It is my delight to share this conversation with Joel Glanzberg today on Sense-making in a Changing World.
Joel, based in New Mexico is a tracker, a regenerative design practitioner and permaculture teacher/builder/farmer/designer/thinker. He has been immersed in permaculture for over 30 years and loves what permaculture offers- particularly the way of seeing and being in the world from a pattern perspective, of bringing vitality and regeneration, and to cultivate a capacity to see the beauty of the world we are a part of – the beauty of life.
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
Joel first took a permaculture design course in 1986 and studied with Bill Mollison too.
Through many decades of deep connection with permaculture in many contexts – with First Nations communities, with education and design – Joel shares how his understanding and perception of permaculture has changed over the years and where he sees permaculture people offering their highest potential in the context of the world today.
Watch the conversation
Or, listen to the podcast on your favourite streaming service here.
Joel is a founding partner of the Regenesis Group – a collective of regenerative design practitioners rethinking development – exploring regenerative development – transforming the way humans inhabit the earth. You can watch an introduction to their work here.
Regenesis founded the Regenesis Institute and offer in-depth training around the world in regenerative thinking and practice through their The Regenerative Practitioner Series
Joel was one of the founders and designers of Flowering Tree Permaculture in the high altitude desert of New Mexico and demonstrates here how it is possible to green the desert, transform arid landscapes into food forests. You can watch a short film here about it – a 30-year-old example of how to reverse desertification, create conducive human habitats.
You can find Joel at Pattern Mind and as he invites during this podcast, he is open to being contacted and to offer mentoring over zoom wherever you are in the world.
Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking, the way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection.
What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration.
This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life.
We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
Morag Gamble:
Thank you so much for joining me on the show today Joel. It’s such a pleasure to actually have this chance to meet, talk. I’ve known of your work for a long time and the work that you do in permaculture and regenerative design. You’re the co-founder of, well, a founding partner of Regenesis. You’ve been working in permaculture for decades setting up something I understand called flowering tree permaculture and working in arid zones and you can find a lot of your work in pattern minds. It’s a lot of things that I wanted to explore with you about that particularly around permaculture. What is permaculture for you particularly around the permaculture mind. I think you’re writing a book about permaculture mind at the moment, too, I understand. Is that right?
Joel Glanzberg:
It’s Pattern Mind. So there’s this kind of three things I do. There’s the permaculture I’ve done for 30 years or more. And all this tracking traditional skills and all this regenerative thinking living systems thinking work and I realized I was bringing all of them into classes I was teaching. Whether it was a permaculture course or a tracking course and there was no name for it and so I realized that they are all looking at the pattern level of the world instead of all the stuff we see. So in tracking you don’t get stuck on the tracks you’re looking for what is the story it’s telling you that left the tracks. It’s a kind of non-material view of the world. It’s an energetic view of the world and that we’re so stuck in. Oh if there’s a it’d be different from you guys but if there was a wallaby track and you took a stick and you made it into a bigger kangaroo track it wouldn’t turn the wallaby into a kangaroo but that’s the way we treat the world. We think that we bring a bulldozer and change the hill doesn’t change the geological processes that we’re still engaged in, right? So we have this weird view that if we shift the physical manifestation, that is how we shift reality. But because we haven’t changed the energy flow, it’s going to go back to what it was previously. The hill is going to reform in similar ways it was before and the same thing politically, economically, socially, culturally, it’s really how do we change those underlying patterns that transform the physical world in a lasting way. And it’s so funny to me we’re stuck in this viral time and that’s how viruses work. It’s this tiny little information change that changes an underlying pattern and look at the transformations of the world and so that’s how I see permaculture. One of Bill’s insights, you know, I compared Dave Holmgren’s principles to Bill Mollison’s principles and Dave’s are excellent design principles and Bill’s [is] all about changing the way you see the world. The problem is the solution, right? At least change for the greatest effect. They’re all about how do we look at how do we observe all these things that are going on and find that little inoculation that flashes out through the system and transforms.
Morag Gamble:
So what you’re saying then really is that it’s not it’s not a big thing that necessarily needs to happen. It’s inoculation and it’s not a linear thing either the change doesn’t happen incrementally over time it can just change like that so what are those points of inoculation that you found or what is it.. how is it that you’ve noticed when people come in contact with permaculture with the programs that you run that shift is able to happen. How do you help to tend that?
