Past Events at Kairos
Thursday July 3rd 2025
Is an Ecological Civilisation Possible? with David Tyfield
Many now argue that our current civilisation is finished. But could a new, and better, civilisation take its place? And what might we learn from rising global superpower China about how that future could look?
In 2018, the Chinese constitution was amended to include the concept of “ecological civilisation” – both as philosophical vision and strategic goal. In this talk, David Tyfield, Professor in Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at the University of Lancaster, used the fascinating, contradictory case of China to interrogate the idea that civilisations are inherently unsustainable.
What might we learn from the rise of China about the future global order, climate action and the very nature of ‘civilisation’ itself?
Tuesday July 1st 2025
Kairos Deep Conversations: How Can We Find the Power to Act?
We held an evening of guided conversation about how to find our agency in a time of climate and ecological breakdown, what we can do and who we can we do it with.
The evening included a series of structured one-to-one and small group discussions in response to a set of carefully chosen questions, a break for a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together, reflections from Charlie Gardner (conservationist, activist, and author of a forthcoming book on what we all can do in response to the climate and nature crisis) and a concluding full group discussion.
This was an invitation to combine theories of change with personal stories, to find empowerment in community, explore our own limits, and build solidarity and understanding.
Due to a family bereavement, Kimberley Hare, who was going to join Charlie in leading the discussion was not able to take part. Kimberley is the founder of the Heart Community Group and the author of “At the Edge: What Is Mine to Do? And Who Can I Do it With?” She also leads regular 4-day retreats that support people in answering that same question.
Tuesday June 24th 2025
Movie Nights: “The End We Start From”
“The End We Start From” (1hr 45mins, 2023, dir: Mahalia Belo) stars Jodie Comer as a young woman whose baby arrives just as catastrophic floods submerge London and society begins to break around her.
The screening was followed by supper and discussion,
Thursday June 19th 2025
How Animals Heal Us with Jay Griffiths
In this talk followed by discussion, writer Jay Griffiths explored how animals are healing, not only for the individual but for society.
Healthy societies need a sense of ethics, justice and wise politics. We heard how humans learned ethics from wolves, how some police dogs have acted more ethically than their handlers, and how many primates and dogs detest unfairness and have a sense of justice. We learned about the democracy of honeybees and the political alliances created by fieldfares, among many other examples.
We also discussed how animals are the wellspring of human art, how they are the remedies at the heart of myth and folk tales (medicine stories) and how the spiritual invigoration that animals provide is at the heart of the wellness of the collective psyche. In the longest sweep of history, shamans, who are the first healers, have always said it is the animals who heal.
Wednesday June 18th 2025
Book Club: “Eco-miserabilism & Radical Hope” by Mathius Thaler
In this short paper, political scientist Mathius Taler explores eco-miserabilism, the thought that it is already too late to avert the collapse of human civilisation. He offers a “reparative” reading of this post-apocalyptic approach, which is gaining traction in contemporary environmentalism, by defending it against those who associate it with defeatism and fatalism.
He argues that authors like Roy Scranton and the members of the Dark Mountain collective, while rejecting mainstream activism, remain invested in a specific kind of (radical) hope:
“Eco-miserabilists, hence, promote an affective politics for our climate-changed world that is both negative and iconoclastic. Without offering blueprints for a desirable future, they critically interrogate reality and disenchant the “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant) behind reformist plans for a “good Anthropocene.” The ultimate target of the eco-miserabilist position is the illusion that groundbreaking innovations, either in the realm of science and technology or of ordinary representative politics, could redeem us on an environmentally ravaged planet.”
Thursday June 12th 2025
In the Belly of the Beast: Soil, Soul & Society with Alastair McIntosh
Alastair McIntosh – quaker, land reformer, spiritual ecologist and honorary professor at the University of Glasgow – played a leading role in the campaigns that brought the Isle of Eigg into community land ownership and stopped the Isle of Harris superquarry.
