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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 do believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would 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 the core concept of this podcast, of the whole Accidental Gods project, of the membership, of everything else that we do, is that each of us, every single one of all 8 billion humans on the planet, has a role to play in the emergent future. And that role is connecting to the web of life and being able to ask, what do you want of me? And respond to the answers authentically, not to projection, in real time. And to do that, we need to understand ourselves as integral parts of the web of life. We are a part of the web; we are not separate. Nature is not a thing 'out there'; we are self conscious, co-creating nodes in the web of life. But this is not the narrative that we have. This is not the paradigm in which we live. We are told we are separate. We're told we have to battle nature, that we have dominion over it, that we have to own it and control it and tell it what to do and keep ourselves safe from this outside thing. And while manifestly that's nonsense, it's a really deep part of who we are.
Manda: So how do we create the stories that will bring all of us back to the web of life that will help each of us find hope again? Help us to lean into our heart's yearning for connection and relationship and being and belonging. This week's guest has spent her entire life looking exactly at these questions. Ally Kingston is a creative facilitator and strategy lead at Purpose Disruptors, where she developed the Breakthrough Agency for Nature, a pop up agency bringing nature into youth culture in the understanding that this is an integral part of who we are. A former advertising strategist, Ally is curious about how creativity intersects with myth, meaning, consumerism and desire, and how we might design new cultural infrastructures that seed fresh possibilities for how to live. Ally has also trained as a death doula and a rights of passage holder, and she recently co-created the Tending to Endings Card deck, which is a garden inspired tool for engaging more meaningfully with loss and grief, and the composting of the old systems to allow the growth of the new. So this was a really wide ranging episode. We explore the nature of advertising and how an industry that has been so deeply embedded in the death cult of predatory capitalism can turn all of that wild creative magic in service to life. How the skills that push us to buy the pseudo satisfiers can instead remind us of our original connections; can turn us back towards co-creation, connection, and belonging. And we talked too about grief, and how learning to compost the old system is a key to the new growth we need and want.
Manda: Ally is so multi-talented, so switched on, so engaged with the change that we need to make in the world. It was a joy to explore so many different ways we can bring our whole world back into love with life. Back into balance, back into each of us being part of the solution and letting go of the parts of the problem. Ally has a lurcher. I have a lurcher puppy. And there are times in the recording of this where she sleeps and dreams and digs holes in the carpet and crunches on food, and I didn't go back and rerecord over each of these. So if there are puppy flavoured extraneous noises, then I apologise in advance. But that appart, people of the podcast please do welcome Ally Kingston, of Agency for Nature, Purpose Disruptors, Tending to Endings and so much more.
Manda: Ally Kingston of Purpose Disruptors and Agency for Nature and Tending to Endings; you do so many amazing things. And you have a lurcher. So what could be better, as we're moving down towards (in our hemisphere) the dark nights and the times of introspection, and the time of looking within, the looks within, and the exploration of who we are and how we are and who we could be. Welcome to Accidental Gods. This feels, it's been a long time coming and I am so looking forward to this. How are you and where are you?
Ally: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be here. How am I? I'm well, I'm staving off some nursery lurgies that are coming to our house, but I've got lots of Berocca. I'm in a market town in Somerset, in my kitchen. Yeah.
Manda: So amongst all the other things that you're doing, you helped to set up agency for nature. I think probably you set it up single handedly; you can tell us that. And on its page it says, amongst a lot of other amazing stuff, 'we need to help human civilisation come back to life'. And that just leapt out and hit me between the eyes, because it's so true and it feels increasingly urgent. And so I wanted to ask you two things. How did you get to understanding that? Because I'm guessing you wrote that. And how do we get there? So let's answer the easy one first, which is how did you get to understanding that we need to help human civilisation come back to life?
Ally: Yeah. Thank you. It's funny to have someone play back that line because it does feel like a bold assertion. But I think we all know it's absolutely true. Certainly not me, it's a group effort the Agency for Nature, it began Back in 2023. So an organisation I work for, Purpose Disruptors who we'll probably speak to a little bit more; and a wonderful organisation called Glimpse who are no more, but who are also really deeply engaged in kind of nature connection and creativity and how all those things intersect. We all kind of came together. And I guess our question was like, we have this amazing kind of machine in the form of the creative industries, who are really responsible for shaping what a good life looks like in the public imagination. And it's a version of a good life at the moment that we're all surrounded by, which is really one of material abundance. Like more stuff, status, you know, power, etc. That's not the one that actually makes us happy. We know that. And it's not the one that is possible within the confines of our planet. And then at the same time, we've been doing a bit of research into what people really are dreaming of when they dream of a good life. And it's always the same thing. If you speak to people in the UK, across any party line, it's like they're really dreaming of connectedness, more connectedness, to themselves, to other people and to the natural world. It comes through again and again, you know, this real desire and this feeling that something is missing.
Manda: Because something is missing.
Ally: Because it is missing. Right, exactly. So part of this project, I think, was a response to what we knew was an inherent desire that we wanted to kind of play back to people. And then of course, there's a bigger context around knowing that we have really severed an incredibly primal connection to life on Earth. And some of us, you know, we're starting to get inklings of how it might feel to just be threaded back in, even in a small way, even in modernity. It's like, okay, wow, it feels a hell of a lot better than not having that, you know.
Manda: Right, right. And so Agency for Nature, there was a group of you, I get that. And you were all within the advertising industry that seems to be right in the heart of the death cult of predatory capitalism. It is the superorganism, along with the markets and all of that sort of thing. But it is the thing that drives consumption. And if we understood it correctly, it was basically started by Sigmund Freud's nephew, who took everything that his uncle had understood about human insecurity and weaponized it in service to increasing consumption. Because until then, people didn't have as much of the sense that stuff was going to solve all their problems. And I'm sure we've been part of the trauma culture for millennia. And there was always a hierarchical, patriarchal system that was pushing value to the top, but it wasn't accelerating it to the top in the way that it is now. And so the industry that arose to sell people the idea that consumption was going to solve all their problems, succeeded in weaponizing human psychology very fast. That race to the bottom of the brainstem that we're seeing was absolutely predicated on an understanding of human insecurity. How did you at Agency for Nature decide to switch it? And what was your strategy for switching it? Does that make sense as a question? Is it what you decided to do?
Ally: Yeah. I mean, yes, absolutely I love the way you just described what role the advertising industry plays. It's absolutely on the nose. And I worked in it for many years. That was where I came from. So most of Purpose Disruptors came from the advertising industry. And then at some stage in all of our careers, had a real moment of waking up, I guess, to that feeling of like, oh, okay, the better I do my job, the faster this...
Manda: Faster we're going over the cliff.
Ally: Exactly like those two things are directly correlated. Like this is the industry that amplifies the system we're in, you know. And that's obviously a big thing to to grapple with. And a lot of people do, and they leave, including myself.
Manda: Right. But a lot of people leave and go off and do something completely different. And what you guys have done is go, okay, we can take these skills and use them in service to life.
