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“Stop imagining. Start building!”

Lessons on how we transform minority insights into majority action – with cooperation, care, friendship and moral clarity.

What if collapse isn’t the end, but the beginning of something more beautiful? In this third episode of the Force of Life podcast series, Mik Aidt speaks with Danish architect and systems thinker Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov, whose work explores how we might rebuild our societies on a foundation of cooperation, care and moral clarity.

→ Transcript

The multiple crises we face – climate, inequality, disconnection – all stem from the same root: a growth-dependent economy that has lost its sense of meaning. This is the premise of Kasper Bjørkskov’s platform of strategy thinking. The antidote, he suggests, lies in community, sufficiency, and movements built on friendship rather than fear.

Through stories of his own journey from architecture to activism, Kasper describes the creation of the Reduction Roadmap – a bold industry-wide call for climate accountability in Denmark’s building sector – and shares lessons on a major ‘grail’ in the climate movement: how to transform minority insights into majority action.

Kasper explains why true change doesn’t come from appealing to power but from organising the periphery – those willing to act first – until the centre cannot ignore it anymore.

The conversation also introduces the concept of reverse dominance, a social technology as old as humanity itself – where equality and solidarity naturally keep power in check. It’s a vision of democracy rooted not in domination but in cooperation.

Interwoven through the dialogue are two new songs written for this episode: “The Periphery”, and “Beyond” – each a poetic echo of Kasper’s message that humanity’s task is to bend, not break; to replace systems of control with systems of care; and to remember that we are not separate from life, but part of it:

The episode ends with the Force of Life signature song “Return Again”:

→ More songs here

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“On our finite planet with finite resources, we basically only have two options. It’s either to fight or to share. Once we understand that, then I know what I prefer.

We are all interconnected – part of the web of life. I’m no different than a tree. We live in the same system. We are co-dependent.

You can choose to fight, but at some point it will be your own destruction. Choose to share, because it brings reciprocity to everyone.”

~ Kasper Bjørklund

Highlights in this episode

• What the “poly-crisis” really means – and how surplus disconnected us from each other
• The Reduction Roadmap and the call to regulate the Danish construction industry within planetary boundaries
• How to transform scientific insight into social mobilisation
• The importance of “third places” and rebuilding social muscles
• Why movements must outgrow mobilisations – and how to sustain pressure for change
• Reverse dominance: humanity’s forgotten model of power
• Building scaffolding for the post-collapse world
• From fighting to sharing – the moral choice that defines our future
• Three original songs from Force of Life inspired by the conversation

“Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns. They are, in fact, one and the same.”

~ Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor, in The Nation magazine, April 2025

Dictionary

• Poly-crisis: a situation where many different crises – climate, economic, political, social – happen at once and make each other worse. It’s not just multiple problems, but their interconnection that defines a poly-crisis. 

• Meta-crisis: The deeper crisis beneath all the others – a breakdown in meaning, trust, and shared values. It’s the cultural and psychological root cause that drives the poly-crisis – showing that our systems are not only failing, but so are our ways of thinking and relating.

• Techfeudalism: A term used to describe the new economic order emerging from the dominance of digital platforms and tech giants. Like feudal lords of the past, they control the infrastructure we depend on – data, algorithms, and digital markets – while extracting value from users and workers who have little power to resist.

• Hegemony – the dominance of one group, culture or ideology over others, often so normalised that it feels invisible or “natural.”

• Cultural homogeneity – when everything starts to look, sound, and think the same; a loss of diversity in ideas and expression.

• Reverse dominance – a term from anthropology describing how early human societies maintained equality by preventing any one person or group from gaining too much power.

• Regenerative design – a step beyond sustainability; creating systems that restore and enrich the environment and communities they touch.

• The periphery – those at the margins of power and decision-making; in Kasper’s usage, the place where real change and innovation begin.

• Scaffolding – metaphorically, the supportive framework that helps a new system or culture grow while the old one collapses.

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About Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov

Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov is founder of No Objectives, a non-for-profit research and design agency on a mission to make complex ideas accessible and actionable for everyone.

Also an architect, Kasper bridges strategy, activism, and design to transform complex challenges into actionable solutions, helping organisations drive collective action. Through branded activism, he integrates marketing with social and environmental causes to spark systemic change, shaping a future that prioritises sustainability, equity, and resilience.

Kasper is a columnist for Illuminem, the world’s most-read sustainability information and data platform.

In 2022, Kasper was part of the group that brought together a range of Danish architecture firms, engineers, researchers from universities and NGOs to create the so-called ‘Reduction Roadmap’ – “a regenerative transition plan for the Danish building industry” – which was a call to action for firms, organisations, and individuals in the construction industry to support the development of research-based targets to meet planetary boundaries in building and real estate.

It was not only a research document but also a mobilisation platform. The Reduction Roadmap has brought together hundreds of companies, organisations and municipalities to sign on and influence change in legislation and industry practice.

Branded activism
Kasper’s aim is to accelerate a social tipping point through a strategic approach that integrates marketing techniques with social and environmental causes – Branded Activism. Through Branded Activism, organisations, businesses and communities acquire tools and insights necessary to enable collective action, and in doing so, they can help mobilise and build the innovations needed for a post-growth future.

Kasper’s agency No Objectives is founded on this assumption that transforming complex, real-world challenges into novel responses empowers collective action.

“Real change begins when experts stop speaking only to other experts and people learn to communicate beyond their peers. This shift hinges on our ability to make complex ideas accessible and actionable for everyone,” Kasper writes on No Objective’s home page.

The company help organisations, businesses, and communities realise their agency, reimagine markets, redefine business models, shape tomorrow’s services, and turn systemic insights into actionable strategies that help organisations realise their potential. It states on its home page:

“We consult with purpose, advocating for nature and safeguarding the environment for future generations. We are committed to shaping strategies that protect and restore the natural world, ensuring a legacy of resilience and balance for those to come.”

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“Want to learn how to mobilize people — to turn a single insight into a movement strong enough to change the rules? That’s what this keynote is about.

At the Inner Development Goals Summit, I shared the theory and tactics behind how we mobilize an entire industry — not to fight regulation, but to demand it.

It’s a practical guide to how power shapes public opinion to keep us obedient — and how we learned to reverse that playbook.

To mobilize not to centralize power, but to redistribute it.
To replace competition with collaboration.
To show that courage is contagious.

This isn’t a story about architecture.
It’s an example of how systems move — through framing, narrative, and collective action.

