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The Sustainable Hour no. 549 | Transcript | Podcast notes

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How values can guide the next civilisation

Our guest in The Sustainable Hour no. 549 is Michael Haupt, systems thinker and founder of Evolutionary Agents. New original music featured: Symphony of the Shift

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What if collapse is not the end – but the beginning of something better?

In this week’s Sustainable Hour, we explore how society might evolve through our overlapping crises toward a new kind of civilisation – one built not on class, but on shared values.

Our guest Michael Haupt, a former IT executive turned global systems thinker, joins us from South Africa to unpack how we can make sense of today’s chaos through the lens of “punctuated equilibrium” – a biological concept describing sudden leaps in complexity after periods of disruption.

Michael is the founder of PETOC, the world’s first crowdsourced Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of Change – offering a practical framework to navigate and plan for the unpredictable bursts of rapid transformation expected between now and 2030, guiding individuals and organisations through unprecedented uncertainty.

We discuss:

– Why the future could be a values-based civilisation
– The role of municipalities and communities as engines of transformation
– How a new mycelial consciousness is emerging alongside material systems
– Why localism and bottom-up coordination are essential
– How AI, when guided by deeper consciousness, can support this shift
– What practical steps citizens can take to prepare and respond wisely

Michael introduces his 3M Model – Metaphysics, Metacrisis and Municipalities – and shares insights into building resilience not just to survive, but to co-create a regenerative and thriving future.

“What could emerge is the opposite of a class-based civilisation. This time it’s a values-based civilisation.”
~ Michael Haupt, in The Sustainable Hour no. 549

→ You can connect with Michael Haupt on LinkedIn. More info further below on this page.

The episode concludes with a call to action for our listeners:

What should we call this new movement?
Michael and our podcast team invite name suggestions for this emerging vision of community transformation and conscious evolution.

→ Send your ideas to: info@TheSustainableHour.au

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Global Outlook by Colin Mockett

Colin covers the International Energy Agency’s latest report showing a surge in clean energy investments and the economic downturn for oil, particularly in China. He also reports on escalating climate disasters, the United Kingdom’s new North Sea green partnership with Norway, and a football update from Forest Green Rovers – the world’s most sustainable football club.

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New music in this episode

→ More music from The Sustainable Hour

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TONY’S CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Today’s chat with Michael has been huge for us. It very much follows the evolutionary process we at The Sustainable Hour podcast have been on for the 12 years of our existence. Michael’s “evolutionary process” involves a change of thinking about how our civilisation will look and feel like after the rapidly approaching collapse we face. 

This line of thinking allows us to be proactive in preparing from this collapse. The more his ‘municipalities’ work to control their future destinies, the more resilient they will be after the collapse. Municipalities and communities involved in the Localisation movement are already well down this path and provide good models for others to follow.

The solutions will flow when the “Us-Versus-Them” thinking is overcome. They won’t come from the “top down”, or the “bottom up”, but from the “middle out” with a focus on evolving to a safer, more just, inclusive, sustainable, peaceful and healthy world. 

Michael, we’ll gladly accept your invitation to this evolutionary process and will do our very best to report accurately on it. In the meantime, we’ll be back next week with our 550th episode.

Be a big system thinker!

“I believe humanity is poised at a moment now where after this collapse what could emerge is the opposite of a class-based civilisation. This time it’s a values-based civilisation. And the indigenous people around the world are living examples of what a values-based civilisation is. So the aborigines in Australia is an example, the Khoisan in southern Africa is an example, the North American Indians is another example. There was no hierarchy, and yet they had very intricate forms of governance. And so I believe that the human species is at that point where our consciousness has developed sufficiently. We have all of the global networks to communicate globally, and so what you’ll have is a body of humans stepping into a values-based human coordination system, which to me is profound.”
– Michael Haupt, in The Sustainable Hour no. 549

EDITORIAL
An apocalyptic revelation

The word “apocalypse” originally comes from the Greek word apokalypsis and meant “uncovering”, or “a revealing of what is hidden”. It referred to the divine revealing of future events, including judgment and cosmic transformation. In its earliest sense, it was not about destruction, but about revelation – a moment of deep insight, when the truth breaks through the illusion.

Over time, particularly through the Christian Book of Revelation (Apokalypsis Ioannou), the word became associated with the end of the world – fire, flood, collapse. But perhaps the time has come to return to the original meaning. Because in many ways, we are living through an apocalypse today: not just in the sense of multiple crises converging, but in the sense that truths long hidden – about our economy, our climate, our politics of growth – are being unveiled.

What was once obscured is now plain to see: the cost of denial, the fragility of our systems, the interconnectedness of life. This unveiling can be terrifying – but also liberating. When illusions fall away, so does complacency. And in that space, new possibilities emerge.

Understanding the apocalypse as a revelation, not just a catastrophe, invites us to ask: What truth is being revealed to us now? And what will we do with it?

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Bonus reading: A late-night conversation with ChatGPT

After our interview with Michael Haupt, co-host Mik Aidt stayed up reflecting on the deeper themes of collapse, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and evolution, and had a fascinating follow-up chat with the AI chatbot ChatGPT. The result is a personal dialogue about the future we’re all heading into. You can read the full conversation here:

📄 Download the PDF:
Symphony of the Shift – A late-night chat with reflections on AI, collapse, and being human

What do you think this movement should be called? Let us know at info@thesustainablehour.au

Will we need the robots to save us from ourselves?

→ Subscribe to The Sustainable Hour podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify

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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.

The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.

True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.

“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org

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The transition phase of our evolution

This is not comfortable, but it was helpful to me to shift how we think about stuff. And the frame is that anybody concerned currently about climate only or being able to do something from an individual perspective that is going to stop something happening is a convenient distraction. And what I mean by that is that this thesis, which is the top down human control system, wants to keep us as busy as we possibly can, doing ultimately useless things, including responding to the supposed crisis called climate change. The more meaningful response is to say: ‘Hold on, this is an evolutionary process. We understand the concept of the thesis. We understand that as busy-busy-busy well-intentioned activists, we’re operating in the antithesis space and we were running around trying to stop climate change and plant trees and do all of those things, but a better level of coordination is realising that a synthesis will come out of those two. One is the top down, and one is the bottom up approach, and let’s figure this out.’

