Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to create that future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller on this journey into possibility. And often on this podcast we explore Joanna Macy's concept of the three pillars of the Great Turning, which are: Holding Actions - the things that stop the damage; Systems Change - the ways we might get ourselves to the emergence edge of inter becoming; and Shifting Consciousness, which I would see at the very least as changing our value system, and at best, us finding ways to reconnect with the web of life. We explore in many ways the different parts of this. And today, we're heading very deeply into one of the really effective holding actions. Our guest this week is Jojo Mehta, co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, which she and the late pioneering barrister Polly Higgins founded in 2017. She is the driving force at the heart of the growing global movement to make ecocide an international crime. Their core work is supporting diplomatic process and fostering global cross sector support for this. They collaborate with diplomats, politicians, lawyers, corporate leaders, NGOs, indigenous and faith groups, influencers, academic experts, grassroot campaigners and individuals Positioning themselves with great clarity at the meeting point where legal evolution meets political traction and public narrative. All of which means they are uniquely placed to track, support and amplify this essential global conversation. So talking to Jojo was a privilege and a delight.
Manda: Our conversation took us in many directions. We explored the legal implications of the law, what it is, what it's trying to do, why it's framed, the way it's framed. But beyond this, we looked at how it has the potential to counter the inequities of the states investor dispute settlement, how it could bolster indigenous groups in seeking protection for their ancestral lands. We looked at the ways the law is being framed and where it and laws like it have already been enacted. We looked at its progress in the International Criminal Court and what the ultimate aims are in shaping it as a deterrent, but also as cover for those already inside the extractive, destructive industries; which, let's face it, is basically all of them; who want to act but are constrained by the constant requirement to push always for profit, regardless of its impact on people and planet. Those who drive them may not care about the little people, about you and me, and particularly quite clearly do not care about the impact on the greater system. But they care about themselves. And if they face actual jail terms, then their incentive structures become quite different. And as Daniel Schmachtenberger so often says, 'show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome'. Stop ecocide International exists radically to shift the incentive structure, and it is making real headway. If you despair about the ways that we can change the trajectory of the system, if you think our chances of veering the bus away from the edge of the cliff are small, then this, the work of Stop Ecocide International could be the spark of light that you need in the gloom to give you the impetus to keep going.
Manda: It is genuinely encouraging. And Jojo herself is so switched on, so warm, so completely aware of all aspects of this and so able to walk that very fine line that isn't setting out to trigger people, that isn't setting out to make gotchas, or to power people into walls or to make them feel small. And yes, I quite often think I probably try and do that to the people that really upset me. But what impressed me about talking with Jojo was how willing and able she is to stay balanced on the knife edge of the moment and talk sense about the fact that we only have one planet. We are the consciousness on it, and we are currently destroying it and it would be a really good thing if we didn't. And how about we have some laws that give everybody equal legal protection? Because if my competitor can do something but I can't, then I am pushed into doing it too. If none of us can do it, then we can all stop together, and that makes a huge difference. So for this week's spark of optimism, and for an understanding of the ways that people are working behind the scenes to make real change happen, people of the podcast, please do welcome Jojo Mehta of Stop Ecocide International.
Manda: Jojo, Welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this happy summer afternoon?
Jojo: I'm actually very well, thank you. And I am coming in from the Cotswolds. I'm in a little market town called Stroud in the west of England.
Manda: Oh, Stroud. Stroud is magical. It's kind of like Totnes, isn't it? It's got that sort of switched on peopleness to it.
Jojo: It definitely has. I think there may be something in the water around here. I mean, Stop Ecocide started here. Extinction Rebellion started here. The Global Citizens Assembly started here. So...
Manda: And Roz Savage, I believe, lives there. And she just got to be the MP of North Cotswold.
Jojo: She has indeed. Yes. She's just won a seat.
Manda: This time last year she didn't even want to be an MP. It's like in less than six months she was the candidate and then elected, it was amazing. So there you go. Stroud is actually magical. So yes, all these things started here. And you are the co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International. So tell us a little bit about the founding, because you and Polly Higgins started it together. How and why did you do that?
Jojo: Well, I mean, firstly, to absolutely encapsulate what it is we do. We're an international advocacy organisation with one very specific goal, which is the criminalisation of the worst harms to nature, or ecocide. And this is a concept that was resurrected by Polly, who dedicated the last ten years of her life to bringing it back into prominence. She sadly died in 2019 of a very rapid cancer. But I suppose in a way I'm going to start with her and then how I kind of ended up joining that stream, if you like. So, I mean, she was actually quite a successful barrister and was just sort of hitting what you might call the big time when she had this kind of epiphany. And she asked herself this one question, how do we create a legal duty of care for the earth? And really that was to direct the rest of her life. And she looked down a number of avenues, including Rights of Nature, which is now quite a large movement internationally. But she came to the criminal law side when she discovered that during the drafting of a code that was being worked on by the International Law Commission in the 90s, that was kind of like a precursor to the Rome Statute. Now, the Rome Statute is the governing document of the International Criminal Court. And when she was looking into this sort of drafting process that was happening back in the 90s, what she discovered was that there was originally a clause in that draft that would have addressed severe, widespread and long term harm to the environment. Now, that clause never made the Rome Statute.
Jojo: It never made that final treaty. And I think that honestly her reaction was almost like, well, what world would we have been in today if the International Criminal Court had not just addressed war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, but also ecocide? And so I think she spent the last ten years of her life dedicated to what she saw as replacing the missing international crime. And that was ecocide. And I met Polly in 2014, and by that time I had already spent maybe a year or so diving into environmental campaigning and activism as a result of my discovery of fracking or hydraulic fracturing, which is this incredibly polluting way of bringing oil and gas up from deep under the earth. And I remember reading about it and just thinking, there is absolutely no angle from which this makes sense. Not economic. It's obviously not ecological. In terms of health. I mean there was no way that it seemed to work and I just couldn't understand it. And I think most activists or people who've sort of been in that space have had a moment of kind of wake up or outrage. And for me, that was mine. And, and I remember talking about it to my friends and family, and my little daughter was just five at the time. And she burst into tears and she said, mummy, if they're poisoning the ground, they're going to poison themselves. They're going to die. You have to call them and tell them to stop.
Manda: Oh, the joy of youth.
Jojo: Exactly. And I just thought my five year old understands this and surely this should be obvious to everyone. So that was, I suppose, the moment that started to kind of move me in this direction.
Manda: Wow. I'd love to go down the fracking route. Actually, let's go down the fracking route, because as someone who knows relatively little, the thing that really blows all my fuses is the idea that they are poisoning the groundwater forever. For the rest of the existence of this planet, the groundwater is now poisoned with stuff that they won't tell us what's in it, because it's a commercial secret. And I just cannot believe human beings who will do this. But you're saying it's not even commercially viable. One of my students is a very powerful activist who's been around since Greenham days, and once in a while puts on a business suit and looks very smart. And she went into one of their meetings and she said, all along the walls there were big posters saying 'the size of the price'. And she hung around with these people looking like one of them and all they were talking about was the potential for making huge amounts of money at some point. And they literally don't care about anything else. But if I just heard you right, you're saying it doesn't even make sense commercially?
Jojo: No, because in order to actually make a field productive, you've got to basically put thousands of these wells, which obviously destroys entire swathes of countryside. And one of the things in the UK was they were trying to make out that somehow it was just a little well, here and there in the countryside. And of course, actually when you looked at the pictures from, say, Queensland, Australia, where you could see what actually happened
Manda: It looks like a pincushion.