In this talk, Alastair shared learnings from his activist work over nearly half a century. He briefly outlined his work with land reform, urban poverty and nonviolence with the military, in order to draw out what it means to sustain engagement while acting inside the systems we’re trying to replace.
He talked about the spirituality that underpins his work, the Naming, Unmasking and Engaging of the Powers that can sustain challenging work and power it up from a place of inner necessity. Collectively, we then discussed what we all can do, despite living inside “the belly of the beast”.
Friday June 6th 2025
Friday Drinks with Beto Marubo
We were joined at Friday Drinks by Beto Marubo, an indigenous leader of the Marubo ethnic group in the Javari Valley region of the Brazilian Amazon, who chatted informally with us about his work to protect the isolated peoples of the region.
Friday Drinks is our weekly bar night with free entry and a pay bar serving cocktails and other alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and food. Whether you’re a regular Kairos attendee or have yet to come to one of our events, if you’re on your own or with a group, or if you just want a quiet catch up with a friend, all are welcome.
Thursday June 5th 2025
The New Culture of Self-Organising with Gully Bujak
For the past two years, Cooperation Hull has been taking inspiration from democratic and economic experiments around the world like Cooperation Jackson, Mondragon, the Zapatistas and Rojava, and applying them here at home. Their model brings these learnings together with their own experiences of civil disobedience to plot a course towards real system change, founded on a new culture of self-organising.
Gully Bujak was arrested ten times with Extinction Rebellion, coordinated the shut down of Murdoch’s printworks in 2020 and was acquitted by a jury for criminal damage before co-founding Cooperation Hull. She presented Cooperation Hull’s work so far, which includes holding over a dozen people’s assemblies in the city with the lowest voter turnout in the country, starting radical ‘solidarity economy’ projects in deprived neighbourhoods, confronting Reform and supporting other northern initiatives like Cooperation Sheffield to get off the ground.
Fresh from attending the historic People’s Platform in Vienna as a Cooperation Hull delegate – a gathering of 800 revolutionaries from around Europe – Gully gave a frank analysis of what has and hasn’t been working in Hull and discussed what it means to translate international examples to an English context.
Wednesday June 4th 2025
The Radical Recentralisation of the World with Eliane Brum
Brazilian writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker Eliane Brum talked about the journalism platform she has set up in the Amazon, along with British journalist Jonathan Watts who also took part in the discussion, and the radical idea behind it.
Eliane, who has made her home in the Amazon Forest, advocated a radical recentralisation of the world. She argued that we need to shift our current understanding of “centre” and “periphery,” thinking instead of enclaves of Nature and the values of their peoples as central. The centres of the world are where life is, not where markets are.
Eliane and Jonathan explained how this idea led them to create Sumaúma, a trilingual journalism platform based at the epicenter of rainforest destruction. Launched in 2022, today Sumaúma runs a co-training program for forest-journalists, where traditional journalism intersects with the cosmogonies of Brazil’s original peoples, and seeks to recenter journalism through a radical, daily, recentralisation of the world.
Tuesday June 3rd 2025
Open Projects Night
We held our regular open mike night, where we learnt about each others projects, built connections and offered each other support.
Open Projects Night is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
The evening included a series of short presentations – including Theodor Keloglou on Shoshin College and Amanda Douge on “Rosa Luxemburg and I” – discussion about the projects presented, and a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together.
Thursday May 29th 2025
Building the Commonsverse with David Bollier
The urgent question of the moment is not just how to constrain a surging authoritarianism, but to figure out what compelling new vision for governance, provisioning, and social order we should pursue.
The “old normal” cannot be restored, and in any case, it has failed to deal with climate change, savage inequalities, predatory markets, democratic decline and social alienation. New types of social relations and institutional forms are desperately needed; the confusion and disarray in current politics provides the opportunity to create them.
Drawing on his just-published book “Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition”, David Bollier, a long-time activist/scholar at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (US), described the wide variety of commons now flourishing outside the control of the corporate market/state. A globe-spanning Commonsverse – encompassing land, water, agriculture, food systems, energy, digital networks, mutual aid, alternative currencies, and much more – is opening up new vectors of democratic and economic possibility. It represents an unacknowledged “parallel polis,” as Czech visionary Vaclav Havel might have put it.