Joel Glanzberg:
Hmm, that’s a great question. I want to back up for one second and address this linear thing because all the patterns we see in nature whether it’s that the rings on the surface of a pond or that logarithmic spiral in the seashell, the branching patterns, that the rate of change speeds up it goes faster and faster and faster and faster right and that we do not have the time and energy to fix all the ecosystems of the planet and all the soils and all the damaged human beings but we have the opportunity to harness that way that nature develops to transform and regenerate the living world and I think that’s why what you’re pointing at is so important is that it’s not so important that people in a course they learn “oh here’s the right way to build a swale” here’s but those are all tools to help people see the world in a different way. I never thought about “oh if we cut a ditch on contour we catch all that water and even if it rains you know this much annually here we could effectively have two meters worth of water in there if we wanted to” right. That for me it’s that change in the seeing that’s really important because then you can say “oh it’s the same with building soil fertility” it’s the same with building economic wealth, it’s the same with lifting people out of poverty in all these different ways instead of just seeing those patterns of little investment that transforms the pattern or even people’s capability that grows exponentially.
Morag Gamble:
So I wonder with the.. you’re talking about lifting people out of poverty and can you can you just kind of unpack that a little bit more. A lot of the work that I’m doing at the moment is working with people in refugee camps for example and with permaculture and helping in that frame shifting to a more sense of abundance is what I see happening potential. There seems to be new just endless possibilities starting to emerge out of that. I just would love to hear a little bit more about you speak about how you see permaculture mind or pattern mind helping to address social systems and particularly in areas where there’s poverty or maybe even political shifts. Something like there’s a lot of that going on in all part of the world at the moment and it’s a huge area and I wonder what permaculture from your perspective has to say about that you know that’s kind of like very different realms of thinking about social systems but you know they’re all connected.
Joel Glanzberg:
Yeah the first one.. I was just on a call with some students through Regenesis, this organization I helped to co-found some 27 years ago and the institute that we began just a couple years ago. We’ve been doing an educational program for six or eight years because people are interested in working with us learning from us all around the world and it didn’t make any sense to bring everybody together so we started an online program. Just eight or nine sessions, weekly or bi-weekly intensive and some coaching in between and it’s called the Regenerative Practitioner. So it’s people who are already practitioners to kind of pump up their abilities to accomplish. Many of us feel as if we’ve plateau-d. We’ve accomplished really great things but not really what we’ve aimed to. And so how do we develop our abilities so we can actually get beyond that glass ceiling and we’ve just completed a series in Rwanda and many of the people are professionals. They’re architects, engineers, builders particularly working on governmental projects and one of the things they’re talking about is the government is doing all these excellent projects largely resettling people who are suffering from the impacts of climate change and also trying to provide them with a livelihood. So they’re not just getting homes. They’re maybe getting some chickens or farmland or cattle and they were talking about how often people will then sell the chickens, sell the cattle, sell the doors and windows and mattresses and bathtubs out of the homes, right and then go back to the government and ask for more and we were talking about how much of it is because they don’t have an ownership in it. They didn’t build the house, they didn’t raise the chickens, their neighbor didn’t raise the chickens and I am often reminded of my friend Brad Lancaster who’s written all these books on water harvesting and the like. He talk about how in front of his house they caught the water off the street planted all these edible native plants, it was cooler and shadier, everyone was hanging out there he got some grant money to do the same thing in whole block they said the most important piece of the design was not the water catchment structures, it wasn’t the plant guilds and their relationships to one another, it was the process for implementing it, and the process for implementing it was the people in the street doing it and it was not just that they learned about water harvesting and the like. It was that they owned it. So somebody came along and parked their truck on top of the plant, grandma would run out of the house, bang on the truck with her cane “my granddaughter planted that plant, move..” But if the city had done it, she wouldn’t have cared or a landscaping company and it’s one of the things we neglect in permaculture in general is we design something and we don’t consider the process for implementing it. So that it is creating new capacities, skills, all kinds of abilities, money going in ways it often usually doesn’t go and I think the kinds of cases you’re talking about, you’re sort of forced to do that. So much of permaculture is there’s somebody who’s got the money and they’re going to pay the people to bring in the plants, supply the plants and do the water harvesting and build and that’s wonderful and only goes so far. But if we really want to transform communities, we really have to focus on the process. Do you know that Gregory Bateson story about the new college of Oxford, England.
Morag Gamble:
No, I don’t think I do.
