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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week, as we watch our governments lay waste to our social agreements across the world, most obviously in the US, but clearly in other places too, it can be hard to imagine extending the franchise of legal rights and sovereignties to the more than human world. And yet, if we are going to transcend this moment, it must be because we have become something other than we are now. And to do this, we need the roadmaps that show us how to move through and beyond the collapse of the old into something new. A couple of weeks ago, we spoke to Ally Pimor about this, and when I first met her, I also met this week's guest, and each of them had so much to say that I wanted to talk to them separately. So with this in mind, this week's guest is Brontie Ansell, the founder and co-director of Lawyers for Nature, which is a group of lawyers who act to represent the natural world and the more than human communities. They provide legal assistance and research for anyone doing nature protection and nature inclusion work.
Manda: Brontie was the first human to act as the nature guardian, speaking on behalf of nature at the company Faith in Nature. Giving the natural world a voice and a vote on a corporate board for the first time in history. Previously, she was a lecturer in law, firstly at the University of Brighton and Sussex University, and then later at the University of Essex as an associate professor. Her teaching specialised in rights of nature, climate justice, employment law and land law. Her work is informed by the global Rights of Nature Movement, and she is grateful to all who came before her to create the bedrock for this work. Given the times we're in, we started the conversation with a quote from Elliott Morris and Strength in Numbers, which I was confusing with another organisation, when Strength in Numbers is in fact Elliott Morris's Substack blog. It is well worth reading, and I put a link in the show notes, along with a few others that I think are worth adding to your must read list every morning. You have one of those, right? Good. Last week, with his permission; hi Oli if you're still listening; I read from Oliver Kornetzke's Substack as part of the intro. I am not going to make a habit of this every week, at least I don't think I am, but I do want this week to read something from Jackie Summers blog, the one entitled Field Notes for Cracking an Empire, because it seems to me one of the most useful at the moment, and even writing it is an act of enormous courage.
Manda: She says: "If you've been reading my work for the last few years, none of this should be surprising. The old narratives are gone. This is what fascism looks like in real time. First, ICE agents killed Renee Nicole Good, a white woman. Now they've killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37 year old US citizen. A nurse with no criminal record. White women's bodies were supposed to be sacrosanct. Respectable professionals were supposed to be off limits. That is no longer the case. For black people this country has always been fascist, what's new is who else is inside the blast radius. The Venn diagram of safe and endangered is now a circle. If you're shaken, it's not just grief, it's narrative whiplash. The distance between 'this can't happen' and 'it just did', on camera, no longer exists. You have choices. You can either cling to the lie and let someone else keep paying, or pay the cost of updating the story about this country. About who is safe, about what you are willing to do now that protections are gone. I've said it before; empire can handle outrage. It has no defence against empathy at scale. Outrage spikes, trends and fades. Empathy which says 'it can be me. It already is them' changes what people are willing to risk and protect. This is recruitment by atrocity; your blood spilled right in the streets, just like ours. It shouldn't take this. It always has.
Manda: Those are the opening paragraphs. And what follows is one of the most cogent, clear, useful, grounded lists of how we can all join what Greg Bovino, the head of ICE, called over the weekend well organised anarchists. And if that's what we are, I'm not sure that's bad. At the end of her blog, Jackie writes: 'if you're going out, your first job is coming home. If you're staying home, your first job is staying human'. I am speaking to you from the privilege and safety of a rural home in the UK. I am absolutely certain that the death cult would like to take over the UK in the way it is currently trying to take over the US, and I hope when it starts we have the same courage to resist. As somebody said over the weekend, if they're going to try to break America, it's good they started in Minnesota,because we know how to look after one another. So wherever you are in the world, please start looking after one another, now. And for ideas on how to transcend this moment of how we can build back better, people of the podcast, please welcome Brontie Ansell of Lawyers for Nature.
Manda: Brontie Ansell, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this kind of grey January morning?
Brontie: Hi. So I'm good. I am feeling particularly like we're moving into quite a different phase now, so I feel like the the old 2025 is finally shedding and I think we're sort of galloping towards a new space. So yeah, it feels really positive in some ways for me. I know that's not the same for everybody, but my world is all feeling really great.
Manda: Brilliant.
Brontie: Where am I? I'm in the northern hemisphere, in a place where the trees are still very brown and spiky, but the crocuses are out, the daffodils are out. Yeah, there's a few buds, a few shoots of growth. So it feels like spring is literally knocking at the door for me. So yeah, that's me.
Manda: You must be quite a ways south of us because our snowdrops have only just come up. I can see the daffodils are thinking about it, but we certainly haven't seen a crocus yet.
Brontie: Yeah. We're quite in the south here.
Manda: Right. And the nights are getting slightly shorter. Used to be when the puppy got me up, it was still very, very dark and now I can almost go downstairs without a torch, so this is good. Anyway, you're one of the co-founders of Lawyers for Nature, which says, amongst many other things, 'we imagine a world in which nature has legal rights and we act as though it does'. And yet we are recording on the Monday after Alex Pretti was shot on the streets of Minneapolis. And last night, Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, which I do not think is a particularly hardcore left wing organisation, far from it, said of the United States: the consent of the governed has been withdrawn. Which I think is what you were referring to a little in terms of 2025 felt like everybody was gearing up for something. And 2026 has seen the something begin to unleash. And I'm well aware that in the majority south and Iraq and Venezuela and lots of the Middle East, particularly Gaza, the consent of the governed was withdrawn a long time ago. But it hasn't been withdrawn in the US, probably since what we call the War of Independence and they call the Revolutionary War. And so we're in a point where who decides what's legal, feels to me, is becoming really relevant again. And there was one of the definitions of fascism, which is, let me get this right; there's an in-group that is protected but not constrained, and an outgroup that is constrained but not protected. And following that definition of authoritarianism, the people at the top decide which laws apply to them and which laws apply to everybody else, and that we're in that territory now. And as a lawyer, I wonder how that feels for you.
Brontie: Yeah, it's a lot. A lot. I think the stories we tell ourselves are really, really fascinating. I get completely obsessed with the stories we tell ourselves. And I think what's becoming really apparent to most people is that law is just a story. It really is just another story. And I think we've been in this incredibly privileged position for a good many decades, whereby most people understand law to be statutory. So people petition their MP and that MP takes a proposition to the government, the government supports the legislation, the legislation goes through, the legislation exists. There's no retrospective aspect to that legislation and everybody knows the law and now we have a new law and off we go, right?
Manda: In an ideal world. Has that worked like that for a while?
