it was easy to own your own home, we were the first generation of mass university education, particularly women, we rode the feminist revolution. It was my generation that got around the table and said, No! We women don’t want to be locked in the house. I mean I come from a generation when women got married they had to give up their job. They couldn’t own property in their own right.

Whitlam changed all that with no fault divorce.

So it was a time of great optimism, but also what we now recognise: privilege. But also, Mik, it’s many of the decisions that my generation made that are now causing the crisis that’s coming upon us, particularly since the neoliberal revolution, led by Thatcherism, that got adopted around the world as a way of dealing with stagflation – and it had disastrous consequences in many ways because this whole belief that the market would sort everything out was such a sort of wonderful alternative to the stagnant authoritarianism of communism, has also proved illusory.

I mean, I’m not romantic about communism because one of the things I did when I was young, at the end of teaching in Queensland for two years, I went on a university student trip to China in 1968. So I was in China during the Cultural Revolution, and we were nominally called ‘the Revolutionary Red Guard of Australian Youth’. But I saw before my eyes the savagery of that revolution, that Cultural Revolution and the sort of extremism of the young people who were caught up in the Red Guard movement. It made me realise that yeah, Mao Zedong said – ‘A revolution is not a tea party’ – is absolutely true, but neither is free market a tea party. It’s also savage. It’s ruthless.

And all this and I think what’s happened in the West is we’ve been caught up in this conflict between the liberal humanistic goals and the savage competition of neoliberalism. So people are sort of, you know, if I was to use an impolite term to your listeners: We’ve been caught up in a mindfuck, you know. A sort of psych, schizophrenic – or what Paul Sartre called ‘living in bad faith’.

We pretend one thing but we’re living another, and it really screws with people’s minds, and I think that’s fed into the rage that’s feeding all this right-wing populism and looking for some sort of leader that’s going to somehow get them out of this double bind.

But we know where that will lead us well, we know it leads to fascism and that’s no solution either.

So I always come back to Bayo Akomolafe’s vision that in the cracks and crevices of the modernity vision which is already crumbling under its own contradictions, new roots are spreading and I find these new roots all over the place and then so I think the eldership revolution, it’s the job of we elders, baby boomers, to help the young people grow these new roots, these new plants in the soil.

And my vision is that here in Australia we have, you know, the wonderful invention of the superannuation sector that Paul Keating brought in, which is now holding trillions of dollars. And its job is to look after retirement. So how about we reimagine the whole meaning and purpose of retirement?

Because as Tor pointed out, people no longer die at 70. They live on for 10 to 20 years. So what do they do with this time? I mean, at the moment, it’s sort of envisioned as ‘a time of fun and joy and pleasure’, playing golf, playing cards, going on endless overseas trips. You know, they all don’t know what to do with their money. So those who’ve managed to hang on to large superannuation accounts, you buy more houses to rent, and then you get more and more wealth, and then you stack it up and pass it on to your children. So the wealth gap continually increases.

And that creates an intergenerational conflict that’s poisonous.

So we eldership, we people of that generation, through an eldership revolution can step up to this challenge and lead by example.

And I’m hoping that I can… I’m trying to look for a way to talk to people in the superannuation sector. And I want to start out with a small little pilot project here in the Blue Mountains. Because, as one of my friends who runs a local Steiner School says: There are lots of people in the Blue Mountains who are living that story of service to community and service to life.

So I thought okay let’s start by telling their story. And she thinks the way to do this is to get young people to interview them.

So one of the things I’m looking for is a little bit of money out of the superannuation sector to fund a pilot project here, where we can harness the energy of young people with the skills of interviewing and taking photographs to get these people who have lived the Eldership Revolution in their life to tell their story, tell it on a podcast, put it in a book, and then seed that as a new idea for reimagining retirement all across Australia.

So that’s my vision of the Eldership Revolution, led by example and seed – put new seeds in the soil of the retirement world and give up this stupid, stupid quest of endless overseas journeys on ocean cruises to faraway places. That’s the whole over tourism problem that’s occurring at the moment and start to make a life in this world, in this country where we live for the coming generations. As one of my young friends said, ‘leave life-affirming legacies’ should be our mission.