Joel Glanzberg:
So he tells this story. The new college which was founded some 500, 600 years ago had this great dining hall in it with these massive oak beams that supported the roof. And one of the workers noticed sawdust coming down and went up and dug in with this pen knife and found beetles were riddling these beams and so he went to his boss and they talked to all these different people and they couldn’t figure out where they were going to find the massive oak trees they needed to replace these 500-year-old beams. So finally they called in the forester because the college had forestry lands as part of their endowment and they asked him he said I was wondering when you were going to ask about them trees. He said what are you talking about? He said everybody knows that oaks gets beetles in about 500 years so when they built the college they planted oaks to replace them and each forester told the next forester don’t you cut them oaks, those are to replace the beams in the college and he says that’s the way you run a culture. So you don’t begin with the architectural design, you begin with the forestry or growing or creating whatever it is that is going to end up being the thing.
Morag Gamble:
And it’s not just that. The building is the forest as well. It is all of those things simultaneously even whether everyone sees all the parts of it but it is, it is all of that and yeah it’s a wonderful way of seeing it. A wonderful way of being. You know I see a little bit of that happening within Crystal Waters. When Crystal Waters, the ecovillage here that I live in was designed and set up there was a number of people who also started planting forestry areas on parts of the land that wasn’t so great for houses or the other parts of growing and it wasn’t the steeper slopes where there was you know natural forest it was never to be cut it was kind of the midslopes darker side and so they planted them up with trees and so we know to go to Peter who’s the forestry guy when we need some timber and so we go walk when I needed to build a chicken structure not that long ago. It’s not quite the same as an Oxford College but anyway so I go across to Peter and tell him what it is that I need some timber for and we go walking in the forest and he picks out the particular trees that he thinks would be appropriate for that job. Similarly you know when I needed to get something that was a little bit more substantial for the house we would walk deeper into the forest and we’d find the older trees that were would have the suitability for that. He’d say come back tomorrow and there was the tree was on the edge ready to be picked up and I’d take it away. There’s something kind of amazing about that when you’re in your home and you’re touching that piece of wood that you know where it’s come from where it’s grown, who’s grown it and been involved in the process of respectfully harvesting it and you have a different relationship with the space and the place and the home it’s not just a house, a commodity, it’s a living thing that has a life and a story that stretches way before it became that and will continue on with the sense of being much more further on as well and then the richness of that story so I totally agree with you about this whole concept of that the most important part is the process and the relationships that you build the relational process that happens within permaculture. I mean my experience of being involved in permaculture application from the start with city farms and community gardens have seen that sort of connection and the ownership. My background was in landscape architecture and I think I escaped it because it just felt like it was doing it for someone else and and creating spaces that people consume as apart from being connected to and so that bigger picture too of wanting to offer something that was making a positive contribution of regenerating the planet, regenerating communities just didn’t feel like it was capable of coming through that and so I wonder maybe you’ve kind of talked a little bit around it but what is the bigger picture for you of like what inside is the motivating force for wanting to do this kind of work. Where does that come from and how would you how would you describe that. No just a small question haha!
Joel Glanzberg:
Well it’s interesting because i’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I just saw the movie Kiss the Ground that maybe you’ve seen. I’ve worked with those people a little bit and when we were first watching it I sort of grumpily said to my wife I’ve been talking about this for 30 years! She said well that’s one way of talking about it. You could also see it as the time has come that people are finally paying attention that there is this beautifully produced movie and using the word regenerative that you know when we started regenesis nobody used and really all of this comes from my childhood. It’s like you talking about experiencing nature with your children and I was lucky enough to grow up on the edge of the city, on the edge of the suburbs really. There was still forests and fields and farmlands all around and there was a forest right behind our house and I spent most of my life there and it got me really interested in how did the peoples here live and I became kind of obsessed with learning about it. I found this little paperback book. I was probably about my son’s age about nine and I found this little book Black Elk speaks and in the book he tells about this great vision he had when he was a little boy and in it he talks about the flowering tree. The tree that’s at the center of all things that’s alive and blooms and shelters all beings like prairie shelters its chicks and how from that view he saw how the world was a hoop of many hoops. Like the face of a sunflower right. Those interlocking hoops creating one great hole and he talks about how he was shown that the tree had withered and that his mission in life was to find, to make the tree bloom again and he felt as if he had failed and being a little kid I took his words really directly in he says maybe look for it somewhere there’s a root of the tree that’s still alive. Find it and nurture it that it will grow and bloom and fill with singing birds again and so that’s really what has motivated all of my work all of these years and that’s why it’s Flowering Tree Permaculture is the institute that I co-founded. The name of that place that’s in the little video 30 years Greening the Desert Flowering Tree.