In the talk, I share:

🔥 How to mobilize people when everyone feels powerless

🧠 How to flip the playbook of power — and use it for good

🤝 How to turn minority insight into majority action

⚡ How to trigger positive social tipping points through collective action

Because change doesn’t start with institutions — it starts with us.

When we speak to hearts, shift perception, and act together, systems begin to move.

If you’re trying to create meaningful change in your company, community, or sector, this keynote offers both tools and mindset.

🎥 Watch the full 20-minute keynote here → https://lnkd.in/dye_T8KU

I’m proud of this one — not because it’s mine, but because it shows that transformation isn’t something we wait for. It’s something we build together.

This work is built on the collective knowledge of everyone who shaped the Reduction Roadmap campaign — and on the foundation of the book Branded Activism Dani Hill-Hansen🌱 and I are writing. A book about how movements are designed, not discovered — and how collective courage can shift systems.

More than anything, I’m grateful for the people behind this.

Movements are never made by one person — they’re made by many. By those who dared to believe we can do more together than alone.”
~ Kasper Bjørklund, on Linkedin

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Kasper’s writings

Across the past three years, Kasper has published an extensive catalogue of essays and posts on Substack and Linkedin. Some examples and excerpts:

The revolution won’t be televised – it’ll be commodified

“When every social problem is reframed as a personal failing – burnout, debt, insecurity, anxiety – we don’t fight back; we self-optimize. We buy courses on mindfulness instead of demanding shorter workweeks. We install apps to track our “well-being” while our rent doubles. We post about injustice to show we care – and then go back to work, tired, overdrawn, but feeling slightly better for having done something.

Capitalism has learned the greatest trick of all: how to turn even resistance into revenue. So yes, we still dream of a better future. We just can’t find the time, space, or community to make it happen.”

“Critical thinking is the oxygen revolutions run on. The ability to trace cause and effect, to question narratives, to recognize manipulation. Without it, imagination floats away like smoke.

We also need critical spaces – places where people can gather, speak, and act together in ways that break the spell of individualism.

Because revolutions don’t happen in solitude. They happen in solidarity.

We need to start rebuilding the places where collective action for systemic change is possible – places where we regain social connection, reclaim our agency, and step out of the accelerometer.”

→ The Minority Report – 4 November 2025:
The Revolution Won’t Be Televised – It’ll Be Commodified
“We don’t suffer from a lack of vision; we suffer from a lack of agency.”

The curse of the sun

We are using the abundance of the sun to destroy our planet. It sounds poetic – but it’s physics, politics, and survival. Every second, the sun floods Earth with ten thousand times more energy than humanity consumes.

Yet instead of flowing with that abundance, we built systems to trap it – turning the feast into a factory, the river into a dam.

We call it progress. But it’s really control.

In nature, everything that endures – rivers, trees, galaxies, lungs – follows one rule: flow.

Energy moves. It circulates. It connects. That’s how life persists.

Our civilization does the opposite. We hoard wealth instead of circulating it. We concentrate energy instead of distributing it. We build hierarchies instead of systems that self-organize like forests or fractal veins. And so our societies stagnate – like blocked arteries of a global body that has forgotten how to breathe.

My new essay, “The Curse of the Sun: Why Our Economy Runs on Excess, Not Scarcity,” based on Giorgos Kallis’s “Political Ecological Economics and the Nature of Economic Growth”, explores how we can reconnect to nature’s logic – designing economies and systems that move like rivers again.

Where degrowth isn’t about less, but about different – redirecting surplus from profit to participation, from extraction to regeneration. Because everything that endures – rivers, trees, galaxies, and minds – shares one truth:

They move. They connect. They flow.

And so must we.

Read it here – and if it resonates, share it.

→ Substack – 11 November 2015:
The Curse of the Sun
“Why Our Economy Runs on Excess, Not Scarcity.”

From myth to reality: Designing an economy that works for life

“If we were serious about building an economy that didn’t eat the biosphere for breakfast, we’d need to redesign it from the ground up. Not with utopian blueprints, but with real-world materials: limits, relationships, and a working knowledge of planetary boundaries. Here’s what that would look like — one principle at a time, with both clarity and caffeine.”

→ Substack – 23 September 2025:
From myth to reality
“Why the Economy Should Come With a Warning Label”

Beyond the Roadmap

“As long as growth is the goal, technology becomes the illusion of progress.

If you’ve ever cared deeply about sustainability — if you’ve spent years working, researching, or advocating for a better world — this will probably feel uncomfortably close to home.

Because the truth is, most of us entered this field to protect life.

To heal what’s broken.

To make things better.

And yet, somewhere along the way, our work became part of the very system we wanted to change.

We optimized. We innovated. We made things “greener.”

But we didn’t slow down.

We didn’t consume less.

We just learned to consume more efficiently.

If that feels unsettling — good. It means you still care.

The new report Beyond the Roadmap invites us to confront this contradiction — not to feel shame, but to rediscover integrity.

It asks a simple, radical question:

What if sustainability isn’t about doing less harm… but about living within the limits that make life possible?

It’s not an attack on innovation — it’s a call to responsibility.

A reminder that even the best-designed solution means nothing if it exists within a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet.

And you’ve never been someone who accepts half-truths.

You’ve never been the kind of person who looks away because the story is uncomfortable.

You’ve always believed in asking the harder questions — even when they challenge everything familiar.

That’s exactly why Beyond the Roadmap was written for people like you.

For those who understand that progress without justice isn’t progress at all.

For those who see that doing “no harm” in a world already in overshoot is simply not enough.

This report offers a new path — one grounded in science, fairness, and possibility.

It shows how Denmark — and every high-consuming society — could return within the safe and just limits of our planet within a generation.

It’s not a vision of sacrifice, but of freedom.

Freedom from an economy that treats both people and nature as expendable.

Freedom to design systems that serve life — not the other way around.

Most people will scroll past this.

They’ll nod, agree, and move on — because deep down, they know how big the problem is, and how small they feel.

But you’re not most people.

You’ve never been.

You act because you care.

And you care because you know that what’s at stake is not just the future — it’s our shared sense of what it means to be human.

So here’s the quiet invitation:

Read ‘Beyond the Roadmap’.

Let it challenge you.

Let it restore your belief that change is still possible — if we’re willing to live by the truth we already know.

If you’ve ever felt that silence isn’t an option, this is your moment to act.”

~ Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov

The climate crisis was never a story of carbon — it’s a story of power

Welcome to a climate-driven financial collapse

Sustainability has become bullshit

Stop imagining. Start building

Make politics make sense again

We are the pattern – Relearning how to flow

Two worlds. One illusion

Stay curious rather than defensive

Prepare for the unavoidable

What if the future of democracy is hidden in your friendships?

