Saving the World From Bad Ideas

In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas speaks with Anni Pokela of Operaatio Arktis about why “Hands off Mother Earth” is no longer a serious response to the climate crisis. The conversation explores how humans are already deeply entangled with planetary systems, whether through emissions, land use, or atmospheric pollution, and why the real question is no longer whether we intervene, but how we do so responsibly. From Arctic tipping points and AMOC collapse risks to solar radiation management, social license, indigenous engagement, and the politics of research, this is a probing discussion about climate intervention in a world where inaction is itself a form of intervention.

🧠 Topics Discussed
🧊 Why Arctic tipping points pushed former climate activists to rethink the limits of conventional climate politics
🌍 Why the term “geoengineering” may be misleading if humans have already been reshaping the planet for centuries
🌊 Why the weakening AMOC has become a major concern in Finland and across the Nordic region
☀️ How solar radiation management, especially stratospheric aerosol injection, entered the climate debate
☁️ What marine cloud brightening is, and why it is being explored in places like Australia
⚖️ Why climate intervention has to be understood through risk comparison, not moral purity
🗳️ Why shutting down research is undemocratic, especially for countries on the front lines of climate impacts
🚨 How the “dangerous distraction” argument can end up policing climate discourse instead of opening it
🧪 Why more public, transparent, internationally shared research matters before private actors shape the field
🧭 What Scopex revealed about indigenous consent, scientific arrogance, and the need for better governance
🤝 Why Anni argues that these technologies should be approached through entanglement, responsibility, and democratic legitimacy rather than technological denial
🌐 Why the biggest risks may lie less in the particles themselves than in geopolitics, power, and unequal decision-making
📚 Why this whole field needs more input from humanities, philosophy, sociology, and justice-oriented perspectives, not just climate modeling
👩‍🏫 Guest Bio
Anni Pokela is part of Operaatio Arktis, a Finnish climate strategy and communications organization founded by former Extinction Rebellion Finland activists. The group works with researchers and institutions to support responsible, ethically sustainable climate intervention research, with a particular focus on Arctic risks, tipping points, justice, and democratic governance.

📚 Recommended Reading & Resources
Operaatio Arktis
Research on AMOC weakening and Arctic tipping points
Work on solar radiation management and marine cloud brightening
Discussions around Scopex, social license, and indigenous consent
Research on climate intervention governance, justice, and public legitimacy

💬 Quote Highlights
💬 “The question then ceases to be whether we should intervene or not. The question then becomes how do we do it?”
Anni Pokela

💬 “How are we responsibly in that relationship and in that entanglement with the planet?”
Anni Pokela

💬 “Shutting down public research around this topic... it’s madness.”
Anni Pokela

💬 “It only sort of benefits the people who want to do this in the shadows.”
Anni Pokela

💬 “Things. You know, when we... have the blue dot that we can save... the question then kind of ceases to be whether we should intervene or not.”
Anni Pokela

🌐 About WePlanet
WePlanet is an international movement campaigning for science-based solutions to the climate, nature and development crises. Through conversations like this one, we challenge bad ideas, spotlight better ones, and make the case for a more abundant, resilient and hopeful future.

📥 Join the Conversation
💬 podcast@weplanet.org 
📩 https://weplanet.org/podcast
👁️ https://twitter.com/weplanetint