This is not easy, and there’s no recipe that we can just follow a hundred per cent. This has never happened in the history of human civilisation before. There’s a totally unique moment, but it’s up to us to figure out. And it’s not figuring out from the point of stopping climate crisis. It’s figuring out from a much more wise and conscious steering and navigating and working with… I call it: an evolutionary impulse, which is the innate organising principle within all living systems to organise itself and achieve higher levels of complexity. That’s our role. It is to figure that out.”
– Michael Haupt, in The Sustainable Hour no. 549

DIVE DEEPER INTO THESE ‘RABBIT HOLES’

• Punctuated equilibrium: Describes how Complex Adaptive Systems evolve through prolonged stability interrupted by rapid transformation, challenging assumptions of gradual change. Deep dive
• Neolithic revolution: Also called the Agricultural Revolution, it represents a Punctuated Equilibrium event in human cultural evolution that occurred approximately 12,000 years ago. A long period of stability as hunter-gatherers was interrupted by a brief episode of significant change. Deep dive
• Material consciousness: The predominant way of thinking since the Neolithic Revolution that has resulted in cities with monumental architecture, written language, social hierarchy, poverty and wealth, top-down power structures, organized warfare, empires, patriarchy, the depletion of nature leading to overshoot, objectified reality, scarcity, and separation. War will always exist while we remain beholden to material consciousness. Deep dive
• Mycelial consciousness: The emerging way of thinking in which war becomes obsolete. It mirrors the sophisticated coordination patterns found in fungal networks. Deep dive
• Values-based society: All social systems in a class-based society support the pursuit of luxury, driven by the extraction of resources. All social systems in a values-based society support the pursuit of prosperity, defined as human and more-than-human flourishing. Deep dive

→ Follow Michael Haupt’s thinking-out-loud process on evags.substack.com

→ Accidental Gods podcast – 10 July 2024:
The Tools We Need: Raising the Collaborative Commons with Resilience Strategist Michael Haupt
Podcast episode on Youtube (1 hour 18 minutes)

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Crafting climatesafe communities

→ Radically Local – 1 April 2025:
BRACE FOR IMPACT: Building A Real-World Guide to Surviving Climate Collapse
“No rebuild. No help. No relocation. If you’re still waiting for someone to save you, you’re already too late. The only path left is radically local, and I’m mapping the way. No fluff. No theory. Just straight-talking, radically local action — read on.” By Margi Prideaux, PhD

→ Radically Local – 5 June 2025:
TRUST, DIRT, AND FIRELIGHT: Shared Answers for a Collapsing World
“We didn’t plant the tree of survival twenty years ago. Now, storms are here — and there’s no more time to waste. In this raw, practical, and unflinching guide, three collapse-aware thinkers answer six urgent questions about building resilience, growing food, forming survival networks, and finding meaning in a world coming apart. It’s not about bunkers or billionaires — it’s about skills, soil, and solidarity. Read it now. Share it like firelight.” By Margi Prideaux, PhD, Matt Orsagh, and Justin McAffee

“The world is burning, and the powerful refuse to act. We are not facing a crisis of awareness—we are facing a crisis of power. In this essay, I break down why the current system is leading us to collapse and why only a mass democratic revolution can stop it.
We have a choice: obedience to a system that is killing us or rebellion to create something new. Which side are you on?”

“Political revolutions will occur in the next decade as the horrors we face become plain for citizens to see. These revolutions will open up the political space for the small window through which we will survive this century. Revolutionary change then is now essential and therefore should be welcomed. It is, in fact, our only chance to create the miracle of human cooperation and innovation that we need.” 

~ Roger Hallam, British climate activist, mobiliser and strategist

Jem Bendell: Leading through collapse

Jem Bendell: Living to the max at a time of collapse

Climate action is now harm reduction

Alex Steffen writes:
“This is a bit of a longer podcast, where I unpack some of the uncomfortable realities of this present moment in the planetary crisis — and why we need a new approach to solutions thinking and chosen optimism.

Some of the ideas discussed:

How I’ve been reluctant to engage the more conflict-generating parts of climate foresight in public, but am done being circumspect.

The violent reaction to knowledge, expertise and authority being recontextualized by discontinuity.

Moving from a time of climate action as solution to climate action as harm reduction.

The staggering scale of needed climate responses, and their steepening nature.

The impossibility of saving many communities from grim futures, even if we mount a currently-implausible set of national and international ruggedization and mass-relocation efforts.

The necessity of responding as effectively as we can, despite the certainty that much will be lost, in unfair ways, and millions face some pretty tough futures.

The need to envision and articulate futures of relative safety, partial stability and limited inequity — and to embrace building rapidly and at scale to secure those futures.

The default future of brittle places: brittleness traps, unofficial abandonment, transapocalyptic local collapses.

How anti-climate right being far more aggressive and focused on destroying our capacities to respond than largely liberal climate advocates have been in trying to build them up.

Trump’s attacks on climate diplomacy, environmental law, climate planning, clean energy, disaster preparedness and response, risk management, even basic science itself.

The billionaire predators and their allies who foresee luxury survival compounds for themselves — and walls, debt and profitable exploitation for everyone else. People who look at the breaking of the future as their chance to try to cement their hold on dynastic wealth and unchallengeable power.

The need for building rugged sustainability into the fabric of communities in relatively safe places, both for its own sake and as a counter-balance to reactionary disaster exploitation. Successful climate response demands a giant building boom.

The less we build, the tighter the climate-relocation bottleneck will get.

Why personal climate strategies are no longer luxuries, and time is short.

As always, thank you for tuning in.”

~ Alex

→ Alex Steffen, The Snap Forward – 24 May 2025:
Climate Action is Now Harm Reduction
“…and other thoughts about this dangerous moment.”

→ The Guardian – 18 April 2025:
‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday
“Liberals in the US make up about 15% of the prepping scene and their numbers are growing. Their fears differ from their better-known rightwing counterparts – as do their methods.”

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Sign the Polluters Pay Pact

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Transcript of The Sustainable Hour no. 549

Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General:
We are flirting with climate disaster.

Jingle:
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.

Tony Gleeson:
The Sustainable Hour acknowledges the traditional owners on the land on which we meet, work, play and broadcast from, the Wadawurrung people. We pay respects to their elders – past, present and those who will come. At The Sustainable Hour we take inspiration from the long history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism and resistance in Australia and seek to amplify the voices of marginalised groups. We know there is much for us to learn from the way they managed and nurtured the land for millennia before their land was stolen by the first white settlers.

Xiye Bastida, TED-talk, April 2025:
We have been told time and time again that we are heading towards climate apocalypse. And I ask, haven’t many communities suffered apocalypse? Haven’t many communities ended with colonisation, with displacement? And so I choose to say that we’re not heading towards apocalypse. We are rising from many. When you have that vision, you become empowered to learn and act as if we are truly rebuilding and we are resilient and we’re tapping into the histories that we share.