Jojo: Exactly. I mean, it's absolutely insane. But also, the whole kind of way that it was set up were almost what you might think of as kind of Ponzi schemes, in the sense that you're selling an investment, but then ultimately the productivity is never very high. And also the actual track record of the Wells was terrible. I mean over a fairly short number of years, there was some huge percentage like 50 or 60% that would ultimately end up leaking.
Manda: And they're leaking methane, which is a fantastically potent greenhouse gas.
Jojo: Exactly. So you can imagine this really sort of drove me into this, sort of onto my feet I suppose, out of my activist armchair where I was happy signing petitions.
Manda: Because you had been working for 38 degrees, if I've understood your CV correctly.
Jojo: Well that's right. I mean, obviously it was voluntary, but I started the local 38 degrees group here in Stroud in the UK. 38 degrees is, I suppose, a bit like the sort of UK Avaaz or something like that, or sort of we move. And so yes, I'd been involved in that, but the fracking in particular had got me actually properly researching, writing leaflets, giving talks, organising demonstrations, all of that. And I met Polly because she moved to our area. And also she was at the time researching some stuff around fracking for a potential case. And some mutual friends put us in touch and they said, look, you've got to talk to Jojo because she knows all about this. She's been doing loads of research and everything. So that's how we originally got talking to each other, I guess. And it was one of those kindred spirit moments. I mean, I had come across her in the past. I'd heard about what she was doing and I remember thinking, well, yes, call it ecocide, make it a crime. That sounds incredibly sensible. But when we met, it was very much a kindred spirit moment. I mean, you know, after about half an hour with each other, we were pretty much sitting there saying, well, we're obviously working together then. What we shared was this incredibly kind of pragmatic, common sense approach. I sometimes think of it as a sort of ready, steady, cook type approach. So you know that you want to end up with something specific. I mean, obviously with Ready, Steady Cook, it's a beautiful dish, in our case it was an international crime.
Manda: Slightly wider scope.
Jojo: And you don't know exactly how you're going to get there.
Manda: But you know where you're aiming for.
Jojo: You have a range of ingredients in front of you and the response is, well, what can I creatively do with these ingredients to sort of get me where I'm going? And I suppose it's a slightly kind of maverick improvisational approach, but also a very grounded one. You know, what do we actually have? What can we actually do? And I think that partnership, what became a very close friendship actually, was very much in that spirit, I suppose.
Manda: And did you have a legal background?
Jojo: Personally, no. My background was quite meandering, actually, in terms of I didn't have a career path as such. But there was I suppose, a thread that ran through all of that, which was probably communication. I actually worked in travel in my 20s, in manufacturing in my 30s, I used to run a manufacturing company, if you can believe that. And then I got into design and web design and graphics and all of those kinds of things. And I ended up working with Polly through the environmental campaigning side, which I'd obviously taken up, not so much as work, but as a sort of passion project, I suppose. I worked with Polly until she died, which was sort of four and a half to five years from then. And by that point, I was probably one of the best informed people on the planet about this particular area.
Manda: Yes. You know how laws are formed by then. You know the structure and the wording and also how people have made them happen.
Jojo: Yeah, I mean obviously I wasn't a trained lawyer, but I knew this area very well. And at the same time, what we brought to the party together, if you like, was this combination of the campaigning spirit, which is obviously the direction I came from and the legal side, which is where Polly came from. And we actually originally co-founded what is now Stop Ecocide International in 2017, partly in response to the fact that it was actually difficult for Polly to find funding for the work that she was pioneering. Particularly we needed more funds to move forward the diplomatic conversation, which was just beginning at that point. And so it was a sort of response to that where the bigger foundations and so on just found it too extreme. They found it too radical. I know it's crazy, isn't it, when you think about it? Because, you know, there's nothing less radical than just saying, let's not destroy the planet. I mean there's nothing particularly outrageous about that. But what we did eventually was to convert Polly's following into the beginnings of a membership. And effectively almost crowdfund that way, if you like. So that's how the campaign was born. And that enabled some of the first trips that Polly did to The Hague, to the Assembly of States Parties, to the International Criminal Court and so on, were financed that way.
Manda: Right. So taking a step back, you said earlier that we wanted to add a fourth crime. That the International Criminal Court, if I've got it down right, there are war crimes as one thing, Genocide is another thing, and crimes against humanity is a third thing. And they decided not to have crimes against the natural world when they were originally setting those up. Do we know, first of all, why not? I mean, because war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity seem a bunch of overlapping things. But then, if you were to add in 'and destroying the entire ecosphere, which is the thing that underpins all life', it's an obvious envelope in which all of those exist. Was there a huge amount of lobbying from, say, fossil fuel companies or just generally big companies to get it taken away? Or did they all just think it didn't really matter?
Jojo: No, I don't think the latter was true. From the research that Polly did, along with some academic colleagues, it seems that there wasn't a specific moment when it was voted out. It sort of got quietly dropped from what we can see. But there were there were several countries that weighed in against it at different points.
Manda: Would I guess the US and the UK?
Jojo: Oh yes. The US, the UK, also France and the Netherlands and at one point briefly Brazil.
Manda: The Netherlands! I thought they were the good guys.
Jojo: Well it's interesting isn't it, because actually all of those countries are oil countries. They're all oil countries. And certainly with those main four: US, UK, France and Netherlands; at the time, they were either already testing or considering testing nuclear weapons. So obviously making a nuclear weapon may or may not be ecocidal, but using one almost certainly is. So I don't know how it can be anything else really. So that could have had something to do with it. We can't guarantee it. We don't know for sure. But it's interesting to sort of join some of those dots and just speculate. But certainly those three crimes that were covered by the statute when the court first opened its doors in 2002, I mean you're absolutely right that ecocide ultimately underpins all of them. Because without obviously without a liveable planet, I mean, we can't even consider, you know.
Manda: The rest are just noise. You know, it's total genocide.
Jojo: Exactly. And in fact, there was another crime that was added later, the crime of aggression. So there are actually now four, although not everybody's ratified the fourth.
Manda: Has everybody ratified the others? Because it seems to me that part of what was happening, you know, the chaos in the Middle East is that Israel either doesn't recognise the International Criminal Court or doesn't care what it says, which is an also an issue.
Jojo: Well, yeah. Indeed. And certainly at the moment, the discussion around international law is quite alive in a way that it possibly hasn't ever been before, precisely because of this. And of course, the court has had to do the even handed thing, which is in line, obviously, with international law and request arrest warrants all round, if you like. But they have been controversial. And there's all kinds of discussions going on at the diplomatic level around those issues. What we do as an organisation is do our absolute best to steer clear of those discussions, because we believe that the ecocide issue is so fundamental that it shouldn't depend on any other context. And in the same vein, this year as you know is a big election year around the world. And what we've made efforts to do is actually try and keep ecocide out of that conversation.
Manda: You don't want it to be assigned to one or other side of a guaranteed bipolar situation. Okay. Yes.
Jojo: Yeah, exactly. So we don't want it to become a partisan issue. And sometimes in panels I've been asked, so what's Stop ecocide's position on x, y whatever? And I will simply say we don't have a position on that. There's one thing we want and that is the criminalisation of the worst harms to nature.
Manda: Okay. That's really clear. Yes.
Jojo: And actually, interestingly, we believe that this is a big part of how we've managed to, in a sense, sort of work our way through the political and diplomatic conversation to quite a high level. Because we we are always positive about how we portray things, which is interesting, obviously, given the subject matter. But what we don't do, for example, is point fingers, accuse particular companies or particular states. What we actually underline is the fact that this is an absolutely common sense provision that will help everybody, and that we're all going to be in deep water without. And effectively keep it the sense of really a legal tool that is of benefit to everyone. In fact, sometimes I think of it as a Swiss Army knife. You know, whoever you're talking to, there is a tool somewhere in there that ecocide law will provide.