In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas speaks with global ecologist Tom Crowther about a seductive but dangerous assumption: just leave it to the market. While part of the conversation focuses directly on capitalism, inequality, poverty, and wealth redistribution, the discussion is much broader than economics alone. Drawing on Tom’s new book Nature’s Echo, they explore how feedback loops shape everything from the birth of stars to the spread of ideas, the dynamics of ecosystems, the structure of societies, and the possibility of ecological recovery. The central argument is that markets can generate growth, innovation, and momentum, but without balancing forces they also drive instability, degradation, and collapse. It is a wide-ranging conversation about regeneration, resilience, scientific thinking, and how human systems might better mirror the stabilising logic of the natural world.
🧠 Topics Discussed
🔁 Why feedback loops are one of the most useful ways to understand nature and society
🌌 How the same looping dynamics help explain the formation of stars, life, and ecosystems
😱 Why climate doomism can become self-fulfilling if it closes off regenerative possibilities
⚡ Why renewables and electrification may now be driven by powerful self-reinforcing momentum
📉 Why no exponential growth system lasts forever, and why overshoot matters
🌱 How regenerative feedback loops can build when livelihoods improve alongside nature
🚜 Why Tom distinguishes regenerative livelihoods from simplistic anti-industrial romanticism
🌾 How nature loss can eventually reduce agricultural yields, even in intensive systems
🥩 Why plant-based proteins and nuclear energy could radically reduce ecological pressure
💸 Why poverty is one of the strongest drivers of environmental degradation
🧾 How wealth redistribution can act as a stabilising feedback in both society and ecology
🌳 What the trillion trees controversy got wrong about restoration
🗺️ How the Restore platform helps land stewards, funders, and the public support regeneration on the ground
🧪 Why science needs both rigour and humility, especially when defining the world in fixed categories
🧠 How constructivist thinking, belief, and consensus shape the way societies understand reality
👩‍🏫 Guest Bio
Dr Tom Crowther is a global ecologist working across multiple universities, with his foundation based in Switzerland. His research spans biodiversity, forests, restoration, agriculture, and the feedback loops that shape planetary systems. He is also the author of Nature’s Echo: Harnessing Ancient Feedback Loops to Heal a Changing Planet, which is now available.
📚 Recommended Reading & Resources
Nature’s Echo: Harnessing Ancient Feedback Loops to Heal a Changing Planet by Tom Crowther
The Restore platform
Research on ecological restoration, regenerative livelihoods, and nature recovery
Work on feedback loops in climate, biodiversity, and social systems
Writing and debate on trillion trees, reforestation, and restoration policy
💬 Quote Highlights
💬 “For me, the bad idea is that we’re doomed to a bleak future.”
Tom Crowther
💬 “There’s unbelievable potential for regenerative loops to build momentum as well.”
Tom Crowther
💬 “I am trying to think like a natural system.”
Tom Crowther
💬 “I think our economic system needs to perfectly mirror that.”
Tom Crowther
💬 “Poverty is the biggest driver of degradation.”
Tom Crowther
💬 “When they are lifted out of poverty, that is when nature thrives and they start to thrive more, which makes nature thrive more.”
Tom Crowther
🌐 About WePlanet
WePlanet is an international movement campaigning for science-based solutions to the climate, nature and development crises. Through conversations like this one, we challenge bad ideas, spotlight better ones, and make the case for a more abundant, resilient and hopeful future.
📥 Join the Conversation
💬 podcast@weplanet.org
📩 https://weplanet.org/podcast
👁️ https://twitter.com/weplanetint

In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas speaks with science writer Rowan Hooper about one of the deepest misconceptions in biology: that life is only about competition. Drawing on Hooper’s new book Togetherness, they explore how symbiosis and cooperation run through life at every scale, from lichens and corals to ants, orchids, the human microbiome, and even the origin of complex cells. The conversation also revisits Darwin, Malthus, ecology, overconsumption, and the ways modern society has been shaped by an overly narrow reading of evolution. It is a wide-ranging discussion about why life’s greatest successes often come not from ruthless struggle alone, but from collaboration, interdependence, and living together.