Mik Aidt:
In The Sustainable Hour we are always on the lookout for things that are changing the story. That big story we all buy into and which increasingly has become a story of insecurity, uncertainty, unprecedented weather, chaos on one side with danger and collapse of ecosystems and dying coral reefs and so on. Warnings from the scientists that it’s not just some other species that we are eradicating from the planet. It could – if we’re not careful – be ourselves, the human species, that will go extinct sometime in a not too distant future unless we change our course.

And then on the other side, of course, there’s that story of all the progress that we are actually making in the clean tech space. The speed of our innovation is amazing and the numbers are rising in the green transition.

And in the middle of all this, there’s a climate movement which is at the moment I think in a kind of contemplation, maybe even disarray about where do we go from here? As a movement, what is the next big thing we need to advocate for? Well, in the sustainable hour today, we’re going to chat about these bigger questions and the big vision for where we’re heading. And we have some good news.

But more about that soon. First of all, we must hear the Global Outlook presented by Colin Mockett OAM. It’s a big and busy world out there, Colin, so what do you have for us? – lots of bad news again? or have you…

Colin Mockett’s Global Outlook:
Like you would just encapsulated, Mik, my roundup almost every week is a mix of disasters that are climate related and then the cures and how we can do it. And that’s exactly what I have for you this week. Because there’s mass flooding in Argentina at the moment. It’s caused 16 deaths and thousands of people being evacuated. And tornadoes swept through centrally America, not Central America, but the centre of the USA, and that’s caused 25 deaths during the past week. But these sort of events have become so commonplace in our roundup that we need to remind people that they’re all attributed to climate change. It’s not just people dying in tornadoes.

So, instead, I’m going to begin our roundup in Paris, where the International Energy Agency released a report which states that the global investment in clean energy has surged since 2020, with annual spending on renewables and grids and storage now surpassing investments in fossil fuels for the first time. Last year, it was $3 trillion that was invested in clean energy worldwide. But the IEA’s World Energy Investment Report came with a warning that it’s still not enough. That’s because to meet global climate goals, including the UAE consensus targets of tripling global renewable energy capacity and doubling energy efficiency, cumulative investment must reach $31.5 trillion by 2030. Essentially, that means we’ve got five years to increase our efforts tenfold.

The IEA report centred on the need to scale up proven financial models, including blending finance, sovereign guarantees and public-private partnerships to mobilise clean energy investments at scale. It emphasised the importance of tailoring these models to extra context, particularly across the sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, where financing gaps remain most acute. Also in the region, the UK and Norway announced a new green industrial partnership last week aimed at turbocharging the North Sea’s role in the clean energy transition. Signed in Oslo, the agreement cements plans for joint investment and innovation in offshore wind, hydrogen and green infrastructure. Energy security means national security, said British Minister Ed Miliband. This partnership is about building clean power that we can rely on, backed by strong alliances and not fossil fuel volubility.

Now in that regard, the figures released at the weekend following President Trump’s visit to the Gulf states, where he shook hands with so many people, that he claimed it was more than any human had ever done before. But behind all that bluster were some really hard facts. The first was that Saudi Arabia has admitted that its policy of restricting its supply of oil onto the world market hasn’t worked because there’s still a glut on the market and the price appears static around $16 US dollars a barrel. The Saudis want it closer to $90 a barrel to balance their budgets. But the rollout of EVs worldwide, especially in the world’s biggest market, that’s China, means that demand has dropped for oil and the price is in freefall. The figures show that oil imports to China reached its peak in 2023, was down last year and it’s in freefall so far this year. That’s very bad news for the fossil fuel industry, but good for the planet.

And that brings us to the world’s greenest sports club, Forest Green Rovers. They play South End, which is in seventh place in their division, in a playoff 03:45am tomorrow morning our time. That means, essentially, that they’re two wins away from promotion to the English Division One. We’ll have news about all that next week, but in the meantime, that’s my roundup for the week.

Jingle:
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.

Mik:
Our guest today in The Sustainable Hour is Michael Haupt. He’s from South Africa – a former IT executive who’s now today become some sort of a systems thinker, an author who is publishing a blog and a newsletter called Evolutionary Agents. It’s about how we move society, the world, humanity into a much more interconnected and conscious civilisation.

Michael Haupt:
I’ve had two very different careers. The first was in information technology – specifically mobile phone telephony and ironically I was headhunted from Johannesburg and ended up in Sydney, Australia, and then from there eventually lived in 16 cities on six continents, so I view that as the best education I could have got I was paid to go and see the world at somebody else’s expense and it was an incredible time of my life. But my career then bifurcated – and I love that phrase, bifurcated – in other words it forked and took a different route in 2004.

So what had happened is I finished a major assignment in Taipei, Taiwan. My then girlfriend and I traveled through Asia pretty much backpacking. And in that process, I had an out of body experience on a beach in Thailand, which completely changed the direction of my life. So from being a very left brained pragmatic person focused on telecoms and computer system implementation.

I now moved into consciousness. So I discovered a whole world of consciousness research that I’d never known existed before in an attempt to try and answer this question. What is this thing that had just happened to me on the beach? And just to stress, there was no substance involved and I wasn’t going on any kind of spiritual quest. was literally just the universe whacking me on the side of the head saying, okay, time for a change.

And so I couldn’t easily go back into the corporate world. I did try, but was miserable. and then subsequently ended up in the systemic change space. So for the past 15 years, I’ve been advising think tanks, research organisations, grassroots activists, initiatives, trying to address what has come to be known as the meta crisis. and that’s led me to doing the work that I’ll do that we’re doing today, but I’ll pause there and just, just to give you a sense that I had two very different careers.

I’ve now walked away from the tech implementation phase and now very much concerned about the Meta Crisis and very positive about where this could take us if we take a very different worldview about what’s unfolding around us. Is that a reasonable enough introduction?

Mik:
It’s very interesting. And very relevant for, I think, the work you could call it that we do in The Sustainable Hour every week. And one word that came up a number of times when we celebrated Earth Day this year was another word for a meta-crisis, which is: collapse. Quite a few people seem to think that the collapse is not something in the distant future. We are already in the middle of it. Does that ring a bell for you? And where do you take it from there?

Michael:
Very much rings a bell for me and I would go perhaps further and say that even those who are comfortable accepting that we’re already in collapse perhaps haven’t realised how far we are into that collapse process. So to put that in context, I had to go and study, it’s called collapsology. So it’s a meta study of all the various civilisational collapses that have happened over almost 10,000 years.

There’s 26 of them that have been detailed, know, researched and detailed books have been written about them. And then there’s a meta study as a layer over those individual collapses. And from that meta study, we see seven very distinct cycles that come out. I’ve extrapolated those cycles and applied them to our globalised civilisation and seen that depending on which country you’re in, you’re either in stage five, six or seven, of a seven phase cycle and that’s true for every country. The good news about that very bad news is that something new always emerges from it.