Manda: Okay. I like the Swiss army knife metaphor. Let's move into that later. But you've said several times now that we're criminalising the worst harm to nature. And worst has to me an objective scale to it. How do we decide that something is is bad enough to count as being worst, and something that's just really not very good, but isn't the worst? Where are you setting the dividing lines on that?
Jojo: This is a really important issue and it comes down to how do you define ecocide? And actually, one of the biggest milestones in all of this was the establishment by our charitable foundation in 2020 of an international panel of lawyers to spend six months drafting a definition of ecocide that could effectively have the weight and credibility that governments could seriously consider it, and to actually propose it at the International Criminal Court. And of course, these issues of thresholds were very much part of those discussions. And it was actually a remarkable situation because, I mean, the term ecocide actually goes back to 1970, where it was originally used to describe damage to the natural environment in Vietnam caused by Agent Orange. But it's sort of languished I suppose a little bit in a kind of political and legal backwater over the decades since. But there were various attempts to define it. What was different about this one was that rather than just being a lawyer or a small group of lawyers saying, oh, well, we think Ecocide should be a crime, we think he should look like this. This actually was the result of a political request. So we were actually approached by Swedish parliamentarians who said to us, this is obviously your area of expertise, would you be able to convene a drafting project and come up with a consensus definition that we can credibly take to our government? And that enabled us to bring together these top lawyers from around the world, including the very renowned British French barrister Philippe Sands, who is himself an expert on the origins of international crimes. And we were delighted that he accepted to co-chair this panel, along with a remarkable Senegalese jurist, Elisabeth Dior Fall Sow, who was the first female prosecutor there, also. And those discussions took place over six months and emerged with a consensus definition. And what's so beautiful about this definition is that it has a few paragraphs to it, but the core text is only one sentence, and it's so concise that it fits on the back of a business card.
Manda: That's very cool.
Jojo: And I think this is wonderful. When you're dealing with politicians, they never have time to read through a 20 page report. But the definition they came up with is ecocide means 'unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there's a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long term damage to the environment being caused by those acts'. Now, that's actually based quite strongly on legal precedent, but at the same time, it's actually very straightforward to understand. Both looking at the severity of harm, so it can't just be chopping down the trees on the village green, it's got to be severe and either widespread or long term. But also this aspect of unlawful or wanton, where effectively it either has to be something that results from a kind of a breach of existing laws, but takes the harm to a certain level, or it has to be something that, even if it's permitted, creates a disproportionate level of harm. Now, this definition emerged in June 2021, and I could put it in a personal way and say that until that time I was able to read all my emails. After that, things just kind of ramped up because it absolutely triggered political, legal and academic conversation all around the world. And things have moved incredibly fast since. And I think what it encapsulates is firstly this severity, because to be an international crime, something has to be pretty severe. But you'll notice it also doesn't designate particular amounts.
Jojo: So it also doesn't say a certain kilometrage or a certain duration. And what the panel realised when they were doing their discussions is that if you did that, you would be effectively preventing a case by case analysis, which would actually be essential in cases like this. So you might have, for example, a chemical disaster maybe like Bhopal, for example, where actually the damage was fairly localised, but it was absolutely extreme. And you would want that to probably come under ecocide. On the other hand, you know, you could have something that potentially was very widespread and might eventually be restorable, but it would be so expansive that it should also be included. So they ended up with this severe and/or, you know, in other words could be widespread or long term. And actually, in criminal law, it's not unusual to have these things set in this way. Things like recovery in a reasonable amount of time or, what constitutes severe. Because those things are decided on the basis of individual cases. I mean, let's just take a simple example; if you're beaten up in the street, it's not the number of bruises that will tell a court whether it was attempted murder or grievous bodily harm or simple assault. It's the whole ensemble of what happens.
Manda: Okay, so we have an established set of concepts that allows courts internationally to balance these things? Because I'm guessing, and this is a pure guess, that assault in the street, if I get a black eye in the street, it might mean different things in different jurisdictions. How at an international level, do we bring people together to agree that Bhopal is really bad? Or I'm sitting here thinking the fact that you now have polyfluorinated alkylated substances in the rain is pretty darn widespread. And I heard something the other day on Nate Hagens podcast that Daniel Schmachtenberger's Consilience project got an earth scientist in and the total, let me get this right; I think it's 46 or 48 billion is the income per annum of the whole PFAS industry. It would cost 118 trillion per annum, which is more than the GDP of the entire planet to clean it up. That strikes me that that should qualify. That really ought to qualify. Please, can we bring a case? And so how do lawyers, you must spend a lot of time talking to lawyers; how do they balance something so that is is genuinely international? And so a harm in any part of the world is considered a harm by lawyers everywhere.
Jojo: Well, I think what you're dealing with in criminal law is that you do have to be able to point to a specific act that created something. So something that happens cumulatively across an industry is harder to pinpoint, to be fair. What you would be more looking at, I think, in that kind of context, you might be looking at the permit level. So you might be looking at a political decision, for example. Because you need to be able to isolate a particular decision. But the whole discussion around criminal law is interesting, because when you say the word crime, even, people tend to run off down a dark alley with a knife because that's what they associate with the word crime. And what people often don't focus on is the fact that criminal law is there primarily as a protective structure. So murder is a crime. Yes, we punish murderers and we put them in jail, etc. but really the point of it is to stop people killing each other. And of course, with ecocide, this is very much the idea. That what you would be creating is a level of deterrence, because ultimately, yes, of course, once the law is in place, there will be prosecutions, there's no doubt.
Jojo: I mean, there's plenty of lawyers wanting to get their teeth into this. However, that isn't ultimately the point. We're not that interested in throwing people in jail. What we're interested in is protecting the planet. So what we're interested in is changes in behaviour. And changes in behaviour, I mean, when we're looking at systemic interventions that (a) the system allows, and (b) actually can have a concrete effect in a fairly short amount of time; criminal law is very high on that list. Because there's no real moral stigma attached to breaching regulation. And most environmental law is in that regulatory sphere. And that's a big cultural thing. You know, we've spent centuries building up an economic system that depends upon our attitude towards nature being one of treating it as a bank of resources, rather than treating her as the origin.
Manda: And damage to it is an externality, and we don't care.
Jojo: Exactly. So companies do treat damage to nature as externalities. And they don't absorb the costs, they don't consider the consequences. So when you name the worst harms, when you name ecocide as a crime, what you're doing on one level it's quite simple. You're adding a crime to a list of crimes, and the system perfectly well permits that. There are amendment procedures. It can be done. But what you're actually saying is something quite profound. What you're saying is you're shifting our kind of cultural attitude toward nature, and our position within nature, and effectively saying that destroying ecosystems is as bad, wrong and dangerous as it is to destroy or damage people. And that starts to really shift our mindset and our sense of what our responsibility is to the living world around us. Not only that, but how much we actually depend upon it as well. So there's a very big, I could say it's a symbolic function, but it's actually more than a symbolic function because our lives and the future of our civilisation actually depend upon it. So even if no prosecutions were ever taken and I'm sure there will be, but even if they weren't, just placing it in that position at the court that deals with the most severe crimes, you are actually starting to create really quite a profound shift.