Since capitalist modernity remains a major impediment to change, David also focused on several key challenges for expanding the Commonsverse: the re-configuration of state power to support commoning; the development of (noncapitalist) “relationalized finance”; creative legal hacks on Western jurisprudence; the mainstreaming of social cooperation as an institutional form; bioregionalism as an integrated ecological/economic vision; and new modes of collaboration between commoners in the Global South and North.
Wednesday May 28th 2025
Book Club: “The Rivers North of the Future – The Testament of Ivan Illich” as told to David Cayley
For May’s Book Club we discussed The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich in which Canadian journalist David Cayley compiles and reflects upon the thoughts of Ivan Illich, one of the 20th century’s most visionary cultural critics.
Illich believed that the West could only be understood as a corruption of the Christian New Testament. Cayley presents Illich’s exploration of this idea, illuminating Illich’s thoughts on the criminalisation of sin, on how the Church has become a template for the modern nation-state, and how contemporary society has become a congealed and corrupted Christianity.
Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a brilliant polymath, an iconoclastic thinker, and a prolific writer. He was a priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of numerous books, including Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Medical Nemesis.
Friday May 23rd 2025
Friday Drinks with Tree Oh!
Our weekly open bar night featured a special appearance from Swedish music collective Tree Oh! who were passing through London after performing at the Hay Festival.
With their roots in Swedish folk and influences from classical to Americana, Tree Oh! sing about nature in cities, enchanted gardens, mighty trees, the climate crisis, rising oceans, the legacy of colonialism and the need for new dreams. Singing in harmony alongside viola, flutes, and Celtic harp, they performed a selection of songs from their debut EP Our Urban Nature over two 30 minute sets.
Tree Oh! is Anna Jonsson, Sara Nilsson and Nina Wohlert, musicians and environmentalists, with their lyricist, author and campaigner Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute.
Wednesday May 21st 2025
The Breakdown of the Global Economic Order & What Comes Next with Ann Pettifor
Or “Globalisation and Balshazzar’s Feast”.
What does the ‘invisible hand’ portend for the US dollar and financial markets? Is the writing on the wall? How can we transform the system?
There is widespread recognition that the increasingly lawless global financial system is unstable, and like the ecosystem, prone to failure. Yet economists and investors remain bullish.
In this talk, international political economist Ann Pettifor explored the deep flaws of a global system that marketises and deregulates the social technology we call money; denationalises finance and thereby threatens financial crisis, while declaring ‘there is no money’ to address climate breakdown.
The system and its flaws are well understood. We have been here before. We know how to fix the system, and we know how to mobilise the finance needed for transformation. We face constraints but they are not financial or monetary constraints. The only real constraints are ecological, and the other real resources – public understanding, labour, the earth’s resources and infrastructure – needed to meet humanity’s collective needs.
Tuesday May 20th 2025
Reviving the Commons: Our Land
Britain’s common land has been systematically depleted through encroachment, enclosure, privatisation, commodification and financialisation. The result has been chronic mis-management of our land, including over grazing, the depletion of peatlands, soil degradation and widespread habitat and species loss.
How can we revive the Commons and restore our land?
In this participatory event – part of our year-long series on the Commons – we explored a vision for the land commons, and discussed a set of demands for inclusion in a new Charter of the Commons being developed at Kairos over the course of the year.
We heard a series of short presentations from land, river and commons experts: Economist Guy Standing, Carol Wilcox of the Labour Land Campaign, Anthony Hurford from the Environment Agency, writer and ecologist Helen Baczkowska, Tom Chance of the Community Land Trust Network and Carey Doyle from Scotland’s Rural College.
We then broke into groups to discuss their ideas before coming back together to collectively discuss a set of principles and demands to include in the Charter.
