Let’s begin at the end.
During Indy Johar’s closing provocation at the 2025 Wisdom & Action Forum, in which he encouraged us to spend more time staring the complexity and severity of the metacrisis dead in the eye instead of averting our gaze to simpler tasks, my existential dread rang my existential doorbell. And I let it in.
I felt a little lightheaded, a little nauseous. A little like the challenges we’re facing were simply too much for my pea brain to make sense of. I thought about my children. I thought about the children they might one day have and what the world might look like for them. I felt the grief in my bones.
This was, of course, Indy’s intention. Not so much to trigger a wave of low-flying panic attacks in his audience, but to bring us back to the truth. The brutal reality of now. Like so many of us, I dedicate an unreasonable amount of time to specifically not thinking about the truth, preferring instead to focus on the things I can do, ideally today, with my time, skills and resources to make a meaningful contribution.
Over the course of an hour, Indy (who runs Dark Matter Labs out of the UK) and his fellow panelists – Small Giants’ co-founder Berry Liberman, Global Wellbeing and Economics expert Julia Kim, and Small Giants’ newly appointed Chief Sensemaking Officer Alexander Beiner – explored the ways in which we might make sense of these times and find our way through them, together. Berry explored a brand of active hope that’s driven by love, not anxiety. Alexander explored the idea of an informal nature-based ‘religion’. Julia played the violin. There was no definitive answer. How could there be?
The Wisdom & Action Forum is a conference, sure, but similar to other conferences only in name, not content. There are no keynotes from marketing gurus or advertising clairvoyants about the latest irrelevant fantasy. No back-slapping brands who 10xed their growth with this one simple hack. (There are tote bags, though). This is a space for delegates to grapple with our current social and environmental challenges and have real conversations about them.
Attended by 300 leaders and thinkers – politicians, CEOs, activists, advocates, investors and artists – from all over the world, the theme of this year’s three-day forum was ‘We Are Nature'. It was designed to connect us back to this universal truth. “This is not a conference where there is a hierarchy of knowledge,” said Small Giants’ co-founder Berry Liberman in her opening address. “Take what you learn, take what you know, and do as much wild stuff together as you can.”
In between keynotes and panels on the main stage, breakout groups converged on a vast range of themes from the intersection of business, nature, politics and impact. One group discussed green investments, impact funds and reimagining economic models to be in service to nature. Another explored global examples of natural entities – rivers, mountains, reefs, etc – being granted legal rights and protections, and how we might encourage more of that. Other spaces were filled with conversations about regenerative agriculture, applying Indigenous wisdom to modern challenges, rewilding with psychedelics, and reimagining our future cities with nature front-and-centre. I meditated with some horses.
At the end of day one, Berry was joined on the main stage (via video link) by financier and environmentalist Ben Goldsmith, who is helping to spearhead something of a rewilding revolution in the UK, one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth, and now one of the world’s-leading examples of rewilding gone right. I had close to zero knowledge of Ben’s work, story or context, so what transpired over the next 60 minutes caught me completely off guard. Ben delicately wove his own grief and loss – the worst kind of loss you could imagine – into a meditation on the power of nature to hold us, restore us and to help us find peace in times of crisis. I couldn’t take any notes during Ben’s appearance because I was – like everyone else in the room – crying my fucking eyes out.
Elsewhere, a discussion between Small Giants’ Tamsin Jones, Swedish environmentalist Pella Thiel, Climate 200’s Simon Holmes à Court and Greenpeace APAC CEO David Ritter explored the dynamics of power as it pertains to protecting nature, and the importance of pulling all the levers we have at our disposal in order to do so. “Knowledge and love alone are not enough,” said David, “because they will run into the bulldozers.” Simon, who is on a mission to get as many independents into parliament as humanly possible in the name of climate action, highlighted the importance of engaging with the political process – not disengaging out of apathy. “Individuals move thousands of dollars, philanthropy moves millions, governments move billions,” he said. “Politics should be the air that we breathe, not something to be feared or disgusted by.”