So that’s my vision of the eldership revolution and in fact I’ve long been interested in elderhood because of my Buddhist background because I was always interested in wisdom as a form of knowledge, which is kind of missing from the Western tradition. And for 12 months I worked with an Aboriginal elder called Bob Randall, who’s from central Australia, a Yankunytjatjara man, and actually helped him work on his autobiography, which was published as ‘Song Man’.

And I was asking him, you know, what does it take to be an Elder in the Aboriginal tradition? And he said, well, it’s not about being old. It’s about what service you’ve given to your community and how you’ve lived your life, your sense of integrity, your care for country, for the cultural truths of your culture. That’s what makes you an Elder, not just by getting old. So I thought, yes, we can learn from this in this Eldership Revolution.

Mik: (24:16)
One wishes that our politicians were a little bit more like elders too.

Barbara:
Yeah, well, I think we have to have compassion for politicians. They’re caught up in a sort of fractious political system which is driven by the media industry. I know because I worked in the public service for a little while after I came back from doing my three year Buddhist retreat so that was a culture shock I can tell you. But it’s a lot of it’s driven by managing conflict, managing pushback from media all the time.

And as you see that you saw the way Albanese is not getting, meeting with Trump, it was a life-shattering problem for Australia. And he held his nerve through it all, but the media kept pushing it, pushing it, pushing it. And then because he made that quip against Kevin Rudd in the White House, all the media seizing on it, publicising it, promoting it all the time, as if it was the most momentous thing. When you look at the video, they all laughed it off.

And the Coalition, constantly, their only way they know to play opposition is to constantly try and find points of conflict. The media only way they know to do it is to constantly look for conflict and antagonism and anger and rage because as we know in that in media industry that’s what drives eyeballs to screens and to newspapers and that feeds the advertising sector. So it’s a very pernicious poisonous media environment in which politics now has to operate and that’s the reality.

I know a lot of people get very frustrated with Albanese as Prime Minister, but personally when I look around the world, I’m extremely grateful that we’ve got such a man as our Prime Minister. His cautiousness is exactly what we need at the moment because we know when that doesn’t happen, a whole lot of people are sucked into the weaponising of conflict. They go on these anti-immigration riots. They’re traveling across to the One Nation party. They’re always looking for someone to blame. The other. The mysterious other.

So, even though, you know, you get frustrated with politicians, it’s not an easy gig. I mean, Susan Ley, I’ve never been an admirer of Susan Lay, but you know, I have great compassion for the predicament she finds herself in. And currently, because that group’s fed by right-wing populism as their rump, they’re basically putting themselves in a position where they’re unelectable long time into the future, because they’re absolutely failing to deal with reality, the realities that we face.

I think Albanese knows this, but he knows if you don’t herd the cats, if you don’t keep people who are frightened, feeling that it’s not too dangerous to go down this other path, they’ll come with you. Because if you don’t, your country will fragment. I mean, look what’s happening in the UK with the rise of the Reform Party. I mean, it’s scary stuff in the United States. So that’s my take on politicians.

Mik:
But the reality of things is, you know, we open our computers or the TV screens and the headlines are straight in our face. Just this morning, for instance, here’s a headline, out of control, heat wave sparks, fire chaos. You know, and the ABC just the other night had a report where they opened with this line, a smorgasbord of extreme weather. And then they talked for five minutes about the devastation that’s happening to people, but not a single word about why it’s happening, what’s causing all of this – it’s our emissions! But nobody really wants to talk about it. And that enables politicians still today to think that they can win votes by saying, ‘Net zero is a scam’, or ‘Climate is a scam’, and so on. Because the media is not telling the Australian people what’s going on.

Barbara: (28:39)
Well, I think it’s more complex than that. I mean, there’s certain media, for instance, that deny climate change, like Sky News After Dark, which is where the rump of the coalition followers live. And of course, they want to hang on to that, not because they don’t know climate change is happening. I mean, they’re not stupid. They were part of the bushfire, the Black Summer fires. They’re part of what’s happening to agriculture, the droughts. Australians well used to this. But it’s scary. They’ve got to give something up. They’ve got to give up a way of life and a whole set of assumptions. And they don’t know how to, and they’re not, because the opposition knows they can feed off conflict.