Morag Gamble:
So can you tell us a little bit more about what you what you’ve been doing at Flowering Tree Permaculture because this idea of greening the desert is something that’s really important around the world as we’re seeing desertification spread and you know it’s particularly important here in you know places like Australia, too. We’re mostly dry and getting drier and well more extremes. Here in the subtropics you know we spend most of our year in dry even though it sounds like it should be wet and lush, it’s mostly not. And so this idea of you know greening the desert and positively transforming landscapes, regenerating landscapes through this work I think is i something that’s really important to explore. So I wonder whether you might just be able to describe a little bit about what it is, what it was that you’ve done there to make that change.
Joel Glanzberg:
Yeah so I had done a permaculture design course in what 1986 or something like that and married a native american woman from Santa Clara Pueblo, Roxanne Swentzel, and we began to apply some of these things and then I did a second course with Bill Mollison in Arizona somewhere in the late 80s and so began this dual task of looking at what people had done there traditionally, what species they had used, what were the native plants and trying to apply all the permaculture principles in this place and it was relatively small three quarters of an acre. We had rainwater catchment, we had municipal water and we had an irrigation ditch. We worked on creating a food forest in the high desert which is cold and dry and hot and poor soils and the like. It was all weeds when we started and then it became better weeds and then it was all these little sticks amongst the weeds and the third year after we planted all these little trees the [ditch] was broken and they got no water but all those years they had grown their roots and then they were able to grow and they didn’t particularly need that water. It was very impressive and then Rox and I broke up 27 years ago now and so I was there about nine years and it’s just continued to grow and prosper and I made this little video about it a few years ago and the beginning of the video is zooming in on google earth you see the dry southwest and then you see this little postage stamp green food forest and at first I was kind of proud of it and then in the middle of the night I woke up and realized it was a symbol of failure that I didn’t just want to make a model and show it could be done I wanted to transform the way people saw and lived with their land and it should have disappeared like the first blades of grass in the meadow or the first trees in a forest. It should be a sea of food for us that is just maybe the oldest bit of and it did not and it made me realize that some of these things I talking about I was really good at designing a food forest but I didn’t even think about designing a process for creating a food forest that made everybody understand it, made them engaged with it, made them have ownership in it so that it would change people’s minds and changed the way these ways they lived and it was a real lesson to me how materialistic I am and how mechanical mechanistic I am. I was thinking I will build. It’s this thing we say all the time.. build it and they will come or prove that it can be done and then everyone will do it. I had that fantasy when I was an early permy that I’ll just show that we can do this and everybody will do it and it does not work that way.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah I guess that’s a thing isn’t it having the demonstration garden. It’s something that is still really common in terms of what I hear all the time. But what you’re saying is that not that we don’t need those spaces but there’s something else completely other that we need to be paying attention to in creating those things which is the way that it’s done, the way that it enriches the relationships with the community and beyond. Do you maybe want to just talk a little bit about that a bit more? I know you have already but say if you would if you were starting fresh on a project like that, how differently would you do that now? There’s a lot of people who’d be listening to this who are in the process of starting their own places and wanting to become people who are activating change and educators and so I think in order to kind of shift it from just creating a spot and teaching from there what’s that other aspect of it that you would encourage people to explore and to bring into what they’re doing.
Joel Glanzberg:
So this is really central to all this work we’ve been doing with Regenesis. It’s mostly been in development projects and one of the first things we’re working on is getting people to realize it’s not about your project it’s about the community your project is within. That you cannot regenerate, no project is regenerative. You can help to develop the capabilities for the place to regenerate itself. So two little stories. When my oldest son was little I was holding him and he was sleeping and having built stuff all my life I was thinking how I would build his miraculous body and I’d frame him up I’d put all his bones together with tendons and ligaments and I’d run all his veins and arteries and his circulatory system and I’d install those organs and I’d cheat them up with skin and fill them with blood and water and food and start them up and it made me realize this is how I think about designing and making anything. If it’s a curriculum, if it’s a garden, if it’s a school, if it’s a non-profit, if it’s a business, if it’s whatever. I design it, I make it, I start it up. Nature doesn’t do that with anything. His body was built by carrying on the processes it still carries on. Metabolizing food and water and moving about right. Just like the river wasn’t dug and then the tap was turned on. It was the water flowing that made the river. So that’s a key shift in how I try to think about things. So what are the existing processes that we are trying to reorient? Not what is the thing I’m gonna make and start and it’s the ideal silver bullet. This morning working with these folks from Rwanda I told them the story of stone soup where these soldiers come into this town everybody’s doors are locked no one will welcome them in they get a big pot full of water and start to cook three rocks. People come “what are you doing?” “oh we’re making stone soup.” Oh stone soup, I want to know how to do that because there’s plenty of stones around. Some salt would be good, some onions right you know the story and what they have done is they’ve put a vision into everybody’s mind of a big pot of food whenever they want it because they can just get stones and then everybody begins to see how they can contribute to that reality coming about and to me that’s what regeneration permaculture is all about. It’s how do we actually look in depth enough into a place, who it is. The most destructive part of the industrial revolution is that we’ve seen and treated everything as if it was the same. Whether it’s school students or women or workers or a board or a piece of meat or a vegetable or a piece of land, we treat it as the same or we make it right. First thing we do is flatten it, make sure the kids fit in the box and the beauty of the living world is that every one of us is unique. Every piece of land, every person, every human being and every place and so that’s a core to our work in regenesis. How do we help us understand the water we’re swimming in that is invisible to us to understand the unique potential of this place. How we could envision the potential of this place into the future and how we can each be called to contribute to that shared vision. For some of us it might be gardening, some of us might be foresting, some of it might be cooking, some of us might be business, some it might be schooling, but it’s.. Ben Haggard who’s one of my co-founders at Regenesis we did permaculture together for a long time he said our failure as permies was teaching classes everybody wanted to be us instead of learning to be a permaculture-minded lawyer and a permaculture-minded teacher and a perma.. right. That it really is how do we have this world view and this way of looking at things that whatever our skills and our callings are we can contribute to the health of living systems that are whole and increasingly whole and increasingly developing.