Brontie: Well, I think that has been people's understanding of law. Even with the stuff around the European Union, people did understand that the European Union largely made law through process. But I think what's becoming really apparent with the points that you've just made, is that law starts way before that. I mean, law starts as morality, it starts as ethics. It really does start as a story around a campfire, you know, shall we behave like this? Shall we say that? Shall we treat things like this? Shall we treat people like that? And sometimes that takes a very long time to work its way through to the legislative system. And other times it's almost instantaneous, where there's a flip, and the social contract is broken and completely ripped up and destroyed. And we are scrabbling around saying, what on earth has just happened? And I think that when we think about law as a story that some humans tell other humans, we do really quickly realise how fluid it is, and and how important the storyteller is in that. The amount of power they hold, the options for constraining that power, the options for sharing that power. I think there's only been honest conversations about power in some circles. You know, the vast majority of people understand that power exists, but they don't necessarily critically examine it, who's holding it, how they're constrained, until something really awful or radical or destructive or terrible happens. And they say, well how? How did that happen? And then you have to explain, well, the power wasn't constrained in the ways we thought it was. Or the constraints weren't strong enough, or they weren't diverse enough, or they weren't diffused across a number of structures enough. And so, yeah, constitutional power is absolutely fascinating. And I think it's the spaces in between that we never watch.
Manda: Right, right.
Brontie: And that fascinates me as well. It's the stuff of the aether. It's the swirling dust in between the big hard rocks. And that's so fascinating because we can look at constitutional structures and we can go, well, they can't do that and they can't do that. But then they do all this stuff in between and you just go, how? What? When? You know, and it's because there's those gaps and they can be exploited. And of course, sometimes they can just ride roughshod over the hard corners as well, you know. So.
Manda: Well, exactly. I mean, it seems to me, particularly in the US, but also with Boris Johnson in the UK, they just decided that certain laws did not apply to them. And I think there's a particular class of people, particularly in the UK, the public school boys; and I use that gender very explicitly; who have always believed that the law did not apply to them in any way. And then they get into power and what's different now is that they're not masking it anymore. The masks have come off. And as many, many people have been explaining over the weekend, it has always been thus for the not white, not men, throughout our trauma culture. It's just that it's becoming more obvious. And it's now that the in-group is narrowing very fast. The people that they will defend but not constrain is basically now straight white men. And not even that. Straight white men who agree with their politics. So there were a lot of the right wing over the weekend saying that basically anybody who disagrees with the current administration in the US is a domestic terrorist and therefore is fair game. Without going into that in huge detail, what I'd like to explore, I really resonate with this idea that our world is the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. And that we often don't examine them because we're kind of skating across the top of a shared unreality and a shared sort of agreement.
Manda: And we don't explore the depths of that agreement too deeply until it begins to fall apart. So, for instance, I'm watching a lot of people online exploring the Second Amendment in rather more detail than they were previously. Because Alex was carrying a gun that he did not touch and that had been removed from him before he was shot, but the fact that he carried it suddenly, for certain aspects of the political body in the US, is evidence of terrorism. When previously Kyle Rittenhouse turned up, an underage boy with an automatic rifle that he could not have been licensed to have, and that's his Second Amendment right, because he was shooting at black people. I think the hypocrisy is more obvious now. And I'm also really thinking of David Allen Green, who up until now has been the constitutional lawyer in the UK to whom I pay most attention, who said, quoting one of his lectures that he never names, but he says his name is on the spine of all the books that will be in a legal library.
Manda: And he said: "domestic law is a matter of record, foreign law is a matter of expert opinion, and international law is largely a fiction" which we have seen also recently with Trump just, you know, international law is what he says it is or not what he says it is, you know. Greenland is or is not an independent nation depending on whichever strange wave of geriatric insanity has passed across his brain most recently. And yet, we're also discovering that the national law that we thought was fairly well documented, is also open to the interpretation of, in the US, the Supreme Court and over here, various other legal bodies. In your world as a lawyer, given that it feels like the things that we thought were written in stone are actually just basically traced on the sand and the tide has swept over them, how would we begin to establish the moral and ethical boundaries that could take us forward into a world where the human and more than human worlds have once again got space to flourish? Does that make sense as a question?
Brontie: Oh, totally. Yeah. I think first of all, most people are coming to the reckoning or the understanding that something's got to give, right? And a lot of us are working incredibly hard to try and figure out what comes next. And I think if you're asking me personally, I'm fairly convinced by theories that contain aspects of care, justice and fairness. And I think if we were to be able to wipe the slate clean and really start again with our constitutional structures, our governing structures, our power sharing structures, 'what would we do?' is probably the question of our time. I'm quite persuaded by John Rawls theory of justice.
Manda: Tell me more.
Brontie: And I've done some thinking around that and think that we could, in fact, quite quickly adapt that to start to think about governing with nature and governing with the natural aspects of the natural world. So, I don't know if you know much about John Rawls' theory of justice?
Manda: No, please tell us, because I don't and I don't think the audience will do either.
Brontie: So, summing up someone's life's work in a minute or two, the pressure.
Manda: In a sentence would be fine. Yes. Go for it.
Brontie: Ideal. Yeah of course. Here we go. So the easiest way to explain this is if we had an island and we took 100 people there, and we said to them all, we're going to create a power sharing constitutional structure to make this island work for everybody. And when I say everybody, I don't just mean the humans, I mean the more than human, the water systems, the air systems, everything. And he says the best thing you could do is tell all 100 people that they will never know what position they will get. So they will design all those positions. Maybe they'll even design a king or a queen. They'll design administrative positions, they'll design probably a police force. But they'll never know for sure what position they're going to get.
Brontie: And Rawls calls that the veil of innocence. And it creates a system on our island whereby you cannot help but engage with justice, fairness and equality because you could at any moment become an earthworm. You could at any moment become a refugee. You could become a queen, you become a butterfly, you could be living under the water system, you could be living in the mountains, you could be living by the beach. So you could be holding huge amounts of power for three months, and then have that taken away from you under the structures that we design, because your time has come to an end and you now are moved into a different part of society. So he says, once you ask that of a group of people, you genuinely get engagement with equality, fairness, justice. And you get what is termed distributive justice rather than retribution and retributive justice. And I think for me, that's where some of the gold lies. So we spend, as lawyers particularly, but society spends a huge amount of time on retribution.
Manda: That has been demonstrated not to work.
Brontie: Right, exactly. So, you know, we spend a huge amount of time going, this awful thing has gone wrong. You know, there's this wrinkle in society, whether it's environmental crime or whether it's human on human crime, human on animal crime, fraud. And we don't like it. We say, well, you know, this awful thing happens, let's punish all of those involved.
