Planet: Critical

Update on new website

20 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hi everyone,I’ve designed the new Planet: Critical website and I want your feedback. If there’s any sections, groupings, design changes that you’...

Health Begins With Earth | Sharon Friel

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Doctors are tasked with an impossible job: Keep our bodies healthy while Earth’s collapses. Our healthcare systems are already under-funded and over...

China's Leverage | Kenneth Hammond

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is China the next world leader? Ken Hammond is a professor of history at New Mexico State University, where he specializes in the history of China in ...

There Are No Simple Solutions | Jessica Hernandez

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine if we rolled up our sleeves instead of pointed our fingers?Jessica Hernandez is an indigenous climate scientist and author of Growing Papaya T...

How the Eco-Crisis is Changing Our Brains | Clayton Aldern

18 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The climate crisis is causing an invisible health crisis. The number one cause of neurodegenerative disease is the environment. And our environment is...

Beyond Paradox | Iain McGilchrist

11 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2The two hemispheres of our brain collaborate to produce...

Bad Environmentalism | Gordon Katic

04 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gordon Katic is the founder of the award-winning podcast production company, Cited Media. This week, they’re launching Green Dreams, the new season ...

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Collapse has historically benefited the 99%.That’s the amazing conclusion of Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Socie...

Community Sufficiency | Kara Huntermoon

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How can we become good ancestors? Permaculturist and educator, Kara Huntermoon, says the hobbies we pick up now can be skills we pass on to our childr...

Knowing and Being | Tyson Yunkaporta

14 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself. This is the message of this week’s guest, Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunk...

Why Complex Societies Collapse | Joseph Tainter

07 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is the world even collapsing?Joseph Tainter is a Professor at Utah State University and the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies. He explains o...

Is Non-Violence the Only Way? | Rowan Tilly

01 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We’ve been protesting for decades. Is it time to escalate?Rowan Tilly is an elder of the British peace and environment movements. She has risked jai...

Degrowing Healthcare | Martin Hensher

24 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

All of our industries are going to have to shrink. But how do we shrink the good ones?Martin Hensher is a health economist and  a Professor of Healt...

Why Earth Needs a Feminist Movement | Silvia Federici

17 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Women’s bodies have always been the cornerstone of reproduction. So has Earth’s. It’s why the enclosure and appropriation of both is fundamental...

What's Really Warming the Planet | Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop

10 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ask anyone anywhere what’s the leading cause of global heating and they’ll tell you: fossil fuels. But what if we’re all wrong? Gerard Wedderbur...

Resilience is Resistance | Max Wilbert

03 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do we survive?Max Wilbert is a long-time activist who spent the past few years defending Thacker Pass, and recently joined CELDF to as part of the...

Human Exceptionalism | Christine Webb

26 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What makes humans special?Nothing. But a small band of us in the Western hemisphere have inculcated ourselves over thousands of years to believe in ou...

Why We Can't Understand Each Other | Damien Williams

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There’s more information than ever — but we can’t agree on what it means.We think of language as a tool of communication. But it’s so much mor...

How to Change People's Minds | Sarah Stein Lubrano

12 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Don’t Talk About Politics!That’s the title of neuroscientist and political theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano’s first book. A phenomenal and heavily r...

Change is Risk | Celine Semaan

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The status quo won’t survive. Neither will we if we’re not willing to change. In this phenomenal conversation with powerhouse Celine Semaan, an ar...

Beyond Separation | Willow Defebaugh

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Does nature have a plan?It’s a lovely thought. But we’re going to have to be more accountable than that. In this achingly beautiful conversation w...

Is the End Nigh? | Émile Torres

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

 What is an extinction event? How have human beings considered extinction in the past? How is the contemporary understanding of human extinction dif...

Voices of the Amazon | Chumpi Washikiat

15 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Achuar people first came into contact with the outside world sixty years ago. Since then, they have mostly been left in peace, able to take what t...

Confronting Collapse | Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

08 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We need a new story. We also need to do the hard work of re-engineering our societies, re-imagining our relationships, and remembering our bodies. Van...

Resource Scarcity and Eco-Fascism | Antonio Turiel

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Militarisation, isolationism, extractivism.It looks like we learned nothing from the 21st century, as the powers that be are approaching looming civil...

Carbon is Not Our Enemy | Mongabay

24 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I recently interviewed Paul Hawken for Mongabay and want to share the moving conversation with you here. Celebrated author, thinker and entrepreneur P...