And there are people who want to hang on to their mineral rights, the coal industry like Matt Canavan. I mean, he’s not a stupid man, but he’s got a vested interest in coal. So they’re on this ridiculous path that the cost of energy is the main thing. Well, no, the energy bill is going to keep going up because we’re dealing with adaptation to significant climate change. And the whole growth of AI is pushing up this incredible demand for electricity and water that’s going to just feed into higher electricity prices, whatever you use. So it’s a very febrile environment.

Of course the media feeds on that as we just talked about, even the ABC’s got to sort of prove its ratings that people are watching it, otherwise they’ll be defunded. But behind the scenes for those of us who read the deeper story, you can still find those stories on the ABC. You can still find them in The Guardian. You know, there are people who look for this deeper story and I think there’s… I think Australians know that climate change is here. I mean, there’s been the National Climate Risk [Assessment] report. That was a very sobering document.

And the reality is, you know, we are locked into 2°C degrees warming. There’s nothing that’s going to reverse that. Forget 1.5°C. We’re locked into two degrees warming. And the political risks of that in the future because of the impact it will have on human habitation in low lying areas. Like Bangladesh is gone basically, Shanghai is going to be flooded, you know, it’s going to have devastating consequences on people migration and we can’t even handle migration now, let alone what it’s going to look like in the future.

So these are difficult times, Mik, and it’s going to take, I don’t know, the press is driven by ratings and it’s shallow and most journalists here have lost their jobs. They’re into PR now, it’s the only way they can earn a living, or they run substack newsletters that a few people read. So, you know, well you’re a journalist, you know, it’s not an easy world. And that’s why where we can, there are these new voices. And we just need to water them rather than get angry about the others. You know, that’s all you can do because the moment when you invest in anger and rage, that affects your spirit.

You know, it curdles you. And one of the things I’ve realised, you know I wrote one blog about it, it’s called Taming the Beast. If you go back to Buddhism 2,500 years ago when the Buddha sat in meditation and focused on the sort of suffering nature of human life. He gave this teaching on the four causes of suffering. It’s called the Four Noble Truths, the causes of suffering. And you come back to the psychic propensities with human beings, you know what’s called the negative emotions, our vulnerability to pride, to envy, to prejudice or ignorance, to greed.

You know, the wanting, wanting, wanting, or the not wanting – you know, ‘No, I don’t want that!’ ‘It’s someone else’s problem.’ It’s not wanting to know the ignorance, ‘not in my backyard!’ Look away. These are human psychic vulnerabilities that lie at the core of our nature that we need to face and deal with. I mean, the Buddhist path is all about that. And all religions have tools and methods where people deal with this.

But unfortunately religion often gets hijacked to prop up other agendas as we know. So even though those truths exist in Christianity and Judaism and Islam, those religions have been terribly hijacked by rage and righteousness and vengeance as we see tragically playing out in Israel and Gaza today. So the spiritual journey is one that demands great honesty.

You know, not fantasy, not righteousness on doctrine. It’s about coming to terms with your own inner nature and your own vulnerabilities to these propensities and working on that.

And I think part of the journey then is this inner journey. It’s not just an outer journey of solving society’s problems. It’s an inner journey of solving your own internal contradictions and coming to terms with that. So you need both the inner and the outer journey to match together. And interestingly, when I looked up this new School of Being I just came across, it’s all about that.

So people are doing it, you know, and because they know people are lonely and you know the loneliness epidemics that we face because as more and more people spend time in the social media world they lose their capacity to deal with real human beings because that often involves difficult interactions. It’s not, as you’ve done any community development work, it’s not always easy.

People come with different backgrounds, different anxieties, different wants, different needs. And all of that is part of the sort of humus, if you like, the sort of rich matter of community life that’s real, that we need to be able to live with. It’s not the sort of fantasy world of an AI chatbot that chats away to you and feeds you what you want to know, you know. It’s actually having the compassion and awareness to deal with real human beings as best you can and a kind of tolerance for ambiguity.

And one of the most powerful things you learn on the spiritual journey is the power of not knowing. You know, the open mind, the power of the open mind, of being open to new possibilities, of not rushing to judgment. So, I mean, it takes me back to the Eldership Revolution idea that one of the ideas then, there is another form of knowledge beyond expertise, it’s called wisdom. And we need a new pedagogy of wisdom to underpin the Eldership Revolution.