No previous knowledge was required – either of the Commons generally or land issues specifically. All were welcome to contribute or just come to listen.
Thursday May 15th 2025
Transcending the Alt Reich in an Age of Collapse and Renewal with Nafeez Ahmed
The far-right is resurgent. The United States has been taken over by a technology oligarchy with an alarming technofascist agenda to supercharge hyper-capitalism and fracture democracies.
In this interactive talk and discussion session, author, systems theorist and journalist Nafeez Ahmed drew on his transdisciplinary research into what he calls “the planetary phase shift” to help us make sense of this dangerous moment, and create strategies for action.
For as well as an unprecedented convergence of ecological, energy, food and economic crises, there is also an unprecedented possibility space emerging for the radical transformation of the systems that define civilisation.
Nafeez discussed the findings of his new book, “Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within”, and argued that understanding the nature of the ideology of the far-right through a systems lens can help us recognise strategies to defeat it through systemic transformation. He showed how the Alt Reich is an effort to head off the emancipatory possibilities of system changes that are occurring right now across society, culture and technology.
Wednesday May 14th 2025
The Fashion Commons: Reclaiming Our Clothing Culture
Clothing culture has been hijacked by the growth imperative. The industrial fashion system is creating insupportable amounts of waste and pollution whilst failing to provide for human needs. The industry contributes 10% of global carbon emissions, with this on track to grow 40% by 2030 (from 2022). This growth is enabled by fossil fuel by-products, with 67% of fibres made from cheap synthetics.
There are alternatives. We can reclaim our clothing cultures. Commons-based clothing models, in which communities steward their collective wealth, are overwhelmingly sustainable and sufficient, meaningful and culturally enriching.
As part of Kairos’ year-long series on the Commons, we came together to co-create a vision for how to revive our clothing systems.
In this participatory event – co-hosted by OurCommon.Market, a platform for commons-based clothing practices – we heard a series of short provocations from experts on the fashion commons: anthropologist Sandra Niessen, designer Alice Holloway, fashion ecologist and textile systems designer Zoe Gilbertson and maker, activist and co-founder of Fantasy Fibre Mill, Nick Evans.
Questions they addressed will include: How could small scale, bio-regional, fair and regenerative clothing production become the default? How can we make these alternatives sufficiently persuasive? How could a pluriverse of fashion cultures flourish? What challenges are keeping them in the margins? What rights of fashion commoners need to be protected, and how?
We then broke into small groups to discuss how we might begin to make these paradigm shifts. Collectively, we then discussed which ideas to take forward to an event later in the year which will focus on the Cultural Commons more generally, and which will result in a set of demands to be included in a new Charter of the Commons.
No previous knowledge was required – either of the Commons generally or fashion cultures specifically. All are welcome to contribute or just come to listen.
Tuesday April 29th 2025
The Good Apocalypse Guide with Alex Evans
We have apocalypses all wrong. They can be much more hopeful, creative, empowering, energising and fruitful than the gloomy stories of collapse that we keep hearing about.
Hollywood tells us (incessantly) that apocalypses are catastrophes, plain and simple. Only rugged individuals survive. How to cope? Stock up on canned food and ammo.
Real apocalypses are much more interesting than that. Yes, they’re moments of extreme turbulence – but they can also be incubators for new futures, that bring out the best of us like nothing else. And while they can certainly lead to catastrophic breakdowns, they can also be times of extraordinary breakthrough.
So what tips the balance? In this talk, Alex Evans – founder and executive director of Larger Us and author of the The Good Apocalypse Guide on Substack – explored how our ancestors made sense of moments of cataclysm, why our mental and emotional states are so central to the kind of future we’ll inhabit, and why the ‘religion shaped hole’ in modern life matters most during apocalyptic times.
Wednesday April 23rd 2025
Kill the Corporation Before it Kills Us
The profit-making corporation is almost perfectly designed for the purpose of using up the world’s resources as quickly as possible, and then taking no responsibility for cleaning up the damage.