Ally: Yeah, well, that's the funny thing. My journey was I left and I worked in sustainability for a while and sort of tried to understand that and then realised, you know, I have no use here, right? I'm learning about nitrate runoff and how to minimise that, but I'm a creative strategist, I'm a person who's spent ten years learning how to distil really complex ideas into something very simple that has cultural relevance or that can travel around media. So what am I doing over there? Like these are really good skills, they're just currently only being used in service of that whole mess. So what would it look like if we started to, I guess, redirect the creative firepower of the advertising industry in service of the new version of a good life. And that's where Agency for Nature really came from. Like, we know we need to fall back in love with the world, right?
Manda: Right. The web of life. Everything that is human and not human.
Ally: Life. Exactly. Yeah.
Manda: Okay. How long has it been going?
Ally: We opened in 2023.
Manda: Okay. So just on the back of the pandemic. So we'll be heading into three years soon.
Ally: Yeah.
Manda: How do you make your money? Because it's very easy to see how advertising makes money. It's we're going to help you sell your widgets massively better, and therefore you're going to pay us for the privilege of doing that. And it works. And clearly advertisers can get to be extremely rich. How does Agency for Nature survive in a competitive, industrial, capitalist culture where everybody still needs to pay the bills? And you're saying to people, your widgets are not what we need to be selling, we need to be selling ideas. And probably we need to be selling fewer widgets or bottles of your carbonated sugar water or your industrial produced food like substances. How do you sell that as an idea to people?
Ally: Well, first of all, I'll say it's called Agency for Nature. I mean, it's a bit of a pop up experiment, you know?
Manda: Okay.
Ally: Classic advertising backgrounds making it sound like it runs, you know, 24 seven and is a whole thing. Because really, it's an experiment. It's something that we're evolving all the time in response to the industry and the world. So I'd say it doesn't really run like a normal agency in any way.
Manda: Good. That sounds like a good thing to me.
Ally: Yeah. Yeah. I think we have to experiment, don't we?
Manda: Sure. So explain to us what sort of experiments you're doing. Or perhaps it might be easier to go back to Purpose Disruptors from which Agency for Nature arose, and explain that as the foundation. And then we could come back to Agency for Nature. Is that a better way around?
Ally: Yeah, I'll give a potted history of how it came about. So Purpose Disruptors is an organisation that really exists to try and support the advertising industry to come into harmony with the natural world.
Manda: Which in itself is pretty big. Yes.
Ally: Well, yeah. And there are loads of different ways that it does that. There's a kind of a measurement arm, which is all about working out how we can start to support agencies to take accountability for the carbon emissions associated with the uplift in sales they claim to have generated by doing a car campaign.
Manda: Right. So you sold more of your electric cars maybe, or even your not electric cars. And as a result of that, there's this much extra carbon in the world. Wow. And is that embodied carbon as well as emitted carbon by the cars?
Ally: Yes. Oh, yeah exactly. Very much embodied carbon. So there's a whole workstream there, which is around how do these kind of service industries like advertising begin to take responsibility and accountability for what they're amplifying in the world. Like all of those sales they claim to support with their campaigns. That's one part of Purpose Disruptors.
Manda: Hang on. Let's dig into that, because it seems to me quite quickly, if you take that seriously, selling has to stop. I mean, very quickly, we Purpose Disruptors are explaining to you, advertising agency, that you are actually accelerating the bus off the edge of the cliff. And you need to not just be not selling cars, you need to be anti selling cars. You need to be selling fewer cars. And that involves the total systemic change that we're always heading to and the frame shift. Because at the moment people still want cars. And cars now is a placeholder for stuff. We still exist in a culture where people believe that having more stuff is the answer to their problems, and up to a point they need more stuff. The old car died and and I still need to get from A to B because my job is in B and I live in A, and how else am I going to get there? Because there is no functional transport system. And I still live in a world where I still need to pay the bills, and the only way to pay the bills is to have a job that is a long way from my house. And very quickly things start to unravel, I would imagine conceptually, to the point where the only answer is total systemic change. And anything else is is tweaking; not just painting the deck chairs on the Titanic, but but kind of standing, looking at the paintbrush.
Ally: Exactly.
Manda: And how do you get around this, Ally? Because clearly you've thought about this a lot.
Ally: Well, I think what you're raising is so interesting. Your response to this is like, oh, okay, I'm following it to its logical conclusion. Surely the conclusion is we've got to stop selling cars. There's a lot of resistance.
Manda: People's jobs depend on selling cars.
Ally: People's jobs depend on them. Exactly. Their mortgages, their understandings of a good life. And the kind of cushioned life they imagine for themselves that a career in advertising facilitates. So yeah, I would say that is the logical conclusion. And yet we're all working with human people and all of our denials and our realistic, kind of entanglements with modernity as well.
Manda: Right. Because we do still have to pay the bills. And until we all change the system, one person deciding not to bother paying the bills just makes their entire family destitute. It doesn't change the system. My assumption is that you are aiming for total systemic change. However, you don't walk into an advertising agency and say that because it won't mean anything.
Ally: Exactly.
Manda: I guess this would be throwing bits of Velcro at the lino. It's not going to stick because how could it, because that's not a concept. And yet I'm thinking that if you lead people gently towards the point we need to get to, there must come an internal crisis that everybody hits where they realise the current system is not sustainable. And you then turn, I imagine, into the therapists who are holding the space while people fall apart. Is that a thing?
Ally: Well, yeah. I mean, a really big part of Purpose Disruptors is community building and community weaving. Because there are so many people who want to come to a pub and say, I don't know what to do with this tension. You know, like, help! And work it out and game it out and be held in circle and be in an environment which is non-competitive, which is possibly with other people who are there, like competition from other agencies outside of the walls of the pub. But here it's like, okay, let's all just grapple with this for a second and sit with it for a moment, you know?
Manda: Right.
Ally: Amazingly, that's where so much change happens, and often without much instruction from the Durpose disruptors staff at all. It's like you just make a space, step back.
Manda: Right. But you're still holding the space, and you've still got that sense of being seen and feeling felt and getting gotten that is essential to everybody. Of I am here with friends, it's a safe space. I can be vulnerable.
Ally: Yeah, absolutely.
Manda: I can open, I can let the parts of myself that I have to hide at work come out. And once they have a chance to speak, then my system can become more integrated. We're talking kind of Thomas Hubel IFS work, but even so, that's where we need to get to.
Ally: Absolutely. Yeah.
Manda: Okay, so I think we've probably accelerated quite fast through what Purpose Disruptors was in the origin and where it's got to now. So tell us a little bit about the history of purpose disruptors in more detail, because I'm feeling that we may be leaving listeners behind. I don't want to accelerate from the beginning to the end too fast. Tell us more about how you came to Purpose Disruptors, what it is and what it does.
Ally: So Purpose Disruptors began as a group of people working in advertising or formerly in advertising, who would meet in a pub and who would have this conversation. And that was really it. It was just like, how do we live with this tension? What do we do with it? That was back in maybe 2019. And it morphed into a non-profit organisation that slowly, with three co-founders, all of whom had held really senior positions across marketing, media creative, which are different parts of the advertising industry if you were to sort of map it out. Who created this sort of small organisation with a big mission, which was like, how do we really meaningfully engage with the crises around us? And what would it take? And even though we're only three or now five, now kind of maybe eight, how can we push an Overton window of what's expected, what's normal in an industry that we can all agree is part of the problem, right? What does systemic change actually look like in action? If you play around with stuff like the measurement work, what does it look like to create a metric like that? Who will adopt it? How does it shift? The conversation around a big fossil fuel client coming up to pitch and who wants to pitch for them, and does it create nervousness in the field? Like, what are those little bits of warm data, that tell us we're moving in a direction?