Manda: As long as they weren't particularly rich, in which case we just let them off or ignore it or hide the files forever.
Brontie: Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, that kind of justice is so flawed in so many ways, and I wouldn't sit here and pretend anything else. But when you engage with retribution, it's really just one version of justice. And I think, going back to the stories we tell ourselves, the fictions and actual fiction, you know, people drafting all the time books on crime, true crime, fictional crime. All of that is a focus on on retribution and finding the perpetrator and punishing the perpetrator and holding them to account. And I think one of the things we need to do with our systems is really start to think much more about distributive justice from the very beginning. Distributive fairness and equality from the very beginning. I think that if we did that and we genuinely started to have a sensible conversation about equality and fairness for all, including the more than human and all ecosystems, and we engage with the veil of innocence, that could be such an interesting proposition, right?
Manda: Yes, totally. Has anybody done this?
Brontie: Well, I mean, lots of people have written about John Rawls theory of justice. Off the top of my head, I don't know if anybody has started to engage with it from a rights of nature perspective.
Manda: Or even a human perspective.
Brontie: Yeah. I mean, loads of people have written about it from a human on human perspective.
Manda: But I mean, actually implemented it. I'm thinking, has Iceland or, you know, a small Nordic country ever actually done this?
Brontie: I mean, yeah, for sure. It's a really well documented theory of justice. And certainly good politicians have engaged with aspects of it. And I think that's fine. I mean, I'm a firm believer that you don't need to haul absolutely everything in and do absolutely everything that it says. But the fact remains is that the large powers, particularly of the West, haven't engaged with it at all, really.
Manda: Well, it would be antithetical to the way that they currently run. I'm thinking that the Mondragon cooperative in Spain did something very similar, in that people were randomly moved through within the businesses, they were randomly moved between the businesses and from managerial positions down to the shop floor. You would have a managerial position for maybe a year, and then you'd be back to something else. And it worked really well.
Brontie: That's exactly it. Yeah. And you just never know. So you have to behave as if at any moment you could be changed around. And we're not saying necessarily that those positions are better or worse, it's just that you're in a different part of society. So you have to engage with rules that would allow the vast majority of people to be treated fairly at most of the time. I mean, we could spend all day on Rawls Theory of Justice. I think for me it probably needs to be tempered a little bit by an ethic of care.
Manda: Right. So talk to me a little bit about that. How would that work?
Brontie: Well, so my current existential crisis over breakfast, much to my child's dismay, is what on earth are humans on the planet for? Because I think the more time you spend in nature, the more time you spend with animals, with beetles and bugs, and with moths and slime and trees, you know, you think, what are we here for? What exactly do we do as a species, compared to all these other fantastical creatures that exist around us? So this is my current existential crisis, and the only way I'm solving it right now is, is with with the concept of care. And I think that our society, I think part of the great remembering or some people have said to me, it's the great re-remembering, because actually we do know this stuff and we know it in recent times, it's just we're choosing to ignore it. Part of that is really understanding what it means to care and really understanding what an ethic of care means. And I think care is different than being an ethical being. And it's different than empathy. That's really important. So empathy is when you tell me something and I say that's so tricky, I'm so sorry, that sounds awful, I've experienced something similar in my life. Or I haven't, but I can relate in some way. That's empathy, right? Caring is actually coming and saying, what do you need to be okay? And how can I be in service to that? So we all have those people in our lives where you'll pick up the phone and you'll tell them something and they'll go, that's awful, you know; good luck. And you think, okay, so they empathised, nd then they went straight back to doing their thing. And that has to be fine. And then you'll tell someone else, and you'll you'll probably have a picture of this person in your mind right now, and they'll go, okay, I hear you...
Manda: I'm getting in the car. I'm coming over. Whatever you need.
Brontie: Yeah. Or maybe that's not what you need, but they are in service to your best interests. As long as they're not putting themselves in massive danger or breaking their own internal boundaries or whatever. But those people will say, how can I help you to feel okay? How can I be in service to your care needs? And I just think maybe that's it. Maybe that's why we're here as humans, is to be caretakers. And I think it's linked to guardianship. I think it is linked to empathy, but I think it is something distinct. And I think that when you spend time with nature and first of all, you start to notice nature and you start to pick up on what nature needs from you, either as a species or as an individual. And then you really start to try and provide that care. That is just the joy of life. I mean there is nothing that you can sell me in a shop that makes me happy in the way that caring and being in nature and noticing nature.
Manda: And offering oneself in service to the web of life.
Brontie: Exactly.
Manda: But then we have to ask, and I've said it so often on the podcast that as far as I'm concerned, what humanity is here for is to become self-conscious nodes in the web of life. Which means we are constantly asking, what do you want of me? Of the entire hyper complex web and responding to the answers in real time. It's everything that we teach in Dreaming Awake and in the Accidental Gods membership. But the key, the runes that open the gateway to this for me, are helping people to find the ability to ask that question and hear the answers, in ways that are not projections of wounded parts of ourselves, otherwise known as our egos, or our hopes, our fears, whatever we choose to call it. How do we, in our culture, where we are so fragmented internally, where we have so many parts that are ready to step up and go, "it's okay, I've got the answer to this!" How do we get that inner flow and flexibility and resilience to actually ask of the web, "what do you want?" and hear the answers? Because even between people that's hard. Because what you think you need and what you actually need may not be the same thing. And your capacity to ask for what you need, even when you know what it is, may be compromised. And my capacity to hear what you're saying in a way that lands, and my capacity then to fulfil your need, all of these things. There's a lot of very, very complex communication stories and and pits into which they may fall. And so for me, my life's question is how do we, in time and at scale, help a critical mass of people to be able to ask that question and hear the actual answer, as opposed to what they would like the answer to be, or are afraid the answer might be? And I wonder how you approach finding that authenticity.
Brontie: That's such an important question. I think for me in my life, there is nothing more important than a curiosity mindset. I think that when you're curious about a person's inner world, you don't superimpose your view on them. You you say to them, what do you feel is in your best interest right now?
Manda: Okay.
Brontie: And when they do have the capacity to say that, you know, this would work for me, you can then say I can meet that need. I've got that. I can hold that. I can bring that to you. I can do that for you. And I think going to anything, whether it's a relationship or whether it's trying to be in service to nature or whether it's being a politician and trying to somehow rebuild after the fall of democracy. If you go with a curiosity mindset coupled with an ethic of care. So, you know, you can be curious, but also be quite mean and selfish and egotistical. That doesn't really work for me. I think you have to go with curiosity, but also this really strong ethic of care and an understanding of relational responsibility within the network that you find yourself in. I also think that you have to have quite high levels of forgiveness woven into all of that. Maybe forgiveness isn't the word, maybe it's grace. I think the word is grace actually. I think forgiveness has probably got too much religious overtone to it.