So collapse doesn’t mean extinction. It just means the end of the familiar, the end of the way that in which we used to live. And then there’s an emergent process that comes out of that. So I’m very focused on the emergent part of it. It is a very deep and traumatic individual journey to go through, the process of… I call it staring deep into the human condition because things are not good and yet if you look on the other side of that same coin of being not good there’s some very positive stuff going in and that’s what I’d like to discuss for the rest of the call if you’re okay with it.

Mik:
Absolutely, let’s hear. We can’t wait to hear what’s the good news.

Michael:
Well, the more technical explanation of it is something called punctuated equilibrium. And that’s a biological term, which means that circumstances apply such pressure on a living system that it forces it to jump into a higher order of complexity. The simplest way of thinking about it is a balloon. You’ve blown up the balloon and now you apply a pin to the balloon and it pops and the air in the balloon very quickly.

It equalises with the air that’s around it so you get a moment of a punctuated equilibrium and then everything returns to a form of stasis so think about a very calm lake and all of a sudden the calmness is punctuated by a landslide a massive slide of rocks come crashing into the lake and That the calmness is completely disturbed but leave it for long enough and eventually it returns to being a calm lake again

So that’s a simple way of explaining the biological process of punctuated equilibrium. And so I’ve developed a theory of change around this exact process. It’s fairly complex, but what it helps us do is shift our thinking from systems change is something that we have to do to rather saying that systems change is something that happens.

And there’s a process behind which it happens I had to put together a model which I think I can explain fairly quickly. But let me just check in with you there. Is that concept of punctuated equilibrium… is that making sense?

Mik:
I think so. We experienced the biggest thing I think many of us have experienced in terms of collapse was the COVID crisis. And at that time, a lot of people talked about a hiatus, that society was in a hiatus. And then the climate movement began to experiment with the thinking of that maybe we need to really positively look forward to a ‘climate hiatus’ in society and that it’s not a problem, but actually something that we will all benefit from eventually once we have come through it. So I think the thinking has been around.

Michael:
It has. Absolutely. And so my work looks at this from the level of human coordination systems. I’m one of the things I seem to be very good at is picking up on weak signals. So exactly what you’ve just mentioned is very much what has happened. There was a shift in the way we think. Now, not that this doesn’t mean that it applies to everybody in society, but there’s always your leading edge. So around about 5 per cent of society that sees exactly what you’ve just described.

And so where I start is if that’s true, where is this pointing us to? And can we build mental models that help us understand that this is a biological process and therefore we can predict what’s going to happen. and, that’s kind of in the space that I’m in. So for me, there’ve been two major resets with the third coming. This is my interpretation of matters. The first is COVID, as you mentioned.

The second is the Trump administration who is showing how quickly things can be changed at a policy level.

Then the third reset that is, I think, fairly close, is an economic reset.

So if we think about Bretton Woods that happened just after World War Two, that was a major reset of the global economic system. And I believe we’re going to see that as the third reset. And then we can talk about some of the outcomes that will come as a result of that. So those two events view them from a biological punctuated equilibrium process and you’ll start seeing how our human coordination systems are going through a very very significant change now. I can unpack that in more detail, but again, let me just check in is this making sense?

Mik: (at 16:48)
It makes sense, however, it’s hard to see the good news in this. I mean, there’s a lot of people who are really scared when you mentioned Trump and the authoritarian way of running the world and what that will mean to us, you know, individually. Cost of living crisis is also on everybody’s mind.

Michael:
Let’s pick up on that quickly. So firstly, when I mentioned any political leaders name, I’m not either for or against them. I’m seeing them as part of a human coordination system that’s unfolding. So you’ve mentioned the word authoritarianism. That’s a key theme that emerges in phases five, six and seven. Seven is basically the collapse. It’s when everything – the familiar… It’s the end of the familiar. And then you have a crossover point of the new emerging at the same time. So that’s Phase 7.

Phase 6 is full on totalitarianism and in every just about every Westernised country in the world, including in Australia, there are signs of early authoritarianism emerging and it’s not in the United States. It’s not any Trump but the team of very wealthy individuals that he’s amassed around him, or all part of an authoritarian process unfolding I can point to individual incidents, but I think if you know – for the purpose of this conversation – is trying to keep it fairly high level, the point of all of that is that authoritarianism is to be expected. It has happened 26 times in human history before it’s part of the process. We shouldn’t be surprised by it. What we do is figure out how as individuals we respond to that, and I can unpack more of that as we go on. Again, just checking in: Are we still making sense?

Mik: (at 18:28)
Well, so another thing that we also have seen examples of here in Australia, and certainly if you look towards New Zealand, is the Prepper movement: The people who say that ‘We better get ready, folks!’ and they start… they move out in small eco-villages, or they move out on the countryside, and they begin to stock up, and learn all the skills that are needed once society has collapsed. That’s actually happening, and we’ve had some of these people talk in our program about that – what’s driving them, and so on. So again, it’s not a very positive future that they’re foreseeing. It’s one where people are running around with guns and stealing food from each other.

Michael:
Yeah, and that’s not an evolutionarily coherent response. But when you’re looking at it from a human coordination perspective, it’s to be expected. So firstly, I want to bring in the concept that there are two overlapping groups of people here. The first is the Preppers, and the other is the Bio-regional region regenerative people. There’s preppers on the one side and simultaneously there’s a whole lot of people running around restoring environments specifically by regions – and a region is something defined by the lay of the land, the mountains, the rivers, the cultures within that by region. So there’s massive amount of work happening in that space because they see that there’s an ecological collapse and they’re concerned about restoring the environment.

So these are early signs from a human coordination systems perspective. These are ‘weak signals’ of what comes next. I believe that we as a species will build on that, and if the time is right, I can unpack why I say that and why I think this is actually very good news. So view Prepper just as an early… that’s the canary in the coal mine, giving us an early taste of some pretty rough times to come.

Mik: (at 20:26)
So yes, please, we’re really waiting for you to unfold the positive story in all the negativity. Can I say that also, I think a lot of Hollywood movies have influenced our minds. We have seen films that really show a very dystopian future where things get pretty grim once everything falls apart and we don’t have the usual safety mechanisms anymore.

Michael:
Yes. Firstly, I’m aware that there’s enough bad news that if we focused on it, things would look pretty grim. And I’m not sure that that helps us from an evolutionary perspective. So what I’ve done is put together, I’ve called it the 3M model and I’ll explain it fairly quickly and then we can go into whichever level of detail you’d like to. So if you imagine a Rubik’s cube and we’ve got three layers, so top, middle and lower, and then each of those layers have three major topics that you need to consider within them.

