Why Beauty Matters in the Climate Crisis
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At a moment when the world feels noisier, faster, and more demanding than ever, what role can beauty play in helping us slow down, reconnect, and remember what matters?
As the year draws to a close, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson step back from targets, timelines and political headwinds to explore how craft, design and the quiet appreciation for our objects and spaces can shape both the worlds we live in, and the futures we are trying to build.
Tom is joined in Bath by designer and artist Patrick Williams, founder of the design studio and workshop Berdoulat, whose work is rooted in traditional craft, natural materials and a deep sensitivity to place. Together they reflect on what happens when efficiency crowds out care, when buildings and objects lose their connection to human bodies and natural rhythms, and why the climate crisis may also be a crisis of beauty.
As we reflect on a challenging year for climate action, we also offer an invitation for the days ahead: to slow down, to notice what restores us, and to remember that meaningful change is sustained not just by effort, but by care, beauty and joy.
Learn more:
📖 Find out more about Patrick’s upcoming book release, The House Rules
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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivakarnak. |
| 0:05.3 | I'm Christiana Fierrez. And I'm Paul Dickinson. Today we bring you a special episode on what the role of beauty, craft and paying attention is in our modern world. Thanks for being here. |
| 0:16.4 | Okay, friends, so this is coming out on the 24th of December. So that is a period of the year where people |
| 0:22.1 | sometimes take some time off. So this episode is going to be less about what outrage and optimism |
| 0:26.6 | is sometimes about, which is the problems of the world, the targets, the challenges, how we're trying |
| 0:31.7 | to deal with them. And it's going to be a bit more reflective and give everybody an opportunity to |
| 0:37.1 | step back a bit, think about the world |
| 0:38.8 | we're in and the world we've created. We're recording this on the 16th of December, so about |
| 0:43.8 | eight days before you're hearing it, which is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, |
| 0:49.0 | which I don't think is any way that either of you thought I was going to start. I'm sitting here |
| 0:52.9 | in Bath, England, which is where she wrote many of her books. And actually, that's not a bad beginning for a sort of |
| 0:58.9 | an episode that tries to cut a middle line between remembering the pace of a world that maybe has |
| 1:05.3 | passed away as we try and create a world that takes the best of that and the one we have today to move us |
| 1:11.7 | into the future. So we'll get into all those things, but would you both like to say to start us off? |
| 1:16.2 | Well, I would like to say, Tom, kudos to you for this interview that listeners are going to really |
| 1:23.1 | enjoy after we get out of their way. |
| 1:28.3 | No chance of that. |
| 1:29.3 | After we stop to say. |
| 1:30.3 | After we stop, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 1:32.3 | Because it is certainly a time of the year |
| 1:36.3 | to turn our attention to beauty and one would hope that it's not only now. |
| 1:41.3 | Because beauty, awe, wonder, all of that family of emotions are so important for us to |
... |
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