Jojo: And we're in quite an interesting position now, because we've sort of propelled this conversation, with help obviously, but we've been at the heart of it; we've propelled this conversation from zero governments talking about it five years ago, after Polly died, to EU legislation which was passed just this year, for something very close to what we're asking for at the international level. Now for international law that's kind of rocket speed, that's very fast. So we're now in this interesting position where the legislative direction is now established, but there still isn't a huge amount of awareness in the public sphere. And so what we now find ourselves in the business of doing is actually informing people, and particularly in the corporate world, where they're really going to need to know this. Because the whole point is it's coming down the line and they're going to need to look at their practices and how much harm they actually create. It is kind of alerting them to that and saying, look here, can you see the horizon? That's what's coming. So it's been a very exciting, if somewhat roller coaster ride actually, because as I say, the EU has just passed a directive which most of the EU countries will have to harmonise with within the next couple of years, that actually deals with conduct that they're calling 'comparable to ecocide'.
Manda: Wow. Why are they not calling it ecocide? That must be deliberate.
Jojo: Partly because there's no official international definition yet.
Manda: Couldn't they make one?
Jojo: I mean, there's a proposed one that's kicked off all of these discussions around the world, but there's not a sort of internationally agreed one yet. You know, by states. So they couldn't put it directly into the text, at least not without developing it specifically. So what they did was they put very similar aspects of the definition, the severity, the irreversibility and so on. And then in the preamble they described it as addressing conduct comparable to ecocide. So what that's done is it's actually really put ecocide on the map in terms of European law, because it's the first time it's been used in that context. So yeah, very interesting.
Manda: Interesting. And so does this mean that CEOs of the big companies could end up in prison as a result of them, let's say there's a spill in the North Sea; let's say the UK somehow miraculously decides to sign up to something that the EU has developed. Would potentially people who made decisions within that company end up with long jail terms? Because that seems to me virtually the only thing that's going to have weight. Because if you offer to fine them, you'd have to find them probably more than the GDP of the planet before they would notice. Honestly, I mean, they've got so much money and they basically make it out of nothing anyway, that fining them isn't really going to make much difference. So is this actual 'you will languish in a very unpleasant place that you don't want to be in if you break this'?
Jojo: That is a very important aspect. Yes. I mean, the fact that individual physical people, as opposed to legal persons like companies, potentially could lose not just their reputation but indeed their freedom. So that is definitely something. I mean, for example, if you look at the European legislation, they're talking about sentences of ten years plus. If you look at the Belgian legislation, because they've actually adopted ecocide at the governmental level just a few months ago, they're looking at sentencing even potentially longer than that.
Manda: Yay! Belgium.
Jojo: Yes it's a very real thing. And I think the other thing that's beautiful about that, if you can say beautiful about a sentencing procedure, but beautiful about a law like this, is that you actually have, particularly in the corporate world, a sort of double layer of deterrence. Because if you're a C-suite executive and potentially the buck may stop with you, then obviously you're not going to want to have your own freedom or reputation under threat. But the thing is, if you did, it would also affect your company. Because if you look at something like war crimes or genocide that are often ideologically motivated, a genocidal maniac is probably not thinking about their public relations first and foremost. But a company, a transnational company, will be. Particularly if they're publicly listed, which most of them are. Effectively, if there's a threat of a criminal accusation, even if a case is not taken forward, that can have a drastic and immediate effect on stock value. So the level of deterrence is in a whole different league. And it's really important and a very positive parameter if you like, to put in. But I think what some people don't always think about, and this is quite interesting, because lawyers and politicians tend to focus on how will prosecutions work, who will get prosecuted, what's the sentencing.
Jojo: Not that those things aren't important, of course they are. But actually it's often the corporate actors who really kind of grasp the importance of understanding this law now. Because actually the real value, the real window for strategic change is between when you hear about it and when it comes into play. Because actually, of course, you don't want to be in the sort of target area for that law when it actually comes into place. So it's really important that that is actually viewed as a positive, because it's a set of clear parameters. And actually, one of the things that we're confronted with globally at the moment is, it's not like people are not aware of the climate crisis and ecological crisis. A lot of the people, the actors at that level, are not stupid at all. They completely can intellectually understand it. Obviously in some cases there's just simple levels of corruption, but even where there are not, there are culturally embedded attitudes that mean that those people are not behaving as if they understand it.
Manda: And if they did, they would lose their job.
Jojo: Well, exactly. And so once you put those parameters in place, those people who can see that, and often they do want to make some kind of decisions that are more helpful, they can then go say to their board or to their shareholders, we can't do it that way anymore. We're actually going to have to rethink. And that is really fundamentally important because it actually gives protection for moving in the right direction.
Manda: Interesting. So is this beginning to have an impact? Do we have any instances that you are allowed to name where you know that corporate behaviour has changed as a result of the potential of this train coming down the line?
Jojo: We actually do, although I can't give names. But for example, there was a mining company in one of the Latin American countries that was rather reluctant to sign environmental agreements that it was supposed to sign. And the lawyer who was dealing with it showed them the definition of ecocide and said, you do realise this is coming down the line, right? And they ended up signing. So that's just one example, but there have been a few instances of things like that already. And what we're also seeing and you know, it's taken a while, but we're beginning to see this sort of mainstreaming of the conversation now. So for example, just last week we held an event that was geared towards corporate sustainability officers who have to advise their companies on what's happening with environmental laws, you know, what steps they need to take. And actually, some of them have been very frustrated with the fact that they can advise as much as they like and they don't necessarily get paid a huge amount of attention to. But once you bring a law like this in, it's a different story. Because there's this potential for personal criminal liability. And so again, it's very supportive for those people to know about it, but it's also very important for those people to know about it. I mean, it's like earlier when I was saying about how radical it was seen as being. You know, this is not a radical proposition.
Jojo: This is a very straightforward protect everybody proposition. It's basically a safety proposition and it should be treated as such. Sometimes we actually think of it as almost a criminal version of a health and safety law. I mean, you know, the way people have treated environmental laws up till now, it's almost like companies attempted to game the system a bit. And go, oh, well, you know, we're allowed this much of this toxin in this context and that sort of thing. Or even to balance off profits against court cases in terms of fines and things like that. Or just try to say that they're not in the category that they thought they were in. So, for example, I don't know if you remember back in 2015 to go back to the fracking thing, the Infrastructure Act in the UK reconstituted the definition of what fracking was, basically so that companies could say that they weren't fracking, when in fact they were. That sort of thing. Now, of course, when you bring in a definition like this one of ecocide, which doesn't depend on a particular activity, but depends on the potential level of harm, you actually have a kind of reality check.
Jojo: It means that the operational experts, the risk managers, the legal counsels in those companies, are actually having to have conversations. And instead of trying to jump out of a category, they're actually having to go, well, what is happening on the ground and what do we need to do about it? And the thing about that, which is brilliant, is what it triggers is a lot of very specific questions. Specific questions like, for example, how are we going to source or replace our concrete? How are we going to approach this or that engineering problem? These are things that should be being asked and quite possibly should have been being asked decades ago, but nothing has actually constrained them to be asked until now. And of course, when you start asking the right questions, you start finding answers. This is one of the beauties of the way the human mind works. Once you ask a question, you are pre-empting the fact that you will at some point find an answer. And so if there's one thing that this does, this set of parameters, is prompt the right questions. And having come from, as I say, this rather meandering background and actually spent several years as an entrepreneur myself, I know that there is nothing more stimulating to innovation and problem solving than a clear set of parameters.