Manda: It doesn't have to have, I think.
Brontie: Yeah, sure. I think this is me as a recovering Catholic girl. So. Okay.
Manda: So how does Grace differ? Can you unpick grace and unpick forgiveness and let us know the difference between them?
Brontie: I can yeah. I think one of the things that's happened in the last hundred years or so, in my view, is that we have lost a lot of grace in society. And I think it comes back to what you were saying right at the beginning, where you were talking about the mask having slipped. You know, they haven't even got the good grace to keep the bloody mask on, right? You know, at least pretend! So we are in a position where some humans are behaving in a way that is very graceless, and I wonder what it would look like if we prioritised recruiting politicians that demonstrate strong care ethics, really high levels of grace and a concept of responsibility which is widened way beyond the current moral understanding of responsibility. I wonder what our political systems would look like if those were the personality questionnaires that we were putting out. If those were the conversations we were having and saying, look, do you have a sense of care within you? Do you have an ethic of care guiding you? Do you have a curiosity mindset?
Manda: Because this is not how we pick our politicians.
Brontie: No, no.
Manda: They're basically picked on the capacity to navigate a corrupt system. I mean, look at what's happened over the weekend in the UK. There's a by election, Andy Burnham wanted to stand for Labour, the Labour hierarchy will not let him stand, because his next step would be to challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership and he'd probably win because he would be a better leader. So they're not even going to let him stand as a Labour candidate. I don't know if he's going to stand as an independent. But, you know, Isabel Hardman wrote a long time ago a book called Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, which absolutely blew all my fuses because I thought I knew how bad it was, and I had no idea how corrupt the system was. But then someone like Zack Polanski in the UK or Zoran Mandani in the US turns up, and they're authentic and they have care and they listen to people. Zack, I was listening to his podcast last week and and somebody wrote to him and said, I'm a paramedic, would you like to come and do a shift with us? And his first answer was, yes, of course. And would you like to come on my podcast and let's talk about this. And that's not how our politicians work.
Brontie: I think it's worse than that as well.
Manda: Part of the core, I think, is how do we get power to those with wisdom, and how do we establish what wisdom is. Which is, for you, part of wisdom would be to have this ineffable concept of grace, which I guess is human decency and the capacity to be compassionate, to have care, to not just end up with that kind of sympathetic, oh, God, you're in pain, that's not good. But actually, let me do something about this. How would you find the the people who have the wisdom to whom we could entrust a measure of power?
Brontie: I mean, I think almost by answering that question, I'm almost putting myself in a position of power. So I think I have to say that the person deciding how to find something is also...
Manda: The gatekeepers.
Brontie: Yeah, of course, right. So, I'm hesitating because I think that if you if you're truly living with the ethics that I've just talked through, you wouldn't ever say, 'I know'; I know how to do that. I know exactly what to do there. So that's why I'm hesitating.
Manda: There may be a collective thing.
Brontie: I think it's a collective thing. Yeah.
Manda: In indigenous cultures, elders are recognised and honoured as elders by the collective because they have the wisdom and it's self-evident to the group.
Brontie: Yeah, absolutely.
Manda: But we don't have the elders and we don't have at the moment coherence of group.
Brontie: I think we do have the elders. I think we absolutely have the elders. I think what we have is a society that hides the elders from us. I absolutely adore spending time with older people. I love it. Second to that is spending time with ten year olds is the next best thing. But older people are, so going back to the grace thing and the curiosity mindset point, is we have lost so much, so much by marginalising our elders. We minimise them. We minimise their contribution. We constrain them. I mean, we really constrain them.
Manda: Sure. Yeah. We lock them in spaces we don't have to go and pretend they're not there.
Brontie: Right. Exactly. But even having a retirement age. And I'm being super careful here because I know the vast majority of people want to retire at some point.
Manda: Unless they're the president of the US, in which case they're way past retirement age and it doesn't matter. I mean, that is a thing. We make people retire except judges and politicians and then we seem to think that just because they're old, they should be there. And that also is not necessarily true.
Brontie: True. I think that what we do with elders is so terrible. As a precursor to this point I want to make, I think we do a thing in our society now, where we don't really have a strong ability to understand who we can learn from and who we teach. So part of that is the fault of social media, which for all its ills, does have some benefits. But with social media, there is no editing. So it's an onslaught of information all the time with no editing. So we've lost the ability of discernment between people that can genuinely teach us something, genuinely help us, guide us. The people that hold the institutional knowledge, the people that are holding the standard operating procedure manuals, right, for adult life. We've kind of lost those in the melee of slop that comes out into the world. And I think one of the things we can do is we can really start to understand how elders would fit into a new story in a really meaningful way for them. Obviously it's got to be consensual, we can't just drag them out into the streets and say, tell us everything! We're really lost! It's got to be consensual, but there are plenty of older people that I spend time with who are just glorious. And almost everything that comes out of their mouth you're just going, oh my God, thank you, this is exactly what I needed to hear. And it's really helping me and I'm really learning something from you.
Manda: And it's really interesting. So let me unpick this, because this I would really like to go into this because I live in a slightly different world. Let me think about this. So in my world, which I recognise is not your world, but a world the podcast is familiar with, our culture is what we call the trauma culture as opposed to the initiation culture. And this is Francis Weller's distinction, that we don't need to go into, but the trauma culture is at least 12,000 years old because we can't have our form of agriculture if we don't believe ourselves to be separate from the web of life. So we're carrying the trauma of that separation down the lines for at least 12,000 years. And on top of that, Bill Plotkin, who is someone for whom I have a lot of respect, who's done a lot of work with indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere, says that our culture, from the indigenous viewpoint, is locked in early adolescence. We can get to be 110, but we don't actually become elders. We go through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood. And each of these is split in two; between early and late adolescence we go through an initiation process in which we discover what we're for. And then adulthood is enacting that for-ness out into the world and teaching that, spreading what it is that we're for. So perhaps being a lawyer for nature and spreading empathy and care in the legal system. And then Elderhood is helping to hold the space for the adolescents so that you recognise when someone is moving to that place of needing to go out and go through the initiatory cycle. And that we lack adults and elders.