Fight – or share? From rivalry to regeneration

The Future Is Still Ours to Shape

The future is not written. It is not a certainty, nor is it promised. But it remains—still—ours to shape. This is not a hopeful platitude; it is a sobering responsibility. There is a path forward. One where we survive. One where we thrive. But it is not guaranteed. That is the very premise we must all reckon with. Rather than asking if we will make it, the more pressing question is: How do I help ensure that we do?

Inge Røpke once articulated the dilemma of our age with sharp clarity: “On a finite planet with finite resources, we have a choice: to fight or to share.” One path leads to collapse, the other to collective preservation (Røpke, 2009). Our global systems—economic, political, technological—are converging into a moment of decision. Do we perpetuate a logic of rivalry, extraction, and domination? Or do we initiate a new trajectory grounded in interdependence, cooperation, and regeneration? (Schmachtenberger, 2019; IPBES, 2019).

The stakes are existential. Technological development, particularly in the realm of AI, biotech, and automation, is progressing at exponential speed. But exponential doesn’t mean linear improvement—it means accelerating risks as well. The mismatch between the speed of technological evolution and the inertia of our moral, economic, and governance systems has created what some call “rival risk dynamics” (Ord, 2020; Schmachtenberger, 2019). This means that if we don’t evolve our systems of coordination and value quickly enough, the tools we’ve created will ultimately outpace us—and possibly end us.

Let’s be clear: technology is not inherently destructive. But without a shift in our underlying values—without a conscious reimagining of how we relate to one another, to nature, and to power—technology becomes a mirror of our dysfunction, scaled (Harris, 2017). The future of humanity hinges not on technological breakthroughs alone, but on whether we learn to outgrow rivalrous dynamics. In simple terms: if we don’t figure out anti-rivalry, we go extinct (Schmachtenberger, 2019).

To understand why, we must revisit the foundations of our current system. Economics is often viewed as a neutral science, but it is anything but neutral. It is a reflection of our values, embedded into equations (McMurtry, 2011). It tells us what we value relative to other things—what is worth preserving, extracting, or discarding. For instance, if a dead elephant with ivory tusks is worth millions on the black market, while a live elephant roaming the savannah is valued at nothing, then we have encoded a value system that incentivizes destruction over preservation. That’s not just an economic failure—it’s a moral one. (Baruchello & Johnstone, 2011).

And when systems reward psychopathy—when empathy and long-term thinking are disincentivized—it creates a culture where violence, manipulation, and ecological collapse are not bugs in the system, but features (Schmachtenberger, 2019). The system then reinforces itself: controlling media, influencing education, shaping governance. This is not conspiracy; it is systems theory. Economics and consciousness co-evolve. Our sense-making—our shared understanding of reality—is deeply shaped by what the system rewards and what it suppresses (Schmachtenberger, 2023).

This is why the paradigm shift must be total. Incremental reform won’t cut it. We need entirely new systems of governance—not simply better versions of democracy or autocracy, but structures rooted in collective sense-making, transparent values, and synergistic outcomes (IPBES, 2019). We need new economics that recognize the inherent value of a living biosphere, of unpaid care work, of non-extractive labor (McMurtry, 2004). We need education systems that don’t merely prepare humans for jobs, but help them grow into emotionally intelligent, ecologically literate beings capable of navigating complexity (Baruchello, 2019).

And underneath it all, we need a revolution in identity. We are not separate individuals competing for scarce resources—we are interdependent beings, part of a living system. As soon as we recognize that we are not separate from trees, soil, fungi, and oceans—but dependent on them, composed of them—our sense of self begins to shift. There is no “me” without the photosynthesizers. There is no “civilization” without the soil. To act as though we can thrive while the biosphere collapses is not only unethical—it is delusional (Deep Ecology Overview, Middlebury College, 2023).

And yet, most of our modern systems are built upon this illusion of separateness. We are told to optimize ourselves, our careers, our status—often at the expense of others. Rivalry is rewarded. Scarcity is manufactured. But in a world of exponential technology, rivalrous dynamics become exponentially dangerous. War, inequality, and ecological collapse are no longer slow or containable—they are global, interlinked, and accelerating (Ord, 2020).

So the only viable path forward is anti-rivalry. But this is not simply a policy or a political stance—it is a psycho-spiritual process. It requires us to reclaim sovereignty over our attention, our emotions, our triggers. It asks us to notice when we are hijacked by anger, fear, ego, and to consciously choose another way. That’s not weakness—that’s power. To become ungovernable by manipulation. To become deeply self-aware and emotionally grounded (Schmachtenberger, 2019; Harris, 2017).

But it cannot stop with the individual. Anti-rivalry must also become a collective capacity. We must learn to coordinate, to dialogue, to disagree without domination. To build systems where our values align, not through coercion, but through mutual recognition and shared stakes. That is what it means to build a regenerative civilization (Schmachtenberger, 2023).

Of course, none of this is easy. And none of it is guaranteed. There is no hero coming to save us. No singular breakthrough or election or app that will fix it all. The shift ahead will be disorienting. It will require each of us to learn things we do not yet know—to integrate knowledge that perhaps has not even been synthesized yet. It will require humility, experimentation, and failure. But above all, it will require courage (IPBES, 2019; Kawano, 2021).

We are like imaginal cells inside a caterpillar, activated just before metamorphosis. The old body is breaking down. The old systems are collapsing. The instruction manual we inherited no longer works. And yet, the new form—the butterfly—has not fully emerged. This is the liminal space. It is uncomfortable. But it is also filled with possibility (Emerge Magazine, 2019).

To be alive at this moment is to hold an extraordinary responsibility. Not just to survive, but to imagine and create the foundations of what comes next. You do not need to have all the answers. But you do need to engage the question: How can I help build the future we need?

Because the future is not a given. But it is still ours to shape.

This reflection is deeply informed by the brilliant thinkers and researchers cited throughout. I do not claim these insights as my own, but rather use my platform to amplify their essential work. I highly encourage you to explore their writings and talks directly, as I have learned immensely from them.

