Jonathan Dawson on Rethinking The Narrative

“I am a storyteller; that’s what I do…” Welcome to this week’s
episode with the delightful, insightful and charming, Professor
Jonathan Dawson.


Jonathan might describe himself as a storyteller, however, in
this episode it is not Jonathan telling the story: we deconstruct
“The Story” or many narratives that we have all been told, which
play a huge part in the cause of our climate crisis.


“The key narrative that we live within, that really needs
to be challenged, is that which governs how we experience the
other than human world. Because the messaging is, ‘you look at a
tree and its timber’, rather than being an intelligent being.
This is the critical bit, because as long as we have stories that
these are inanimate objects that are out there for our use, as
long as we do that we can continue to sh*t on the world, and if
we are going to stop, a big part of the story needs to be that we
see the world in different eyes and we see ourselves as living
within an animate universe as one brand of intelligence among
many other forms of intelligence.”


Jonathan is a sustainability educator and a former President of
the Global Ecovillage Network. He has 20 years of experience as a
researcher, author, consultant, and project manager in the field
of small enterprise development in Africa and South Asia and
before joining the College he was a long-term resident at the
Findhorn Ecovillage.


We spoke in length about the many issues which have lead to our
need to redefine how we live, in particular Findhorn, which is an
amazing example of how a community can live sustainably.


“People associate having a low foot print with suffering.
In Findhorn, nobody needed television as what was happening
outside their front door was so interesting. This is what we need
to bring, we are not talking about sacrifices, we are talking
about retuning into who we are as a species, and what floats our
boats and it is not buying whatever gismo it may be, it is
reconnecting with people and finding your own place within your
community.”


A very insightful episode - we hope you got as much from it as we
did.


Big love,


Dave & Steve


Reference


Richard Heindberg


‘Small is Beautiful’ by E.F. Schumacher


Satish Kumar


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