Can our national and international legal systems be harnessed in service of life, to put the brakes on the worst excesses of capitalism and slow the annihilation of our eco-sphere? Stop Ecocide International exists explicitly to make this happen and this week, we talk to Jojo Mehta, co-founder and Executive Director of the movement.

If we're going to stop capitalism's harms to the planet, we have to build road blocks into the current system that will be recognised by those who make the harms happen and one of the key ways to do this is to criminalise activities that are wiping out the future in real time - if we're using Joanna Macy's concept of the Three Pillars of the Great Turning, this is one of the most effective Holding Actions imaginable (the other two pillars are 'Systems Change' and 'Shifting in Consciousness', which we explore in many other episodes.

Today, though, we're exploring this ultimate Holding Action and our guest is right at the forefront of this. Jojo Mehta is co-founder and Executive Director of Stop Ecocide International (SEI) which she and the late pioneering barrister Polly Higgins (1968-2019) set up in 2017. SEI is the driving force at the heart of the growing global movement to make ecocide an international crime. Their core work is supporting diplomatic progress and fostering global cross-sector support for this. To this end, they collaborate with diplomats, politicians, lawyers, corporate leaders, NGOs, indigenous and faith groups, influencers, academic experts, grassroots campaigns and individuals, positioning themselves with great clarity at the meeting point of legal evolution, political traction and public narrative. As a result, they are uniquely placed to track, support and amplify the global conversation.

This conversation took us in many directions, exploring the legal implications of the law, but beyond it to the potential it has to counter the iniquities of the States Investor Dispute Settlements and how it could bolster Indigenous groups seeking protections 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, how it's progressing in the International Criminal Court and what the ultimate aims are in using it as a deterrent, but also as a cover for those in the extractive, destructive industries - which, let's face it, is pretty much every industry - who want to act, but are constrained by their requirement to push always for profit regardless of the impact on people and planet. Those who drive them may not care about the little people - you and me - but they care about themselves and if they face actual gaol terms, then their incentive structures become quite different. As Daniel Schmachtenberger so often says, 'Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome' - Stop Ecocide International exists radically to shift the incentive structure and it's making real headway. If you despair about the ways we can change the trajectory of the system, if you think our chances of veering the bus away from the cliff's edge are small, then this is the spark of light you need in the gloom - it's genuinely encouraging.

Stop Ecocide International Ltd https://www.stopecocide.earth/stop-ecocide-international-ltd
Stop Ecocide Foundation https://www.stopecocide.earth/sef
Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide https://bell-harmonica-g83z.squarespace.com/legal-definition
SEI on Twitter https://x.com/EcocideLaw
JJo on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jojo-mehta/
Stop Ecocide Film on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw0HWM9n8I

Guardian Article showing real progress - yay! https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/sep/09/pacific-islands-ecocide-crime-icc-proposal

The climate emergency is impacting our entire eco-sphere. Plants are at the core of every food chain but we have no idea how fast they can adapt to changes that are taking place in decades where once they took Millenia. Which is where human ingenuity and intervention could be game-changing. If we put our minds to it, could we help plants to evolve in ways that serve the entire web of life?

In this regard, Dr Shane Simonsen is someone who has oriented his entire life to making sure that we have the right seeds to grow the food we'll need as industrial agriculture grinds to a halt.

In this regard, Dr Shane Simonsen is someone who has oriented his entire life to making sure that we have the right seeds to grow the food we'll need as industrial agriculture grinds to a halt.
Shane has a prodigious output. When he's not writing his substack on Zero Input Agriculture - this means no water, fertiliser or pesticides, and the former of these is seriously impressive when you know he lives in subtropical Australia - or recording his Going to Seed podcast with Joseph Lofthouse, or writing Taming the Apocalypse as a non-fiction view of how the world could be if we got it right, or converting this into fiction in Our Vitreous Womb… when he's not doing all of this, Shane is farming in the aforesaid sub-tropical zone of Australia, exploring the means of production in their most grounded sense; creating parrot-resistant maize or hybrids from Bunya Nuts and Parana Pines - species that haven't been on the same continent together since the tectonic plates last shifted and Australia became separate from South America.
Shane is a polymath's polymath: he has a PhD in biochemistry which means he can trace down ideas to their roots and then extrapolate back up and join them with other ideas to create something new. He celebrates the old gentleman scientists of Victorian times who may have been innately colonial products of the trauma culture, but they played at science, they did things that weren't obviously oriented to producing the next paper or winning the race to the next patent: they had fun, they followed their intuition and most of the really big advances in our technologies arise from them. Shane is also aware that most of the big advances in human evolution came when we were under serious pressure as a species.... kind of like we are now. So he's made it his life's task to find ways we can feed ourselves with low technology in a changing world. What species will survive and how might they grow? What hybrids can we intentionally create that will open up new spaces of possibility? How can we - how will we - transform ourselves in this changing world?

Zero Input Agriculture Substack https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/
The Going to Seed Podcast with Joseph Lofthouse and Shane Simonsen https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-going-to-seed-podcast/id1713240427
Shane's speculative fiction 'Our Vitreous Womb' https://haldanebdoyle.com/
Taming the Apocalypse - Shane's non-fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212297242-taming-the-apocalypse

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1955162/
Gail Tverberg Our Finite World https://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/
Going to Seed Online Community https://goingtoseed.org/pages/community

Any Human Power Book Club Sunday 15th September 6-8pm UK time (BST) https://accidentalgods.life/any-human-power-discussion/

'Are we [in our WEIRD culture] intelligent enough to be more generous than we have ever been throughout history?' So writes Jenny Grettve, in her new book, 'Mothering Economy'. Jenny is an author, philospher, systems thinker and designer who joined us in Episode #228, talking about the principles and practice of her generative, systems-led design agency, 'When!When!'

At the time, she said she was writing a new book - and now, ‘Mothering Economy’ is coming out at the end of this month (August), so we’re back in a wide, deep, provocative, generative conversation about what it might takes for us to have the courage to care deeply for ourselves, each other and the more than human world. She writes, ‘The profound mothering among humans that I envision is not a burdensome technological revolution, but rather a simple way of being together. We have a vast number of examples: what we lack is the intention and commitment to raise awareness…’

And so let's do all we can to raise awareness by exploring the ideas deep in Jenny’s book and searching our own beings for ways to show up with stronger, clearer, more open hearts.

In the meantime, please enjoy this wide, deep, thoughtful, caring, connecting conversation with Jenny Grettve, author of Mothering Economy.

Jenny's book https://andthekiosk.com/products/mothering-economy
Jenny's Website https://www.jennygrettve.com/
When!When! https://www.whenwhen.agency/
I, Pencil http://files.libertyfund.org/files/112/Read_0202_EBk_v6.0.pdf