Inge Røpke (2009):
Theories of practice — New inspiration for ecological economic studies on consumption

Anders Jespersen (June 2024) – in Danish language:
Grøn økonomi sætter tingene på spidsen – dele slås

Toby Ord (2020):
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

IPBES (2019):
Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Tristan Harris (2017):
Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

John McMurtry:
The Primary Axiom and the Life-Value Compass

Giorgio Baruchello & Rachael L. Johnstone (2011):
Applying McMurtry’s Onto-Axiology: An Overview

Middlebury College:
Deep Ecology Overview

Emily Kawano (2021):
Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy

Emerge Magazine:
Rise of the Emergentsia: Meaning Making in a Time Between Worlds

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“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

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Transcript – Force of Life Episode 3

MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, speaking in the 1940s: (00:05)
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living

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

Joseph Gelfer:
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.

Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov: (00:37)
I believe that there is a much more beautiful way to live together that’s not the system but it requires us to the systems or the scaffolding to create a new sort of getting those movements, getting those understandings of how we interact with each other how do we reverse the power structures all of those things so when things collapse we have our system ready to take over when the old one crumbles. That’s my sort of dream.

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

Narrator: (01:19)
We act because we care. We care because we know that what’s at stake here is not just the future. It’s our shared sense of what it means to be human. We entered this field to protect life, to heal what’s broken, to make things better. And change is still possible if we’re willing to live by the truth we already know. Progress without justice isn’t progress at all. Doing no harm in a world already in overshoot is simply not enough. When growth is the goal, technology becomes the illusion of progress.

Monty Python movie clip: (02:11)
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. Yeah, we have been for some time. Ages!

Mik Aidt: (02:33)
Today I’m pleased to introduce to you Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov, who’s one of those few and rare voices out there who combines systems thinking with a straight moral clarity. Kasper is part of that new generation of thinkers who refuse to look away from the hard truths of our time.

He’s the founder of No Objectives, a non-profit research and design agency which has dedicated to turning minority insights into majority action through strategy, activism and design. He’s based in Denmark and trained as an architect, but he discovered that design alone won’t do it. He couldn’t answer the question that has come to define Kasper’s life, which is how can creative work serve life on Earth rather than the systems eroding and destroying it?

Kasper:
The state of the world is pretty dire, to be honest. I think that’s why it’s a huge responsibility to be living in a time like this, because we are sort of the last generation to be able to do anything about, or try to at least doula the new world into order, basically. So what we’re living through is sort of poly-crisis, compounding crisis that together make a much more sort of severe crisis on its own.

And basically the crisis consists of many different things, but of course the climate crisis where we have reached seven out of nine planetary boundaries, which are those boundaries that are keeping the environment and the ecosystem intact in the stable Holocene period that we are in now. So we are slowly eroding that, getting into what we think might be a hothouse Earth where it’s gonna be almost impossible to live on a large part of the globe, which will cause huge migration.

But at the same time, we’re living in a period where we’ve never been more connected than ever, but we also never been more lonely and sick. And so we’ve also created this incredibly unhealthy, unhealthy society. And at the same time, inequality is rising. More more people live in absolute poverty, which is also an interesting thing, right? Because that’s also what you’re told that capitalism alleviated people from poverty. That’s actually not true because that’s only because we have a false low number of what absolute poverty means because if you were to actually say how many people live for five dollars and fifty a day you would see that that that number has actually increased so it’s only people that were below two that has decreased so I don’t know anyone that would think that $5 dollars a day no matter what country you live in would be enough to have a sort of decent life.

So we’re also seeing so that erosion and and and so and we our reproduction functions are reducing by 50 per cent since the 1950s. So, you know, we are slowly eroding all these crises are interconnected. And basically they are all stemming from one thing. They’re stemming from the system of a growth dependent economy. That’s sort of the underlying structure of the the poly-crisis.

But if you want to understand what really happened, we have to understand that which is above the poly-crisis – or the reason why we are in a poly-crisis – is because of the crisis of meaning that we have.

So let me explain what I mean by that is that before we were able to basically create surplus and with surplus I mean that at some point we were hunter-gatherers, we were dependent on day-to-day actions together in collective groups to ensure our survival. And then as a survival mechanism we’ve tried to find ways to ensure that we could generate a surplus of food so we would not die out, which is completely normal and also very sensible in the sense that we have one purpose as human beings, especially a very long time ago, was to survive. That’s the purpose of almost all the life on Earth, is to keep staying alive.

So what we ended up being is that we ended up inventing agriculture and cultivating the land. And what you do when you cultivate land is essentially you store surplus. So you take a plant and then you get the energy from the sunlight and you store it in a food that you can then store for many days or even ferment it and you have it for longer and longer. And then you start to be able to create civilisations. So this is where we slowly entered into this way of understanding how we can live with the hierarchies.

(07:24) But what surplus does on a more fundamental level, which I think is super interesting, is that it allows us to disconnect. When you can store all of this energy and you’re not depending on a land anymore, you slowly can disconnect from the land that you were. It means that you can move from place to place because you can cultivate in another place. And that sort of understanding, we never had the wisdom to understand that it’s great to store surplus, but it needs to come with certain conditions.

So now we have a society where you can disconnect all the time. That’s also why communities are struggling. If you don’t like your communities, you can just get up and leave. If you’re very poor or if you’re not in an underdeveloped country, you’re forced to make that community work because that’s all you have. Because the surplus allows you to remove yourself from the situation. And now we enter into this new crazy age where basically our biggest cultural aspiration is to not be with people.

Because if you are a billionaire, you have a private jet, you live in a secluded mansion, like the epitome of success is not being with people. It’s the ability to completely disconnect from everything, from nature, from all of those things. So that fundamental understanding of us disconnecting from place and people is what got us here. That’s why we are where we are today. And I think that is such an interesting understanding because what does that mean? It means that if this is what we do, how do we then cultivate a culture or society that does the opposite? That understands that surplus is good for survival, but taking more than we need is like a cancer. So how can we create those actual things?

I think for me that that’s the point. You know, we have to understand that if we want to get out of this crisis that we’re in. And it’s a dire crisis because it’s going to kill us. It is exactly like cancer. It’s going to outgrow the host and then we don’t have anything else. And I think Earth will probably be alright, but we won’t as humans. That’s the point. We won’t be here anymore if we continue. So I think we are on a trajectory for collapse. I think that’s undisputable.

That’s what’s going to happen, more or less, no matter what we see, the question is, are we going to break or are we going to bend? Are we going to end up in a situation where it’s going to be so bad we have no way to respond? Or can we sort of bend the curve so the collapse will happen, but we have the scaffolding ready to adapt to those circumstances? And that will require building all of those new ways of being sort of understanding the wisdom of only having enough, the sufficiency understanding of the economy. All of those things. Can we do that?

That’s my work is trying to do that. How do we prepare for that? How do we enable the system or build a scaffolding ready for the collapsing to sort of doula it into a new way of living? And that’s more or less where I’m coming from.