And I think that brings me then to my, the final thing I wanted to talk to you about here, which was the rebellion of the earth kingdoms.

So on my long journey about a change in consciousness and how we can make this shift to think about the world through the living experience of indigenous culture, it’s about then: how do you shape shift?

To imagine that you’re looking at the human species from the perspective of the different kingdoms of the natural world. I call them ‘kingdoms’, but you could call the domain: the marine world – the whales, the dolphins, the fish; the terrestrial world – the animals, the sky world, the birds, you know, the insects – so crucial to the fertility of nature, the reptiles, you know, the wonderful history of the serpent, the rainbow serpent which is this mythic creative symbol that underpins Australia, but you can find this role of the the mythic serpent across so many cultures so it’s a really all that symbology that comes out of mythopoetic knowing that we need to tune into.

So in my blog post I came across this 2024 report by World Wildlife Fund on this is called the Life of Nature or some sort of name like that. And I thought, well, let’s imagine the other Earth Kingdoms responding to this report by the human world where they’ve got some friends. The friends are the World Wildlife Fund people, you see who… Their appeal back to the humans join us in a rebellion of the Earth kingdoms to change the way we’re living on this planet. Look after one another and see one another as family. It takes me back to when I was working with Bob Randall, you know the very first time I met him it was at an educational weekend put on by an Indigenous college, and I told him sort of I was interested in wisdom, etc. And he was helping me put my tent up. He was this sort of funny looking guy with a white beard and a white cowboy hat on. He said, you know, I’m an indigenous man from the Northern Territory.

Anyway, then he said, ‘Barbara,’ he took me outside the tent and he said, ‘I want you to just look around you. Can you hear the birds in the tree? Can you hear that rustle of insects? Can you see all the leaves moving? He said, all this is your family and they just love you.’

And as he said those words, it’s like I felt that love just completely pouring into me. And I thought, ‘Wow, who is this guy?’ And that’s how we began our work together.

So that recovery of the sense of kinship with the natural world, not just looking after it like as if you’re the boss and you know and they’re the kids. It’s like we’re equal, we’re kin together.

We all have our struggles and our differences but together we need one another because we are the complex, mycellium-like network by which life on earth is woven together and feel that deep in our bones and in our psyche and enter into it imaginatively.

I mean, to some extent that what’s happens in Indigenous culture when they have totems. So you grow up, you know, because of birth circumstance and other you can adopt a totem which is an animal spirit as your intimate kin and usually that comes with a prohibition about ever eating that particular creature because it’s your brother. But at same time in many Indigenous cultures of course people do eat nature and nature eats people.

I remember the other thing Bob said to me once about with indigenous people when you’re crossing a stream that’s got lots of crocodiles in it, he said, “You put the old people at the back because you’re entering into their tyranny so if one of them takes you there’s no anger because you’re in their country. You put the old people at the back because it’s the young ones you’ve got to protect. There’s none of this vengeance against a dreadful crocodile that’s taken one of us that you see white people do. It’s more like, ‘You’re in their territory!’ So that’s their nature, they’re looking for food, honour that, respect that.

And we know in all hunting cultures, whenever they killed, they killed only when necessary and they always honored the animals they killed. So it’s that attitude that we need to recover, but in a modern context. So we bring all the benefits of modern ecological sciences and scientific understanding to bear. It’s not about going back to a sort of pre-industrial world. That’s not possible. It’s about creating a post-industrial world that’s based on ecological regeneration and kinship.

And so I wanted to, with this Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms, I wanted to create a story, what do they call it? A story room, where you get a bunch of people to think it all out. And then make you responded with this wonderful response… So let’s play that to the audience.

. . .

SONG (41:14)
‘Rebellion of Life’ – mp3 audio

Jane Goodall: “Every single one of us matters. Every single one of us has some role to play.”