Manda: Yes, because a problem by nature has a solution as opposed to a predicament which is just a wicked problem where there are possibly no solutions. So I'm thinking particularly of the PFAS, where faced with any kind of regulation they just redesign the molecule so it's one atom different. Then they go, see we're not regulated anymore. Which just turns my blood into lava, really. But then this is a different way of looking at it. So then we have an international law. And unless a miracle happens in November and we have a completely different kind of American administration, the chances of them signing up to this are vanishingly small. They never do, because they have the best democracy money can buy; the people with the money don't want to be constrained. How do we get around the fact that an international court can say, we hold you culpable and these are the penalties, and they go 'you and whose army mate?' Which, you know, is the American attitude, frankly. And nobody has an army big enough currently. So are we assuming that reputational damage will be enough and that it won't just turn it into a badge of pride?
Jojo: I think this is a really good question, because some of the biggest countries and indeed potentially therefore the biggest polluters, that's China, America, Russia, India, they're not actually members of the International Criminal Court, so they're not signed up to it. And in fact the US still doesn't recognise the genocide convention. So that is definitely an issue. However, it's also a double edged one in the sense that obviously if you're not in the voting population...
Manda: Okay, you can't influence the way that it frames things.
Jojo: Obviously, you can certainly try and I have no doubt that that potentially happens. But what you don't have is a vote. And that is actually quite useful. And the way that the International Criminal Court works is that it's a one state, one vote situation, like the UN. But unlike the UN, there's no veto and there's no kind of permanent Security Council members or anything like that. It is literally just a numbers game.
Manda: It is actually weighted, right.
Jojo: And what that means, of course, is that the smaller states or the small island states, and we work very closely with the Pacific island state of Vanuatu, for example, which has really championed this over over the last few years. They have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by this moving forward. And they're able to be first movers in that context. And there are also quite a lot of them. We're also now have regional coordinators in Africa and in Latin America. And there's a lot of interest in some of those countries. A lot of those groups either vote together or have a lot of internal communication when dealing with these amendment issues or treaty issues. So there are a number of reasons why actually the ICC route is better than most. At the same time, I think there is also the aspect that any ratifying country could take a prosecution. And of course, because of the globalised nature of the economy, let's just say you have an American company committing ecocide in a country that has ratified the amendment, they could prosecute in that country. And you've also potentially got a situation where if a company has an operational office in a country that is a member state, depending on how that that country deals with things like universal jurisdiction, that could also be a possibility. In other words, from the lawyers perspective, there are a number of different possible avenues. But the other thing is I don't want to be too pessimistic.
Manda: No, not at all.
Jojo: I don't genuinely believe that you can make something happen if you don't believe it's possible. I just think you're cutting yourself off at the knees.
Manda: Yes. And I wasn't suggesting it wasn't. I was just beginning to see that there might be ramifications down the line.
Jojo: Of course, ramifications. You're absolutely right. But what I would say as well is that what comes in here, and I think this is something that we have worked on very concretely is the civil society conversation. Because ultimately, when it comes to international law, it is public opinion ultimately that holds that in place really. And actually, there's an awful lot of sympathy in the public arena for this law. In fact, one of the very common responses is, oh, what? You mean it isn't a crime already? Because it feels so intuitive. So we know from public surveys that there is a strong appetite for it. And also the other thing that's interesting, I mean, we actually do have an advocacy group in the US. And one of the things about the US is that you could say they have the loudest voices, in the sense that on the world stage, US influencers can be very powerful. So we're pretty certain it's just a matter of time before various well-known voices are speaking up about about ecocide, amongst other things.
Manda: You mean well-known voices in the US?
Jojo: Yes. And that is the direction that we're heading in. But at the same time, I would also refer back to the globalised nature of our economy and the fact that these big corporations that are the ones most likely to need to pay attention to this law, operate in many countries. And so what potentially happens is that over time you get a marginalisation of those corporations that don't align themselves, because their sphere of operation is gradually shrunk until ultimately you would get the situation where an American company could pollute its own backyard, but nowhere else. I mean, obviously we're a little way away from that, but once the law is in place and actually we're already starting to see the shift now, as the conversation grows. But I think once the law is in place, this will actually be a real game changer in terms of a kind of what you might call an entrainment factor. I sometimes do this thing where I pick up a pen like this and if you imagine this moving through water, because it's very narrow at the front end, this whole concept of ecocide, if you like, is very, very precise. So it doesn't really create a huge amount of resistance.
Manda: It's more like a knife moving through the water, isn't it?
Jojo: Exactly. But behind it you get a wake. And so in effect you're actually drawing kind of ripples in the whole system. And that, I think, over time will be very difficult to avoid.
Manda: Brilliant. So I have on my pad TTIP as in transatlantic trade and industry protocol, because that's one of the most invidious legal constructs on the planet. It basically means that a big company can sue a country not just for stopping it making money, but for stopping the potential that it thought it had to make money. And given that most of the ecocidal things also tend to be quite lucrative, which is why they do them; I'm wondering, is this going to be the shield that countries can use against TTIP? Because TTIP there's three judges that are picked by the company, and they meet in secret to decide how much the country should then pay to the company.
Jojo: It's the sort of investor state dispute settlement arrangement.
Manda: Yes, exactly. The ISDS.
Jojo: Like the Energy Charter treaty, for example. But actually some countries are now backing out of that, which is interesting. Yes, I actually think ecocide law will be very, very interesting in this context because criminal law does trump trading agreements.
Manda: Let's not use that word! Does override trading agreements.
Jojo: It doesn't matter what other treaties you sign, if you're murdering lots of people to fulfil it, you still can't do that.
Manda: I'm watching the Middle East and thinking, I'm not sure. Technically.
Jojo: At least legally speaking, you still can't do that. So yes, I think is the answer to that. It will create a tool for an area that has been very, very tricky in recent years.
Manda: That would be amazing, very important. That would be a game changer, actually. If this came into effect and the whole TTIP and ISDs thing was then shut down, that would be extraordinary. This feels like Joanna Macy speaks of three pillars of the great turning. And there's the holding actions and the systemic change and the shifting consciousness, and this is a big holding action. It's not necessarily changing the system, but it's putting the brakes on the system that is hurtling us to the edge of the cliff. You spoke earlier about a metaphor of a Swiss Army knife. Do you want to unpick that a bit more? Because that really intrigues me. I've got a bottle opener and a screwdriver and I've got something that actually cuts, I've got a pair of scissors. What are they all. How do they work?
Jojo: That's really interesting. I actually haven't gone quite as far as to actually identify them one by one. But the metaphor I use is that one, because we have many different allies and many different audiences in this conversation. And what we find is that ecocide law, in a sense, represents something different in each case. So some of them we've looked at just in this conversation I've been having with you. So for example, for sustainability leaders in business, it's a playing field leveller. For those who are in the extractive industry, it's a clear set of parameters in order to ask specific questions. You could then look at some very different players, for example, indigenous land defenders. It's an additional legal tool to help hold to account those who are potentially destroying their lives and livelihoods. It is also a complete narrative changer. In other words, at the moment protesters and land defenders are often being criminalised and portrayed as criminally interrupting legitimate business activity. But as soon as you put something like ecocide law on the table and the question mark then moves from the protesters to over the business itself, so you're going, well, is this activity actually ecocidal? And at that point, even before you've taken any cases, you've totally changed the narrative, because at that point, those defenders become moral upholders of the law.
Manda: It becomes a citizen's arrest rather than assault.
Jojo: Kind of, yeah. But effectively it's the way you think about it. So the framing is literally flipped. So there are all these different aspects to this law that I have yet to come across an area where it isn't helpful. Other than the very pure make money however you possibly can Avenue. But of course, this is the insane thing, is that actually there is no reason whatsoever that you can't build a good business model around a framework that actually protects the planet. It's just you won't be poked to do so until that thing's in place.