. . .

SONG (11:21)

‘The Periphery’

Verse 1:
The system runs on surplus
So you can leave the land and place
No one feels the disconnection
You just got to keep up pace

The hegemony keeps shouting
‘Growth is good! – Buy more!’
But the truth is breaking open
Crops are failing, pressure climbs

Pre-Chorus:
We’re in a poly-crisis now
The walls are coming down
Our leaders have betrayed us
not to turn this ship around

Chorus:
That’s when we shift the power

Verse 2:
The tricks of branding
claiming ‘gas is good for us’
Making trade-offs just for comfort
Hold us captured in the past

But we can use that language too
We can amplify what’s right
Using insight from the margins
Rising up to win this fight

Pre-Chorus:
We’ve got the scaffolding
ready for when it ends
so we won’t break, we will bend
Gaining strength, we gather numbers
Mobilising to defend
Drawing a line in the sand

Chorus:
That’s when we shift the power

(No more heroes, no illusions)
That’s when we shift the power

(No more doubt – no more confusion)
That’s when we shift the power

Bridge:
From the edges
Let the citizens assemble
Reverse the old dominion
We speak for those to come

We can fight, or we can share
within the boundary of our globe
One leads into ruin
The other is our hope

Final chorus:
That’s when we shift the power
No more heroes, no illusions
That’s when we shift the power
No more doubt – no more confusion
That’s when we shift the power

. . .

Spoken words and audio clips heard in the song:

Antonio Guterres:
Time is short. The clock is ticking.

Zack Polansky:
We are not here to be disappointed by you. We are not here to be concerned by you. We are here to replace you.

Ian Dunlop:
We’ve got to treat this like a wartime situation.

Narrator:
Disconnection. Alienation. Separation. Loss of trust. The escalation of crises. Poly-crisis… meta-crisis!

ABC News reader:
The Philippines has declared a state of emergency…

Narrator:
We entered this field to protect life. We act because we care. We care because we know that what’s at stake here is not just the future. It’s our shared sense of what it means to be human.

Narrator:
To heal what’s broken. To make things better. And change is still possible, if we’re willing to live by the truth we already know. Doing “no harm” in a world already in overshoot is simply not enough.

ABC News reporter:
Stunned survivors who had made it to safety could only look on in disbelief.

Barnaby Joice:
You can either believe in the Paris Agreement or you can believe in the pensioners (you can’t have both).

Narrator:
Confront the contradictions. Not to feel shame, but to rediscover integrity.
A new path, one grounded in science, fairness, and possibility.

Antonio Guterres:
The climate time bomb is ticking.

BBC London in 1940s:
The army of volunteers is ready.

Narrator:
Progress without justice isn’t progress at all.

. . .

Mik: (14:30)
Born in Denmark, trained as an architect, Kasper’s own journey from the design studio into climate activism began with one single question: How could creative work serve life rather than the systems eroding it? And that’s a question that leads directly into what comes next and his whole rethinking of the human story itself.

Kasper:
I studied architecture and I ran a research and design department in architecture for the last eight years. But around eight years ago or something, I coincidentally got an assignment from a Stanford professor saying, we need to sort of make a completely self-sufficient way of living because like we won’t really have a planet to live on in the future and I was like this was the first time I sort of I knew there was something called climate change but it wasn’t something that was really on my mind because that’s not what I was taught in architecture school.

I started researching and as you know it’s a rabbit hole and it got scarier and scarier and sort of in that process I became radicalised and of course like when we then we did the project and it turned out that it was actually feasible to create a small community for 50 people that could be completely self-sufficient with anything from food to energy. And we sort of ended up putting it out there and it went completely viral. It had 45 million views and I thought like, okay, there must be something to this. think like we are, cause for me it has been like a learning journey and what we are sort of showing was also something that clearly resonated with people. So I started studying and I started developing this research department further and further and it became more more progressive as I realised how sort of bad things actually were.

And I was sort of living quietly with trying to say, can I try to steer the industry from within, trying to change it. And then I read a book called ‘How to Blow a Pipeline’, which is one of my favorite books by Andreas Malm, which is basically arguing that there’s never been a social movement that had any sort of actual success unless there was a radical flank to ensure that it sort of pulled momentum and dragged the overturned window in the right direction.

And I decided, ‘Okay, maybe I can be that flank’ because I don’t care about being listened to. What I care about is trying to do something that actually helps the environment and my kids. I have two kids now. I had one at the time.

So it became sort of this way for me to do this. So I started being very vocal about all these things, which was very not appreciated by my employer at the time. And actually not anyone in the industry because I was really, people thought I was a troll and it was because no one likes to be told that what they’re doing is wrong. But it was sort of the way it was and I just kept doing it because I thought like, we need to get this message out there.

So that was sort of my entrance into this. So I sort of gradually left corporate architecture to become sort of a radicalised architect. Then in November last year, I quit my job to start my own nonprofit to work on mobilising basically people into creating actual change, which is sort of a combination of the skills I have as an architect and the research that I’ve acquired over many years. So that’s more or less my journey and where I’m at right now.

. . .

Narrator – inspired by Kasper’s post on Linkedin.com: (18:28)
Confront this contradiction. Not to feel shame, but to rediscover integrity. Ask this simple radical question what if sustainability isn’t about doing less harm but about living within the limits that make life possible. It’s not an attack on innovation it’s a call to responsibility.
Even the best design solution means nothing if it exists within a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet.
You’ve always believed in asking the harder questions, even when they challenge everything we know, right? A new path, one grounded in science, fairness and possibility.
We can return within the safe and just limits of our planet within a generation. It’s not a vision of sacrifice, but a freedom. Freedom from an economy that treats both people and nature as expendable. Freedom to design systems that serve life on Earth.

. . .

Kasper (19:40)
Often as activists or people working in this space, we sort of tend to think that we have to have one box, that that’s what we stick to, but it’s basically all strategies have to be deployed at the same time. So what I’ve done is that I read Gramsci, who is one my favorite authors and one of the key points she has is that the cultural hegemony is something that the elites choose to ensure that no one actually rises, upgrades any sort of revolutionary ideas.

So there is this point and for me that was to use social media and media landscape to actually to push the agenda and to break up this cultural hegemony because we need to understand that the overarching things that we are told are basically lies that serve one elite. So the idea that growth is always good, if you’re poor, it’s something of your own undoing, you can just work harder and all those things. We need to counteract those prevailing myths because they are basically just keeping us from really understanding what’s going on. So that’s one leg of it.