In this talk, David Whyte, Professor of Climate Justice at Queen Mary’s University, analysed the political and legal foundations of the corporation – the organisation that was created as a device of European colonialism – to show exactly why it is the deadliest human invention.
David argued that our best chance of survival is to understand the foundations of corporate power and set out the steps we need to take to fatally weaken the corporation. We need to kill the corporation and replace it with organisations that promote common ownership. Only then can we work towards surviving climate breakdown.
Tuesday April 15th 2025
Rooted Innovation: The Future of Technology with Joycelyn Longdon
What does the future of technology look like amidst ecological and cultural breakdown? How we might come to see technology as a generational practice of craft, learning from those who have come before us, and those whose technologies are grounded in reciprocal relationships with the environment, in order to build the worlds of the future?
Joycelyn Longdon, environmental justice technologist, author, educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge, will explore the histories and possibilities of technology beyond a Western industrialist view, beyond silver bullets and panacean solutions, towards an appreciation of the many forms of technology, old and new, material and cultural and the technologies nature itself designs.
Joycelyn’s research focuses on the design of justice-led conservation technologies for monitoring of biodiversity with local forest communities in Ghana. Her debut book, “Natural Connection: What Indigenous Wisdom and Marginalised People Teach us about Environmental Action” was published in April 2025.
Wednesday April 9th 2025
Book Club: “Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Andreotti
“There are clues [here] to how we find the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know it.” — Dougald Hine
For our April Book Club we discussed “Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Andreotti (aka Vanessa Machado de Oliveira).
“Vanessa presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behaviour patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.
Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance…But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?
Vanessa breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance…and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviours, and belief systems hold us back – and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest.” (Publisher’s description.)
Saturday April 5th 2025
Concerts Don’t Cost the Earth with Gibbon and Goldfinch
Following Gibbon & Goldfinch’s knock out appearance at our Winter Solstice Party, they were back at Kairos with Concerts Don’t Cost the Earth, a unique musical experience to move, motivate and inspire.
Gibbon & Goldfinch – aka performing duo Marcus Decker and Holly Cullen-Davies, who met running protest song workshops – are singers, multi-instrumentalists, activists, curators and entertainers.
For this concert, the first at Kairos since we acquired our own piano, Marcus and Holly performed a range of pieces from J.S. Bach to Nina Simone and Claude Debussy to Joni Mitchell.
Concerts Don’t Cost the Earth brings together musicians, hosts and audiences in convivial settings where everyone is included. They offer the chance to be surprised, to laugh and possibly cry, to learn something new and to make new friends.
Thursday April 3rd 2025
How We Live and How We Might Live with Ken Worpole
How can we move from communities of interest to communities of care?
In his 1964 essay, “Urban Place and the Non-Place Public Realm”, American urban designer Melvin Webber coined a phrase which anticipated the changing nature of social life in the modern world: community without propinquity. This suggested that the communities of the future would be based more on shared interests and identities than physical proximity and face-to-face encounters. Webber predicted this long before the Internet made the creation of online ‘communities’ – whose reach now extends across the globe – even more commanding.
Today social media generates millions of such self-described ‘communities’, none of whose members have ever met in person. In such conditions, social change becomes ever more difficult to achieve, for as John Stuart Mill argued in “Principles of Political Economy” (1848), society needs ‘experiments in living’ – new forms of working and living together – to guard against ‘the weight of Custom bearing down upon human capacity for improvement.’
In his recent books, New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society (2017), No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain (2021), and Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory (2025), writer and social historian Ken Worpole explores the post-war history of such experiments in living and working together, now commonly called elective or ‘intentional’ communities.
In this talk, Ken highlighted four remarkable case studies he knows well – one environmental, one pacifist, one religious in origin but open to all, and one a newly opened experiment in social care – and discussed what we might learn from them as we face the environmental and social upheavals of tomorrow.
Tuesday April 1st 2025
Open Projects Night
We held our bi-monthly open mike night, where we learned about each others projects, built connections and offered each other support.