Popping the Tech Bro Bubble | Molly White

17 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Free speech is under attack.Banning books, cutting library funding, attacking Wikipedia. The authoritarian regime of the tech-bro backed hard right do...

A World of Contradictions | David Edgerton

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We can’t make this make sense.The world’s most famous face of renewable solutions spent a record-breaking amount to get Big Oil’s candidate into...

Collapse: What It Is — And What To Do | Sarah Wilson

03 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The s**t’s hit the fan. We can’t turn the fan off, argues best-selling author Sarah Wilson. But we can learn how to clean up the mess.Sarah, autho...

How To Do The Right Thing in Business | Brad Vanstone

27 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Businesses could run differently — with the right leaders. Brad Vanstone, cofounder of plant-based cheese company Willicroft, is an example. He foun...

The "Energy Transition" is a Pipe Dream | Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Civilisation always wants more energy. The idea that our global society will merely switch from one energy source to another is fantasy masquerading a...

States, Markets, and the Rest of Us | Grace Blakeley

13 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It wasn’t always like this. Just decades ago, working people had power to leverage governments, ensuring our politicians weren’t just capitulating...

The Age of Territorial Expansion | Michael Albertus

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our borders are changing.Russia wants Ukraine, China wants Taiwan, Israel wants Palestine, and Trump wants Greenland. We are in the beginning of an ag...

Animal Agriculture Exceptionalism | Kenny Torrella

27 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big Oil has a Big Brother — animal agriculture.A handful of multinational companies are driving environmental degradation and cruelty around the wor...

How to Cool the Planet | Sailesh Rao

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is one thing we could all do tomorrow? Switch to a planet-based diet.Sailesh Rao, Executive Director of Climate Healers, joins me to explain how ...

The B******t Stinking Up Silicon Valley | Ed Zitron

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ed Zitron is one of Silicon Valley’s fiercest critics. Since A.I’s arrival, Ed has virulently exposed its singular lack of intelligence, its huge ...

The Smallest Parts | Craig Slee

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Where does your body end? The human body is filled with ecosystems of creatures keeping us alive. It exists within larger ecosystems keeping us alive....

Climate Violence | Peter Schwartzstein

30 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A hotter world is a more violent world. Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist and researcher, and author of The Heat and the Fury which i...

Israel's Campaign To Destroy Life | Samaneh Moafi

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Samaneh Moafi is the Assistant Director of Research at Forensic Architecture, a research agency operating across human rights, journalism, architectur...

Planetary Solvency | Sandy Trust

16 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ecological collapse doesn’t happen in a vacuum.Our global economy will also collapse by up to 50% before the end of this century if we continue as w...

Climate Criminals | Aaron Regunberg

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do we take Big Oil to the criminal courts? There's been a major wave of climate litigation over the past 12 months, mostly in civil courts. But gr...

Scale Out in 2025 | Rachel Donald

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Happy New Year!Following the success of last year’s special episode, we're ringing in 2025 with another one from me in which I answer your questions...

The Need for Roots | Nathalie Nahai

26 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is a system? This is the type of question which can only be meandered through, which is exactly what Nathalie Nahai and I do on this week's episo...

Exposing the Imperial Class | Matt Kennard

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is the United States for? Journalist Matt Kennard would argue the most powerful nation in the world exists to undermine democracy, deny national ...

Language and Violence | Sunil Amrith

12 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the beginning was the word—and that word justified it all. In this stunning conversation with Sunil Amrith, historian and author of Burning Earth...

From the Ashes | Dana Fisher

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Do things have to get worse before they get better?Yes, says Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community & Equity and author of Sav...

Civil Resistance | Pasha Bell

28 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Climate researcher and activist Pasha Bell was jailed for 22 months for protesting against the British government’s climate inaction. They join a gr...

Climate Litigation Breakthroughs | Nikki Reisch

21 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Is the law fit for purpose?This is one question Nikki Reisch, Director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental...

Hurt People Hurt People | Kosha Joubert

14 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How does trauma show up?Kosha Joubert is the CEO of the pocket project and NGO dedicated to exploring and healing collective trauma. She joined me to ...

WTF | Emily Atkin

07 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

WTF – What Trump F***s.*Beside his extensive sexual assault of women, Trump’s political agenda involves violently assaulting the planet, climate l...