Manda: Yes. And have you trained with Nora Bateson? Has one of you trained in warm data work?
Ally: No, I don't know why I threw that in.
Manda: Okay. But it's an interesting concept. Wouldn't that be fun to do, though? And I can see that we could do that. Were you one of the founders or are you one of the people who came in?
Ally: No, I'm not one of the founders. Well, actually, I kind of seconded myself while I was still in the industry. And then I volunteered, I collaborated, you know, it was all informal and made up, like everything.
Manda: Like all the best things.
Ally: Like all the best things. Until probably a few years ago where I really joined.
Manda: It's still very young because it's still only six years heading for seven years and the pandemic in the middle, which must have disrupted the Purpose Disrupters. So talk us a little bit through how this does work. Let's keep cars, because cars are pretty neutral ish. They're not fossil fuel companies and yet everyone can see that they're probably a part of the problem. How does it land with people whose jobs it is to sell more cars, to suggest that measuring just the carbon; we're not then looking at the whole meta crisis, we're just looking at one tiny index. But it's an index that people are increasingly paying attention to. What happens? Do they then offset? We as a company have created this much megatons of carbon by selling this many more cars, therefore we are going to help somebody plant a forest in Borneo? What happens?
Ally: Well, so I'll say, first of all, Purpose Disruptors does a little bit of carrot, a little bit of stick. There's all kinds of different things in the mix. And this is the stick. Like this is the hard line. What does it look like to make a metric and how do we quantify your negative impact?
Manda: Okay. That's a big stick. I can imagine that creates quite a lot of internal resistance in people. There's a lot of bits that are going to feel shamed and judged as a result of that.
Ally: Absolutely. Yeah, of course. And that's why at this stage, this stuff takes a really long time to adopt. Right at the moment, it's still an idea which feels very edgy. There's now funding, there's a methodology getting developed, there's universities on board. So it's kind of building its coherence. But still you need some lead agencies who are going to really fly the flag and be the ones who can test it out and say we're now trying to adopt this. But of course it's a very slow process. I would say my real expertise, my interest is really in the, in the other side, which is about using the industry's creativity and supporting people who are skilled in storytelling and creativity, to really understand that they have skills that can be used in a far wider way and to support very different versions of a good life.
Manda: Okay. And how does that work out in practice?
Ally: So back in 2021 ish, we had this question which was that the advertising industry are architects of desire, really. That's what they do so well. They're given stuff and they can attach meaning and desirability to that stuff, in ways that really appeal to our core limbic system. Like they're filling these voids in us.
Manda: And are you genuinely trained in how to do that? This is something that I just assume that advertisers have some kind of gut instinct for, for what's going to work. But it sounds like you're given really quite detailed psychological training of how to identify where people feel a lack, and how to suggest to them that widget X is going to fill that lack. Is that the case?
Ally: No, not really, to be honest.
Manda: Oh, okay.
Ally: Yeah. I like the idea of there being a school of dark arts but...
Manda: Yeah, well, the Stanford Digital Persuasion Lab does exist, but it's much more gaming and gamification of things.
Ally: Yes. I remember working in my early years on alcohol brands. One brand will have a portfolio of loads of different spirits and they'll have an archetypal model where each spirit will embody a different archetype.
Manda: Like your vodka is young and hip hop dance or something.
Ally: Exactly. Or vodka will often have this spirit of real, pure essential hedonism, whereas gin is more about relaxing a little bit, you know. Whereas rum will be kind of sexy.
Manda: And whisky is rugged mountains and going off to shoot the grouse.
Ally: Exactly. Yeah. They have their own kind of archetypal territories that we know because we've all lived in the world watching ads for our whole lifetimes. Then as a person in that industry, you kind of step into it and you're like, oh, okay, I'm going to be the custodian of this kind of vodka and this kind of gin. It's bizarre. I mean, it's kind of extraordinary. It's really modern myth making, I think, you know.
Manda: It really is. And then you've got those skills, which is what we need. We need to build modern myths. That's exactly where I wanted the podcast to go. But anyway I took us off a track there. Let's get back onto the track. So we were at Purpose Disruptors. You have all of these amazing creative, myth making skills that really go deep into people's limbic systems. And in predatory capitalism, they're all in service to death, basically, they're in service to greater consumption. And Purpose Disruptors realised that they could be in service to life, and particularly Agency for Nature realises that you could begin to take all of these things and bring your skills to help other people become in service to life. So first of all with Purpose Disruptors, and then Agency for Nature, what is the core of what you're doing? And particularly, back to my original question, how is it panning out and how do you want it to pan out? Because you're obviously at early days. So I'm imagining there's an emergence thing here and it changes all the time. But what's your best case?
Ally: Yeah okay. All right. I'll work backwards and I'll get to best case.
Manda: Okay. Yes. Perfect. Go for it.
Ally: So it's funny, even in a few years, you realise how much has changed and how much the discourse has changed. When we were back in sort of 21, still deep in the pandemic, it felt like the future, 2030 was a decade away, like we were going to have this wild transformation between now and then. And at the time also there was this notion floating around that we would halve our emissions by 2030. I know emissions and low carbon lifestyles, even that that sort of language feels like a time.
Manda: Yeah. It's weird, isn't it? But you're right. It was there. We also were not in the middle of so many wars, and we weren't factoring in the amount of CO2 embodied and otherwise, that is just thrown around with every missile.
Ally: Exactly. But that was really the start point, was this thing of like, okay, so in the future, if we get there to this future of halved emissions, life will look and feel very different, assumedly. And we also know that actually, by most measures it will be a better quality of life.
Manda: Because we'll be doing less work and have more leisure time and will be more creative. Is that what we were thinking in those days? That's what you were thinking?
Ally: Well, definitely there was this sort of idea, which I think still holds, which is like a world with reduced carbon emissions, all of the infrastructural changes required to build that world will result in cleaner air, easier public transport, less food waste. La la la la. It will be a better life. And yet we have no concept of what that could look like. How does that feel? When I wake up in the morning in 2030, in this future, what does it taste like? What does it smell like? What is this world?
Manda: Yeah. What does my day pan out like, that is different?
Ally: Yeah. And okay, this is a problem. And a problem that it feels like people in advertising can help resolve.
Manda: Yeah. This is thrutopian. It's what does it look like and how do we get there? This is thrutopian thinking. I'm so excited by this.
Ally: Exactly. Yeah. Oh. Thank you. Yeah. So that was really our start point, was how do we build new ideas of what this good life can look like and then bring them to life in a poster, in an advert. Put them in the world, start making cultural materials that give people a sense of what's possible. And so our start point really for that was a piece of research. We started getting quite into how to research people's imaginations. How to research what people were dreaming of, if you give them space. And I think it takes certain conditions to create the space to let people really imagine, because we are really not trained to do that. And in fact, it doesn't come naturally to us at the moment in modernity to sort of dream.
Manda: So how did you give people the space? That would be my first question, because you're right.
Ally: Well, this was in Covid as well.