So the three M’s stand for Metaphysics, Metacrisis and Municipalities. So at the highest level, when I say metaphysics, I’m talking about how we make sense of the reality that we see around us. Very often the word metaphysics is interpreted incorrectly by some philosophical, spiritual woo woo nonsense that has no applicability to real life but I view it differently, so I had a very interesting understanding of religion which critiquing and questioning what we perceive to be as reality to get to a scientific understanding of what is reality really, and so my view in this metaphysical space is that the universe exists to evolve meaningfully and purposely, and so to back that up.

She’s collated all kinds of scientific research that starts from the splitting of the the cells split and eventually that process led to us humans coming out of that evolutionary process. So if we view that as a very intentional process of the universe every time there’s a crisis. So when dinosaurs were wiped out we mammals appeared on the scene. So there was a higher order of complexity, and there’s a lot of science that lays this out as a structure that is busy unfolding.

So then we come to the Metacrisis and now we can view the Metacrisis as another punctuated equilibrium moment in this very long process of the universe itself evolving, of which humans were introduced on the planet to speed up their progress, which is part of the next phase. So humans, there’s a lot of, there’s a view that humans have damaged the planet.

Well, that may be true, but when we were teenagers during the teenage years of any species growing, the growth is incredibly rapid and then it changes the shape of its growth. The growth curve more flattens out.

So view the Metacrisis as that process of the human species ending their teenage years and now stepping into more of the wise elder years with their development.

View the Metacrisis not as a drama, but rather is that pressure point that enables the leap to the next thing. And the next thing you… So firstly, let’s go back to cover solid ground – I’m covering lots of ground here very quickly hoping it’s all holding together – in the record of 26 civilisations that have risen and fallen every single one of those were a class based civilisation which creates the one percent problem you’ve got the hierarchy you’ve got people concentrating wealth at the top of that pyramid.

I believe humanity is poised at a moment now where after this collapse what could emerge is the opposite of a class-based civilisation. This time it’s a values-based civilisation. And the indigenous people around the world are living examples of what a values-based civilisation is. So the aborigines in Australia is an example, the Khoisan in southern Africa is an example, the North American Indians is another example. There was no hierarchy, and yet they had very intricate forms of governance.

And so I believe that the human species is at that point where our consciousness has developed sufficiently. We have all of the global networks to communicate globally, and so what you’ll have is a body of humans stepping into a values-based human coordination system, which to me is profound.

But I’m going to stop there because of covered a lot of ground. Is it making sense?

Mik:
It does make sense, however, let’s say that there is a collapse as you talk about, how are we going to feel secure in terms of, you know, if hospitals are not working or if there’s people running around with guns and the rest of it? How do we keep our societies peaceful if things are falling apart?

Michael:
So that brings us onto the third of the three M’s. So just as a reminder, we did Metaphysics, we did Metacrisis, and the third is Municipalities. So I believe that municipalities will be the hub from which new forms of human coordination systems and governance systems emerges. However, it will only happen where the people of a particular municipality can work in partnership with the municipality to understand what is coming from a collapse perspective – and then to introduce these new forms of human coordination systems.

So rather than answering your question, ‘What are we going to do about hospitals and people running around with guns?’ – that’s going to happen and it’ll be prevalent in cities where the mayor has not figured out this evolutionary process underway, and he cannot do it on a… he cannot do that on their own.

It will require citizens within that municipality to figure this stuff out first and go to the municipality with a partnership proposal that says, ‘This is how we’re going to navigate it’.

The core of this level of navigation is a credit-based monetary system, a mutual credit monetary system issued by the municipality and accepted by the municipality as payment for rates and services. This goes into deep modern monetary theory, which we won’t have time to unpack here.

But to the extent that the municipality can issue those credits, and there’s examples of this called the Virgil from wartime areas, there’s a precedent of how it works. It’s basically a token system.

So what happens is you have national government issuing a debt-based monetary system, which is the mechanism by which we’ve enforced constant growth because there’s a requirement to repay interest. And now you’ve got bioregions represented by municipalities issuing their own credit-based mutual aid currency system and your hospital services will come from community driven mutual aid health services. Food production, all of those things will be driven by the community supported by the municipality.

That’s the highest 50,000-foot level view of it I can give, but we can unpack at any level that you’re comfortable in.

Tony:
On that, I’m just wondering how the localisation movement fits into that. There are communities that are doing that, heading down that path already. Is that the sort of thing you’re talking about?

Michael:
It’s exactly the same thing. View the localised community thing, bio-regionals, preppers, these are simply early examples of human coordination systems springing up. They will, over time, mature and improve, particularly when they no longer see government as the enemy, because it’s in the metacrisis work, there’s still a lot of us versus them thinking. So, only when we can shift our mental capacity to say, Yes, the way we’ve coordinated human activity has evolved and is busy evolving and we’re all part of this whole journey anyway. Fossil fuels, all those things that many of the activists assume are so bad for the environment. Yes, they’re bad, but it also allowed this rapid growth period during our teenage years. And now we don’t point fingers at government, we don’t point fingers at the fossil fuel. We say, thank you so much for the progress that you enabled.

We’re coming together with you now to figure out what the next phase of our evolution is. There was a bit of a long answer, but the localism part of this process is incredibly important. We’re shifting focus from nation states, and we also have actors that are viewing human coordination systems from a global perspective. This is the World Economic Forum in the United Nations, World Health Organizations. The global coordination of human systems will not work. It’s not how nature works, and it’s not going to work in a human system. It will come from local people and then all of that aggregating up to a global system, but not global to local.

Mik:
It reminds me, Tony… do you remember when we talked about the Ecological Civilisation? I think it was back in 2019. We ran a whole theme in The Sustainable Hour where we talked about… In China, they were at that time actually using the word ‘ecological civilisation’ in Chinese and describing that as the vision for their future. Could that be a word that you associate with? And before you answer me: when will we get there? Because it sounds like you have a timeline in mind?

Michael: (at 30:04)
So I’ll answer in two parts. Firstly, the Chinese vision of an ecological civilisation. I agree with the principle, the idea in principle. However, they are implementing it in a very authoritarian top-down mechanism. They are enabling local groups to do it, but it’s still being driven very much from the top. So from a human coordination perspective, this will not be top-down. You’ve got to understand the Hegelian dialectical process.

George Hagel himself didn’t use this phrase, but it’s an easy way to understand it. You’ve got thesis, you’ve got antithesis, and you’ve got synthesis. So thesis and antithesis come together and clash heads a bit, and they churn their way through a process, and out of it comes a synthesis. So the thesis at the moment is top-down, authoritarian-style global coordination of all human activities. That’s the thesis. That’s what the World Economic Forum is pushing for.

