The Happy Pear Podcast

“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.

Episode 24 – Jonathan Dawson

“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.