🧠 Topics Discussed
🧬 Why cooperation and symbiosis have been neglected in biology for so long
🍄 How lichens show that radically different life forms can combine into one successful organism
🪸 Why coral reefs depend on symbiosis between animals and algae
🔋 How mitochondria and chloroplasts reveal that complex cells were built through endosymbiosis
🦠 Why humans are ecosystems, not just individuals, thanks to the microbiome
🧠 How symbiotic microbes influence digestion, mood, sleep, and immunity
📚 Whether modern understandings of symbiosis challenge Darwin, or deepen him
⚔️ How Darwin strategically emphasized competition to make his theory acceptable
📈 Why Malthusian thinking shaped both Darwinism and modern ideas of scarcity
🌾 How artificial fertilizer helped humanity escape Malthus, while creating new ecological damage
🐜 How leaf-cutter ants became extraordinary farmers through fungal symbiosis
🌸 Why orchids cannot even germinate without fungal partners
🌍 How ecological stress and climate change are breaking down vital symbiotic relationships
🧪 Why technologies such as genetic engineering may help restore ecological function
🌱 What it means to live more ecologically on a crowded planet
👩‍🏫 Guest Bio
Dr Rowan Hooper is a science writer and author whose work explores biology, evolution, ecology, and what science can tell us about the human place in nature. In this episode he discusses his new book, Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations. The book is published on June 4 in the UK, and on August 14 in the US and Canada.
📚 Recommended Reading & Resources
Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations by Rowan Hooper
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
Work on Lynn Margulis and endosymbiosis
Research on the human microbiome
Writing on ecology, soil health, plant-fungal symbiosis, and coral bleaching
💬 Quote Highlights
💬 “The emphasis ever since Darwin has been on competition. And while that is correct in many ways, it’s led to a terrible neglect of cooperation and symbiosis.”
Rowan Hooper
💬 “That’s done real damage to the way we live in the world.”
Rowan Hooper
💬 “I am an ecosystem, mobile ecosystem.”
Rowan Hooper
💬 “Darwin was actually... a very cunning plan basically. He did it deliberately in order for his book to be accepted.”
Rowan Hooper
💬 “Orchids are super successful and the whole root of their success is through symbiosis.”
Rowan Hooper
💬 “From the origin of life to now and then into the future. We need it.”
Rowan Hooper
🌐 About WePlanet
WePlanet is an international movement campaigning for science-based solutions to the climate, nature and development crises. Through conversations like this one, we challenge bad ideas, spotlight better ones, and make the case for a more abundant, resilient and hopeful future.
📥 Join the Conversation
💬 podcast@weplanet.org
📩 https://weplanet.org/podcast
👁️ https://twitter.com/weplanetint

In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas speaks with journalist and author Nicholas Niarchos about the dirty, dangerous, and politically fraught supply chains behind lithium-ion batteries. Using cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a central case study, they explore how a technology essential to electrification and decarbonisation became tied to child labour, unsafe artisanal mines, corruption, colonial legacies, and weak global accountability. The conversation pushes back against a simplistic response, namely shutting down cobalt mining altogether. Niarchos argues that cobalt is a highly effective battery material and that the real problem is not the mineral itself, but the governance failures and moral outsourcing that allow abuse to persist across global supply chains.
🧠 Topics Discussed
🔋 Why lithium-ion batteries became central to the clean energy transition
⚙️ Which minerals go into modern batteries, including cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, graphite, and phosphates
🏭 How Exxon helped pioneer lithium-ion battery research before abandoning it
🚗 Why lithium-ion batteries made modern electric vehicles viable
⛏️ Why cobalt from the DRC became so important to battery chemistry
👷 The realities of artisanal mining, including child labour, mine collapses, and extreme precarity
📱 How major brands such as Apple are tied to these supply chains, even when they claim high standards
⚖️ Why industrial mines and artisanal mines differ, but both still raise serious questions
♻️ Why recycling alone does not solve the underlying justice problem
🧪 Whether sodium-ion and other new battery chemistries will reduce dependence on cobalt
🌍 Why the goal should be fixing the supply chain, not abandoning battery technology or Congo itself
👩‍🏫 Guest Bio
Nicholas Niarchos is a journalist and author whose work focuses on conflict, extraction, inequality, and global supply chains. In this conversation he discusses his book on the hidden human and political costs behind lithium-ion batteries and the minerals that power the energy transition, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
📚 Recommended Reading & Resources
The Elements of Power by Nicholas Niarchos
Reporting on cobalt mining and battery supply chains in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Research on artisanal and industrial cobalt mining
Work on battery chemistry, electrification, and critical minerals
Analysis of colonial extraction, governance, and resource politics in Central Africa
💬 Quote Highlights
💬 “The bad idea is the battery supply chain itself, which arose from a series of decisions that didn’t seem to be taken particularly consciously, but seem to be driven by avarice, essentially.” - Nicholas Niarchos
💬 “I have been to mines that sit directly in Apple’s supply chain and watched as people without shoes go into these mines.” - Nicholas Niarchos
💬 “The iPhone is the great success story for Apple. Don’t forget it. This success was built on the backs of these kinds of labor conditions. - Nicholas Niarchos
💬 “If we start recycling all our material, which we’re admittedly a very, very long way off from, what gets left in Congo? - Nicholas Niarchos
💬 “There’s no need to go to sodium. There’s no need to try and figure out new technologies... because we have the technology. The technology is the lithium ion battery.” - Nicholas Niarchos
💬 “The bad idea is the supply chain, not the use of cobalt in batteries.” - Mark Lynas
🌐 About WePlanet
WePlanet is an international movement campaigning for science-based solutions to the climate, nature and development crises. Through conversations like this one, we challenge bad ideas, spotlight better ones, and make the case for a more abundant, resilient and hopeful future.
📥 Join the Conversation
💬 podcast@weplanet.org
📩 https://weplanet.org/podcast
👁️ https://twitter.com/weplanetint