The antithesis is bottom-up activist-led local movements that we’ve just been discovering. They’re going to in some way clash heads very significantly and in terms of a time scale it’s between now and 2030. 2030 is the date that the World Economic Forum has set. That’s kind of seeded into human consciousness and you’ll hear a lot of conversations around 2030 being a key date.

Now the synthesis that will come out of that is taking the best of the thesis, which is human coordination systems at a global scale, but taking into account the antithesis, which is the more activist led stuff. And when you mix municipalities into the middle of that, it’s no longer either top down or bottom up, neither of which will work on their own, but it’s middle out. So municipality represents middle out, which is the synthesis of thesis and antithesis.

Tony:
The science is saying that mentioning 2030 as a crisis point, I guess, and you’re talking about it. So all that can be achieved in five years, do you think?

Michael:
Well, the point of a punctuated equilibrium moment is that it cannot rely on linear progress. And this is where I have an issue with the systems change space. They viewing these changes as incredibly linear and predictable processes. This is not linear and it’s certainly not predictable. It will require a massive shift and it will unfortunately require the pin pricking the balloon. There will be an external event more than likely economic that will trigger the pressure point sufficiently for these massive changes to happen.

So let’s imagine a city where they’re completely unorganised. There’s no level of this kind of thinking or conversation going on. The outcome for that city is going to be incredibly messy, incredibly authoritarian. The 15 minute cities, I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase where everything is watched and monitored using technology. That’s one outcome for a city where the constituents, the people living in that space or not having these level of conversations. The other outcome is where citizens and I prefer the word ‘denizen’ because that’s place-based. Denizens and their municipalities are working in a conscious acknowledgement of what’s going on thesis and tithesis. And they working together on a synthesis so that when this new economic system, which I believe will be the pinprick, they have an alternative and they step into this mutual credit system where local people trade with each other.

This is big stuff we’re talking about. But don’t ask, I believe it doesn’t help us, to ask the question, is this all going to happen in time? When you take a linear approach, it appears impossible. When you take an evolutionary perspective that this will be a very rapid shift in a very short space of time, it’s possible.

Mik: (at 34:04)
And we see… certainly in nature, for instance, one year there’s not very many bees or butterflies and then suddenly there’s a year where there’s butterflies everywhere and they came out of nowhere, that’s how it feels. Nature is like that, isn’t it?

Michael:
Yeah. Well, you know, let’s acknowledge we’re in a bad space, but linear thinking is not going to get out of it. If we think evolutionary and think momentous leaps and all the stuff that we’ve covered in the brief minutes that we’ve been together.

And so maybe I can suggest ways in which if anybody’s listening to this and they’re asking the question, well, what can I do and how can I get involved is firstly, get your head around this concept of the universe evolving and reaching higher levels of complexity as a process and we are part of that one significant shift in that process and how we address what happens in this time is very much up to the individual level.

It’s no longer up to national leaders, it’s not even up to our mayors in our municipalities, it’s up to the people living in the municipality that can see what’s going on and they put together a plan amongst themselves, approach the municipality and say this is what we want to do.

I’m working with a team based in Canada that have a process for engaging with municipalities, but it requires the citizens to organise themselves first around this level of thinking.

. . .

SONG

‘Symphony of the Shift’
Audio file

[Verse 1]
At first we saw it as a climate crisis
Then we found it to be so much more
As threads began to unravel
And the meta crisis converged
Inequality, control
oligarchs and emperors

[Bridge]
The world we knew started crumbling
But that’s when we found direction
We discovered that old song
of the natural evolution

[Chorus]
There’s a signal in the chaos
There’s a stirring in the wave
This is our time, this is our reality
This is our symphony – of the Shift

[Verse 2]
They were midwives of what came next
as humans gave birth to a values-based path
interconnected, indigenous direction
seedbeds emerging, regeneration

[Bridge]
There was an invitation
There was collective imagination
The mechanics were the easy part
The mindset was the harder climb
Breaking down hierarchies
Stopping extraction – and the greed

[Chorus]
There’s a signal in the chaos
There’s a stirring in the wave
This is our time, this is our reality
This is our symphony – of the Shift

[Intermission – spoken]
The shift is not above or below
It’s middle-out
It’s local
It’s conscious
It’s creative
It’s alive

[Verse 3]
Not in palaces, not with power
But in hands that plant
In hearts that listen
Cocreate with compassion
Every rupture
opens doors to complexity
A call to coherence

[Chorus]
There’s a signal in the chaos
There’s a stirring in the wave
This is our time, this is our reality
This is our symphony – of the Shift

[Outro]
Evolutionary impulse
We’ve found our voice
These are our choices
These are our values
This is our world
When we listened, we could hear
the world ask us to grow up
and come home

Audio clips in the song:

Antonio Guterres:
If we are not able to reverse the present trend that is leading to catastrophe in the world, we are doomed.

Michael:
This is big stuff we talk about.

Sir David King, former British Chief Scientist:
We have to move rapidly.

Michael:
This is big stuff we’re talking about. It requires the citizens to organise themselves first.

Michael:
It will be a global values-based civilisation. When nation states have disappeared completely, we view each other as a global family caring for the host that is carrying us around this universe because the planet itself is evolving and we are agents of that evolutionary process.

Michael:
Is this all going to happen in time?

. . .

Mik: (at 39:33)
We are talking to Michael Haupt, who is in Cape Town at the moment, who has been in Sydney and around the world, first with a technical mind and now in a very sort of, I would say almost spiritual mind, talking about the future of humanity and how nature works and many, many big questions. You’ve talked about us humanity being like teenagers. We’ve been fired up with the fossil fuels, but now we’re coming into adulthood. I would like to introduce a baby in your analogy there, and the baby is called AI. It’s only a couple of years old, and it’s just begun, if you compare it to a baby, it has just learned its first steps and begun to say its first words you could say. But if you imagine what AI could look like in, I don’t know, five years, 10 years, the speed of development with AI is so fast that it’s in a way scary, because how intelligent will that collective brain be at some point?

Imagine, for instance, that it can figure out things about the universe, questions and riddles and mysteries that scientists have not yet been able to grasp. Suddenly this megabrain will be able to understand these things that we little humans have barely been able to grasp. What could that mean and how do you introduce that little baby into your picture?

Michael:
There’s two important things to keep in mind when we talk about AI. The first is that AI, as we currently understand it, is only trained on everything that makes up the material consciousness. So in this version of collapse, I refer to two different types of consciousness, which we should have maybe covered in the beginning. So material consciousness is what has driven our progress ever since, let’s say, the Industrial Revolution.

