We’re on location in Yadvinder Malhi’s office in Oxford, professor and director of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. Yadvinder’s work-origin story begins when he first climbs sampling towers in the Amazon to look out on 1000 miles of rainforest in every direction. “I was absolutely bewitched. I felt it viscerally.” We talk about culture and nature, the wild force of nature, and the sense of living in a belly of something huge. He recalls being sent back to India aged six to reconnect, and see the value of the huge family network as another support system. “Vibrancy is more than abundance,” says Yadvinder. It is energy to be shared. Vibrancy is about connections and story.

We talk of ecological civilisation in China, and nature recovery in the UK. He says, “We need to be thinking about radical transformations of landscapes,” not just the utilitarian values of nature.

He also says, “Ecology and ecosystems are the constant negotiation of relationships.”

Yadvinder’s new book will be called “Vibrant Earth.”

His heroes and heroines are the small organisation and local people making positive change: the social underbelly beneath nations and governments.

His book recommendation: David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous.

His key action: don’t stop at connections to nature: turn to action.

Website: https://www.yadvindermalhi.org/

Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery: https://naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk/

Oxford Nature Network: https://www.youtube.com/@oxfordnaturenetwork

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

In Mann Woods in central Essex, therapist and outdoor leader Jo Roberts chats about the work of the Wilderness Foundation and the transformative power of being in nature. We sit around the fire as winter sun falls. She talks about the value of learning small competencies for young people, and how nature interferes to remind us of something greater. Just look up, count the stars. There’s a surprising finding about young people and social media too. She also talks about how discomfort takes us into deep places. Jo says, “the tears fall quickly when you’re in the wilderness.” But that, too, faces will be softer by morning.

Jo’s heroine: Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya.

Her recommended books: Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees”; and Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

Jo recommended action: Be attentive, take time – see the world in a grain of sand.

The Wilderness Foundation: https://wildernessfoundation.org.uk/

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."

I’m chatting with author, academic and former double UN Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter at a street table in the heat of an Oxford summer. Olivier is professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, and says, “We have not made the economy inclusive by design; we have allowed it to operate in another way." The new Roadmap for Eradicating of Poverty Beyond Growth goes beyond 20 new metrics recently proposed as alternatives to GDP, and this Roadmap now contains 80 options for governments, businesses and civil society to take ever-lengthening steps towards a new inclusive and sustainable society.

Growth is still an orthodoxy that leads to extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the few, the growing fear of scarcity, and persistence of poverty and the breaching of planetary boundaries. Olivier calls this “the counter-productivity of growth.”

The Roadmap, he says, will help “broaden the imagination.” Combined with the declaration of an Inequality Emergency, and the launch of the International Panel on Inequality (IPI), he says, “We are at a turning point.”

Olivier’s heroes and heroines are the many low-income and neglected people: “if we listened to them, if we valued their knowing more, we’d make fewer mistakes.”

Olivier’s most recent book is called “Poverty Beyond Growth.”

He recommends Kate Pickett’s new book, “The Good Society”, and says read Hartmut Rosa too, especially his “Resonance.”

Olivier recommends, look people in their eyes, create special relationships, and learn from each other.

Website: https://www.srpoverty.org/

Roadmap: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-poverty/roadmap-eradicating-poverty-beyond-growth

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."