But at the same time, I have been doing the research and have been mobilising an entire industry in Denmark through our effort called the ‘Reduction Roadmap’ where we actually got the entire Danish industry to ask politicians and when I mean the entire industry I really mean the entire industry like from the small-scale green carpenter to the biggest developer in the Nordics, we all came together and asked the politicians to ensure that we had climate targets that we needed to obey by, in order so we could adhere to the Paris Accord, which was, think, the first time, at least in the history I know, where that entire industry has asked to be regulated so heavily that it would meet the Paris Accord climate budgets. So that’s one thing.

That’s, you know, screaming out doesn’t do anything unless you also act on it. So it’s about creating the movements.

And at the same time, I’ve done a degrowth transition plan with my colleagues for the entire industry to show that it is possible to get back and I was one of the, with Velux and Artelia and my former employer, I also developed the building with the lowest footprint ever made in Denmark that could be built at scale. So I mean, my work has been sort of very hands-on from movement building to communication. So yeah, it’s not just one thing. It’s a lot of things at the same time I’m trying to do.

Mik:
So what I’m curious about is if we broaden the perspective out from just Denmark, where you have been very active to the world and talk about solutions for our planet, planet Earth and humanity, what you see is the main obstacle. What are the problems as you see it? And what are the solutions? That’s even more important.

Kasper:
Yeah, I think there’s just two major problems that I see. And the first is that the scientific community or the people actually understanding how the system dynamics works are incredibly poor at getting it translated to people. we have all the knowledge that we need. It’s just very poorly distributed. So one of the things that has been instrumental in my work and also something I took from architecture is to translate those minority insights into majority actions. So I use branding and marketing techniques to sort of lobby for these to get them into the mainstream.

And that was incredibly successful with Reduction Roadmap, which is why it happened and why we could do the mobilisation. I think one of the things is that we are locked in this system where we can’t really seem to get out of the scientific community, to the wider society. So that’s one thing that we’re really missing, and one thing that I’m working on trying to change. the other thing is that we, think it’s Sarah Stein-Lubrano wrote an incredible book. It’s called ‘Don’t Talk About Politics’, where she says something that I really, really like. that’s one of the reasons why we are in this situation is because of something called social atrophy. And she’s a neuroscientist. So she studied the brain and social atrophy is actually because when we spend less time with each other, which has happened throughout the last 50 to 70 years basically, because our life has been more more individualised and we’ve sort of removed all the places we used to meet each other.

The ‘third place’ in the States was the bowling alley. In Denmark, it was with football clubs. And all those things, they have been sort of stripped away. So we have less social connections and we see people less and less basically in daily life, which means that our frontal cortex is shrinking, making us less good at actually engaging in social activities.

And when we are less good at doing something, we tend to not do it. That’s also why it’s harder to mobilise people now than it was a long time ago, because it takes more effort for people to be in social circumstances that they’re not used to. And I mean, as a Dane who’s from a culture that’s incredibly reserved, it’s very apparent here that we are very bad at being social with people we don’t know.

And I think that’s a key thing that when we’ve taken away those third places and those social connections, it becomes harder and harder. So that’s also something we have to rebuild. So basically we have to learn how to get people to understand those basic principles that are what science is telling us. And at the same time, we have to learn how to work together and be together in order to start movement buildings. Because one thing is how to mobilise, which you can do through communication.

But a movement cannot be sustained unless you can have like a social connection. And I would argue that’s also why we’re seeing protests today that have no effect. So the Gaza movement is amazing. It’s a genocide unfolding. It’s like an atrocity what’s going on. And we see hundreds of thousands, even million people on the street, yet the political power is completely quiet. And I think the difference is today is that before those movements, those mobilisations were rooted in movements that sustained pressure over time. Now they become sort of events that people attend and then disperse from.

So there’s basically only that one time when we are in a movement and we say we are unhappy, but then the pressure sort of fizzles out for the politicians. But to be able to get the political movements to actually change, momentum has to be sustained continuously. And that’s what movement does. So I think we have this very weird understanding that mobilisation and movements are the same, but it’s really not the same.

Movements are consistent, are social group, they have strong relational dynamics, and they keep pressure on the political sort of elites, whereas mobilisations can very quickly turn virtue signaling for something that people just want to do. I think that’s the difference and that we have to bridge that gap. And I think that’s what I’m trying to do with the work I’m trying to comment it from those two angles.

. . .

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

Buckminster Fuller:
Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

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

Kasper: (27:40)
One thing that’s important with those movements and how you actually enable the mobilisation is that it’s not about tweaking the existing system. It’s about actually being a force of power to sort of counter it or resist it. think Julia Steinberg says it very well, she says, stop appealing to power, start mobilising to counter it. And I think that’s exactly what we need to do. I think that is the, it’s not about tweaking the system. It’s about building a coalition strong enough to overtake it.

And that’s what we need to do, basically. And that’s also why I believe that movements are essential, because it’s only through those movements we can be powerful enough to overthrow the current elites.

Zack Polansky:
We are not here to be disappointed by you. We are not here to be concerned by you. We’re here to replace you.

Mik: (28:36)
But how do we do it then?

Kasper:
Yeah, I think that’s the really interesting part, I think, because I think one of the things I studied a lot and when we learned, we worked with intensively in how we mobilised with the reduction roadmap was looking at how social tipping point actually works and how actual system dynamics function. So typically you would say that you just need the bigger influencers, you need the big lobby groups to come with you and then you will enforce it. But actually that’s not how change actually happens because the people in the center of power are least likely to actually change their minds because they benefit from straight as coal.

So if you want to enable association mobilisation that can then turn into a movement, you have to collect the periphery. It means that you don’t go about this in the way that you just need as broad a coalition as possible. What you basically need is to engage with all the people that are close to being on the fence.

So the people that you have the easiest time persuading. And a good example of how we did this for the roadmap was that we said, we can go out with this pledge that everyone should sign and we should ask the politicians for, or we can also do something different. We can contact all the ones that are the most ambitious and are probably going to support this in a forum before we go out with this. So we can talk about and get them on board. So we basically take the periphery and organise that before.

So we did that and everyone was on board and it great. And once that happened, then we went live with our campaign. All of a sudden you had very quickly a lot of signups. It just went crazy. And then the center of power gets really scared because now they can see a shift in what the social norms are getting at. And then everyone sort of said, I can’t be left out. You know, the FOMO kicks in. We’re all basically school kids at the playground we want to fit in and then that happens.