Manda: Okay. All right.
Ally: So this was a sort of brave new digital world.
Manda: Stay at home, you've got all that extra time that you're not commuting. You're with your family.
Ally: Yeah, exactly. And we worked with focus groups of people, the sort of hard to reach people in the climate space at that stage, for people who weren't like, yes, electric cars and bamboo toothbrushes. Not them; everyone else. And we created these kind of three day long journeys with them that were really inquiring about their values, what matters to them now, through the home often. You know, show us a room that really embodies something that feels really important to you. Show us the objects that really matter to you, show us photos. So trying to use the constraints of lockdown moment.
Manda: Where you are in Covid, you've just got your home around you. Yeah. Okay.
Ally: Exactly. To encourage people to really share from the heart, I guess, what matters to them. You can't really ask people what are your values? But you can ask show me the thing that makes you feel alive. And then over a kind of reflective journey, how has this changed in Covid? And what now would you like to see as still true in the year 2030? Can we dream into your future, in a quiet place on your own for half an hour. Can you wake up and what are you smelling and seeing? And what's this good life? You know, the life where you're like oh, yes, I feel so like myself. And this is it, here I am. Talk to us about that; what do you see? And it's an amazing thing to do.
Manda: Totally. I am in awe and so delighted that somebody's actually doing this.
Ally: Yeah. Well the funny thing is, the questions are quite clean, clean language, it's not not leading, but the answers are always the same. The answers are always like I'm dreaming of a life of real relationship, like relationality. I mean, that's my word, not theirs. But really having time to work out what it is that I want, or pursuing this thing that I've been dreaming of for ages, but I've been putting it to the side. Going back to my mental health, community. That was such a kind of awakening for a lot of people, I think, at that period of time. Like, why don't I know my neighbours? You know, in ten years I want to really know them. I want our kids to play together and I want us to feel like we can leave our kids with each other's kids and all that.
Manda: Things that used to be normal.
Ally: Yeah. And then nature. I want to move. I want to be by the sea. I want to be in the woods. I want to be surrounded by trees. Like this yearning for a return to an interconnected life, you know? And in different flavours, of course, you know, everyone had their different slants on it, but it was so coherent as a dream. It was like, whoa, this is it. This is the good life. This is the one we want and if we had it and we weren't trying to meet these needs through what I think researchers call pseudo satisfiers. If we just had this, then cool, how do we make that happen?
Manda: Which is exactly why the death cult did not want lockdown to happen, because it gave people the time and the experience of what it might be like to not be harnessed to your hamster wheel all day, every day. And then they had to slam it back. Okay, so you got all this raw data, which was all creating a coherent picture of how humanity, to be frank, has been for 300,000 years or longer of our evolution. It's this tiny little sliver at the end, but we've got no, no, you have to do something that you hate for most of your adult life, because otherwise we'll give you a plastic bag and put you under a bridge somewhere. Okay, so then what did you do with that? Where did it take you?
Ally: So what we did with that, was we created what's called in the industry, a kind of a creative brief. Which is what a strategist would write to give to creative teams to say this is your audience, this is how we want them to think, feel, what we want them to do. You know, this is the objective. And then the creative team would go away and make a campaign, that would be how it would work. So we wanted to keep to that constraint. That's how the industry knows how to make work. But we made the client the future. So we said the client is the year 2030.
Manda: Right. Brilliant.
Ally: Year 2030 has an image problem, right? Because it's solar panels and a wind farm or whatever. No, it's going to be really good, it's going to be connected. And we know it's going to be like that because we've heard that dream echoed by people. So here's the dream and here's the year, here's the future. Let's promote it. Let's do what we do best as an industry.
Manda: Give it an image. Let people see.
Ally: Give it an image.
Manda: And feel and yearn for this. Right. Wow.
Ally: Exactly. So that was the brief. It was called Client 2030. And the response was these kind of ads for the future, that are a real range of stuff. These are agencies working for free. At the time it was Cop26 year at Glasgow. We'd been given the Imax at Cop26. So we had this amazing screen space and agencies wanted to help fill it. So we had this amazing momentum and ended up creating these campaigns. Little, what would be called TV commercials. Like 92 second TV commercials for the future that we aired there. And that continued on for a few years in different versions.
Manda: Tell me how they went down, because I'm looking at the slide deck that you sent me, and I'm assuming some of these are these little campaigns, and they were getting huge amounts of views and clickthroughs and engagements. It seemed like you were getting real traction.
Ally: Yeah. So these were kind of the precursor to Agency for Nature, actually.
Manda: Okay.
Ally: This is what gave us confidence that there is a role for not just a brief, but a whole agency devoted to this work.
Manda: Alrighty. So you've got 2030 as the client, which I think is genius, and it has an image problem; nobody knows what 2030 is going to look like. And you're presenting to other ad agencies who want space at COP, and you're offering them this brief. Tell us what happened, because that sounds really interesting.
Ally: Yeah, it was really fascinating. Because we put forward this brief. People wanted to do it, as you said, they were motivated. Some were on a journey with climate and others were just, you know, that sounds good, I want to get involved with that. And they would respond. In advertising you would have typically a bit of time to go away, look at the brief, work something out. You'd come back for a creative review, and then you'd go away again and you'd come back again. So they would respond at this sort of creative review moment. And often the work would be very behaviour changing, sustainable products kind of world. They'd be saying, yeah, 2030, it's going to look like this. We would be driving around in electric cars and we'll all be using bamboo toothbrushes or whatever.
Manda: Recycling all the time. All the stuff that is basically business as usual.
Ally: Right, right. Or just different products, exactly. Like, that's not quite the brief. Let's go back to the brief, because we're really talking about values. We're talking about a values shift from a world of separateness and individualism, to one of real interconnectedness to self, to others, to nature. Have another crack. And they'd say, oh, I don't really know what you mean. I don't get it.
Manda: Right. Because if you're not feeling that interconnectedness, it's not a head thing.
Ally: It's not a head thing. But if you have a client, you have to.
Manda: You have to get into their head.
Ally: You have to get into their head. And they did. There would always be a moment where they'd come back and they'd be like, I get it. Now I get it. It was really extraordinary. And you would see the work shift. It's hard to give examples, there's work on the Disruptors website. We've made hundreds over the years of different sort of posters and executions. But every time there would often just be this moment of shift, where people would go from it seems a bit complicated, to getting it. And then often to really reporting a kind of mindset shift that would shift everything else for them in their work.
Manda: Right. You mean shift everything that they produced going forward, even within business as usual? Oh that's interesting.
Ally: So they would see their role as different. They would suddenly understand that they had a chance to promote this kind of good life, which is also probably the one that they want, because we all kind of want the same one, right? So it activates a yearning in all of us.
Manda: Advertisers are people too.
Ally: Advertisers are people too. And they're like, oh, this feels good. Maybe for the first time in my career, I'm really enjoying working on something that feels really true to me, you know? And then that rippled into how they worked on other briefs and how they thought about their role as narrative change makers. Not just like, Well, Pepsi's briefed me this, I've got to make Pepsi cool. By whatever myths and archetypes I'm using to imbue with Pepsi or whoever else, I'm contributing to a wider patterning around what a good life looks like. And that wouldn't be necessarily how they would say it, but that was a real refrain. And we saw people take quite unexpected turns in their careers and their lives after working on a brief like that.