Manda: We could get to be 110, and our culture does not allow us to evolve. Added to which, I have not met many elders. I have some old friends that I Revere and love, but they don't have the emotional tools to do the work that I think we need to do. And it isn't to say they aren't amazing people, but I would not want them running the country, frankly, because they would run it as if we were Victorians. And Victorian times might have been okay for a certain class in the UK, but we were inflicting a lot of damage around the world. And so I hear you. Absolutely. And I think I am also remembering a friend who used to work with a number of tribes in Africa who said one of the key things that she noticed was if a child died, it was sad. But you know, children die and you know how to make another one. If an old person died, everybody went into mourning for a year because you'd lost all that wisdom. And that we don't care if old people die. In fact, often we just breathe a sigh of relief and carry on and the problem is the logistics of managing all the stuff they left behind. We have such a broken culture that we don't honour childhood and we don't honour elderhood. And actually, adulthood is just basically you're here to pay bills until you die. So we don't really honour that either.
Manda: We don't honour ourselves as alive, because we're caught in the egregore, in the death cult of predatory capitalism, where we're all just little cogs in the greater machine. And so in our efforts, I'm thinking what we're beginning to unpick, and this is not going anywhere where I thought it would. We need a set of stories for our emerging new culture, which honours all aspects of life, from infancy to absolute elderhood, and allows each of them to flourish in the best way that they possibly can. And we need enough stories of right behaviour to allow that to happen, for the humans and the more than humans. So we need an absolute foundation that every single thing within the web of life has an absolute right to a flourishing life and an honourable death. And that with that as our foundation, we could perhaps begin to build the story structures of a moral and ethical system that allowed these things. That was predicated on those. And then I'm already going off into then we wouldn't need a retribution based legal system because it just doesn't work. This system is not allowing these people to flourish. How do we help them flourish? A care based system. First of all, does that how does that Land? And second, how could we craft that system, within the old system, such that it could replace the old system. I realise this is the existential question of our time, but you have about 20 minutes to do it.
Brontie: No pressure. Well, first of all, thanks for that. I mean, yeah, I feel like you are one of the people that I feel like I can learn from. So it's just such a privilege to listen to you talk for a while about this stuff. And I think, just to clarify, I agree that eldership can come with wrinkles and grey hair and feeling not quite as sprightly as we once were, but it is also a mindset. And you can sometimes find a 30 year old who already has an elder mindset.
Manda: Right, yeah. I spoke to one last week on the podcast, exactly that.
Brontie: I think that it is just that statistically it is more likely that a person who is physically older will have more eldership stuff going on. So I think that's just a statistical thing that we can respect. But of course, there are definitely people out there who are older than us, but not in any way behaving like an elder.
Manda: Not necessarily wiser.
Brontie: Exactly. So I just want to clarify that. And I think that comes back to my point is we've lost the ability to recognise who we need to learn from, because there's just so much coming at us all the time. And so I think one skill we should be developing with children is discernment and critical thinking. So I think those two can be two sides of the same coin. And I think that the kind of stuff that goes on with kids in terms of internet safety could be bolstered massively by teaching them discernment and editing. So I think we sadly and it's a lot of effort, but we have to all become editors in our own lives. We don't have the structure in place anymore for for things to be edited for us, which obviously could be good in some ways, because you get completely unfiltered stuff just coming at you all the time.
Manda: Yeah, because again, whoever does the editing has the power.
Brontie: Yeah, exactly.
Manda: And in our childhood it was the BBC. And and now that I know some of the editing that they've done in the past, it was not in service to the greater good.
Brontie: And I think we're talking about really, really high level concepts here. So I just kind of want to bring it back to, to some kind of concrete example. You know, it is the case that you have the ability to curate your own social media feeds, right? You can fill your social media feeds with the most glorious poetry, with pictures of the most glorious things on earth. Dogs, plants, fungi, moss, landscapes, landscapes. You can fill it with people that are the helpers. You can fill it with people that are the elders. You have that choice. It's completely your choice now. And that is the democratisation of social media.
Manda: Yeah. But your limbic system responds to the outrage.
Brontie: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's addiction.
Manda: Your conscious mind might think it wants beautiful pictures of baskets of kittens, but your limbic system is alert.
Brontie: Oh, absolutely.
Manda: And it feeds on the dopamine drips of that.
Brontie: And what I would say, it's like any addiction, you have to find the quiet moments when you're not performing addictive behaviours, and you have to say, okay, I'm not on my phone. I'm going to write down on a piece of paper with an old fashioned pencil and paper, the things that I'm going to do next time I go on Instagram or whatever. I mean, we've gone into a proper side tangent thing here.
Manda: But this is useful. Yeah.
Brontie: It's a concrete example. And I think by not doing that we are blowing around like plastic bags in a storm and untethered human beings who aren't really actively managing their own environment, whether that's social media or workplace or relationships or whatever. And I think those kind of human beings, coupled with arrogance and stupidity, when they get into positions of power, that's the disaster, right? You know, they just blow like a plastic bag from one virtuous thing to the next, that they think needs to be said. And so I think the untethered human without editing is probably one of the worst things we can do in our current society. I think just bringing it back to law, I think that it's important for me personally to remember that I am a western lawyer and that's my specialism. That's the blood that runs through my veins. And I will have been influenced so hugely by Western legal tradition. And I think when we talk about morals and ethics and creating new stories, and I talked earlier about having this much wider concept of responsibility, for example. You asked me about how we we design this new system. I think the first thing we have to do is understand what we don't know, what we've not ever experienced, what is just so far beyond the realms of our possibilities and our mindsets. And I think, again, this is where a level of curiosity mindset comes in. It's where a level of understanding and care ethics come in. Because if you are excluding certain things from your design, then you have to really be sure that you understand that (a) you're excluding them and (b) why you're excluding them. And so I think this is a very roundabout sort of way of coming back to our work at Lawyers for Nature.
Manda: Yes! I was going to ask you that.
Brontie: A very circular route. We've done a few motorways and a few side roads on the way there. But I think for us, when we look at our work and I look at my work, I genuinely believe that a rights of nature approach has the ability to become part of a new design for a new way of being in the world. I don't think it's flawless. I don't think it's perfect. I think there's a huge amount that can be criticised about the concept of nature having rights. But for me, when we think about it, we think that it's very obvious what we're doing now doesn't work. So when we think about environmental law, it is retributive. It's retribution, right? It's saying, you know, polluter pays, for example.
Manda: Or doesn't.
Brontie: Or doesn't. Yeah.
Manda: You can dump as much sewage as you like in the river and we'll tell you that that wasn't very clever and then do nothing about it.
