Across India and around the world, communities are resisting destruction and reclaiming their right to shape their own futures. Shrishtee Bajpai, researcher and activist with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, reveals how local struggles for self-determination connect across cultures and what is being done to weave a 'pluriverse' of possibilities rooted in social and ecological justice. Highlights include:

• How Shrishtee's upbringing as an upper caste, urban Indian girl living along the river Ganga shaped her search for personal freedom and ecological and social justice;
• How her work with Indian village communities resisting ecological and social destruction helped her connect academic critiques of feminism and development to lived realities;
• How she challenges oppressive systems while also interrogating her own privilege and colonial inheritance;
• Why creating a 'pluriverse' of diverse, locally-rooted alternatives is essential to move beyond the dominant development model and progress narrative;
• Why the Global Tapestry of Alternatives supports 'radiating out' values and lessons rather than 'scaling up', which risks destroying the important nuance of local context;
• Why strengthening communities’ imagination, confidence, and self-determination is central to her work;
• Why the Rights of Nature movement must de-emphasize the perspectives of NGOs and governments and center the voice of local communities with long-standing connections to their environments;
• How profound experiences with the more-than-human world and with story-based community ritual sustain her work.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/shrishtee-bajpai

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.

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Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate

Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org

Copyright 2025 Population Balance

For 5,000 years civilizations have told themselves stories of progress. Today, the progress myth has become humanity's most dangerous illusion. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea, illuminates the destructive lineage of progress, why these myths endure, how they enable socially and ecologically parasitic societies, and what values might guide us beyond them. Highlights include:

• How narratives of progress have persisted from Mesopotamia to today, and how those narratives have persisted even as the means of material subsistence and political economy have changed enormously over time;
• How the progress narratives of today are primarily divided into four camps: techno-liberal, Silicon Valley's android kingdom, the social justice vanguard, and right-wing grifters and political opportunists;
• How the ecological, energy exchange relationships of mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism offer a framework for understanding human societies' concrete and abstract energy capture historically and in the present;
• Why long-lived societies tend to be mutualistic or commensalistic with animistic, biophilic worldviews and egalitarian practices, while parasitic societies collapse due to the ecological and social destruction they cause;
• How parasitism has evolved across three broad ages of mythical, secular, and today's economistic, fossil-fueled, and globalized capitalist network;
• Why neoliberalism, the latest economistic project, is so resilient - and how it prioritizes economic growth over political rights, co-opts reformist movements and exploits the human cooperative impulse while entrenching corporate power at the expense of democracy;
• Why elite fantasies of transhumanism and off-planet escape are dangerous and delusional extensions of parasitic growthism;
• What more mutualistic and commensalistic alternative paths forward might look like, from agroecological local systems and rewilding to indigenous land rights, fossil fuel bans, rejecting AI, and class struggle - all guided by values of biophilia, fairness, and restraint.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/samuel-miller-mcdonald-2

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe

Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate

Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org

Copyright 2025 Population Balance

Modern techno-industrial civilization is running up against the law of diminishing returns - and societal collapse is inevitable. B, author of The Honest Sorcerer blog, reveals why our civilizational complexity carries the seeds of its own destruction. Highlights include:

• What led B (who also shares his reasons for remaining anonymous) from believing modern civilization would persist for centuries to recognizing collapse as inevitable;
• Why diminishing returns on energy, materials, and innovation are central to the collapse of complex societies;
• Why societal collapse is a long process taking place over decades or centuries rather than a single event, unfolding as a stair-step decline with sharp drops in complexity followed by brief recoveries and stabilizations;
• Why declining fertility rates should be embraced as a natural adjustment to overpopulation, rather than a cause for elite-driven panic;
• Why collapse will be liberating for some, devastating for most, and why adaptation to a simpler life will favor poorer communities that already know how to live simply;
• How and when to strategically leverage large-scale political change, and the role writers, thinkers, and local action can play in helping people face collapse more calmly .

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/the-honest-sorcerer

OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.

Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe

Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate

Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org

Copyright 2025 Population Balance