So I think this is how we enable that mobilisation is that we are incredibly smart in understanding how system dynamics works and how we mobilise to get the effect we need because trying to get endorsement from celebrities or trying to get big sort of organisations that are in the power situation right now to be part of it, it never works.

They are never going to do it. will always maybe just say they will do it, but behind their back, they will do something different. So it’s about organising the periphery so it becomes large enough that the majority can’t ignore it anymore. And that’s sort of how we should go about it. And that’s also why I think a lot of movements fail because they think they are a broad coalition and they aim for a broad coalition. And when you aim to be something for everyone, it becomes nothing for no one.

And that’s basically what happens. it’s about being very articulate in what do you want to do and then putting strategic pressure on the right points and organising according to that. And I think another thing that has been very instrumental, at least the work that I’ve been trying to do is that there’s been this tendency in the climate movement and I think the climate movement has actually done some amazing work. There’s been so many… I’m still in awe every time I see the young people blocking the streets and what they’re doing is just… In my mind, they are the actual true heroes of this century. But one thing I think that’s been missing in the climate movement is the understanding of how successful movements have actually happened in the past. Because… if you look back into civil rights movement, for example, they always had the goal of equal rights, but it was not what they asked people to follow immediately. They asked for small steps toward a goal, which was equal rights. So first it was to end segregation, which they mobilised around, which is a very simple thing to say, please mobilise with us for this thing to end this. And then when people start mixing because segregation is easier to move on to the next step which was positive affirmation, so voting rights and getting into schools and so forth, so it continued. And I think that’s what the climate movement never got, is that that’s the stepping stone.

Mik:
Some years ago, Kasper was part of that group that brought together a range of Danish architecture firms, engineers and researchers from universities and NGOs to create the so-called Reduction Roadmap, a regenerative transition plan for the Danish building industry. That was a call to action for firms and organisations in the construction industry to support the development of research-based targets to meet planetary boundaries in the building and real estate businesses. It was not only a research document, but also a mobilisation platform, as Kasper explains it. The reduction roadmap ended up bringing together hundreds of companies and organisations and municipalities to sign on and influence change, both in industry practice and in legislation in parliament.

Kasper:
It was just one step. It’s not at all enough. So now the next step, which we also launched in Denmark, is building stuff. Stop building new buildings. We don’t need more of them. And then after that it becomes redistribution. Then until you end up with a building industry that works on not the benefit of financial interests, but the benefit of the people. And you just have to lay that plan out and try.

But I also want to be honest, tried to mobilise a million times and failed. I’ve tried to tell you know it’s a trial and error game it’s not something you can put on a formula, it’s difficult, it’s hard work.

. . .

Narrator – inspired by Kasper’s post on Linkedin:
Have you ever felt disillusioned with politics? Have you ever longed for a world where power serves people, not the other way around? What if the future of a well-functioning democracy lies hidden in our friendships? Think about it. In a healthy circle of friends, no one gets to boss the others round. Just try. You’ll quickly be met with laughter, an eye roll, or an outright refusal to play along.

That subtle pushback isn’t just social banter. It’s a glimpse into something far deeper. Humanity’s oldest, most overlooked form of power. It’s called reverse dominance. It’s the ability of the many to prevent anyone from rising above the group. No rulers, no subjects, just solidarity, accountability and equality enforced by the people themselves. For tens of thousands of years, this was how humans lived. So why does it feel impossible today? Because our current system rewards domination. It isolates us from each other. It makes inequality look natural.

You can’t laugh a billionaire off their yacht. You can’t eye roll a politician out of corruption. And as we spend more time alone, our social muscles for cooperation and resistance grow weaker.

But here’s the good news. We already know how to live differently. Every joke that keeps a friend humble, every grassroots group that refuses to be bought, every community kitchen or repair cafe is proof that another way is not only possible, it’s already happening.

This isn’t just theory, it’s a roadmap for what comes next. Citizens’ assemblies, universal access, community spaces, a culture that refuses domination in all its forms. This is about rediscovering forgotten social technology that once kept us equal and which could help us build a more just, a truly democratic and a livable future. The question is, can we scale it up before it’s too late?

. . .

Mik: (37:11)
Some of the blog posts you put out are really deep, feel, where you’re touching on things such as how we govern. Recently you had a post which was about opposite power, in a way. Can you explain what you were saying there?

Yeah, it’s the reverse dominance hierarchy. The idea is that when we are in a healthy friend group, no one governs over each other. No one has the dominance, basically. And if someone tries to be the dominant one, they are very quickly sort of to be put down by the others through sort of jokes or getting ridiculed or even, worst case, of shunned from the group. But basically, we have these mechanisms in our society and actually in our evolutionary traits that we know how to ensure that these things can be put in place so no one actually goes outside the boundaries. If we’ve done that and actually there’s evidence from David Graeber, who wrote a book which goes through archaeological findings that show that we lived in population of million people, cities without any form of hierarchical structures, all egalitarian. So we’ve actually have been able to live like this before. So these reverse dominance hierarchies is about understanding that if we set up the system that we live in in the right way, so those power trades, which our economy is now, so are not prevalent, we can actually enable a society where we don’t need the hierarchical structures that are sort of causing us so much pain today.

Because today there’s no way you can live outside this. You live in a hierarchical, our entire system is based on this. Surplus buys you freedom to govern over others. And that’s basically how the system works. So we can at the same time figure out if we know how we got here, what’s the reverse way to break that power down. So there is not going to be that. And for me, one of the most important things is how you govern is completely skewed in that today it’s money that controls both politics but also the means of production.

So basically there is no democratic voice in any of the capitalism we see today. So there’s very few companies that are democratically owned. They’re run by shareholders or for profit. And you can’t really ridicule a CEO to stop being bad to the environment. That’s not how it works, unfortunately.

So ways to get around this is to take the power and get the democracy into those means of production by either having corporations that are owned by the workers themselves, or if you have even a government structure in politics that are not politicians or not no lobbyist group, but basically are citizen assembly that are chosen randomly and advised by experts to do this thing.

And we know, which is really interesting, we know when we’ve done those citizens’ assemblies that when they are, even though they come from a sort of variety, a big variety of people that are same as the general demography of a country, they end up making incredibly progressive political points and strategies because they are not influenced by any means to keep the power. They’re just there for a fixed period and they listen to the expert because they know they don’t know and they can, you know, they are human beings that want the best for other human beings.

Whereas in our current system, we have politicians that have all these ulterior motives and it’s all about keeping the power. It’s all about the interest that they have and that’s what makes it impossible. So I think like dismantling those things are key in enabling this reverse hierarchy, reverse dominance. And at the same time, ensuring that people have a green job guarantee so people are not going to be left poor and alone in this.