Open Projects is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
Thursday March 27th 2025
Ecological Medicine: Healing the People, Healing the Planet with Jenny Goodman
In this talk, followed by discussion, Jenny Goodman, qualified medical doctor and author of “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times”, set out a vision for a new way to heal ourselves and the planet.
Ecological Medicine looks for the root causes of illness, especially the causes of our current waves of chronic, degenerative diseases; our epidemics of dementia, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative and autoimmune disease, all of which were rare or unknown before the industrial revolution – and all of which are preventable.
Crucially, ecological medicine sees the human being as an intrinsic part of the wider ecosystem which is Planet Earth; we cannot heal the one in isolation from the other.
Reclaiming control over our own health is a profoundly political act.
Tuesday March 25th 2025
This Is an Act of Care with Tim Jackson
Care is the foundation of organic life. But its fate in society is precarious and uncertain. Care work is arduous and underpaid. Yet without it, health and vitality are impossible. Care itself ends up leading a curious dual life. In our hearts it’s honoured as an irreducible good. But in the market it’s treated as a second class citizen – barely recognised in the relentless rush for productivity and wealth. How did we arrive at this dysfunctional place? And what can we do to change things?
In this talk, Tim Jackson, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Surrey and author of The Care Economy asked what it would take to position care as a central organising principle in economic life.
He journeyed through the history of medicine, the economics of capitalism and the philosophical underpinnings of health. He explored the gender politics of care, revisited the birthplace of a universal dream and confronted the demons that prevent us from realising it.
He also described some of the struggles he encountered in writing The Care Economy, his manifesto for a healthier and more humane society, and asked what it would mean to take health seriously as a societal goal.
Tuesday March 18th 2025
Reviving the Blue Commons: A Plan to Repair Our Ocean
As part of our year-long series on the Commons, we came together to co-create a vision for the Ocean Commons and explore how we might bring it about.
The ocean is under attack. For decades it has been exploited for the benefit of the few – coastal communities are struggling to survive, fish populations are plummeting and the ocean is awash with pollutants. The demands we are placing on the ocean are increasing year on year. This “Blue Acceleration” is leading us towards disaster. But another ocean is possible.
In this participatory event, featuring a series of short presentations from oceans experts followed by small group discussion, we explored how to reinstate the ocean as a Commons. Economist Guy Standing outlined the necessary laws and governing mechanisms needed to revive the Blue Commons. Political theorist Chris Armstrong advocated for Blue Justice: The ocean is a more-than-human space, so whose Commons is it? Social movement scholar Antje Scharenberg explored Blue Activism, asking what kind of ocean democracy we can hope for. And Tobias Troll from NGO Seas at Risk explained the concept of the Blue Doughnut: How can we care for the ocean and look after ourselves?
Collectively, we then discussed a set of demands to be included in the Charter of the Commons being developed at Kairos over the course of the year, and which could initially be presented at the UN Oceans Conference 2025 taking place in June.
No previous knowledge was required – either of the Commons generally or ocean issues specifically. All were welcome to contribute or just come to listen.
Thursday March 13th 2025
We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For with Adam Greenfield
How can we hold our own against the Long Emergency?
We have together entered an epoch in which not merely the raw fact of climate-system collapse, but the second- and third-order consequences of that unfolding, threaten to undo the infrastructural, economic, political, social and even psychological systems that undergird everyday experience: a Long Emergency with radically uncertain prospects for the sustainment of any life we recognise, and no clear end in sight.
In this talk, based on his 2024 book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World On Fire, Adam Greenfield explored ways in which we might organise ourselves to not merely survive this Long Emergency, but to do so in ways that uphold our fundamental commitments to dignity and justice.
He drew on lessons learned from a number of communities that have faced down existentially hard times before, from the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers in the 1970s to the self-organised Occupy Sandy mutual-aid initiative, the solidarity networks of Crisis-era Greece and the large-scale, non-state society of Rojava.