Verse 1:
Humans built towers and walls so tall
Thought they had to silence nature’s call
Turned from kin to the ‘Masters of Earth’
Conquering, plundering all of its worth

Their children saw it happen. They understood
They’d talk to the fox, and listen to the fish
But as they grew up, they lost the skill
They sealed off their inner channel to the

Chorus:
Rebellion of Life
Watch the Earth Kingdom return
Life on Earth
Rebellion of Life
Like the Earth Kingdom relearn
Life on Earth

Verse 2:
Birds and bats cross the sky each year
Their pathways fading, future unclear
The wetlands gone, collapse seems near
They circle, crying, flying low

The trees used to ooze of fertility
Now dry winds scour the empty soil
They caged the birds and mined for coal
Enslaved in a wheel of ‘eternal growth’

Chorus:
Stand up! Stand up! — the kingdoms rise!
With thunder in oceans, with fire in skies
Wake up! Wake up! Open your eyes!
You’re not above — you are…
Life. Life alive

Interlude Part A (instrumental)
Quote from Barbara Lepani’s blogpost:
“Humans across the world are beginning to understand just how much nature and the non-human world contribute to the viability of their ongoing wellbeing.”

Jane Goodall: “Every single one of us matters. Every single one of us has some role to play.”

Bridge (The turning):
In Dreamtime light, the elders stand
Their stories carved in rock and sand
They call you home to understand:
To care is to belong

This earth is breath, not property
You are the branch, not the tree
To heal the world, respect the ‘we’
Transform the commons to a force for

Chorus:
Rebellion of Life
Watch the Earth soul unfold in a beautiful
Rebellion of Life
Feel the Earth soul reborn
The Rebellion for Earth

Verse 3:
The tides don’t bargain, storms don’t wait
So listen before it’s too late
Our children call to shift our fate
They know how we join the

Chorus:
Rebellion of Life
Watch the Earth soul rebel
The Rebellion of Life
The Rebellion of Life
Feel the Earth soul rebel
The Rebellion for Earth

Outro:
Every living being, every single plant
Wild, domesticated or microscopic
Every single one has a role to play
Every single one has a voice and a song
The Rebellion has begun
The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms has begun

Lyrics inspired by Barbara Lepani’s essay, ‘The Rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms’

. . .

Barbara: (45:24)
So beautiful. Imagine schools choir singing that around the country. That would be just a bit… We should try this. Try to get this going. Yeah.

Mik:
Exactly. And Jane Goodall’s words that we have played in The Sustainable Hour again and again as an introduction when we opened the hour where she’s saying that everybody matters. It just got an extra dimension because I always thought she only talked about humans, us humans, that we all matters. But there is that extra element of that everybody is, of course, every living being that matters.

Barbara:
Yeah, well, I think Jane herself was a product of a sort colonial Britain and although she pushed the boundaries by forming an alliance with the chimpanzees, she still very much came from that perspective rather than an indigenous perspective where all of those animals are on the equal footing with you. You you’re not caring for them and protecting them. You’re in it together. You know, you’re all in this together idea. But she did such extraordinary work, was such an extraordinary being that we can only be grateful that she walked on this Earth.

Mik:
What’s your vision, Barbara? You’ve talked a lot about it already, but if we were to like freestyle a bit and really talk about the big dream of the future, what would your dream be?

Barbara:
I think my dream is, I mean, as we know, we’re living in difficult times. You can’t paper over that. And I mean, I have two sons and I have four grandchildren, and I think of them a lot, know, the world that they’re inheriting. I’ll be gone. And I’m not sure about reincarnation or not. I have an open mind about that as a Buddhist practitioner, but you know, I just have an open mind because I don’t know. All you can do is live your life as best you can.

But in terms of my vision, I think it’s just that we go on this journey of spiritual and inner and outer rejuvenation through spiritual awareness and awakening, calling on the best of the spiritual traditions that we feel drawn to. And that we, like a mycelium network, it spreads and grows across the world and, you know, forms all sorts of associations where we allow the imperceptible to blossom. But the imperceptible, which is this sort of positive, nurturing vision of the world, you know, where we value connection, we value one another, we value a simplicity and natural beauty, not this kind of artificial sort of the

The gilded beauty of the White House room under Trump is the sort of extreme opposite example and the gilded palaces of Europe, not that simple, simplicity of living in a simple but comfortable and sustainable and regenerative way in whatever way we can, you know, and just encouraging people to, for me within Australia, I’m really keen on this idea of leveraging this idea of an Australian way.