Morag Gamble:
I think that’s you know that that’s exactly, it’s what people need to hear I think because it’s this sense that you know permaculture is about going and having a homestead or being a permaculture designer or a permaculture teacher it’s it’s..well it can be that but it’s so much it’s so much more. It’s about like you’re saying, it’s about bringing it in inwards and weaving it wherever you are, wherever your passion and your interest lies. That is a way of seeing isn’t it. It’s a paradigm. It’s a way of engaging and relating and connecting. I wanted to sort of take a step back though because there’s something you’re talking there about that the bigger picture like the stone soup. So my mind is at places like community gardens for example where they’ve been going for a while and they’ve come to a point where they’re just maybe a bit stuck. They don’t have the stone soup and so from the work that you do with Regenesis how do you help communities identify what their stone soup is in order that they then see how they can contribute to that. I think we can all have a sense of what we can do here but like what’s that next step? What’s that bigger picture how and you know taking that out from smaller projects to thinking about you know a more societal level. What is our societal stone soup that we can hold that image of, so that we can be stepping up and speaking up and contributing at a different level.
Joel Glanzberg:
Yeah so I’m going to answer your question using a framework that we use a lot of regenesis. So it’s three nested holes and in the middle one is vitality right so these are requirements to be regenerative. So whether it’s a house plant or a business or a café or a piece of land or a community, it must be vital. Part of what you’re talking about this community gardens that sort of go flat after a bit is the spirit. That spirit that started that was fun and exciting and we’re going to be creative and do all this cool stuff, after a while it starts to fade and it’s because you’ve accomplished the things you decided to or you just accomplished what you could accomplish. But in a changing world you’ve got to constantly be changing and developing or you lose that vitality. There’s some of the most successful projects after a while it happens to all of them. Village Homes in Davis, California which is a beautiful place. It doesn’t have the same kind of vitality it once did because it doesn’t have the same kind of mission and what are we going to actually be doing. So that mission, that calling, that regenerated spirit, is really essential to a regenerative project and then that vitality at the next ring out has everything to do with how viable the plant, the animal, the business, the garden is in what’s around it. We all know of great businesses or communities that they were incredibly viable and then the world moved on. So even kodak film, when the world moved on, what had made them incredibly viable was no longer viable and that’s true for all of us. Here in this country small bookstores went through that when the big box book stores came along, they couldn’t compete with them just selling books and they had to realize that what they were offering was a really different value. Had to do with a community gathering space around ideas and because the big box stores are based on selling books for the cheapest, they can’t compete with amazon and so that.. it’s about how we have vitality and regenerate that vitality and that viability and continue to regenerate that viability in a changing world and that brings us to the third ring which is the capacity for evolution. That all of our projects if we do not build into them the development, the ongoing development or the capacity for evolution you cannot maintain that vitality and that viability and that’s why the design that is just a piece of paper with drawings on it is not going to maintain vitality and viability or instill the capacity for evolution into it. I’ve taught and visited so many old hippie communities, intentional communities and they’re all kind of fading. People are getting old, people are dying, young people leave, young people don’t come. It’s not that fun right and it’s a problem of succession and one of the things we know human communities that have figured out lineages, things not only are passed on for many generations, they continue to evolve and grow. So one of our roles as permaculture teachers I believe is to ensure that our students excel beyond us because if not, it’s only a downward slope. And it’s one of the main things that I see in the whole permaculture world and permaculture education is that it’s like a game of telephone that oh I didn’t quite get this for my teacher so then I don’t teach it so then none of my students get that and it becomes this devolutionary process if you’re focused on the information, if you focus on the underlying patterns, everybody can have new insights about how they’re applied and how to use them and how to use them to understand people in places and other living beings. So that is the biggest change, I would say, is how do we be thinking that our design and implementation process is primarily a capability and capacity building process, an educational process is one of the ways to think about it so that when we’re gone, the garden continues to grow more and more and more spread.