He described how participants in all of these efforts experienced an expanded sense of possibility, purpose, and their own power; explored the reciprocal relationship between that power and the provision of mutual care; and finally weaved these threads together in the book’s culminating proposition: that we establish a network of the neighbourhood-based, self-organised and self-sustaining relief and recovery hubs called Lifehouses.
Tuesday March 11th 2025
Screening of “My Octopus Teacher” with Bel Jacobs
My Octopus Teacher (2020, 1hr, 25mins) tells the story of filmmaker Craig Foster who, over the course of a year, gets to know a female octopus in the waters off South Africa while working through his emotional crisis. The film, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, won multiple awards, including an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
After the screening and a break for supper, we talked about the relationship at the heart of the film and how we all might begin to reconnect with the rest our more-than-human kin. Bel Jacobs, founder of the Empathy Project, loosely guided the discussion.
Wednesday March 5th 2025
Britain’s Common Land: Past, Present & Future with Helen Baczkowska
Britain’s common lands have long been contested. Historic enclosures of Commons changed the very fabric of Britain’s society and ecology and cast a still lingering shadow over rural England.
The Commons that remain today are often misunderstood, with their legal protections and ownership hard to grasp. Helen will de-mystify these complex issues and look at how common land remains at the very heart of debates over grazing in the uplands, and of the management of flood waters, re-wilding and peatlands.
In this talk followed by discussion, writer, ecologist and environmental activist Helen Baczkowska explored what common land is in the 21st century and how crucial it is for nature conservation and public access, as well as what conversations about its governance, both past and present, can teach us about the Commons of the future.
Thursday February 27th 2025
Revisiting Radical Ideas Past: An Evening of Shared Readings
We held an evening of shared readings from the works of visionary past thinkers. We asked, which radical ideas from the past should we revisit to help us understand and respond to this current moment? All were invited to propose a short reading or just come along to listen.
Figures we had in mind included William Blake, Ivan Illich, Donella Meadows, Alfred North Whitehead, bell hooks, Raymond Williams, John Berger, Fritjof Capra and Agnes Heller, among others. What we heard were readings from Doreen Massey, Peter Kropotkin, William Godwin and Dorothy Smith.
If you were unable to attend but have suggestions for other past thinkers we’d love to hear from you via events@kairos.london. Do let us know if there are any written works in particular you think we should include in our library collection.
Thursday February 20th 2025
Learning from Conservative Media: How to Counter Anti-Climate Messaging with Geoff Dembicki
Why are anti-climate messages resonating at a time when extreme weather disasters are escalating and solutions to the crisis have never been stronger? What can people who care deeply about a liveable planet do to counter their influence?
Canadian investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki drew on his years of reporting on conservative media to reveal how fossil fuel companies and their political allies are successfully spreading skepticism about climate solutions by linking those solutions to issues including abortion, free speech, diversity initiatives and high housing costs.
He shared insights from growing up in working-class resource towns to explain how communities on the front-lines of oil and gas extraction are more open to transformative climate action than it might initially appear. The talk, which was followed by plenty of time for discussion, covered questions of social status and narrative that go to the heart of how we understand and communicate the climate crisis.
Tuesday February 18th 2025
Bioregions & the Commons: Becoming Citizens of Place in a Changing World with Isabel Carlisle
Bioregions, and bioregioning, are seeing a worldwide renaissance that offers a viable response to the polycrisis. How could this very old model of human organising become a template for the future?
Bioregion literally means ‘life region’ and from the earliest times our species has aligned itself with nature’s life-support systems of food, water, energy, shelter, plant medicines and materials for making, such as wood and stone. The agricultural revolution of the Neolithic, and more recently the industrial revolution, set up a metabolic rift between those life systems and human societies. We’re experiencing the consequences of that today.
Isabel Carlisle, co-founder of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in South Devon, explored how bioregional organising could help build regional resilience and reinvent the idea of being a citizen of place. In the same way that there would be no commons without commoning, ‘bioregioning’ is a relational practice that animates a region and addresses the impacts of geo-systemic change on natural and human-made systems. More than that, it’s about meeting the deep human need of belonging to place.