Manda: Okay. And that sounds so hopeful. And yet from the outside, I wasn't at COP26. COP26 was the one that was a turning point, it seemed to me, because it had more fossil fuel people there than any previous COP. The fossil fuel people outnumbered everybody else. And it had felt to me as if we were on a trajectory, just coming out of Covid, and people were genuinely talking about systemic change. And then they really started pushing back. It seemed to me that the fossil fuel people got together at COP26 and went, we're stopping this. And they had hiked the price of fossil fuels before a Petro state, Russia, declared war on another Petro state, Ukraine, and that gave them cover for hiking the prices even more. There was a narrative around there's going to be inflation in the states, because Biden has done whatever he's done in terms of giving people money. And so a lot of companies just hiked their prices and created inflation that otherwise wouldn't have happened. And declared record profits. So we've got inflation narrative, yay, let's make inflation happen because we can. And it felt like everything began to sink.
Manda: And then we talked to Paddy Lowman earlier in the year, and he said that at Davos this year the masks were off, and everybody was no longer pretending that they even had a sustainable bone in their body. And that the relief was palpable and they were we're all (expletive deleted) we're going down the pan, so we might as well just basically, it's the last days of the Reich. Let's just party till the end, and then we can all bite our cyanide capsules. Which is so distressing. And yet I'm looking at a set of slides that you sent me to look at, and there's a film about a talking tree powered by AI technology. And AI may be going to kill us all. Anybody makes it, everybody dies; there is a book called that and it's frightening. However, good things happen with AI too. And so it feels like we're in this dual reality now, where you've got Agency for Nature, you've got all these people in the ad industry who, if they haven't gone crazy and/or fallen back into business as usual, are actively trying to create values shift at the same time as the old paradigm is in its last gasp and and hurling everything at the wall. How does it feel like from the inside to you?
Ally: Well, I mean, even talking about COP26 and the brief, it's like clawing back to a different lifetime, isn't it?
Manda: Right. It wasn't that long ago.
Ally: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Because that was a moment where climate and sustainability had this momentum behind it for the advertising industry. And it was the cool new thing. You know, the advertising industry of all the industries, loves a cool new thing and will rush to it. And that was a moment where the winds were in our sails and now they're not, let's face it. And the industry is under existential threat with AI, you know.
Manda: Like every other industry, frankly. But probably more so because people can just give ChatGPT a brief and it will produce the ad for you.
Ally: And if you're a client and you're spending millions on your creative agency, but now you can actually just have this thing in-house that makes just as good 10,000 versions of your brand mascot in a different setting.
Manda: Right. And is trained on how to create behavioural change in people. I mean, it can make teenagers commit suicide.
Ally: Oh yeah. Why are you going to pay humans millions to do that? You just aren't. So no, you're absolutely right. The industry's head has been hugely turned. And that is really partly why agency for nature, which is the evolution really of that sort of good life questioning and that good life work, had to become something that felt much less theoretical and much more tangible and compelling and useful and clear. So where before we were like, what is a good life? Come and explore that with us. This is not a moment where people can do that. They just can't do it.
Manda: Under existential threat is when you can't do that, because your sympathetic system is in overload.
Ally: Yeah, exactly. And you're desperately clinging on to the job that is the problem. So we're in a whole different world now. Agency for Nature is a little bit of a response to that, which is like, okay, here's the one thing we know we can all get behind, right? We all know that we've lost this connection to nature. This is one of the strands of the good life.
Manda: Okay. So Agency for Nature is okay, we're under existential threat and yet so is the rest of the planet. So what can we do?
Ally: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, maybe we're not in a headspace to fully interrogate the meaning of everything, but we can help a new generation fall back in love with nature. We can do that. We can bring young creatives. We can second them to your magical pop up, weird agency that you've invented, Purpose Disruptors and Glimpse. And it will be fun, you know, and a great learning experience for the young creatives. And so amazingly, despite a massive drop in kind of the salience of climate and sustainability, Agency for Nature is like this vessel that remains super, super magnetic for the industry.
Manda: Okay. In spite of the fact also that their jobs are on the line and they're watching AI suck value away from them, they're still sending young people to come and fall in love with being alive.
Ally: To come and work, yeah, which is, you know, long may that last.
Manda: And I mean, you look like a young person to me. You don't look like you're old enough to have been decades in the advertising industry, but let's assume they look even younger than you.
Ally: Oh they do, yeah. For sure.
Manda: How are they responding? Because this is the generation, I'm guessing we're talking about people who were born in the new millennium and are watching the chaos unfold without the old guardrails or guiderails or constrictions or restrictions that our generations had. They haven't grown up believing that the world is on a trajectory to everything being bigger and better and beautiful. They're on a trajectory to us, going over the edge of the cliff if we don't do something in a hurry. How do they respond as people and as creatives to the ideas of Agency for Nature?
Ally: Well, again, it's fascinating. Because these are young people who are very, very connected into culture, not necessarily so connected into nature. Some of them will have grown up in the countryside, will have some memories in childhood that they can kind of reactivate. And others will come and they'll be like, nature's boring, nature's nerdy, you wear an anorak, it's not my vibe. Really, it just doesn't mean anything to them.
Manda: Oh, my world just crashed into a brick wall. This is like talking to Daphne De Cros last week, who said they'd taken a bunch of youngsters, young people 15 ish, from Telford to a farm, and one of them said it was the first time he'd seen the horizon. And that just blew all my fuses. But this sounds like quite a lot of that would be the case.
Ally: Yeah, yeah, just people who it hasn't been part of their life. You know, it's not been cool and these are people who are probably extremely online as well.
Manda: Also their formative years were during Covid. They were actually locked inside and all that. Everything came off a screen.
Ally: Yeah. Also, that's right.
Manda: This is how we end up with Silicon Valley saying that the natural world is an aesthetic option, because for them it is. And it's an aesthetic option you can choose not to have, and your world doesn't change. So how do they respond when you go, actually, this is the source of all life and it would be nice if it didn't die.
Ally: Well, we begin by doing a kind of a nature immersion experience. So the construct is this is the Agency for Nature. We are in service to nature here. And you go on a client induction. That's what you often do if you're a young creative working on crisps, you go and you have your client induction, right?
Manda: And for those not in the industry, does that mean you go to a crisp factory or do you go to a potato farm?
Ally: Yeah, often. You'll go and you'll learn about what the history of this brand is. You'll go to the showroom or the crisp factory or whatever.
Manda: Okay. So what do you do then? How do you introduce people to the natural world who think it's not cool and requires anoraks?
Ally: We spend a day in nature, but crucially, nature in a city. So we've spent some time at Camden Street Natural Park near Kings Cross and the Walthamstow Wetlands. So we'll do briefings in nature, but not 'over there'.
Manda: You're not taking them to Dartmoor and making them camp overnight.
Ally: No. And the reason for that is because that's what they think nature is. We have this idea of nature as being like the countryside, deer, not for me. I live in a city.
Manda: Cold and wet and miserable. Lots of mud.
Ally: Yeah, exactly. And it's like, no, it's right here, wherever you are. It's this bird, it's this weather. It's just the weather outside. You are always in it. So it's really important to start to see that, that it's part of this separation myth, that's just like, well, I live in a city. I don't interact with nature.
