Interview with Paul Raja Rao

Katherine and I visited the Bharti Integrated Rural Development Society about six hours by car outside Hyderabad (unlike much of India, there is no train service) in rural Andhra Pradesh. BIRDS addresses a host of needs in the area from health to water management to micro-finance loans.

I interviewed Paul Raja Rao, the director of BIRDS, one night on the veranda of their organic farm (they are attempting to re-introduce organic agriculture into an area mostly given over to chemical based farming).

Interview with Katherine Welch

Here is a rough cut of my interview with Dr. Katherine Welch who I was travelling with in India (this is a 26 minute long-form cut of what will become 10 minute piece). She speaks concerning her work internationally on the health needs of trafficked or prostituted women and their children.

Click here for the .mp3 file.

See more about Katherine’s organisation Global Health Promise

McIntosh at the Big Tent Festival

This is a lecture presented to a packed out audience (at the Big Tent Festival) by Alastair McIntosh on his new book Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition. It’s published by Birlinn Press and can be ordered from their website or Amazon. I’m reading the book right now and will comment after finishing it; Alastair introduces the book and provides some context for the writing of it. It’s worth listening all the way through the end questions; his last comment is simultaneously inspirational and haunting.
Listen to the MP3 here—it’s about 40MB but should open in your browser.

Sorry for the slightly dodgy audio quality; I was tied into a PA system and the line feed was a bit overmodulated at times.

Several months ago, Alastair presented a similar lecture at the Centre for Human Ecology AGM; I recorded it and you can listen to the MP3 here.

Hell and High Water

I attended the Annual General Meeting of The Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh last night. Prior to the AGM, Alastair McIntosh spoke on his forthcoming book Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition (due out in May from Birlinn Press).
Alastair’s critique of the human condition in this book pulls us out of the technical realm of “fixing” the environment and into a larger discussion of the moral, social, and spiritual causes of our situation. From the publisher:

Climate change is the greatest challenge that the world has ever faced. In this groundbreaking new book, Alastair McIntosh summarises the science of what is happening to the planet – both globally and using Scotland as a local case study. He moves on, controversially, to suggest that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity. In a fascinating journey through early texts that speak to climate change – including the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato’s myth of Atlantis, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth—McIntosh reveals the psychohistory of modern consumerism. He shows how we have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and the motivational manipulation of marketing. To start to resolve what has become of the human condition we must get more real in facing up to despair and death. Only then will we discover the spiritual meaning of these our troubled times. Only then can magic, new meaning, and all that gives life, start to mend a broken world.

I recorded his talk and the Q&A following (right before he starts speaking in the recording, he removes his jacket and jumper. The venue for the AGM was The Melting Pot in Edinburgh):

click here for the .mp3 podcast

Update: Okay, somebody has already asked—a few minutes into the lecture, Alastair uncorks something and pours a glass. Just to clarify, this is a glass of WATER not a glass of WHISKY!

Note that, after this cover was designed, Alastair considered the ultimate message and aim of the book. The word Hope was then added to the title—as hope is one of humankind’s most enduring and energetic abilities.