Brontie: And go oof! That sucks. So I think the vast majority of environmental law is written by incredibly clever people, and they're doing their best. I'm not here to criticise those lawyers. I think they're some of the most wonderful people who have written that legislation over the years. But the fact remains is it doesn't really work. And we really need to start asking the honest question of why doesn't it work? And I would even go as far as to say, you know, there are other campaigns or other movements out there. For example, Ecocide. And again, you know, Polly Higgins, Jojo Mehta, they are the most glorious women. And I have so much respect for them, but I personally can't put my life's work behind something that is end of the road, which is retribution and punishment, without really starting to think about what comes first. Because when you think about Ecocide and you're saying, hey, you destroyed an entire ecosystem. We're going to put you in prison. We're going to fine you. The ecosystem is still dead.
Manda: Exactly. You have to catch that upstream, so that you don't destroy the entire ecosystem first. We're heading that way with the oceans, and we're going to regret it if we don't turn away from that cliff.
Brontie: Exactly. And the coral reefs and the Arctic and even just heritage ancient forestry. I mean, once it's gone, it takes a thousand years for that forest to come back. I mean, depending on your definition of an ancient forest, right? But even just thinking about bacterial cultures and their adaptation and the destruction of those sorts of things. Even our own individual gut bacteria, we murder it every day. I mean, you and I probably don't, but, you know.
Manda: Yes, because we don't know about it. Yes, absolutely.
Brontie: Exactly.
Manda: We spray glyphosate on the land because somebody told us it was safe for people, and nobody asked, what else is it killing?
Brontie: Yeah. So I think for me, a constitutional rights of nature, whether it be through legislation, through case law, through what we do, which is largely transactional law. It's behaving as if nature has rights and working through society, with willing victims who are prepared to come to us and say let's do this thing and see what happens. I think it does have a huge amount of power. It won't save the world on its own. For me, Rights of Nature is a genuine upstream methodology. It's something that comes at the beginning of all the stuff. And it's something that if we could find a way to create systems where nature has rights, I think it could be really, really interesting. And I think it could really help. And I think as well, just to clarify, when we talk about Rights of Nature, it's a really nebulous concept. I mean, even my colleagues don't all agree on what rights of nature is.
Manda: Oh, really?
Brontie: Well, yeah. I mean, there's huge disagreement in the field.
Manda: That's another rabbit hole. But could we just look at what the spectrum is?
Brontie: Yeah of course.
Manda: Very briefly because that feels important.
Brontie: So I mean, at its most simple, rights of nature would say that in order to be healthy under law, in order to be well, in order to have justice and fairness under law, you need to be a subject of law, not an object of law. And so as people, we talk about legal personhood, and we say that the minute a child takes its very first breath, it is a real life human being separate to its mother. And it will have the right to life, for example, and it will have a qualified personhood status. So it won't be able to sign a contract, but it is entitled to be resuscitated, for example, that kind of thing. So there's an element of intervention that we're prepared to have a guardian stand up on its behalf and say its taken its first breath. It is now alive. It's got a sentience.
Manda: And I, the Guardian, am going to speak for it, because it does not yet have the executive function to speak on its own behalf.
Brontie: Exactly. And then at some point, in an arbitrary way, usually at 18, we say you now have this whole new bag of legal rights. So, you know, you can vote in an election, you can smoke, you can drink, you can get married. You know, all of these things. So personhood often is a precursor to rights. That's how law works. And so we know this really, really well, because humans have an incredibly checkered history of exclusion and complete refusal to award personhood to huge swathes of society.
Manda: And we're seeing that being rolled back in the US in real time. Or in Gaza.
Brontie: Exactly.
Manda: It's, you know, you draw a line in the sand and people that side have personhood and people the other side just don't have it.
Brontie: So I mean, it's the playbook. It's the exact thing that happens time and time again when you have unchecked power, the first thing you do is you strip people of their legal personhood, essentially. You marginalise them, you dehumanise them. You use terrorism legislation to say, if you become a terrorist under this definition, you will lose these rights. The right to a fair trial, the right to an open trial in public, the right to representation, the right to certain defences, the right to certain sentencing rules. So we twist personhood really quickly when we have unchecked power. And that's awful for humans, but with nature, for example, nature is an object under law. So it's a resource to be used by humans. Certainly in the Western legal tradition that you and I find ourselves in, nature has never been seen as a subject of law. And by legal history, I'm talking 800 years or so. We don't have a concept of nature as a subject of law within what we would call modern legal history.
Manda: Even the Romans would not have called it that.
Brontie: To some extent the Romans had some cool stuff around Commons rights, which was quite interesting. And so they did in some ways have a bit more of an enlightened approach to the sharing of nature than we do now. Right now, in our legal tradition, it is a resource to be used by humans. It has no space within the legal system to advocate for itself. And so therefore, when we talk about rights of nature, the first thing we have to do is start to question whether we would like to begin to recognise nature as a subject. And I say that in a slightly satirical way in that nature, of course, doesn't give a single crap whether we do or not. This would be for us, right? This would be for us to make us behave better, to make our world better. So that is step number one in any legal design. And I think we're sort of edging towards answering your question, which is how do we do this? And I think we've kind of talked around it a lot, but I think we diffuse power really accurately across a number of systems and a number of voices. And I think we start to bring in a concept of responsibility to human beings that is widened, so that it includes responsibility to recognise ecosystems, nature, parts of nature, river health. The example I often give is tap water. You know, tap water is fantastic. I mean, come off it! Just 70 years ago or so you could not turn a little tap and have clean water come out. I mean, we are brilliant. We have shipped tap water. And don't get me wrong, I know there's many, many places in the world that don't.
Manda: You know it's highly toxic and you don't actually want to drink it, but it's there.
Brontie: Even in the UK, I mean, people I know live in Tunbridge Wells and there's 4000 people that haven't had water there for like 28 days or something. It's ridiculous. So none of it's perfect, but if we just think about the concept of tap water for a second, it's a really illustrative example where the humans in that system have demanded personhood. You know, we're real things, we live and breathe, we need water. We have this need, we have this basic need and therefore that basic need becomes a basic right. So the right to clean drinking water. And then either the state or the private actors provide that need through these technologies. We're ignoring huge things that can go wrong with all of that.
Manda: Yes, absolutely. Let's not go into that. But yes.