Manda: Nature is out there. Yeah. Okay.
Ally: And that's an image problem. Again, it's like, no, no.
Manda: All of us. We are a part of it. Even that as a concept must be quite hard to get their heads around.
Ally: Well, that's the goal. I mean, what happens amazingly over the kind of 12 week period of responding to this brief is you'll often speak to them at the end and they'll say, yeah, I think I've kind of realised, you know, we are nature. And you're like, ah!
Manda: Yes. And you didn't have to say that.
Ally: Didn't have to say it. Exactly.
Manda: You lead them to the point where they work it out for themselves, which is when things Land. And how do they respond? So they do their 12 weeks with you, which sounds amazing, and then they go back to advertise agency X, which is requiring them to sell more widgets. What happens? How do they not end up crashing into a brick wall? Having got to the point where they presumably are at least a little bit in love with being an integral part of the web of life?
Ally: Yeah. I mean, we are really very keen to find ways to support them, to become advocates for nature, to give them a platform once they have done their work. So what will often happen is they have this 12 week period. There's ten per season; so five pairs from five different agencies. They'll create a campaign. We will enlist media donors basically to give us billboards, give us telly, give us TikTok, give us whatever we can assemble to see this work out into the world, so people can see it, so it has some cultural impact. And then that will have a sort of interesting long tail. There'll be a sort of bright burst where maybe there's press and there's events or whatever. And those young creatives often have a platform for the first time and get to rehearse a new story about how they made this work and what it means to them. And that will lead them down all kinds of new rabbit holes. Some of them won't last in the industry or will find new paths out or do other work. Some of them will really settle in and will be leaders from the belly of the thing, right? So everyone has their own path. But what we found is everyone who goes through it does seem to remember, does go through this process of remembering oh, yeah, this is what it's all about.
Manda: And this is how we create the ripple effects. This is how we create the fractal starts and the tipping points and the critical mass. I'm so in awe. I want to move on to Tendings for Endings. But just before we get there, I have a question that feels quite alive. Which is, it seems to me that Zack Polanski in the UK and Zoran Mamdani in the US, and a few others are beginning to shift the narrative. Zack Polanski is a Green Party leader, but he's been very careful mostly to be speaking about social equity. But he's speaking about it clearly and cleanly in a way that were I his ad campaign person, I would be really happy that it's beginning to Land.
Ally: Yeah.
Manda: Tax, wealth not work. I think he's got some really good slogans. And he's part of the Green Party. So I'm wondering whether that shift is landing? Whether you're seeing in the young people, because it does seem that a lot of young people are signing up to the Green Party, whether that is changing the narrative landscape yet, or is it too early to see?
Ally: Um, well, I think I'll say one thing, which is we put these campaigns out into the world, and then there's a sort of experimental waiting to see how the world responds to them. So obviously with platforms like Instagram, people are commenting and they're saying this is how this makes me feel. And what we often find is that these are campaigns that really celebrate the feeling of being connected to nature, but in kind of culturally relevant ways. And people will often be like, oh, this is me! Ah! This times a hundred.
Manda: Thank you for... Yes!
Ally: Yeah. And there's a sort of a resonance, I think, like a quality of resonance that we often observe, where the way that people respond, and this is very hard to measure, right? Like, I don't really know how you evaluate this.
Manda: It's going to end up being anecdotal rather than hard data.
Ally: Exactly. Apart from that I just know that's like a sign of an outsized reaction to something they've seen on Instagram. Which is just like, wow.
Manda: And that must be so reinforcing for the young people who created that thing.
Ally: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what you want. Yeah.
Manda: That's the feedback you want. I did this thing. It's great.
Ally: Yeah. And like, oh, I've touched something which is kind of weirdly true to this community and all of the briefs of late have been really targeted at specific communities of interest. So goths, football fans, the drag community. And then you'll see all of these drag fans being like, ah, nature. So in all these different pockets, there's a feeling of resonance. And I think there's something about what's going on with Zach and Mamdani in the States as well, where it's just playing back in really simple terms. What feels true to us, what feels like we know to be true. And now you're telling me, and like, thank God!
Manda: Yeah, exactly. Now I am free to say this aloud because someone else has said it first.
Ally: Yeah, right. So I don't quite know how that links, actually, but there's just something there about resonance, you know.
Manda: Well, it's probably too early, I think that's the thing. I would imagine that over the next year, it feels to me like a narrative landscape is shifting quite hard and quite fast because somebody is able to to say the stuff that's true. Jeremy Corbyn was saying something similar, but maybe because he was Magic grandpa and he wasn't young and cool and gay. Zack Polanski is saying it cleanly and clearly and I think it's going to take off, which will be good. But then obviously the establishment is going to push back, and I don't really want to watch that because it's going to be not pretty.
Ally: I know.
Manda: However, before we get to that, Tending to Endings. Tell us about Tending to Endings. Show us for the people on YouTube, Tending to Endings, and tell us how you came to be crafting this. And also how people can get it and what it is. All those things. There we go.
Ally: So this is a little card deck. Thank you for asking.
Manda: We'll put some images up in the show notes for people who are not on YouTube because it's a podcast; why would you listen to it on YouTube. But there we go. Yes.
Ally: Where do I start with Tending to Endings? So I guess as like a segue from what we've just been talking about, you know, this desire that feels so palpable at the moment for a return to interconnectedness, inter-becoming, whatever we want to call that feeling of like, oh, yeah, we're nature. That's it. You know. It feels like often it seems to lie on the other side of a deep ditch of grief. I think in particular, the thing that struck me most was the felling of the Sycamore Gap in the UK. Do you remember that?
Manda: Yes. But for people not in the UK, just give us an explanation.
Ally: An absolutely beautiful and ancient and very beloved tree on Hadrian's Wall.
Manda: Really iconic.
Ally: Very, very iconic tree. Was mysteriously felled overnight, and has now gone on to become a big court case in the UK as to who committed this. But the outpouring of grief around the loss of this tree; like it makes no sense in the world we live in. You would look at that and be like, why is this feeling so strong?
Manda: Why this particular tree, when the tree that they didn't grieve down the road from them was felled a couple of years ago and nobody hardly even noticed.
Ally: Well. Or just even like, why in this world where the goal is to do industrial growth, does a tree come down and we weep such tears of grief. And it's like, because on some level, that tree was our kin, you know? And despite the world we live in, that was true. So sometimes there's just these little breaks in the fabric of life, where you're like, oh, see, this is the proof.
Manda: Yes, people do care.
Ally: Yes, of course we care. And even though there's all this noise, like, we can grieve. So we all know to grieve somehow, so hard. There was another tree that was cut down by a harvester in a car park in Enfield, and it was the same thing. It was just this well of grief, you know, because we're humans and this is our tree. And there's something there that feels very poignant to me.
Manda: There was a very iconic picture of a young man sitting on the stump of an oak tree that had been around at the time of, I don't know, the Battle of Hastings or something, and it had been cut down to make way for the HS2 train line that's not even going to happen now. And he's sitting there and he's got his head in his hands, and it's just such an iconic picture of grief. And there is something, I think, particularly about trees, that they carry such history, and they're so beautiful. And everybody knows that if you go and sit under a tree, however bad you're feeling, you're going to feel better. So yeah, that. Anyway, how did that lead to Tending to Endings?
