After interviewing lots of inspiring and knowledgeable experts it was so lovely to sit down with someone I know really well and embark on a journey together. Hanna is such a great storyteller. I was captivated right from the start by her descriptions of her childhood, her uncompromising teenage passion for animals and the environment and the way she veered off her scrupulously developed life-plan (to become a vet like her Dad) into the chaos, beauty and terror of the world.
This is a beautiful story of the way life reveals pathways and hope where we least expect them.
One of the reasons I wanted to interview Hanna now is that her story aligns with a new focus for my project.
(By the way I have some very exciting news - I’ve been funded to continue the Good Energy Project for another year until October 2024!! I feel like I’ve spent my first year just getting my head around the topics of economics and climate change. In the next year I’m really excited to start to explore how I might be able to contribute.)
One of the focuses for the funding being renewed is speaking to more young people - because our ultimate aim is to support young people who will inherit all these challenges. Hanna is quite young - 27. She wants to be part of a more caring and connected economy and world. But it’s really hard when you’re at the beginning of your career, everything is expensive and none of the obvious ways of making money align with your values.
Another focus for my next year is to experiment with creative ways of working with the ideas and needs I’m discovering - I’ve spent my career devising creative interventions to help bring the humanity back to intellectual topics like science and engineering - things like magnificent science variety shows and storytelling events. I also find myself surrounded by creative people - my wife is an arts therapist, my brother and his partner are puppeteers and writers. I find myself drawn to creative people and I’m convinced that whatever the solutions are to these huge problems I’ve been exploring, they will need creativity to succeed. Hanna is one of my thinking partners for imagining what this could look like.
Another thing I think we’ll need, to bring to life the ideas and possibilities I’ve been talking to people about, is some kind of spiritual or cosmological revolution - something that supports us to change ourselves and our fundamental way of seeing the world. I’m not sure I like the word “spirituality” but it expresses something under the surface that effects everything. Lots of my interviewees have eluded to similar things. Hanna has a nice way of describing this.
So Hanna seemed the right person to help introduce some of these new themes and explorations. She’s also just fun to listen to!
Magic mushrooms, mythical journeys and a new sense of hope in humanity