Manda: Yes, the giant vampire squid just needs to get a bit smaller. But we've got people like Riversimple, we spoke to them about a year ago, and they build hydrogen fuel cell cars, which is lovely. But the really exciting thing is their global Guardian governance model, which gives the shareholders one place on a board that also gives one place each to the workers, the local community, the environment, the customers and the supply chain. And when I wrote about it fictionally I added in future generations. And then everyone except the shareholders is going, oh, look, ecocide, law. Our point then, as a business, is not just to make money for the shareholders, it's to honour the local community and the customers and the environment. And then everything becomes different. And that also seemed to me a narrative shift. And if we could combine the two, that would be completely amazing.
Jojo: Absolutely.
Manda: So we've got the EU, who's brought the concept of ecocide into the legal framework of things that it is creating. We've got Belgium. Yay, Belgium! Who's doing this. What else, looking down the line, what are you seeing coming towards you that looks hopeful.
Jojo: So one of the things that we actually didn't necessarily expect, but has been amazing over the last year or so, which we fully expect to continue, is a kind of wave of ecocide bills being proposed into national jurisdictions. That's happened in Mexico, Italy.
Manda: Italy. Wow.
Jojo: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. And Brazil.
Manda: Brazil, I could see because they've now got left wing. But Italy.
Jojo: I don't imagine it'll have an easy ride because their Congress is still quite conservative. But nonetheless, it's there and it's passed its first hurdle in the environmental committee. And we saw a bill in the U.K.. I mean, obviously it fell with the election.
Manda: Okay. But it might stand more chance now.
Jojo: It might stand more chance now. Exactly. Labour have historically supported ecocide law, so we'll see how that develops. We've also seen proposals in the Netherlands, no fewer than three proposals in Peru recently. And so we're hoping that they'll actually team up between the parties and work out something that they're all happy with. So I think we're seeing this interest coming up not just at regional level, also at national level. And of course, all of that creates a sort of mutually reinforcing thing.
Manda: If the whole of Latin America, for instance, decided. Because I could imagine Chile, Costa Rica, there's a lot of countries that would I imagine, even Venezuela would be on board with this.
Jojo: Chile has actually already legislated not exactly for ecocide, but they recently brought in economic crimes, and there's an environmental element which uses some of the elements from the definition. So it's starting to kind of pop up in all of these different places. And that's really, really encouraging. What we also anticipate is that a formal proposal is likely to be made in the not too distant future at the International Criminal Court. I mean, it's possible even that it could happen this year, but we can't always predict these things because obviously diplomacy isn't a fixed thing. But that said, I think since the developments in Europe, we've seen a shift in the narrative at the international, the sort of global level as well. So instead of being a kind of yes, this is an interesting conversation and wonder whether it'll happen, it's now much more of a kind of, oh, well, how is this going to happen and when is it going to happen? So that shift has been quite kind of palpable in those sorts of meetings. So that's been really interesting.
Manda: Right. And the Davos crowd, is this a sort of thing that the people who have private jets and fly around the world to tell each other how bad things are, because they also tend to have a lot of clout and a lot of money?
Jojo: Yes. Interestingly, we've got some connections into some quite major influencers at that level, it's by no means embedded in that environment. But that said, I actually was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum this year. So I actually was on a public panel at at Davos, which was really interesting. And actually, I think it's quite important that we are there because these people need to know that this is coming. Because they need to sort of shift their decision making, their policy making, their future thinking, because of it. I mean, it was an interesting one. I think we're still a little bit in the situation where it is where the ruling elite meet and sort of financial and political. I kind of felt a little bit like I was sort of there to be a little earthing rod and kind of go, let's just reconnect to what's actually happening on the planet, shall we?
Manda: But do you think you were heard at least somewhere in the room?
Jojo: Well, it was interesting because, one of the trustees of the WEF was on the panel with me and was actually a little bit triggered by my use of the word criminal law and we ended up having a little bit of a sort of sparring match, which didn't bother me at all.
Manda: In public?
Jojo: In public, yeah. It was live streamed. You can probably look it up. Which actually doesn't bother me at all in the sense that it just gave me more opportunity to talk about what we're doing. I mean, it was certainly less fun for the other panellists who got their time hijacked. But afterwards, and it hasn't quite come through, but I was contacted by their assistant who said they were interested in having a conversation with me. So who knows. There are definitely the beginnings of a conversation there. And as I say, like with this event with the sustainability officers, we're really in a position now where these people actually just need to sit up and pay attention. Because this is not a debate as to whether this is a good idea; it's actually something that's already established. It's already coming down the line. So, you know, there needs to be a sort of sense of incorporating that into their thinking.
Manda: Yeah. So I'm thinking of taking this in a slightly different direction. A friend of the podcast is B Lorranine Smith, and she used to be the person who wrote the sustainability documents, the ESG documents, for huge international named companies. Until she realised they were paying her quite a lot of money to write 250 pages of basically greenwash. And then she left and she set up something called Materiality, which is suppose (fill in big name company) was actually doing what it says it's doing to help the planet, what would it actually look like? And in some cases that is basically it would shut itself down, or it would change its trading model so radically that it would cease to sell... Let's say, for instance, an industrial farming chemical that is guaranteed to be poisonous to everything, including the water, it would have to cease to do that. And it would have to, I don't know, sell fluffy bunnies instead. It's not that necessarily fluffy bunny is a good thing, but, you know, it just wouldn't be what it is.
Manda: I'm imagining, I'm actually writing the novel in my head of the activist lawyer, this law comes in, in the International Criminal Court and it goes, okay, I have my list. I could make the list tomorrow, frankly; I'm going to push the boundaries of what's widespread, long term damage to the environment. And I am going to take out as many of these as I can and make them change their business model, because what they're doing is just not compatible with a survivable future. And I would like that to happen. But I'm wondering, have you got the people with real teeth on the edges who are going, just let me at them, I will close them down tomorrow! Is that likely, or am I just fantasising about happy things that I would like to happen?
Jojo: Put it this way, there's certainly a lot of lawyers I think looking forward to getting their teeth into this once it's on the books. At the same time, I think actually in practice what will likely happen, is that any initial cases would be very clear cut, direct pollution cases. Because what lawyers will want is for the jurisprudence to build up in a clear and usable way. So for example, we think it's fairly unlikely that the initial cases will be climate cases.
Manda: But they might be giant oil spill cases?
Jojo: For example. Obviously what you would have to show is that there was some kind of breach of regulation or...
Manda: Okay, it doesn't need to be just we took our eye off the ball and somebody forgot to close a hatch, and there was a giant oil spill.
Jojo: Potentially. Potentially. Yes. I mean, obviously we tend not to make direct pronouncements because until the law is actually in place, you don't know exactly what text you're dealing with. So most lawyers will shy away from exact examples. A good way of thinking about this is, what are the kinds of things that we could have averted or avoided had this been in place? So for me, something like Deepwater Horizon might well come under that, because you've got a safety protocol potentially that wasn't followed. So effectively, you do have a situation of a breach of something that has led to a really serious situation.
Manda: Can you do retrospective things? Can you say ten years ago that was a thing? Or you can just say this would have been and if you do this again, guys, you're in deep trouble
Jojo: As you can imagine, if this could work retrospectively, we would never get it in place. Nobody would vote for it because they would all feel that they might be implicated somewhere down the line. This is the whole reason that we're doing so much work advocating in advance of the law coming into play. Because it's really going to be, you know, from this date, you're going to need to worry about this. You're going to need to think about it, or you're going to need to think positively and constructively about what you're going to do in advance in order to meet it. And actually, realistically, for the vast majority of businesses, you know, small and medium enterprises, it's probably not even going to touch most people.