So just as we want to do the eldership revolution here in the Blue Mountains about leading by example, that here in Australia, we embrace multiculturalism and we embrace the fact that we actually live on the foundations of a 65,000 years living tradition of caring for country, which has multiple levels of meaning.

There’s a wonderful book everybody should read, called ‘Song Spirals’ that was written by the women of North East Arnhem Land. And it actually takes you into this kind of mystical inner domain of what it means to be immersed in a songline to be able to experience yourself through a songline as belonging to the marine world, the whales, know, where the saltwater meets the freshwater, all that kind of immersive mythopoetic way of experiencing the world.

So for me, that’s my vision of the future that we reach out, we all find more and more ways of doing this. And it’s not through sort of elite culture, because only a few people benefit from that. It’s the recovery of community-based culture.

I mean I always think of the time I lived in Papua New Guinea through my husband in the Trobriand Islands. I mean if you go to a place like the Trobriand Islands it’s a small coral atoll halfway between the mainland of Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. Very flat so it’ll probably be lost under rising oceans but you know there everybody can build their own house. The idea of homelessness is completely absurd right. Everybody eats, they all grow their own food, it’s there, they share it.

They have plenty of time to enjoy culture. They sing songs together, they play musical instruments, they create beautiful carvings, they do all these wonderful dances, they have wonderful, you know, costume jewellery that they create from shells shelves. I mean, their life is rich. They never knew what the word poverty meant until white people arrived. Right?

Today of course modernisations happen now they don’t wear their clothes they used to make from natural fibres now they wear cast off second hand clothes or material they have to buy and then you need cash. But that recovery of simplicity where people found culture you know it wasn’t about artists being paid to sing. I mean I don’t blame artists because they’ve got to pay the rent you know. But you know when you make when art becomes neoliberal market product. It just doesn’t work, you know. People can’t afford it anymore. The artists can’t afford to do it, and so you end up bereft.

So I’d like to see us recover that community spirit where we come together and we make our art and we celebrate through beauty, through connection, through music, through poetry, through creative theatre, down here at the village level. That’s my vision, you know, supported by sort of storytelling that’s telling these kind of stories like the rebellion of the Earth Kingdom. And more and more people like you, Mik, creating that beautiful piece in response to my story of the rebellion of the Earth Kingdoms.

Mik: (52:23)
So Barbara, back to where we started with the enlivenment network. If people want to connect with you and get inspired or even be part of that Enlivenment Network, what’s the next step?

Barbara:
Okay, well, you should visit our website called enlivenment.network, and then you’ll see there’s a contact thing, I think it’s called info@enlivenment.network, and get in contact with me. We’re an open network, we welcome all visitors to us, and we look to collaborate with anybody and everybody on projects that are trying to tell this same story. And we’re here for you, as much as we can.

I’m conscious that I’m an old person, I’m a baby boomer. I will die soon. The intergenerational growth of networks like ours where the next generation take up the story and tell it and we’re here to support that generation but that generation is coming forward so we’re very much an intergenerational group that’s seeking to make those connections and committed to supporting young people as much as we can.

Sir David Attenborough: (53:47)
There just could be a change in moral attitude from people worldwide, politicians worldwide, to see that self-interest is for the past, common interest is for the future.

. . .

SONG (54:19)
‘Return Again’ – mp3 audio

Verse 1:
I hear you, Mother Earth, not in words
but in the silence beneath the trees.
A heartbeat in the soil,
a whisper carried by wind

The soil breathes
The trees remember
Tending the Earth
as she has tended us.

Bridge:
We came from you,
and to you, we will return.
Every breath we take is a gift
Every drop of rain, is kindness of Planet Earth

Chorus:
Return again, to the land of fertility
Return again, to what we once knew
It’s how we listen, it’s how we care

Verse 2:
We are not separate.
We are not above.
We are the air,
the birdsong,
the trembling leaf.

Bridge:
There is still time
To touch the ground
with bare feet.
To teach again
the language of kindness,
of courage,
of enough.

Chorus:
Return again, to the land of fertility
Return again, to what we once knew
It’s how we listen, it’s how we care

---