What can the living system of a river teach us? Introducing the Reboot Forum, and a new season of the podcast

By Sandy Glanfield

On the 24th of September, a group of us will gather on the banks of the River Arun in West Sussex. Business leaders, educators, policymakers, artists, landowners, activists and young people, all with different backgrounds and different reasons for being there, will spend a day with one question: what can the living system of a river teach us?

It's the first Reboot Forum we've run, and it feels like exactly the right moment for it.

We're calling it a forum rather than a conference because that's closer to what it actually is. There's no stage, no keynote. Just a day spent on a farm, in the company of people who care, asking what a river can show us about being alive together on a changing planet.

To mark it, we're doing something different with the podcast too. For the next six weeks, Let's Reboot the Future will run a river season. Same rhythm, same 15 minutes, same questions we always ask. But the guests will be people connected to the Forum who work with rivers, waterways and the health of the systems that carry life through all of us. Our usual pink flame will turn blue for the season, just to mark that we're somewhere a little different for a while.

I've been reading Sarah Wilson's I Eat the Stars, and something in it has stuck with me while we've been planning all this. She writes about collapse, and how none of us really knows what it will look like or how it will happen. . But she's clear about what will help: staying open to ideas that are already out there and haven’t been picked up and run with in the cause to save our planet, like doughnut economics, degrowth, regenerative economics, the kind of life economy values we talk about here. And alongside that, she says, we need to slow down and learn from & with each other. Build community, a living library of ideas to borrow and grow from.

That's what our day on the farm is, really. Gathering different skills and different ways of seeing, slowed right down, learning from the living system of the river flowing through it and from each other. Gathering the kind of ideas and connections we'll need to draw on as things keep changing, so that when we're asked to respond, we're not doing it alone or from scratch.

It comes back, in the end, to a question we ask a lot on this podcast: what does it mean to treat others, and the planet, as we would wish to be treated? A river doesn't ask to be understood on human terms. It just keeps moving, keeps giving, keeps connecting one bank to the other, one place to the next. Maybe that's the starting point. If we want a thriving relationship with the natural world, we might begin by extending it the same care we'd hope for ourselves.

We'll be sharing what we hear from the Forum, and from six weeks of river conversations, right here. Come wade in with us.