Manda: Oh I don't know. Okay, you're probably right.
Jojo: There might be some in very particular sectors where that is the case. But if you want to stop people on the street, you know, 95 out of 100 probably won't even have to think about it. But it's more to do with pre-empting what's coming, so that behaviour is different in the future. And don't get me wrong, I completely sympathise with the 'I have my short list of CEOs to put in the dock'. I completely get that. And if you'd have talked to me back when I was in the anti-fracking community, I would have given you a name by name list. But we absolutely don't do that. And one of the reasons we don't do that is that firstly we think of it as a very foundational piece that ultimately will benefit everybody. So we always pitch it positively. But also there is just the pragmatic political thing of different states, different players have different affiliations, and we just want to steer clear of all that. All of that is separate from the recognition that damaging the planet to a severe degree simply should be criminal. It's as simple as that. So we don't get tied up or snagged up in particular cases, in particular companies for that reason. And I honestly think that's one of the reasons that we've managed to progress this so fast.
Manda: So I will abandon all the questions I was about to ask about very specific things. And you're right. I can see that. That's a wise way to do it. Although I can also see that in certain sectors...let's go back to fracking. When I had conversations with the person who was our local MP and cited the US, particularly the leak of methane. You know, the fossil fuel companies getting us to worry about methane from cows. Future generations, if there are any, will look back at that and wonder that any of us swallowed that. Because the leak of methane from fracking wells is many orders of magnitude more severe. And I spoke about that to local MP and he went, oh, yes, but in Britain we'll have it much more tightly engineered. Now in your fantasies, mate! No, they're lying to you. I'm sorry, I can tell you, they're lying to you now. And what they will do is stop you measuring it, because you don't see it isn't there. So I wonder now, I have another novel or, I don't know, a dark water equivalent film script running in my head, where various people are trying to show, look, there's a lot of methane coming out of these wells. And it's a bit like an airline company that shall remain unnamed, whose aircraft are flying themselves into the ground. And the whistleblowers all end up dead, because they're obviously breaching all kinds of safety regulations.
Manda: But as long as nobody can explicitly say which ones they are, everybody can turn a blind eye, because there's a lot of people, a lot of money, and they're throwing it all around. I read the other day that Elon Musk is giving $47 million a month to the Trump campaign, and he doesn't even notice it's gone. You know, this is petty cash. The people who've got that kind of money to throw around can probably influence quite a lot of people with it. And, I mean, this isn't for you specifically. I just wonder in the long run, when the system needs to change, we need total systemic change, how do we get total systemic change when the people who have a lot invested in maintaining the bus hurtling towards the edge of a cliff, because they either don't believe there is a cliff or they think they have the special golden parachute that only they will survive. With the rocket to Mars or whatever it is. Or I heard the other day they've decided that carbon life is the antecedent to silicon life. So it doesn't matter if we're all extinct because silicon life will take off next. And honestly, most of Silicon Valley believes this and they're making the silicon life. It's terrifying. So given all of that, I suppose I just get to.
Jojo: What hope do we have?
Manda: How do we get enough integrity? And I guess it comes down to basic human integrity and people looking their children and their grandchildren in the eye and going, I want you actually to have a liveable planet. And I will do whatever it takes to make that. And if we can get a critical mass of those then it doesn't really matter how many dollars the other people have. My ultimate end is we just change the currency, because then the people with $1 million or $1 trillion or $10 trillion, if dollars are actually not worth anything and we're all trading in something else, they have nothing. As far as I can tell, that's the way through. We just have to make it happen.
Jojo: Well, what I think is really interesting. It's funny, I just read a book, an excellent book, actually, called Democracy in Chains.
Manda: Yes, yes. I've been begging people to read this about this.
Jojo: The beginnings of...
Manda: What we're seeing now.
Jojo: What we're effectively seeing now. But it's taken many decades to get here. And actually, for most of that time, it was too outrageous, even for the conservative right. And what I think is, I know this is going to sound completely bonkers, but I actually came out of that book feeling quite hopeful.
Manda: I didn't. Okay, I'm going back to reread it.
Jojo: No, wait for it. Because if Somebody with an idea that is that obnoxious and that psychopathic and that much resisted, even by the, what you would think would be the more sympathetic parts of society, and yet still eventually gets there by sheer bloody mindedness and in their case, funds. Then surely something like ecocide law. And I think we're already starting to prove this. When you are absolutely specific and determined about the thing you want to get, and you have common sense and practically the entire population of the world behind you, how can you possibly fail?
Manda: Yes, yes. And they moved the Overton window. The people who were saying, 'you can't do this, it's too far', are now on the left of the Republican Party. And they were then on the extreme right. So they just shifted the dial and and we can wrestle it back or we can wrestle a different dial.
Jojo: I think a different dial in a sense, because I actually feel that the whole left/right dichotomy is..
Manda: Last Millennium's argument.
Jojo: Really dying its death. Because it's that whole thing of, you know, you keep going around far enough, you meet them in the middle. All of this sort of stuff. But also, we mentioned this briefly earlier, but there's so much kind of polarisation and controversy and fragmentation in the political space. I mean, people, for example, that I used to find that I aligned with on lots of topics, now it's a complete mixture. Some things I align with and other things, they're somewhere else completely. And so I just think it's quite hard to just divide the spectrum right and left, as we've kind of done for many decades. And actually there's been such an undermining of trust in all politics. Let's say that Labour in the UK wants to bring in something more radical, there's no way they could have campaigned on that anyway, because they wouldn't have got the votes. So it's really quite a tricky landscape. That's why I kind of feel like in a sense, the beacons need to be these really simple truths, you know: be kind, don't destroy the planet, make sure everybody has a roof over their head.
Manda: Change your value systems.
Jojo: The really basic elements of integrity. And you talked about integrity earlier, and I just feel like this is so, so important. And I say it to my daughter when I'm thinking about who she might go out with. I'm just saying, look, just find somebody with integrity and kindness and the rest I don't mind, you know?
Manda: Yes, yes. Those two things. Absolutely. And when I think about value systems change from the separation, scarcity and powerlessness that Miki Kashtan talks about of our current system. What do we want the value system that we move to? Almost everybody can get behind integrity and kindness. We might not have absolutely contiguous definitions of what integrity looks like, because we kind of still want to align it with our political stuff, but if we can let go of all that, integrity is integrity, and you recognise it when you see it.
Jojo: You really do.
Manda: And when someone has integrity, you can talk to them and they're not bouncing around the tribal stuff. I come back to nobody cares who was supporting the Greens and the Blues in the Roman Colosseum or in the chariot races. But back then, you would die if you were wearing something green and you went into the wrong part of Rome, they would kill you. And it really mattered which tribe you were in. And now we we have a lot of Roman values that shape our world. But not a single person knows who was on which side of green and blue, and it does not matter. And I'm thinking going forward, you're right, left/right, or any of the other tribal factions that we're being pushed into by people who benefit from us spinning our wheels and burning up a lot of bandwidth on being tribal.
Speaker3: Divide and rule.
Manda: It doesn't matter. You know, our grandchildren's grandchildren will not give a fuck. They just want us to bequeath them a world that actually is liveable. You know, the survival of complex life is quite an important feature, and the rest just isn't. But the people who are deep in it... I spoke at a conference the other day, and I could feel the people who were deeply in certain tribal things getting really cross with me suggesting that actually they don't really matter. But I just think they don't.
