Kunal Khanna: From compost king to film festival director

Kunal’s the Compost (and Kombucha) King of a permaculture farm in India; co-founder and director of All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (ALT-EFF), the largest decentralised film festival in the world; and a service designer tackling waste systems in Melbourne… and that’s not everything! Much like a screening of ALT-EFF, this chat left Fi and Luke inspired, energised and ready to take action, and we hope you feel the same way. We also promised a fact check for this episode. Kunal mentions an often-quoted statistic that to make a movement into a wide-spread transformation only requires 5% of the population to be on board: that a “critical mass” of people is much smaller than we think it is. We went looking for references, and we couldn’t find any studies that magical 5% backed up by research but here’s what we did find: Research on the impact of non-violent protests by Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D, found that only 3.5% of a population needs to take part in non-violent protest to create social change: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world And research on social tipping points by Damon Central, Ph.D, found that 25% of of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-behavior-spreads/201905/the-25-percent-tipping-point-social-change Finally, we also have a source for the idea we discussed, where people underestimate how much other people support climate action, compared to their own values, which makes being visible and vocal about wanting to see change in this area even more important: https://behavioralscientist.org/we-still-underestimate-others-support-for-climate-action/. Follow along at https://www.instagram.com/bettercircles.co/