“When did we accept this level of destruction was OK?” asked Bush Heritage Australia CEO Rachel Lowry in another panel, after kindly reminding delegates that 19 of Australia’s ecosystems are currently in a state of collapse. Rachel then shared with us that her organisation now owns 1.4 millions hectares (and counting) of land in Australia and is hell-bent on protecting the living daylights out of it.
I can’t and won’t try and summarise the conversation between The Bateson Institute’s Nora Bateson and Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta. But know this: every single living this on this earth is deeply interconnected. Sex – or love magic – has a lot to do with all of it (especially philanthropy – ask Tyson). And we really need to let go of outcomes and KPIs and results, and focus instead on where the work leads us. “A flower isn’t trying to be a flower” was a line I heard somewhere during the forum that bears repeating.
I’d like to talk about shifting baselines but I can’t because it makes me too depressed. So instead I’ll talk about AI, which also makes me a bit depressed, but at least has a glimmer of potential upside in it. As you’d expect, the rampant emergence of AI was a common theme at the forum – none more so than in a brilliant panel titled ‘Can Technology Save the Planet?’ between AI expert Matt Kuperholz, localisation advocate Helena Nordberg Hodge, impact investor Lisa Miller and Alexander Beiner.
As Helena railed against AI as a tool to heal our wounds (“Slow down and be more human! We need resistance and renewal!”), I found myself both in deep agreement with the sentiment and deep resignation around our current AI trajectory. It’s true that AI is merely a tool, neither good nor bad nor neutral (as Matt pointed out), and it’s who wields it that determines its virtue. But AI tech is still overwhelmingly owned by for-profit enterprises, and we know full well how that schtick plays out. Consider also that we can’t even get a handle on the social media oligarchs or their algorithms, and the outlook is a little grim. “[AI] is pretty fucked but it’s also pretty amazing,” said Matt. “And the genie is not going back in the bottle.”
I then got to thinking about AI a little too hard and was swiftly sucked into an AI-specific doom loop, which went something like: if we are nature, then is AI not just an expression of our nature? And if AI is an expression of our nature, should we not refer to it as simply intelligence? AI didn’t get beamed down to us from some faraway planet – it is powered by, and the product of, our natural world, so is it not as organic as a dandelion? As miraculous as a seahorse? And is the same not true for all our other inventions (and intentions), good or bad or neutral? If we’ve decided that we’ve veered too far off our evolutionary path then where, exactly, did that happen? Was it the discovery of fossil fuels and the billions of gigatonnes of energy that we suddenly had access to? Was it before then, when we began to shift from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles and started practicing agriculture – bending the sacred rhythms of nature to suit our needs? Was it religion? The industrial revolution? Capitalism? Language? Consciousness? Was it the internet era – when we began outsourcing memory, attention, intimacy, knowledge and community to machines and nodes and computer chips and corporations? And then, if we are nature, can you call any of that a veering at all, or is it all still simply a continuation of our evolutionary path, for better or for worse? And if that is the case, then perhaps whatever happens next is simply the natural course of things, a flower not trying to be a flower. Ugh.
Despite all the heavy themes and existential dread, there was comfort here. Comfort that this kind of space can and does exist at a time like this (even if this particular space is currently reserved for a privileged few). Comfort in the fact there are millions and millions of people around the world working hard not only on solutions and interventions, but on developing the collective intellectual and emotional dexterity required to have more nuanced conversations about it all. Comfort in community.
The intellectual landscape of the Wisdom & Action Forum doesn’t really lend itself to pithy hot takes or 1000-word summaries. Did we solve it? No. Do I know what it is? Not really. Where is the edge of me? No idea. Are we nature? Yes. If at least that much is true, then one thing I do know is that nature will, in the long run, win out – she’ll just have to shrug off some species on the way. Whether or not we are victims of this cosmic shrug depends on how well we behave ourselves from here on out.
On the weekend after the forum, I made a point to get outdoors with my daughters. As I was sitting and watching them play, and swing from a deep love and affection for one another to a hardline intolerance for the other’s existence, I noticed a bird I had never seen before – a white-plumed honeyeater. It was small and beautiful, with a yellow face and little white stripe on its neck. I have been trying to pay more attention to the birds lately.
Wisdom & Action Forum 2026
Join us for our next Wisdom & Action Forum in 2026 as we explore: Equality & Democracy.