So very rapid material domination of our material world with very little focus on I prefer the word metaphysical rather than spiritual purely because of the way people interpret the words. But what’s emerging now is something called mycelial consciousness related to mycelial networks. It’s all connected different species talking to each other. So in the localism and the bioregion is a movement there are there is evidence of this mycelial consciousness emerging.

Why that’s relevant to AI is just for us to keep in mind that all of the models are currently trained only on material consciousness. And so it’s going to limit us no matter how clever we are with our prompts. It will keep us firmly attached to material consciousness. And as long as we’re using AI within that space, it’s not going to help with our progress at all. However, and this is where I’m hugely excited, there are scientists working in the AI space and that are independent from the developers of the platforms themselves.

Less than 24 hours ago, I was made aware of a particular prompt that a French scientist has discovered, which I tested very briefly and I was absolutely floored because this is now stepping into the more philosophical aspect of where are we as a species going. It’s going to take some work. It’s still very early days.

But this is where if we can see this bifurcation in the way AI is used. If you’re helping to progress material consciousness, you’re going to get the same results as what we’ve got so far. That to me is not useful. It has temporary benefits, but it’s not useful from an evolutionary perspective. When we learn how to use AI at the level that I’ve just briefly mentioned here, I’m not clever enough to explain exactly how it works, but it’s profound. And that is the use of AI that is incredibly encouraging to me.

Tony:
The group in Canada that you’re referring to is that from a specific city? And are there any other models of best practice maybe?

Michael:
So I can mention the group because they’re already public but we’re still refining the whole process so that they called Enterprise Evolution and they have a six-year track record of taking two municipalities in Canada. One is Kitchener, the name of the city is Kitchener, and the other city is Nanaimo. And they’ve backed up the process with academic research. Really what this group has done is quite phenomenal.

So they’ve documented the process of taking a municipality through a mechanism or shifting mindsets. Now the extent to which the outcome of the process is successful depends very much on the leadership within the municipality and their willingness to see the process through. Let me say from a mental perspective, this is challenging, challenging stuff because we questioning everything that we accept as current reality.

So what we believe about money is the first very challenging thing to get your head around. And then this whole concept of top-down control, that’s something that has to be challenged.

So the mechanisms of getting there is incredibly simple when you look at it from a human evolution perspective. But the software, the most challenging software that needs to be upgraded before any of this can work is our headspace. It will happen when there’s a crisis moment. So our headspace shifts very quickly.

When is an emergency you’ll see this in communities when they are floods when they are fires you’ve seen this in australia communities come together very quickly and put aside the old way of thinking how the world works they don’t wait for local government to come and help their friends and families get together and figure out this stuff.

9/11 was another moment where communities got together the people living in new york and around those towers figured stuff out very very quickly without waiting for outside direction as to what to do.

So those moments of extreme crisis is going to create human ingenuity and creativity at levels that we haven’t seen before and to the extent that we can be prepared for that moment you’ll have an even greater leap when it comes to that crisis moment.

Tony:
I’m just wondering, like the problems that are the meta-crisis that were in to a large extent have been driven, been caused, motivated by greed, acquiring more, like extracting more, etc. etc. And that the mindset will change to more of the common good.

Michael:
Yeah, so there’s an issue here around any discussion around human nature. It tends to be fairly binary. In other words, a human is either greedy and selfish or they’re more community minded and collaborative and supportive. And that’s not necessarily true. We have a range of approaches. So every individual is equally greedy and equally collaborative. It depends on the system into which you place that human. So the system determines behavior that was a key thing from the metal meadows the work that she did in systems change. And so the right now we’re all operating in a system that encourages us to be greedy and selfish reach the top of the pile become the best of the best.

And what’s emerging is a different system in which we much more collaborative and so depending on how deep each individual is within that deeply steeped mode of operating and it’s not a human nature thing it’s a system determining behavior thing. Some will find it very easy to walk away from it and where it’s going to be challenging is very wealthy people. Because your wealth overnight is going to mean nothing you know hate to talk frankly about this but this is the extent of the economic reset that’s coming and they’ve warned us about it you will know nothing and be happy this is their way of projecting what’s coming and most of us ignore it we all say look at them who do they think they are well.

They are pulling the strings at the moment and for those individuals who have a huge, you know, they put a huge amount of effort into planning their retirement and their investments and all the rest, it’s going to be a very difficult shift for those individuals to make those who have less the shift will actually be easier for them because they they’re not that attached to this mental model of what we believe to be money. Money is just an agreement between us. There’s no real value as much as you may think your investment has value, that value can disappear overnight. That’s a very tough mental shift to make, which is why I’m saying the mechanics of what we’re talking about is easy. The mental shift stopping us from doing it is the most challenging piece.

Mik:
So what will be the way forward in terms of anticipating a crisis, an emergency that will give us the kick and will shift our minds? In the meantime, at a practical level, what should we be doing, for instance, here in Geelong? Should we start something, a movement of, let’s just call it as a working title, a ‘climate community’? And the climate community follows Michael Haupt’s idea. We read what you have written, we see what they have done in Canada, and we learn. And in that way, we begin to create that resilience that is needed, but also begin that process of changing our minds.

Michael: (at 49:01)
So if I may frame it in a way that was useful to me, this is not comfortable, but it was helpful to me to shift how we think about stuff. And the frame is that anybody concerned currently about climate only or being able to do something from an individual perspective that is going to stop something happening is a convenient distraction.

And what I mean by that is that this thesis, which is the top down human control system, wants to keep us as busy as we possibly can, doing ultimately useless things, including responding to the supposed crisis called climate change. The more meaningful response is to say: ‘Hold on, this is an evolutionary process. We understand the concept of the thesis. We understand that as busy-busy-busy well-intentioned activists, we’re operating in the antithesis space and we were running around trying to stop climate change and plant trees and do all of those things but a better level of coordination is realising that a synthesis will come out of those two. One is the top down, and one is the bottom up approach, and let’s figure this out.’

This is not easy and there’s no recipe that we can just follow a hundred per cent. This has never happened in the history of human civilisation before. There’s a totally unique moment, but it’s up to us to figure out. And it’s not figuring out from the point of stopping climate crisis. It’s figuring out from a much more wise and conscious steering and navigating and working with… I call it: an evolutionary impulse, which is the innate organising principle within all living systems to organise itself and achieve higher levels of complexity.

That’s our role. It is to figure that out, and there’s… I’ve gathered huge amounts of research around this. I have a very substantial research database. That’s all open source. I believe I’ve shared it with the notes. You’re welcome to share that and either do your own deep dives into that research database which is full of rabbit holes, or look for people who can provide some kind of guidance. I’m hoping that I can do that in some way.

