What we've been learning from: December 2025

Here's our regular round-up of some of the most interesting and thought-provoking things our team have been reading, watching and listening to over the past month.

1. Over a pint in Oxford, we may have stumbled upon the holy grail of agriculture

Friend of Opus George Monbiot has written a fascinating article for The Guardian about the Earth Rover Project, a new initiative he’s been involved with that uses seismology techniques to analyse soil health. “Eventually, we hope, any farmer anywhere, rich or poor, will be able to get an almost instant readout from their soil,” he writes. “As more people use the tools, building the global database, we hope these readouts will translate into immediate useful advice.” He continues: “We’re not replacing the great work of other soil scientists but, developing our methods alongside theirs, we believe we can fill part of the massive knowledge gap. As one of the farmers we’re working with, Roddy Hall, remarks, the Earth Rover Program could “take the guesswork out of farming”. One day it might help everyone arrive at that happy point: high yields with low impacts. Seismology promises to shake things up."

2. Many-to-Many System

Beyond the Rules, a project that “practices organising and governance for an economy designed for life”, have published a new field guide to what they call Many-to-Many Governance, with input from Opus’s own James Lock. “Solving today’s complex, interconnected problems requires what we term “complex collaborations” - bringing together many diverse groups (public, private, civic) with many new perspectives, including future generations and the natural world,” write the guide’s authors. “While many collaborations are already doing great work, we believe that finding better ways to support how they are structured and organised them could unlock more effective, system-level change. The Many-to-Many System is focused on unlocking the governance, organising, legal, and learning structures of complex collaborations to enable many resources, not just money, but also knowledge and relationships to flow more freely, and to foster many ways of working that embrace diverse value exchange."

3. Socialism Against the State

Writing for Tribune magazine, 2024 Festival of Debate guest Grace Blakeley argues that we urgently need to build “wider structures of social power” to sustain any possible government committed to a thriving future for people and planet. “This means strengthening trade unions and collective bargaining, expanding public ownership and democratic control over key industries, and building institutions of participatory democracy at every level,” she writes. “It means ensuring that policies – from industrial strategy to climate transition – are designed to foster worker and community control rather than reproduce the autocratic structure of capital. In short, it means using the state to build the movement that will sustain socialism.” If you’re interested in participatory democracy in Sheffield, we’d highly recommend checking out the work of our friends Cooperation Sheffield.

4. Outgrowing Modernity

Here at Opus we’re getting stuck into Outgrowing Modernity, the new book by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and the sequel to Hospicing Modernity. “Climate collapse, social crisis, the decline of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, and our full-faced denial have ushered in an urgent new era,” write the book’s publishers. “Hospicing Modernity asked us to grow up, step up, and show up for our communities and the living Earth. Outgrowing Modernity helps us make sense of where we’re going – and deepen what’s possible – in a time of endings. Vanessa Machado De Oliveira helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration. She explores the impacts of colonialism as neurocolonization: an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine, and adapt. These impacts are wide-ranging and run deep: they cut us off from our natural ways of building community and seeking pleasure. They choke our ability to cope with trauma and embrace complexity. And they trap us in a state of artificial comfort and denial that keeps us from collectively growing up – even when our existence demands it."

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