Brontie: But the tap water example is fascinating because once you start to engage with rights of nature and you start to think that other things in that system have subjecthood under that law, you realise that that water has travelled so far to come out of that final tap. And in fact, everything that's gone before it doesn't have the right to clean water. And it is not until it comes out of your tap that you can say, oh, there's clean water and I have that right. And so what's really interesting is when you start to think, okay, well, let's give the river Subjecthood under law. Let's give the salmon their legal standing under law to say, hey, I live in this river, and this water flows through it and through me, and I have to engage in all of these jobs every day. I have to go to work as the salmon every day. And it is incredibly polluted because of what you're doing upstream. And I have the right to to have my home life healthy and to flourish. And then we would have to really force ourselves to think really carefully and really consciously about our water systems. You wouldn't need to go to the retributive justice side of things. You could stay with the distributive justice side of things. You could stay with the widening the pool of responsibility to include the salmon and the river and the reeds and the roots of trees and the fungi.
Manda: And the beavers.
Brontie: And the beavers and everything. And you know, tap water is such an interesting example that we get to this point where we're like, well, as long as it comes out of my tap and as long as it's vaguely drinkable, I'm okay with that. How have we ended up in such a space where we just don't care about anything that comes before?
Manda: Exactly. And that was my big question. I live in a world where no problem is solved from the mindset that created it. And while we live under the death cult of predatory capitalism, where profit drives everybody, or it drives the people at the top who then drive everybody beneath them, I don't see a way to give the river and the water, the whole water cycle, legal autonomy and subjecthood while it is still a source of profit. And this is back to Daniel Schmachtenberger: while a dead whale is worth more than a life whale, there will be more dead whales than live whales. While a dead tree is worth more than a live tree, there will be an incentive to cut down the forest. And we need to go back and look at what are the incentive drivers? And the incentive drivers of the water industry in this country is that it's an industry. It's full of PFAS, poly and perfluorinated alkylated substances, which are known endocrine disruptors and carcinogens, but the people who make them have bigger lawyers than the people who drink it. And so we're drinking toxic water because it's in the rain.
Manda: And so we're back to how do we create a political governance system, how do we bring power to those with wisdom, who would be able to go, you know what? It's more important that the entire water cycle is seen as being alive than it is that a few people get to be very, very, very, very rich. And we're running out of time. But I'm really interested because you live at this interface, where you're endeavouring to create a system where people would care about the water system while they have presumably pressures to make a profit. And how do you navigate that? Because I would go into it and go, okay, no profit. Guys, just stop trying to make a profit and then we can talk about personhood of the river. But I have the privilege of not living in that system and I can think ideas and go, well, we just need to get rid of predatory capitalism. But we are still in predatory capitalism. How do you do it?
Brontie: So I absolutely think that is such a key question. So let me just unpick it. First of all, I don't ever believe that there is one answer to any of this big, big stuff. So, you know, it's the classic it takes a village. So you need the storytellers and the artists and the makers and the folk singers, and you need to find the people who are guided by an ethic of care and you need to elevate them, and you need them in positions of power.
Brontie: I think if you're asking me for a really specific answer, one of the things we could do right here, right now, which would be quite simple, actually. I'm not saying it's palatable, and I'm not saying the people that are currently drawing those profits would would be happy with it, is we could have a really honest conversation about the externalisation of costs. So we as humans, I'll try and make this brief because I know we're running out of time, but I think we as humans have become incredibly brilliant at externalising costs. So we have incredibly clever people who draw lines around what costs are in and what costs out. And then we have more clever people who say, okay, so you made this much money and you had this many costs. The difference is your profit, and we'll tax you on that profit. And so that keeps the tax system going. And that is important, tax is really important to society. But if we had a super honest conversation about what costs have been excluded and included, and then we looked at the excluded costs and said, actually we need to bring those back onto the profit and loss account. Into the income statements, into the balance sheets. I don't sit here and pretend to be an accountant at all, but we would bring those back in. Because honestly, can you honestly find me a single person who would look at our water systems over the last 50 years and say it is absolutely right that that amount of profit was made and that that amount of profit was paid out to those organisations, people, family trust, whatever. I cannot find a single person, even the people that have taken that profit themselves.
Manda: Except the current government, sadly.
Brontie: Yeah, they've done some things. I mean for me, they're at the wrong end. They're at the punishment end. They're at retribution stage where they're saying when you screw up, and it's not even 'if' anymore, it's when you screw up, we're going to send you to prison.
Manda: But while you're saying that, I wait to see it happen. I don't think it will.
Brontie: Let's see. And how long for, of course. And whether somebody else just, you know, you cut off one head of the monster and another one just grows.
Manda: And in the meantime, the ecosystems are dying. Exactly as you said.
Brontie: Right. So, I mean, the practical solutions are there. They are absolutely there. You say actually, first of all have a very honest conversation about accepting our mistakes. We made a huge mistake with the water systems and the water companies in this country. Huge. It wasn't one person's fault, but we made mistake after mistake after mistake, and that has resulted in huge amount of money being taken from the public.
Manda: Sucked out of our economy and sent off elsewhere. Yes.
Brontie: Sucked out of the public and given to a select few organisations, whilst the infrastructure for all concerned, and I do mean all, I mean the more than human communities, the beavers and the fish, and the rivers, beds and reeds.
Manda: And all people. Everybody drinks water.
Brontie: Yeah. Those things have degraded and degraded to a point now where we have millions of hours of raw sewage being flooded into our rivers on a daily basis. Some of that is, in fact, categorically criminal behaviour. We know that. Some of it is determined by a particular piece of legislation to be 'Accidental'. So we've made mistakes and we need to say this is no longer okay for most of us, if not all of us, including the more than human communities. And we need to really, seriously think about bringing back onto the balance sheet all of the costs that should have been there for the last 50 to 100 years. And when we do that, we see a huge deficit to nature. We see we see a huge bill, a huge debt of gratitude and time and energy owed to nature. And it would, in fact, of course, mean that the dividend payments collapse completely. They'd probably collapse for around about 150 to 200 years. So we do that. That's number one. And the second one is we strip back all of the instruments that are used to obfuscate the truth. So, you know, debt instruments are used categorically. Shell companies, you know, webs of companies and debt instruments are used to obfuscate the truth. So we dig and dig and dig and we say, okay, no more of these instruments in this particular sector. It does not work for us.
Manda: Or indeed at all, actually. We need total transparency in our financial dealings. I mean, that alone would transform things.