The rise in interest in the global and local commons and the fraying of our social, economic and governance structures are all putting air beneath the wings of the bioregional movement. Isabel described the establishment of bioregioning in places as far apart as Costa Rica, the Arctic and Cascadia in Western North America. She detailed the work of the BLC to create the infrastructure needed to establish bioregioning in South Devon (including the creation of a devolved citizen council, bioregional financing and other projects). She argued that bioregions and bioregioning could help us gain the agency we need to start shaping our future.
Wednesday February 12th 2025
Book Club: “The Commune Form” by Kristin Ross
We discussed “The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life” by radical historian Kristin Ross: An examination of the global resurgence of the commune and how they can become sites of liberation.
(Publishers description): When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land – from the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre – have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past.
Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatisation, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.
Tuesday February 4th 2025
Open Projects Night
We held our regular Open Projects Night, where we learned about each others projects, built connections and offered each other support.
We heard presentations from: Mark Mullen on “Rorshok“, Alicia Pivaro on “Anarchy in the Arctic”, Margret Mulowska on “The DARES Collective”; Janos Able on “Teams of Twelve” a plan to create an army of activist readers, Anna Boyle on “The Great Imagining” and Noah Martin with an update on “College of Modern Anxiety”.
Open Projects Night takes place on the first Tuesday of every other month. It’s for anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
Tuesday January 28th 2025
Screening of “All That Breathes”
“Every minute of this Oscar-nominated documentary is gold dust” – The Guardian
In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital.
In “All That Breathes” (2022, 1h 37m) director, director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerising chronicle of inter-species coexistence.
Thursday January 23rd 2025
Kairos Deep Conversations: What Does it Mean to Live a Good Life? with Georgie Nightingall
We held an evening of guided, small-group conversations exploring what it means to live a good life.
For our first Kairos Deep Conversations, co-hosted with Georgie Nightingall, we delved into how we define a good life in an era of ecological uncertainty and social transformation. Together, we reflected on the balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility, the role of spirituality, the wisdom of ancient and new economic systems, and how we can rekindle our connection to nature, community, and meaning. We followed a Deep Conversation Menu packed with carefully designed reflective questions, connecting personal storytelling with big ideas
Georgie, founder of the Trigger Conversations, is on a mission to intentionally design a more human world through the lost art of human conversation. . This was an invitation to think deeply, share openly and spark meaningful change.
Thursday January 16th 2025
Reviving the Commons: A Unifying Vision for Our Shared Common Wealth with Guy Standing
Could the revival of “the Commons” provide the basis for a new progressive political agenda? What would a radically new form of governance look like that was based on equitable, ecologically-sustainable shared common wealth, and how could we start moving towards it?
Throughout 2025, Kairos will be holding a series of discussions focused on the Commons. To launch the series, economist Guy Standing set out a framework for a Commons perspective. Focusing on education, he explained what a Commons entails, countered some misconceptions (such as the flawed thinking behind the “tragedy of the commons”) and explored the governance principles required to preserve or revive our Commons.
Wednesday January 8th 2025
Book Club: “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith – a 34-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists led by the charismatic svengali Bruno Lacombe.
Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno’s idealism laughable – he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But while Sadie is certain that her significant talents are leading her towards a successful resolution, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments and his own tragic story.
Creation Lake was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The judges said: “It’s quite something to wrap a thought-provoking novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. This is a political novel on many levels: it includes radical leftists, utopianists, a reclusive guru obsessed with neanderthals, the shadowy forces of ruthless capitalism. Through it all Kushner examines how the individual interacts with, and disrupts, ideologies. That could sound dry – but her prose is so juicy, her narrator so jaunty, her worldbuilding so lush, that it’s anything but.”
Book Club meets on the second Wednesday of every month.
Friday January 3rd 2025
Kairos Club Drinks: New Years Special
We held our first drinks evening of 2025, a New Year’s special. Kairos will now be open for Club Drinks every Friday.