Ally: I could talk about trees a long time. But there's something there, I think, for me, about grief is such an unspoken experience in modernity. We just do not know how to deal with death. How to deal with loss. How to grieve things well. That's just been a very personal inquiry for a long time, of how do we bring all of that stuff out of the shadow? Because otherwise the dreams of the good life over here, once all of those griefs are accumulating in our systems, we really stop losing the capacity to do that dreaming. And I guess that's the link, you know, just to go back lightly to the imagination research that we were doing back with the good Life. We did three rounds of that over four years. And although the direction of travel was always to a life of greater connectedness, the horizon of possibility got smaller and smaller and smaller. So you move from people having these big, you know, like, I'm going to relocate, I'm going to build community, I'm going to do this and that and the other. To hopefully, maybe I'll get a promotion. Or, hopefully things won't get worse. Things won't get worse? That's not a good life. We can dream bigger than that.
Manda: Yeah. But why? Why was it narrowing so much? Because this was through Covid and out the other end.
Ally: Through Covid and out the other end. I mean, the researchers are calling this an imagination recession. We are becoming inhibited in our capacity to dream other worlds into being. And part of that is stacked up shadow stuff, loss, frustration.
Manda: And fear.
Ally: Grief, grief, grief.
Manda: Shutting down our capacity for imaginal space.
Ally: Fear. Exactly. It paralyses our imaginative faculties. So to me, it started to become really clear that there is this sort of counter work to be done. If you're working in imagination and dreaming the new things into being, we equally need to be getting better at dreaming the old things out of being.
Manda: Composting the old.
Ally: Composting the old and making space for that stuff to get metabolised, to not get stuck, to not just get pushed down. We have to work out how to tend to these endings in our lives. You know, these losses, the lost futures we thought we were going to have. The lost direction of endless progress that we were the inheritors of, you know, that was a story that we thought was ours and it's probably not.
Manda: It definitely isn't. And so tending to endings is this card deck that you've made to help people do the inner work. Together or alone or both?
Ally: It's even lighter than that. It's another experiment. You can probably tell, Manda I'm just interested in very light experiments and then seeing what happens.
Manda: Yeah. It's gorgeous.
Ally: Using metaphors from the garden and from gardening, you know.
Manda: Right. Because composting is a thing, right?
Ally: Exactly. The bonfire and deadheading and composting and the wormery. These are endings that we can locate in a cycle of regeneration. We know in the garden how it works. Things go down, they come back up.
Manda: They grow in the spring, they die in the autumn, they regenerate over the winter. And it's cyclical. The death is not an ending, it's the beginning of the new.
Ally: Exactly. It's the beginning of the new. And often in a world of compost, it's impossible to even say which is this side or that side of birth and death. It's something much more mysterious, actually. And that just feels like it has medicine for us in this time.
Manda: And who's the us? You and who else is part of this making creating.
Ally: Well so this is a project I've been co-creating with a wonderful garden thinker called Will Brown, who is really interested in the garden as a kind of a learning ground, for change of all kinds. And he joined a sort of peer learning journey I hosted a few years ago, around death and the collective imagination. I was really curious about pursuing this inquiry of how we enrich our imaginaries around death. How do we fertilise all of our mental models and beliefs and constructs around death because they feel very thin.
Manda: Yes. Our culture's very bad at dying with grace and intention and awareness.
Ally: Yeah, exactly.
Manda: Okay. Because you trained as a death doula also. I think that's worth saying.
Ally: I did. I'll just say Heather as well, Heather Knight, who is my other collaborator who's wonderful. She's a designer. So she's also involved in the project, does a lot of kind of regenerative design work.
Manda: Okay.
Ally: And yes, I trained as a death doula because I had this question. We live in a sort of a dying time, let's be honest, with expired stories all around us that are still being held up on life support. How do we help it die? How do we accompany this process, which has to happen, because right now it's not happening in a natural way.
Manda: We're in the extinction burst of everything resisting it happening because people don't have the visions of a world that could be better on the other side. It is actually easier to imagine the total extinction of life on Earth than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, because we haven't done the grief and the composting and the death work. This is so lovely, Ally. Honestly, I'm so impressed. So you've created this card deck, and can people get it from you? Buy it even? You know, we're still in the death cult of predatory capitalism. It presumably costs something to make. Is this a thing?
Ally: Yes, yes they can. And it's been a really funny journey, because we began maybe in the hope that we could just live alongside the death cult of predatory capitalism and not really participate in it. And we were like, we'll just seed some cards into the world and put them on a bus stop and see what happens. But then obviously everyone was rightly like, no, I'd like them.
Manda: I'd actually like to buy one.
Ally: And also, yeah, I'd like them next day shipping because I've got a thing on Friday. Right. Okay. Cool. We can do that too. So we have done that. And it's not a fully kind of operational business shop. But they are available for sale. You can buy them.
Manda: Okay. And we will put a link in the show notes if people would like to avail themselves, because they've got a thing.
Ally: Because they've got a thing. Exactly.
Manda: Okay. Or even they just want to explore. I mean, seriously, this is why we run Dreaming your death awake once a year. Because I think unless we've learned how to die with full awareness and grace and joy and wonder and awe and courage at that next stage, that rite of passage, that passing forward, we can't learn to be in love with life. If we've constantly got the grief and the fear in the background; you can be in love while grieving; it's really hard to be in love while being afraid.
Ally: Um. Oh I love that.
Manda: I think grief and love are two sides of the same coin. If somebody close to me dies tomorrow, I will not be less in love with the puppy. In fact, I will probably be more in love with the puppy, because life. But if I am terrified, it's really hard to have my heart fully open. And so anything that helps people to engage with that flow of life and death and thereby come into the creative space that is the antithesis of fear, I think is just going to be amazing. So I'm genuinely in awe. You've got Purpose Disruptors. You've got Agency for Nature and you've got Tending to Endings. What else Ally, what else are you doing that we don't know about yet?
Ally: What else? I mean this question of how we help things to die is just such a rich one at the moment. And the response to the cards has been, again, you know, my favourite theme of resonance has been outsized. And long emails saying like oh, we need this, you know. So again, it's just one small, very modest tool in service of a kind of a collective awakening and a collective reckoning with how we tend to and find agency in this moment of loss. So I have personally a lot more work, I think in that space, and equally with the work of Agency for Nature, you have to hold them both at the same time, don't you?
Manda: Sure. Yes. And it's an emergent thing I'm imagining. Particularly when you're so aware of emergence that you have no idea. If you could predict where it was going, it wouldn't be emergent. So Agency for nature is still going? Are you still running your cohorts of ten?
Ally: Very much so. We're in a process of kind of recalibrating a little bit and working out what impact really means.
Manda: And what does it mean?
Ally: I'm laughing because the more interest... Sorry, this is a whole other, I'll say in a line...
Manda: A whole new podcast that we're probably going to have to do later. But anyway, go on.
Ally: The more interest we have from the mainstream, the more we have to learn how to speak in a way that makes sense to Defra, while at the same time holding what we believe is a paradigmatic shift that needs to happen.