Brontie: Yeah. I mean, we could be here all week couldn't we, if we get onto the banking system. Although I have got an incredible story about a wonderful lady in Switzerland who contacted Zurich Bank in Switzerland and said there's no dead wood in cities. You know, cities have such a deficit of dead wood and dead wood is so important for beetles and, you know, bacteria and everything. And she convinced them to commission her to bring dead wood right outside the bank. And when she turned up with it, I think she said to me she had to get it craned in. She found this massive oak tree, and she got it craned in. And apparently they came out and said, what on earth are you doing? And she just put it outside the bank.
Manda: And she just put it outside a bank in the middle of Switzerland, where everything is pristine? Wow.
Brontie: Yeah, yeah. And said, we need dead wood. And she said, you've got a choice. She said, you can pay the crane driver to take it away, or you can dig in and change the pavement structure, turn it into a feature, and accept that cities need dead wood.
Manda: Right. And living soil.
Brontie: And thank God they did the latter. You know, they did it and said, all right, then let's run with it. She's a very, very interesting woman. She's doing quite a lot of work around rights for bees at the moment.
Manda: Oh, I think I need to talk to her on the podcast.
Brontie: Yeah, maybe you do. Yeah. She is amazing.
Manda: Wow.
Brontie: So yeah, I think, again, off on a tangent there. But I think there's there's some stuff we can do really, really quickly with lawyers, accountants, scientists, bankers and corporate restructuring. We could do almost immediately, which is right at the distributive justice end.
Manda: It sounds a lot like Christian Felber's economy for the common good, where you change the tax system, so that you've reduced taxes on people who are doing good things, and you increase taxes on people who are doing bad things. And your definition of good and bad is largely is it serving the more than human world? He wrote that a decade ago. I'm not seeing it happen. Are you seeing people engaging with this in a way that might make it an actual thing? Because I think it's a brilliant idea, and I think the whole world is tightening into a kind of foetal hunch of terror. And when people get afraid, they are less likely to do things that serve other demographics than their own.
Brontie: Oh, when humans are fear led, it's some of the worst behaviours, isn't it? I mean, I think again, one thing we could do quite quickly is find those shiny, bright people that just stride out into the world with bravery and courage. And again, I think it comes sort of full circle back to what we were talking about at the beginning. You know, we've lost so much. There's so much focus on the risks and fear driven people with massive egos. And we know the stories of the old times. We know the hero's tale. It's a classic literature piece, you know, we know what that is. And we recognise a hero when we see one. We recognise bravery.
Manda: Alex Pretti.
Brontie: We recognise Courage. Yeah, we see it and we feel it straight away. And we just go I know what that is. And actually, that's a good leader. It's an ethical leader. It's a leader who leads with grace and responsibility. And I think one of the things we can do is uplift those people as much as possible in the next ten, 15, 20 years. And when we start doing that, when we start funding those people and we start bringing those people into the spotlight.
Manda: Electing them.
Brontie: Everybody just goes, oh, that's it! That! I couldn't find the words, because we've lost so much language around that stuff. We don't sit around campfires anymore. We don't tell each other fairy tales anymore. So we've lost so much of the language around what a genuinely heroic behaviour looks like. Although, as a caveat, I think Disney has ruined a lot for me. I was thinking about this at the weekend and just thinking about being what I like to call quietly romantic. And I think one of the things that people can do quite quickly is to cultivate an attitude of being quietly romantic. And I think that we're slightly ruined by Disney and those kinds of franchises where romanticism is these huge, flourishing, grand things, where you just get rescued on horseback from a tower. And I think when you start to really think about nature and your place in the world, I think being quietly romantic is one of the most activist things you can do. Is to recreate and recultivate what you understand romanticism to be, away from the modern sense of it. And I think those things come from fairy tales. They come from folk songs. They come from genuinely noticing and experiencing joy of service to nature, is quietly romantic to nature.
Manda: That sounds glorious.
Brontie: Being in relationship with it and being in service to it. So yeah, I think I try as much as I possibly can to really cultivate a quiet romanticism with nature.
Manda: Oh that's gorgeous. I think we might have found our title. I think that might also, I mean, we could keep talking for hours, I think. We could come back and have another go sometime. I'm booked into October, so, you know, sometime in the back end of the year. But that was glorious. And quiet romanticism and grace, those two together. I feel like if everybody worked on that, the world would be a different place.
Brontie: I think so.
Manda: Gorgeous. Thank you.
Brontie: No. Thank you.
Manda: Is there anything else that you wanted to say? Because the floor is yours.
Brontie: Oh. Thank you. I think if there was anything I'd like to say, I think it's that there's a lot of pressure to do something. And I think in our world, you and I, we meet a lot of people that are very, very burnt out. And I always try, when I'm talking to people and say there is a lot of pressure to do something, but also anything is fine. Doing anything is fine. Going and just sitting with your feet in a river, or just being quietly romantic with nature for half a day is fine. Just do it. It's really important. Because it means you come back to your place of work or your relationship with your person or your dog, and you are just better. You're just healthier. So I think anything you can do to make yourself healthier is in service to nature.
Manda: Right. Yeah. And potentially life changing. Brontie, that was wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I'm sure we will have another conversation sometime towards the back end of the year. Thank you.
Brontie: Thank you.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for another week. Huge thanks to Brontie for all that she is and does, for the clarity of her thinking, for her willingness to go out on a limb to places where people of legal profession have not often gone, and yet are now increasingly going. For her willingness to look upstream at the ways that we can use the law to change behaviour. We need total systemic change. And that means we need a total rethink of our social contracts with all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, ourselves in the web of life. But we start where we are, and Brontie is starting where we are. Going out into the trenches of business and trying to turn it from business as usual into the business that we need to see. And it's astonishingly wonderful to see it happening. I look forward to an accelerating pace of change as the years roll over. As ever, there are links in the show notes, so you can go and look up everything that Brontie does. And if you want to take part in any of it, please do what you can. The world is changing faster than we ever imagined it could, and every single one of us is part of that change. Do what you can, wherever you are, and keep checking in to see what else we can do.
Manda: We're going to need to pivot fast from one thing to another, I think. As well as holding the threads of total systemic change and our capacity to become self conscious nodes in the web of life. So with that in mind, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Air-tite Studios for the production. Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas with the transcripts. Faith Tilleray for everything that goes on behind the scenes that keeps us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And to those of you who have posted reviews, I recently found them; thank you. They totally made my heart sing and definitely they are making differences to our numbers. So if you fancy subscribing on the podcast app of your choice, that would be grand. If you want to leave a review, that would be even grander. And while we're here, this is going out on the 4th of February, our gathering 'Honouring Fear As Your Mentor' is online on Sunday the 8th of February, 4 to 8 p.m.. You are more than welcome. There is a link in the show notes. That's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.