The Renewables Solution | Auke Hoekstra

31 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Can renewables really save the day? Auke Hoekstra, Director of the NEON Research Program, says they can. The renewables researcher firmly states that ...

Nuclear and Justice | Jessica Lovering

24 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If not nuclear, then what else? This is Jessica Lovering's question, co-founder of the Good Energy Collective. She says the most important thing is to...

Decarbonising the War Machine | Sherri Goodman

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S Military is going green. But what does that mean? Decarbonised bases, hybrid vehicles, micro electricity grids, recycling methane gas. In fact...

How Net Zero Killed 1.5 | James Dyke

10 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Paris Agreement is dead. The celebrated target marked in ink in 2016 has been killed by the focus on technocratic solutions over systemic change. ...

The Plastic Crisis | Jane van Dis

03 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We can’t harm the planet without harming ourselves.Plastic. It’s ubiquitous. We are now learning it’s also insidious. Plastic is linked to numer...

The Green Washing Machine | Veronica Bates Kassatly

26 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when an industry regulates itself?Bad science, opaque methodologies, incorrect conclusions—and few questions asked. The fashion industr...

The Energy Collapse | Louis Arnoux

19 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when economics takes precedence over thermodynamics?Eventually, the system collapses—because being incompatible with thermodynamics is ...

E-Topia | Deep Dhillon

10 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Can we engineer our way out of dystopia? A.I. technologist Deep Dhillon and I had a heated exchange about technology after meeting by chance in Granad...

The Rights of Nature | Mongabay Newscast

05 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week, P:C features Mongabay.Nations across the globe are trialing “rights of nature” laws and “legal personhood” for various ecosystems a...

Sick People or Sick Society? | Steffi Bednarek

29 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How has the psychology industry perpetuated the problem? Steffi Bednarek is a climate psychotherapist working both with clients on their anxiety and d...

We Deserve Better Certainties | Natasha Lennard

22 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Remember the adage it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Culture inculcates certainties—and only in living against...

Low Tech Life | Kris De Decker

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What if the solutions are the problem?Life is made beautiful by the myriad possibilities that evolve—spontaneously—from interactions in the world....

Crisis of Mastery | Bayo Akomolafe

08 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do we come home to our bodies? Bayo Akomolafe is a philosopher writer, activist, professor of psychology and executive director of the emergence n...

Building Trust | Nate Kinch

01 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How can businesses make better decisions?The corporate world needs new values, values that inspire different motivations for existing. But doing so wi...

Climate Change as Class War | Matt Huber

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The global majority are not responsible for global warming. A tiny percentage of the world's population are in positions of power, making decisions th...

The Sixth Mass Extinction | Peter Brannen

11 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The carbon cycle is more dangerous than an asteroid.An asteroid killed the dinosaurs but unstable carbon cycles caused the worse mass extinctions in e...

How A.I. is Driving Policy | Paul Schutze

04 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A.I. is here—except it isn't. Or is it? A.I. is all over the news all of the time, and nations are scrambling to win the race and become the world l...

Climate Reparations | Esther Afolaranmi

27 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Reparations provide legal rights.So argues lawyer and humanitarian, Esther Afolaranmi. Esther is the founder of the Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foun...

Doing the Right Thing | Gianluca Grimalda

20 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What would you lose to take a stand?Gianluca Grimalda, a climate change researcher, lost his job after he refused to fly back from fieldwork in Papua ...

The Body Politic | Ranu Mukherjee

13 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Our bodies know what words fail to describe.Shifts in culture, ravages of violence, ruptures and reconciliation—the body politic lives in our own bo...

The Symbolic Species | Terrence Deacon

06 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We belong to our symbols as much as they belong to us. Like the planetary environment, our relationship with language and symbols has impacted our cul...

Energy Wars | Art Berman

30 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Whoever controls the energy supply controls the new world order.Russia and China are deepening their relationship, Western allies in the Middle East a...

The Thermodynamics of Degrowth | Tim Garrett

23 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies?Tim Garrett and I come to refer to these as “the ho...

Reimagining A.I | John Wild

16 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What does artificial intelligence have in common with eugenics? The first person to float the idea of a "general intelligence" was a eugenicist who wa...

The Reduction Roadmap | Dani Hill-Hansen

09 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Who takes the initiative when governments fail to ask?Amazingly, in Denmark, an industry is lobbying its government for much tighter regulations to ab...

The Politics of Food | Chris Smaje

02 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What’s the future of food?Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking hor...