Manda: On the assumption that Defra is not really, or not all Defra, some of Defra actually I think probably is, but some of this government is clearly not on board with paradigmatic shift. Okay. So you're holding all of that. And so how are you measuring impact. Because I'm guessing somewhere along the line people in the old paradigm need you to measure impact. How do you do that?
Ally: Yeah. Well, this is where you start to have to get really multilingual, I think. And this is a new skill for many of us, jumping between paradigms. It's like what are the KPIs that mean something in the existing paradigm? Like making nature famous, as famous as a Nike campaign. Like building advocates, building the field. All of this stuff is true and real. It's real in the world. And then there's like another layer which is really about redirecting a skill set which is very, very good at manufacturing desire towards re-activating yearning for our innate human knowing. So what's that KPI? And who cares about that? Because that's true for us and true for some others. May be true for a funder, I'm not sure.
Manda: It's going to be a very special funder, but they do exist.
Ally: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But a lot of other funders might be speaking different language. So it is a multilingual job, as I'm sure you know. You know, with your projects as well. You've got to speak a few languages.
Manda: Yeah. But it's very exciting. It feels like you're right at that leading edge of inter-becoming change. Where you have to have a foot in the old camp, because we do still live in that world.
Ally: Yeah, we live here.
Manda: And yet we have to have the foot on the kind of moving elevator that we don't know where it's going.
Ally: Exactly.
Manda: And you have to not break apart and not split open and hold it with the joy and the reverence and the awe and the wonder that is part of the new and inter-becoming while not looking completely off the rails to the people who are still stuck in the old paradigm. It's a really interesting juggling job, but it feels really alive. And you look really alive to me in this. How does it feel?
Ally: Oh, it feels so alive. I love that you've just told me I look really alive. That's great. I mean, I know it does. It feels absolutely like the work. This is the work. And I think something has shifted, probably for us or for me recently, which is this real anchoring in this new mysterious paradigm/ancient paradigm. The one where we're nature.
Manda: Right. The re evolving into that.
Ally: Yeah, exactly. And even though I don't have very good words to evidence it to Defra for example, it doesn't matter. I'm there now. Or I'm planting my feet there. So we just see where it goes. Yeah.
Manda: See where it goes. Right. So we'll come back, you and I, in about a year and see where it's gone. I think that'd be really exciting. For people listening who are engaged and alive, they can obviously get your pack of cards and they can tend to endings. For ordinary people who are not part of the advertising industry, have you got anything that they could do to feel alive and to feel that they're being part of what you're talking about? Is there anything they can do to support Agency for Nature or anything? What could people be and do to help?
Ally: What a beautiful question. I mean, Agency for Nature exists to help people fall back in love with nature. And it is part of hopefully a growing movement of different actors who are all working out how we fall back in love with nature. So that's on all of us. That's on the culture, you know. And I'm so curious always about how people, particularly people who don't have the source code in their childhoods that they can return to, like me, I didn't really have that. I grew up in a city. I've learned it as an adult, you know. So.
Manda: Right. How did you learn it? I mean, this is almost another podcast. I've lost track of the time because we've had a couple of breaks. But how? Just very briefly, what was it? Can you measure a tipping point?
Ally: Yeah. I mean, I really woke up to first of all the climate crisis around 2019, but that was quite heady. That was kind of a logical following of facts and thinking whoa. And then there was a moment, I was locked down, I was living on my own in a flat in 2020, having never lived outside of a city. And I somehow purchased for myself some tomato seeds. And I grew my very first tomato in a tiny little flat above a Tesco Express in Kentish Town. And only two little tomatoes made it, you know, these little, but I was just thrilled.
Manda: And don't they taste amazing when you've grown your own?
Ally: I didn't eat them. No. I put them in a little candle pot holder thing and I put them outside. I had a big community of pigeons, you know, real filthy north London pigeons who all lived just outside my window. And I put out this little offering, and I waited, and I came back the next morning to see if they'd eaten it. They hadn't eaten it. I came back the next morning and they hadn't eaten it. And on the third day they'd gone.
Manda: Those are for us!
Ally: And I burst into tears, Manda. I just felt, for the first time in my life, like I had participated in a cycle of reciprocity with the natural world, and I was like 29 or something. I was old.
Manda: That's not old. Trust me, that's not old. But anyway, you were 29.
Ally: It's old to wake up to things that hopefully, you know at the age of two, you know, my son's age. But I learned it at 29.
Manda: You probably did know it at two, and it was probably domesticated out of you.
Ally: That's true. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah.
Manda: Glorious. Oh, that is a whole other podcast. Okay, so anyone listening can fall in love with life. Can they follow you on Instagram? Any of the others. And I don't do Instagram, but do you retweet on Instagram or comment? You do something to support an Instagram post? Is that a thing?
Ally: Um, yeah, 100%. I'm Ally Kingston on Instagram. I'm not an extremely online person.
Manda: A little bit on LinkedIn. I found you on LinkedIn.
Ally: A little bit on LinkedIn. And Tending to Endings you can find at tendingtoendings.com.
Manda: We will put a link to that in the show notes to where people can buy some from you. Although if 10,000 people buy them, you're going to be spending your solstice wrapping things and putting them in the post. But we'll work with that one. Okay.
Ally: We'll work with that.
Manda: All right. Ally, this has been such a joy. It's such an amazing way of heading down into the dark nights, or for people in the southern hemisphere heading up into the bright nights. Thank you so much for everything that you are and you do, and I would love to talk to you again sometime in 2026 or early 27 to see where we'd got to. Thank you.
Ally: It's been an absolute joy. Thank you.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Ally for such a bright, lively, hope filled conversation. It's so good to know that somebody so switched on really gets it and is turning such obvious, creative, magical, wild and mythical talent in service to life, in service to helping others reframe what life is for and helping people to find that yearning. To be able to lean into it. To know that it's possible to live as the best that we can be in service to life. Truly, this was a genuinely inspiring conversation for me and I hope for you. I've put links in the show notes to Purpose Disruptors, Agency for Nature, and Tending to Endings. And if you do want to avail yourself of the Tending to Endings card deck, there is a link for you to do so. I thoroughly encourage you, not just for yourself, but as a gift for others, who can help to find ways to compost the old, to let our grief flow so that we can also fall daily, minute by minute, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat, in love with the wild magic of being alive. That's what we're here for. And if we're going to shift the world, and it is definitely urgent now, then falling in love with being alive every moment of every day is the first step.
Manda: And as we're here, moving down into the dark nights in the Northern hemisphere, in the bright days in the southern hemisphere, I would like to offer huge thanks to those of you who have listened to the end of some of the podcast, and recently gave us five stars and a review on the podcast apps. Really, I'm hugely grateful and it definitely does change the algorithms. I would also like to remind you that whether you are a member of the Accidental Gods membership or not, you are always welcome to our gatherings and the next one is Dreaming Your Year Awake on the 4th of January, 4:00 till 8:00 in the afternoon UK time. And there is a link in the show notes.
Manda: And that's it for this week. We'll be back soon with another conversation. And in the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website, for doing all of the stuff that makes the gatherings happen and for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And then, as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can shift the focus of our lives from the old system to the new, how we can fall again in love with being alive, how we can bring our creativity in service to life, then please do send them this link and let them know. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.