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah that’s absolutely critical in what we need to be doing. Because we don’t want it just to be sort of passed on, in a downward side but actually to kind of myceliate from that it just keeps amplifying in ways and in directions that we don’t know and taking on life and form of its own and creating its own vitality wherever it is and that’s kind of a little bit what we’re seeing happening now in a lot of the refugee camps which is it’s just absolutely remarkable and I wanted to sort of circle back around to where you were talking about vitality and viability and that capacity for evolution. There was something in there that I wanted to ask you about like practically how do you make that happen so let’s go back say to that example of community gardens or eco villages and you know aging communities that you’ve experienced. So where do you notice that that vitality is fading. Where the spark…that sense of accomplishment like I think that’s a really important point. There’s this plateauing, you know we achieved it, that’s great, but like once you’ve achieved that bigger set of goals as a community how do you move past you know this is kind of a settling in it’s like “okay we did this that’s really great we’re okay” but there’s always that the new edges that we need to move out to, to bring new life into it. If you could reflect on some maybe examples of practically how you can reactivate something that has plateaued or is starting to sort of fade. How to invite new life into that.
Joel Glanzberg:
So it’s all around us right. You are talking about an ecological successional process and we see it in our cities right there’s the cool, edgy neighborhoods that the artists live in and there’s immigrants that live there and people of different sexualities and it’s a little sketchy, a little scary, and kind of exciting and creative and fun and then after a while it becomes gentrified and it’s still kind of cool but it’s increasingly boring and then eventually it’s senescent. So all the niches are filled that it becomes increasingly simplified it becomes increasingly rigid and stable and brittle and so this idea of a climax forest or climax community that we’d always talked about scientists are now calling senescent and it’s the sub climax communities that are most species diverse and most productive and this is one of the reasons why native peoples all around the world use forms of disturbance fire, flooding, cutting, harvesting, to move to a new sub-climax. It doesn’t just go back to the previous one, it moves on to another one. That’s the capacity for evolution. So it’s one of the roles of human beings is that we cannot only fall in love with anything. We can fall in love with a cliff a rock a tree a bird a person a car right but we can appreciate that right. We’ve turned these tiny little stoney, fuzzy fruits into peaches and these tiny marble-sized things into brandy wine tomatoes you know or it’s what we do. We help children turn into these beautiful human beings or poets look for that one line or that one word that will bring out something and make it obvious. So there’s a couple of ways of doing what you’re talking about one of them has to do with some form of disturbance. Human beings for eons have known this. I have a friend Bill Plotkin who said ceremony is disturbance. It takes you out of your habitual patterns of life if it’s going sitting on the hill and praying for four days, for taking the sabbath off, or fasting, or feasting, or going on pilgrimage you’re breaking the patterns that you’re used to. So ceremony is one of the ways we break our patterns and ceremonies can be as much a habitual pattern as well..
Morag Gamble:
I was just going to say in my mind I heard ceremonies as being actually something that is a pattern that is continued over time as opposed to breaking a pattern that’s a really, that’s a really interesting shift.
Joel Glanzberg:
Well, it’s different than your daily life. You’re not working, you’re not eating, you’re eating a lot, you’re praying, you’re singing, whatever it is you’re all going out into the forest together. You don’t do that every day. So there’s three aspects that are really important one is that to be consciously developmental, to know that we’re going to plateau, and we need to create the next stage of evolution or we’re going to lose the vitality of viability. So being aware of that, that is a pattern in the living world including human organizations so knowing that. So setting up these periodic disturbances whether it’s taking the sabbath off or seasonal festivities or whatever it is and there’s a kind of need for an intensity and a periodicity and a longevity so that all of these communities they’ve had some way of knowing that there’s a tendency toward rigidity and codifying and ownership and all of that how do we have that jubilee, how do we have that ground fire, that cool ground fire, not the crown fire that wipes it all out that redistributes things, gets us to see things in a different way and we can practice it. So whether it’s a yoga practice or, a legal practice, or a landscape architecture practice. It’s actually you’re developing your capabilities by practicing a permaculture practice and so in all these ways it’s a kind of regenerative practice and you have to do it with the garden. The garden is going to start to go down you lose species, the soil gets compacted, or it gets too acidic or too alkaline and you have to move things around and it’s always somewhat painful. It’s like and we’ve always planted peas there. We’ve always had that hedgerow there or the kids love those berries you can’t take those but .. that it happens in our minds as well.