We need the social structures to really ensure that there is no one sort of dominating anymore. So I think that is a really crucial thing to think about. But again, this is where I would like us to go. But it will take steps to dismantle the system, to get there and thinking that we can just ask for all of these things immediately. I don’t think it’s good strategy because I think it will fail quite quickly.

. . .

SONG (41:59)

‘Beyond’

Verse 1:
I started out to heal the world
to mend the fragile make it whole
But somewhere on that road to change
my heart was traded for control

They optimised and called it green
so I would feed their growth machine
Our food would come from out of town
until one day it all broke down

Chorus:
Beyond the map, beyond the race
I found new freedom in a humble place
Beyond the road, beyond the spin
A new way of being could begin

Verse 2:
Ask the hard questions every day
Never been one to look away
Hold the mirror up to my face
I see I too must slow my pace

So I learned to live within the calm
And companies learned to do no harm
To regenerate keep life alive
Secure a way we all can thrive

Chorus:
Beyond the map, beyond the dream
small drops of freedom form a stream
Beyond the road, beyond the spin
Discovering where the flow begins

Bridge:
This is a call
once and for all
to stand for the living

Final chorus:
Beyond the map, beyond the race
a truer freedom a deeper grace
Beyond the road, beyond the schemes
We seize the moment — and live our dreams

. . .

Spoken words by Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov:
I believe that there’s a much more beautiful way to live together. That’s not the system.

We are all interconnected, you know. We are part of the web of life. I’m no different than a tree. Like, we live in the same system. We are codependent. So, you can choose to fight, but at some point it will be your own destruction. Choose to share, because it brings reciprocity to everyone.

We can find the strength to create a new system that’s much more beautiful than the one we have.

---

Kasper: (45:03)
The thing is that I don’t think we should tell a vision. I don’t think it because if you’re a mom struggling to get by, the idea of a utopian dream, far in the future, is just not going to get me off my couch. My vision is to build so strong movements that people want to be in them for the friendship, the group, for the social things, to make that the aspirational thing to be wanting. Not the idea of hopefully we get a better future, but to get a better future here now by doing this work. And I think that’s what’s missing. And that’s what we continuously fail to deliver on.

We say, like: ‘Come do all these things, take out your weekends.’ It’s almost like a chore you have to do in order for hopefully getting a better future instead of saying, ‘No, this is a place where you meet people that are excited about this, you finally… you vent with.’

So it’s like the cognitive dissonance that you’re wrestling alone with because being in this space is actually quite lonely if you don’t have anyone else. So for me, the vision is to get people to understand the big positive benefits there are from actually doing this work and doing it with other people.

And then putting aside, it’s not that we shouldn’t have a nice vision. It’s just that it’s not what we need to mobilise around. Because of course, we all want a better future and a future where our kids grow up actually surviving. I think that’s the hope, right?

Mik:
Exactly. So what keeps you going personally? Because you seem to be putting a lot of energy, time and with time also money, I guess, into this.

Kasper: (46:56)
Yeah, I’m now fortunate enough to have my own nonprofit, where I can, where I thankfully have some nice clients that help me and that I work with to do all this meaningful work. But what gets me going is basically that I don’t know how I could get up in the morning if I weren’t trying to do something about it. Because once you have the knowledge, it’s really hard to unsee it. You know, can’t just leave it anymore. It’s like, I guess you have the same. That’s also why you do what you do. That if you know these things, it’s too painful to stop, basically.

I will say, and also being honest, is that sometimes I wish that I didn’t know all of these things, to be honest, because my life would be much more stress-free if I didn’t have to understand that my kids might not grow up to have a full life. But that’s the sad reality. So all I can do is try to work as hard as I to do something about it basically.

Mik:
And are you optimistic?

Kasper (48:17)
No, I mean, I’ve been, think like many other people, I’ve been going back and forth in this, you you have periods where it seems impossible and you have periods where you feel like, oh, there’s momentum, we can maybe change something. I’m not really super optimistic, but I’m hoping that in the collapse, which is going to happen, we can find the strength to create a new system that’s much more beautiful than the one we have we’re living with now.

And I think it’s a very weird thing that we sort of think of this system as something that’s good. it’s almost like we’re trying to preserve it. It’s like we’re trying to work towards like nothing should change because this is great. But in reality, it’s great for very few people. The majority is living in the hellish conditions so that me and everyone else in the global north and can live a hyper-consumed life that’s making even us miserable.

I think there is a hope for me in that I believe that there’s a much more beautiful way to live together that’s not the system. And that’s what I hope we can emerge. But it requires us to build the systems of the scaffolding to create a new sort of world. And that’s what I’m sort of really interested in trying to do now is that getting those movements, getting those understandings of how we interact with each other, how do we reverse the power structures, all of those things. So when things collapse, we have our system ready to take over when the old one crumbles. And that’s my sort of dream. And that’s what makes me hopeful, actually.

. . .

MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, speaking in the 1940s: (50:14)
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living

Kasper:
One of the people that has inspired me most is a Danish environmental economist called Inge Røbke. And she says on our finite planet with finite resources, we basically only have two options. It’s either to fight or to share. And once we understand that, then I know what I prefer. And I think that it all boils down to this. That’s what it is. It means that if there’s a limited number of resources on the globe that we can split evenly. Either we can go through it through dominant hierarchies where we outcompete each other or go to war for these things until sort of there’s one victor. Or we can basically choose to say, how do we collectively share this to create a system where we’re all sort of actually living the best possible life with the means that we have. And we’ve chosen the fight mode, but maybe we should start understanding that it’s about the sharing.

And that’s where we have to go. I think that’s the future. And the more we know and understand that, the better it is. Because we are all interconnected. We are part of the web of life. I’m no different than a tree. We live in the same system. We are codependent. So you can choose to fight, but at some point it will be your own destruction that you are sort of enabling. So that’s the key. Choose to share because it brings reciprocity to everyone.

Mik Aidt: (52:08)
Could it be that the future belongs to those who choose courage over comfort?
If you’d like to hear more and dig deeper in these kinds of conversations, have plenty of them on climatesafety.info. I’m Mik Aidt and I’m very grateful that you have been listening. You can reach me anytime at the email address info@climatesafety.info.

Sir David Attenborough:
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 (53:11)

‘Return again’

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

Audio clips in the song:
Iain McGilchrist: “A finding, willy-nilly, really, of what is important in life.”

—- [ENDS] —-

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