Designing Collective Security | Olivia Lazard

25 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We’re breaking all kinds of records at the moment: cities are boiling at 62C, ocean temperatures are literally off the charts, and governments have ...

Global Carbon Reward | Delton Chen

18 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Can the market do the right thing?Not without supportive policy. Market-based solutions do not have a good track record when it comes to climate, stuc...

Social Tipping Points | Erin Remblance

11 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Here’s the good news: People can change—quickly.Sometimes it feels impossible to imagine anything other than collapse with the way our energy syst...

Global Oil Depletion | Alister Hamilton

04 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When do you think we’ll run out of oil?2050? 2100? Never? That’s understandable given the IPCC models access to oil until 2100; politicians like R...

The Origins of Hell On Earth | Carl Safina

28 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

I like to think of intellectual discourse as the entangled root network of an ancient tree: everything is connected to everything else. Not so much a ...

The Psychological Transition | Jonathan Mille

21 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We need to confront political impossibility.A few months ago, I was sitting on a train bashing out a furious article about the British government’s ...

Rewilding the Earth to Rewild Ourselves | Laura Martin

14 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We need to restore our own ecology.That doesn’t just mean fencing off parts of the earth into “nature conservation” spaces because, as this week...

Is Nuclear the Answer? | Mark Nelson

07 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Nuclear: The perfect energy or perfect weapon.There are such widely-held—and understandable—fears surrounding nuclear that in 2023 the Green party...

Art, AI and Octopus | Mer Maggie Roberts

29 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Could AI be a natural intelligence?Artist Mer Maggie Roberts, cofounder of the collective Orphan Drift, has been investigating how the natural world c...

Climate Corruption | Amy Westervelt

22 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Truth is stranger than fiction—but fiction is better written.We know their playbooks and their networks, but the bad guys of this story are in no ru...

Trauma, Power and Stories | Paddy Loughman

15 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If society is sick, how do we heal?The idea of an “original trauma” bears similarities with the concept of an “original sin”: We fell, from gr...

Enshrining the Rights of Nature in Washington's Constitution | Chaytan Inman

08 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If they won’t get it done, then we’ll do it ourselves.Chaytan Inman is uninspired by politics. The computer science student was fed up or energy-b...

The Cognitive Dissonance Crisis | Sarah Stein Lubrano

01 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What do W.E.I.R.D countries have in common? Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. The citizens of these countries exhibit markedly more...

What We Get Wrong About Money | Steven Hail

25 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Did you know the government doesn’t spend your taxes?Welcome to the world of Modern Monetary Theory, a revolutionary way of decoding our monetary sy...

Climate is a Justice Issue | Naomi Oreskes

18 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Neoliberalism is the disease which keeps on killing.But did you know the neoliberal economic gospel we live under today is a deliberate misinterpretat...

Becoming Ungovernable At Scale | Fabian Dablander

11 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We can’t do this without taking power back.But with the systems of power so effectively tied up in the complex system of unelected officials, hidden...

Keep Trying in 2024 | Rachel Donald

04 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

One week ago I emailed my subscribers and asked them to submit any burning question they may have about me or Planet: Critical. I expected most questi...

Nationalism and Greenwashing | Laurie Parsons

21 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Carbon Colonialism won’t solve the crisis.State response to the interlocking climate, biodiversity, water, inequality, and health crises has mostly ...

It's Them vs Us | George Monbiot

14 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We need to stop pretending we live in a democracy.The essence of a democratic state is rule by the people, for the people. This has only ever been an ...

Mongabay: Climate loss & damage fund ‘the furthest thing imaginable from a success’

07 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Public Service Announcement!I’m now collaborating with Mongabay on their weekly Newscast podcast, bringing you conservation news from all around the...

Our Global Economy Won't Survive | Sandy Trust

30 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What maniac would suggest a hothouse earth would be economically positive?The financial services—and their incorrect models is costing us time to im...

The Green Democratic Revolution | James Schneider

23 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

All the money and power in the world—but still the ruling class is failing.James Schneider, Communications Director for Progressive International, e...

Oil and Conflict | John Browne

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What Big Oil knew — from climate to Iraq.John Browne, Chairman of BeyondNetZero, was CEO of BP from 1995 – 2007. In 1997, he broke ranks with the ...

Moral Clarity | Hamza Yusuf

12 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Genocides are a Weapon of WarIdeologies are weaponised by the morally bankrupt to control those who are oriented towards values. Despite what the long...