Morag Gamble:
I love that idea of being a practice and what we talk about being lifelong learning. That kind of terminology but it is about not just learning it but actually being in the practice and being in that full engagement with it to know when and where shifts can happen or how to interact in order to bring that change and maybe you could talk a little bit more about change making. I know we’re almost at our time. There’s two big questions I wanted to ask you and maybe we can just maybe I ask them both together we could wrap that up together. So one is about that process of change making as opposed to creating conditions for change because often we head into about you know change makers, we’re going to make a difference. Whereas whether you see that as what we need to be doing is creating conditions for change because things always change it’s kind of like what Nora Bateson talks about a lot and the other sort of just the question that i wanted to bring in here is What do you see being sort of the highest potential of permaculture in the world today? So which kind of relates to the change making I suppose that we need in the world today as well.
Joel Glanzberg:
This is maybe a weird direction to go but you know that in both Hebrew and Aramaic the word we translate as sin means to miss the mark. Like when you’re shooting an arrow or throwing a spear you’re just off the mark, that it’s not about damnation. Change is constant but I think the question is it a developing change or a devolving change and we can instigate both. You clear-cut landscape and it gets poorer and poorer and poorer, the people get poor. So our first art and skill as human beings as trackers and it’s the roots of science. Observation, what are the patterns, where am I going to place myself so that this comes to me or I’m not going to get flooded or whatever it is. So unfortunately much of permaculture has gotten to where people are really proud of their acupuncture needles. Look how cool this needle is and polishing it up and teaching people about this needle, this needle, this needle, this needle, and we’re all one trick ponies. But the acupuncture is the first thing they do is they feel your pulses. They don’t just, oh here’s the point I use on everybody all the time. They’re tracking the patterns to find what is that least change for the greatest effect that will rearrange the patterns of flow that create a different manifestation and so whether or not that’s change makers I’m not sure but I think it really is helping people to see differently it’s that those few words, those images. So i’ve been lucky enough to be part of this Native American Permaculture course for 20 years and now they don’t need me anymore and so I was respectfully uninvited a few years back because they have enough Native American teachers to teach it which is fantastic right and they even stopped using the word permaculture because they ran into some difficulties there but early on when we were doing it we were up at Picuris Pueblo and this older man got up in front of everybody and there was a bunch of young Native Americans and a bunch of native folks from all over the Americas and some non-native folks and I don’t know if you know it’s probably similar to aboriginal folks right that incarceration all of the bad things, the rates are far higher among the american populations than the population in general even black and brown people in general and he looked at everybody he said make a fist, hold it up, yeah, hold it up. So everybody made a fist he said see how your knuckles go up and down up and down just like the mountain ridge, just like the river in the valley. See how your thumb and forefinger spiral just like the water behind a rock where the trout sits and then he pointed to every one of us he said No, square people. We all belong. He made me realize that we were teaching all these ways to do and if we’re doing, doing, doing but all the problems in the world are our fault because we don’t belong it’s a totally different reality than no we belong I have the tracks of the mountain and the river on my hand as undeniably as my grandmother’s nose, I have the tracks of the water and the wind in my hand, undeniably, and when we put ourselves in the picture that we are here with roles to play and we’ve forgotten our original instructions, that changes the game entirely. It’s not about moves on a chess board. It’s about how do we play our role that the world is dying for us to play and for me that is the shift. If we could just make the shift from being these outside operators to inside children of the living earth that are here to play a role, that is inspiring, is revitalizing, it makes us all far more viable and gives us the capacity to evolve that yeah we’ve done all this stuff that’s destructive but that’s because we’re in ignorance. It’s a trauma response to trauma.
Morag Gamble:
Just that idea, too of being. So from that observation perspective, it’s not it’s not that separate observation of, it’s being within it and observing with and noticing the relationship between us and our place and our community. That we don’t exist in isolation and sort of like looking at it separately I think it’s that ring like he’s just saying that bringing ourselves deeply back within as a in a way of being in place and connecting with place and acknowledging our sense of belonging because I think quite often there’s this deep sense that we don’t belong. I mean particularly as part of a maybe a colonized group you know this all the guilt and attack so we sort of there’s still this separation and a doing approach and there’s a lot of shift that needs to happen in that.And healing that way of being as well.