I am in the process now of publishing so I’ve published the punctuated equilibrium theory of change it’s called peter petoc and I’m currently publishing the models the 3M models which helps us just just very quickly get our mental minds together so there’ll be a book coming out later this year around those themes and hopefully the intention is so I work with a community here there’s 25,000 people, and the intention is to get these stories out to groups of people like, what I’m working with here, in a way, that’s easily understood and so that the message spreads and dissipates very quickly.

We are all used to memes and, you know, quick things on social media. This is a little bit deeper than that, but I still think we can create memes and stories around that idea. So I think that’s where the best use of our time is. If this resonates, how do we tell the story in the clearest, most succinct manner that we possibly can?

Mik:
So what do we call this story that you are mentioning at the highest level? We need something as simple as a community of some sort.

Michael: (at 52:28)
Yes, so I’m I have a bit of a marketing background and I’m thinking through that process now. It will be along the lines of a guidebook for evolutionary agents. That’s not the right term, but that’s the angle down which I’m taking. So we’re not seeing this as a meta crisis. We’ve seen this as an evolutionary process. And for those of us that want to play a role in it, we become either architects or engineers. Those are all very left brained and materialist. Consciousness terms but there’s a way of weaving this together it’s a symphony that we are conducting so

Mik:
So in a way, Michael, you’re suggesting moving our minds away from ecological and regenerational?

Michael:
So what I’m suggesting is that those actions that you’ve just mentioned are not unimportant, but there’s simply a consequence of these are the outcomes that will happen when we just shift our focus to an evolutionary process. And the outcome is going to be at some point, the only thing that we can’t answer is the time scale of this, but it will be a global values-based civilisation.

When nation states have disappeared completely, we view each other as a global family caring for the host that is carrying us around this universe because the planet itself is evolving and we are agents of that evolutionary process. Now that’s not going to happen overnight and I’m sure I’m not going to see it in my lifetime, maybe your audience may. I see this as a multi-generational process – but to the extent that we, our generation, can plant these seeds and provide a pathway.

I have a daughter who turns 21 in 2035. My view is that she will be a key player in this emerging consciousness. And it’s not going to happen by accident. I have to do something consciously to make that happen. And so if any of us are parents listening today, have that mindset. How can I bring up my child in a way that they’re going to be effective agents within a myceteal consciousness world. There’s lots of phrases here that currently don’t make any sense and we’ll refine them.

Mik:
But we will, yes Michael, we will need to know what will your daughter be? What will she be? Will she be an ‘evolutionist’? Or what’s the word for what she will be?

Michael:
So, what we’re doing now is applying material consciousness to answering that question. We’ve got to be siloed into very specific roles within society with a very specific method of study that we studied in university, we specialised in some other expertise. Instead, she is going to be a human being in relationship with nature and with those around her. She’s just a human being having an incredible experience in a thriving and abundant society. That’s my dream and and you know I will die trying to get to that perspective – not because it’s my efforts but because I can see this evolutionary process unfolding and to the extent that it can be accelerated and came to play a role in that for her benefit because I’m also not going to see them

Mik:
I’m still, Michael, I’m still going to hold you up on finding a name for the movement. You mentioned evolution as an important word for you, but it’s very difficult for me to say the word.

Yes, well I’m gonna push back and open it as an invitation to your audience and say let’s have a crowd source process If this has inspired you what sort of names would you come up with? And and let’s keep that conversation going That would be a good conversation to to keep going because you’ve got incredible people in your community that are sensing into this. They can feel this already maybe just haven’t had the way of expressing it and so they’re focused on climate change and climate solutions, but there will be people resonating very deeply with the conversation that we’ve had and said, yes, I’m going to come up with that new name and that would be incredible.

Mik: (at 56:42)
That’s all we could fit in this particular big vision, big picture sustainable hour. And with a call out to you, the listeners, that if you have an idea of what we’re talking about and what we should be calling this big next shift that is coming, a good simple name, then send an email to the sustainable hour, which our email address is actually quite simple, info @ TheSustainableHour.au

Colin:
Well that was certainly interesting and I would finish now by saying not just be the difference but be the big thinking difference.

Mik:
That’s a good one. Definitely be the evolutionary difference.

Colin:
As long as it’s not illusionary!

Mik: (at 57:30)
Hahaha

. . .

SONG:

‘Starting From Today’

Verse 1
Looking at your face right now
As you scroll through the headlines
I see the worry in your eyes
About the world we leave behind
And I know you’re wondering
If anyone will make it right
But baby, let me tell you something
That keeps me up at night

There’s still time to change the way
Things are going day by day
And when you feel like giving up
Remember what I say

I can be that difference
I can be that change
I can be that difference
Starting from today

Dad, I’ve seen the videos
Of how things used to be
Clear skies and clean waters
It’s hard to believe
But I’m not just sitting here
Waiting for a miracle
Got my friends beside me now
We’re making it possible

Every small step counts, they say
Little changes pave the way
When it seems too much to bear
Listen close, I swear

I can be that difference
I can be that change
I can be that difference
Starting from today

We rise together
Hand in hand we’ll find a way
We rise together
Every choice we make today
Shapes tomorrow’s way

I can be that difference
I can be that change
I can be that difference
Starting from today

We rise together
Starting from today

. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Events we have talked about in The Sustainable Hour

Events in Victoria

Sustainability Victoria is offering two webinars that showcase community-led Circular Economy Initiatives. Register now to learn more:
Wednesday 28 May Eliminate waste and pollution
Wednesday 11 June Regenerate natural systems

The following is a collation of Victorian climate change events, activities, seminars, exhibitions, meetings and protests. Most are free, many ask for RSVP (which lets the organising group know how many to expect), some ask for donations to cover expenses, and a few require registration and fees. This calendar is provided as a free service by volunteers of the Victorian Climate Action Network. Information is as accurate as possible, but changes may occur.

Petitions

→ List of running petitions where we encourage you to add your name

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Live-streaming on Wednesdays

The Sustainable Hour is streamed live on the Internet and broadcasted on FM airwaves in the Geelong region every Wednesday from 11am to 12pm (Melbourne time).

→ To listen to the program on your computer or phone, click here – or go to www.947thepulse.com where you then click on ‘Listen Live’ on the right.

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Podcast archive

Over 570 hours of sustainable podcasts.

Listen to all of The Sustainable Hour radio shows as well as special Regenerative Hours and Climate Revolution episodes in full length.

→ Archive on climatesafety.info – with additional links
→ Archive on podcasts.apple.com – phone friendly archive

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→ Podcasts and posts on this website about the climate emergency and the climate revolution

→ The latest on BBC News about climate change

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