Jojo: Yeah, it's really difficult. It's interesting when I watch my kids growing up and they have a sophistication of understanding that when I was that age just didn't exist. There are things that even until quite recently I found shocking that my daughter's like, oh God, yeah, I hear that stuff all the time. I just ignore it.
Speaker3: Right. Well done.
Jojo: And in a sense, obviously I'm sure there are people that for whom it is isn't as easy as that, but she seems to have somehow kind of internalised a kind of her own internal radar. And if somebody's just behaving badly, she just doesn't get engaged. She just kind of goes, you know what? Take your shit somewhere else. And even though she's actually not, probably because I am, she's not sort of at the forefront of environmental discussion or politics or anything like that.
Manda: Is this the same one who was five and told you that fracking was bad?
Jojo: Exactly. I Mean, I've had moments where she said, mum, for goodness sake, I wish I'd never said that because I never see you now. But she's now kind of got past that stage, and she's doing her own thing, and she's amazing. And this isn't the focus of her life. But the fact is that I sort of feel like, do you know what? They've grown up with this. It almost feels like it's potentially... I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm not quite sure where this sort of places itself because obviously the young climate activists actually have been some of the most key players in all of this, because they've done this incredible job of raising the alarm. Now, obviously, my daughter hasn't had to do that because she's seen me doing it. It's almost like she now wants to just get on with responding to whatever the world's going to be when she happens to step into it. So she's not sitting there lamenting how many green fields were there 50 years ago that are not there now. Okay. And actually, weirdly, there are different things that motivate different people. I think for example, a lot of the Extinction Rebellion following was completely understandably motivated by anger and grief.
Manda: And despair. Look, I've got something I can actually do. And I've had the last however many decades not knowing what to do. Here's something I can do.
Jojo: Yeah, exactly. But for me, it's different. I'm not saying I'm different to everybody, I'm just saying that the particular way that I approach what I'm doing, it doesn't really come from that. I've been accused of being an adrenaline junkie for saying this, but how many generations get to actually affect the future of their entire species by what they do? And for me, that is incredibly exciting. It's like, why would that not be the most interesting time to be alive? It doesn't mean it's the safest by any means, but at the same time, it's like, wow, I can do something that actually will make a difference. Because actually, we're at one of those points in history where it can.
Manda: Where every breath you take, energetically and in the terms of the way you bring yourself in the world, makes a difference now. And ten generations back, it just really didn't. And it really does now.
Jojo: Yeah, exactly. I mean people talk about it all the time. We're at an unprecedented point and everything, you know. And I think it's probably true; we are at a sort of crossroads and blah blah, all of those sort of cliched terms. But I think for me as well, there's something about, what I can't get over, is how absolutely extraordinary. I mean, I don't know if it's extraordinary because obviously this is the only planet we know that supports life. But here we are, these incredible kind of conscious, intelligent beings, manifest in this extraordinary physical world. And it's like, how is everybody not just kind of going, wow, all the time? And it's like, people kind of trudging through life in this rat race, and I'm just like, just look in the faces of the people around you. These are all Extraordinary beings and all you have to do is get somebody to talk about what they feel passionate about and you get this kind of lift out of that kind of lowest common denominator thing, into actually a totally different vibration. And that, I think is remarkable. And I think we all have the potential for it. We can all carry it with us into any room we walk into. And so really I just think that all there is to do is do that as much as possible!
Manda: That's so, so good. That feels like a really good manifesto to end on. But in case you wanted to say something else. So I will put links to Stop Ecocide International and anything else that I can find on the show notes. That was wonderful. Also, I'm aware of the time. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Because that was just go out there and be your best?
Jojo: Yeah, absolutely.
Manda: Find that enthusiasm, speak it into the world.
Jojo: I mean, in terms of what people can do to support ecocide law and what we're doing. I mean, there are always some concrete things. The most fundamental one is to talk about it. This is all about a conversation. So everybody has their own networks. And what we usually say is that there are kind of three levels. If you happen to interact with policy, obviously bring it into that sphere. If you have public interactions, you write articles, you have events, your sector does anything public or puts out reports; see if you can include ecocide law into that material. Then there's the private sphere and that could be your own networks, your own social networks, etc. but it could be, for example, within your sector. You know, where does your sector talk to itself? Where are your annual conferences, what are your newsletters? You know, those kinds of things, where you can bring ecocide law into the conversation.
Jojo: And those are the things that just really, really help to move the dial. And of course, if you want more specific things, please go to our website. You know, there's an Act now menu as long as my arm. There's something for everybody, we have lots of different networks. So special interest networks, whether that's farming, whether that's business, whether that's oceans, whether that's youth. I mean, really lots of them and lots of cultural things too. If you want a bit of inspiration, look up the Choirs for Ecocide Law project, which is just phenomenal, where you can literally download a whole program to teach your community choir with all the rehearsals and all the everything. I went to an extraordinary mega concert in Helsinki Concert Hall at the end of April, where they had a thousand singers singing this program to an audience of like 7 or 800 people. And it was just mind blowing. And that spreads the message in a totally different way. And, you know, it's just remarkable. The possibilities are endless.
Manda: Fantastic. Right. We'll put links to everything that you just mentioned into the show notes. And, and hopefully everybody will go there and we'll be inspired to do amazing things.
Jojo: Amazing.
Manda: Excellent. Jojo, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. This has been so inspiring. I would really like in a couple of years when this has become a law, to come back and talk again. I think that would be really interesting, but I'll just keep an eye on the website. I'll see what's happening and I'll let everybody know when you get this through. So thank you. Thank you so much.
Jojo: Oh, thank you so much for having me here.
Manda: And that's it for another week. Huge thanks to Jojo for all of the work that she has done, is doing and will do to make the world a cleaner, safer, healthier, more flourishing place for us all. I have put links in the show notes to the website stopecocide.earth. Please do go and visit. There are so many things that you can get involved with. You can donate and if you have the means, please do. But you can sign the international petition or the business open letter. You can become an Earth protector. There's an organisation's manifesto and a digital toolkit and so many ways to spread the word. This is one of those things that we can all get involved in if we all support it, if we all talk about it, if we all explain why it's so obviously necessary, and the fact that it's already beginning to work around the world, it's going to gain traction faster, more deeply and more effectively. So please make it your life's work this week to talk to at least half a dozen people about this. Read up a little bit, get enthusiastic. Go out and find the people who might be receptive. As Jojo said, you have the communities of place, of passion, of purpose. You have your networks at home. You have your networks at work. If you're involved in one of these extractive industries, begin to spread the word that this is coming down the line. Whatever you can do, whoever you can talk to, please go and see what you can do to make a difference.
Manda: So that's it for this week. We will be back as ever next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thank you to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studio for the production. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Lou Mayor for the video. To Faith Tilleray for the website and all the conversations that keep us going. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And if you know anybody who is interested in one of the holding actions that we can all support, then please do send them this link. And as we say once in a while, if you have the time to subscribe and give us five stars and a review on the podcast app of your choice, we would be delighted. And now that we have a YouTube channel, if you feel like subscribing there too, it always helps. I'm not entirely sure why anybody takes a podcast off a video channel, because if all you're doing is listening, please don't do that. You're downloading the video, which massively increases the bandwidth, which massively increases the power use. If all you're doing is listening to the audio, please go and find a podcast app. But if you like watching the video, which I gather some people do, I don't entirely understand why, but that's my thing, then please do subscribe. Every extra little tick makes a difference to how we are seen in the world. The algorithms are king, sadly, but it's true. So let's use them. Okay, that really is it for this week. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.