Joel Glanzberg:
As environmentalists and environmental educators, our messaging has been terrible. If you tell a child they’re bad and stupid and ugly they will believe they’re bad and stupid and ugly. If you tell people that everything is their fault they’ll believe it’s their fault. If you tell them they’re beautiful and wonderful and capable and they are entirely able to make beauty in the world, and that’s who they’ll be, and that’s what they’ll do.
Morag Gamble:
That’s a beautiful place to end our conversation today. Thank you so much for joining me, Joel.
Joel Glanzberg:
Oh my pleasure and I just want to say one of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time on during this plague is doing a lot of coaching on Zoom. It’s an easy way to reach me and if people want to contact me through the contact page of patternmind.org it’s a great way to get a hold of me. There’s nothing better than to talk to people all around the world that are doing their best.
Morag Gamble:
So I’ll put down the links for all of this in the show notes, where to find you and links to your work. Thank you again Joel it’s been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you this morning or your afternoon. And it’s just been really great to connect at the start. I’ve known of your work for a long time and we’re all around the world and something about like.. you’re saying with this time now that because of Zoom many of us have been in various places are actually connecting more than we ever have before and I’m really grateful for that opportunity to have a chance to really reach out and connect with a lot a lot more people. It’s really that’s absolutely enriching.
Joel Glanzberg:
It was funny last night I was thinking about this and I was mostly thinking of questions I’m going to ask you and things I want to hear about your work but we’ll have to do that in another..
Morag Gamble:
A part two! Well thank you. Have a happy beautiful evening and hopefully we’ll talk again soon.
Joel Glanzberg:
Wonderful thank you so much!
Morag Gamble:
Thanks for tuning in to the Sense-making in a Changing World podcast today, it’s been a real pleasure to have your company. I invite you to subscribe and receive notification of each new weekly episode with more wonderful stories, ideas, inspiration, and common sense for living and working regeneratively and core positive permaculture thinking of design interaction in this changing world. I’m including a transcript below and a link also to my four-part permaculture series, really looking at what is permaculture and how to make it your livelihood, too. So, join me again in the next episode where we talk with another fascinating guest, I look forward to seeing you there.
Find out more about permaculture
We need more people who can also support projects like Ego’s.
Learn more about permaculture in my 4 part permaculture series and explore the many free permaculture resources in my Youtube and blog. We definitely need more permaculture teachers everywhere to restore balance to earth’s systems, and to help facilitate regenerative practices.
I invite you to join the Permaculture Educators Program with others from 6 continents – a comprehensive online course that includes the Permaculture Design Certificate and the only online Permaculture Teacher Certificate anywhere.
To support free permaculture education for people in refugee camps please donate to Ethos Foundation – the registered charity associated with the Permaculture Education Institute. We invite young people to join the Global Permayouth Festivals each month.
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work – the Gubbi Gubbi people.
Thank you to Rhiannon for sound editing and Kim for the music.
Would you like to teach permaculture?
Permaculture education reaches across the globe connecting communities, ideas, and resources, and builds hope and possibility. Becoming a permaculture teacher is a positive way to make a difference – as a volunteer or as your job – and support communities around you (or on the other side of the world), and connect with and regenerate your local environment.
Join a global network of [pr]activists addressing the interconnected crises humanity (actually, all life) is facing today. The Permaculture Educators Program joins people together on 6 continents – from Nambucca to Nepal, Sikkim to Spain, California to Kakuma refugee settlement.
Join Permaculture Australia too!
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Thanks for tuning into Sense-making in a Changing World today. It has been a pleasure to have your company. I invite you to subscribe (via your favourite podcast app like iTunes) and receive notification of each new weekly episode.
Each Wednesday I will share more wonderful stories, ideas, inspiration and common sense for living and working regeneratively. Positive permaculture thinking, design and action is so needed in this changing world.
What is permaculture?
Take a look at my free 4 part permaculture series or Our Permaculture Life Youtube and my permaculture blog too. For an introduction to permaculture online course, I recommend The Incredible Edible Garden course. I also offer an online Permaculture Educators Program (Permaculture Design Certificate and Permaculture Teacher Certificate) and involve young people in permaculture through Permayouth (11-16yos).
Warm regards,
Morag Gamble
Founder, Permaculture Education Institute
I acknowledge the Traditional owners of the land from which I am broadcasting, the Gubbi Gubbi people, and pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.
Thank you, Rhiannon Gamble, for audio editing.