In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas speaks with Stanford historian David Holloway about one of the most dangerous assumptions of the nuclear age: history shows nuclear war will never happen. Drawing on Holloway’s new book Nuclear Weapons and International History, they trace the development of the bomb from the Manhattan Project to the thermonuclear age, the Cuban Missile Crisis, launch-on-warning doctrines, arms control, and the unraveling of the post-Cold War nuclear order. The conversation makes clear that the fact nuclear war has not happened yet is no guarantee it never will. Instead, it is a story of repeated near misses, fragile restraint, and a continuing risk that humanity has learned to treat as background noise.

🧠 Topics Discussed
☢️ Why David Holloway wanted to write an international history of nuclear weapons
💥 The difference between atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs
🔥 Why thermonuclear weapons transformed the scale of human destructiveness
🧊 How the Cold War became a confrontation shaped by catastrophic nuclear risk
🚨 How close the Cuban Missile Crisis came to becoming a nuclear war
🛳️ The Soviet submarine incident on Black Saturday and the role of sheer luck
☎️ Why the hotline and early arms control efforts emerged after Cuba
🕊️ How scientists helped launch the anti-nuclear movement
🎯 How deterrence, mutual assured destruction, and launch-on-warning doctrines evolved
⚠️ Why false alarms and misread signals remain one of the greatest nuclear dangers
🤖 How artificial intelligence and new technologies may make nuclear risk worse
🛰️ Why missile defense systems like Star Wars and the proposed Golden Dome are so controversial
📉 How the arms control system built during the Cold War has eroded
🌍 Why a world with fewer nuclear weapons is still a world in grave danger
❓ Whether humanity can find an alternative to living indefinitely with nuclear arsenals

👩‍🏫 Guest Bio
David Holloway is Emeritus Professor of History at Stanford University and one of the world’s leading historians of nuclear weapons and the Cold War. His work has focused on the Soviet Union, international security, nuclear strategy, and the political history of the atomic age. His new book, Nuclear Weapons and International History, offers a sweeping account of how nuclear weapons shaped global politics from 1945 onward.

📚 Recommended Reading & Resources
Nuclear Weapons and International History by David Holloway
Six Minutes to Winter by Mark Lynas
Research and historical accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Writing on the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the Pugwash movement
Histories of nuclear deterrence, arms control, and the thermonuclear arms race

💬 Quote Highlights
💬 “I think we’re entering a new and very dangerous period, partly linked to changes in the world order.” - David Holloway
💬 “The H-bomb is a big step forward in terms of sheer destructiveness.” - David Holloway
💬 “It was a war they didn’t want that they came close to having.” - David Holloway
💬 “We’re entering a new and very dangerous period.” -David Holloway
💬 “We can live with nuclear weapons... I think it’s a very bad idea.” -David Holloway

🌐 About WePlanet
WePlanet is an international movement campaigning for science-based solutions to the climate, nature and development crises. Through conversations like this one, we challenge bad ideas, spotlight better ones, and make the case for a more abundant, resilient and hopeful future.

📥 Join the Conversation
💬 podcast@weplanet.org
📩 https://weplanet.org/podcast
👁️ https://twitter.com/weplanetint