Together will open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth, repair, eco-literacy, and much more.

Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.

Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.

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, shape their habitat positively, and 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 jewel certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global PERMA youth programs. Women’s self-help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. 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 life record as well as your way of life. 

We’d love to invite you to join our wonderfully inspiring 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. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Joe Brewer to the show. I talked with him just the other day from his home in Costa Rica. Joe described himself as a culture designer in service of humanity and the planet. Joe and I have known each other for some time now, but this is actually the first time that we met. We both live permaculture lives and working regenerative work globally. I just love the chance to explore so many ideas with him about how to live regenerative life, how change happens, and what are the seeds of regenerative culture. He’s recently published a book, the design pathways for regenerative earth, and he’s actually one of the most interesting thinkers of my generation. And I was delighted to be able to spend this time talking with him

Joe describes his work as being in service to humanity and the planet. Joe created the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution  and the Design Institute for Regenerating Earth which holds “the vision to see entire communities gain the ability to guide their own evolutionary processes to become more healthy and resilient in our rapidly changing world.”

WATCH EPISODE 33 WITH JOE AND MORAG HERE

Joe created the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution  and the Design Institute for Regenerating Earth  which holds “the vision to see entire communities gain the ability to guide their own evolutionary processes to become more healthy and resilient in our rapidly changing world.”

His book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth is available through the gift economy. You can access it free via this link, and also offer a gift via his patreon account.  You can also join the Earth Regenerators study group that meets weekly to explore how we might collaborate to regenerate the Earth.

Learn more about Joe’s work here more by perusing these articles:

• Culture Design Labs — Evolving the Future
• A Global Network of Culture Design Labs
• Tools for Culture Design — Toward A Science of Social Change?
• Cultural Evolution in the Anthropocene

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, 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.

It’s my great pleasure to welcome Joe Brewer to the show. I talked with him just the other day from his home in Costa Rica. Joe describe himself as a culture designer in service of humanity and the planet. Joe and I have known each other for some time now, but this is actually the first time that we met. We both live permaculture lives and working regenerative work ,globally. I just loved the chance to explore so many ideas with him about how to live regeneratively, how change happens and what are the seeds of regenerative culture. He’s recently published a book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and he’s, he’s actually one of the most interesting thinkers of my generation. And I was delighted to be able to spend this time talking with him. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Hi everyone. And welcome to the Sense-making in the Changing World show. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here talking with Joe Brewer today. Joe, and I’ve been in kind of similar circles for a long time, but this is actually the first time that we’ve chatted. And I’m really looking forward to diving into a whole lot of different concepts and ideas with you. I love your work. I love how you share the ideas of your book. And I wanted to start with asking you about something I read in an article that you wrote, which was at the same time that the climate strikes were happening. And you said something along the lines I’m paraphrasing here that stopped going to school, drop out or drop into regeneration, learn permaculture and other things like biracialism and do something radical. Now, the reason I’m picking up on this particular thread is because that’s exactly what my 11 and 13-year-olds did. They just didn’t see the point of school after that whole.. And they dropped out. So just to kind of add another little segment into that before I hand over to you was another thing that you have written about in your book, or it’s sort of one of the threads of questioning that you explore, which is ‘are humans bad for the planet?. And so this is the other kind of side of why my 11 year old son kind of quit because he’s going really.. Humans are just, what are the point of humans on this planet? We’re just destroying and messing everything up. You know, what is the point? What are we learning all that stuff for and what are we supposed to do? And so I just wanted both sides of that. If there’s some way you could put that in the perspective from where you were coming from, when you said that it would be a fantastic place to start.

Joe Brewer:

Oh, well, I want to talk to your children. So let me answer it as though I’m speaking to them. Because I have a four-year-old daughter and so much of what we do as a family is built around how we think. We should not be preparing our children, it’s not necessarily knowing what we should do we’re trying to figure that out, but what we should not do. And one thing we should not do is pretend that it is extremely bizarre, unprecedented and four and a half billion years history of the earth this moment is what we should treat as normal. That’s just so far from any empirical trend you care to look at, that goes far enough back in time. And so this idea that people should basically do job training, which is what now since roughly the 1990s, there has been.. The economic ideology of neo-liberalism has taken over so much of universities. That it’s really, I mean, I graduated high school in 1995. And even then I was so odd for going to college because I wanted to learn. When almost everyone was going to get a better paying job. And that was 25 years ago. So this idea that we should go to school as if that’s the place to learn is very historically bizarre. And I spent nine years in the university, I’m a total academic nerd. I loved it. I flourished in it. So I get it. You know, I really get it. But at the same time, when I look back at where I learned fast it was when I bent, broke or ignored the rules of the university. Like I invented my own undergraduate degree and interdisciplinary studies. I convince the Dean of the college to let me have extra independent study credits. I convinced professors to join a committee to let me study what I wanted, that wasn’t offered, you know, like I was breaking the rules. So I wouldn’t say go to a place where the rules are broken, the rules they’re using don’t work. And that’s where you’re going to learn because that’s not what I did. I just took advantage of having an academic scholarship, to read books in the, and sit in classes with really knowledgeable people and things like that. And in this time where really the future looks absolutely abysmal in so many ways to continue on a path that stays within the world that creates that terrible future. It’s just the wrong thing to do. It’s like not a good idea at all. And when I started looking back into other areas of my own life and into sort of IP anthropology and archeology of human history, the things that resonated most with were authentic human experiences like my wife and I do bike touring. And when we’re out in the weather and the landscapes experiencing something on roughly a human scale, I mean the go goes a little fast, definitely not inhuman scale. I find that there’s so much to learn that, we only learn by paying attention to the world. And I had to go to college sort of to get away from my dysfunctional cultural history, which gets a little bit at your second question to start finding the part of human culture that I really just deeply love. And one of the things that I think has made this so powerful for me is that I studied cognitive linguistic and I worked with this famous cognitive scientist, George Lakoff. And if you wanted to summarize his work in like one sentence, it would basically be the kinds of minds we have, depending on the kinds of bodies we have, the kinds of environments we find ourselves in, including the social environments. And so we create our realities through those actions and we can choose which stories to live, including absolutely delusional stories that have no basis in reality. And we can live in nightmares and we can live in false, naive, hopeful dreams. But when I started realizing what permaculture was and that I’d already been practicing it, the idea that you just observe and be present and then learn how to care for and love the context that you’re in and then become responsible for it, like the basic ethic of permaculture, and then all the beautiful things you do with it, like, Oh, well, mostly not doing that in the classroom. I was doing that when I was taking what I learned in the classroom and took it into the world. And so that’s.. Oh I’ll stop there for a moment.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. Look, I thank you. Because I love what you were saying there about, you know, we choose the stories we love. And I also like the way you described permaculture there too. And I guess perhaps this is, you know, I wanted to ask you too, what brought you to.. You’re now in Colombia? Is that right?

Joe Brewer:

Yes. yes.

Morag Gamble:

So what brought you to Colombia and where are you in and what was a bit of your pathway of getting there? Just to kind of give us a sense of your, I guess, where I’m trying to think with this is that you were in the academic world and you were studying at atmospheric science, and then you moved into, you said cognitive linguistics, and now you’re living in Colombia. What was a little bit of the arc of that and how you landed there and the reason why you’re there?

Joe Brewer:

Well, I’ll give a couple of moments. One of them was 2003. In 2003 I was in a graduate program in atmospheric science at the University of Illinois in Champaign, which is it’s amazing university with very powerful supercomputer and lots of great professors and stuff. And I would look out the window of my office and see all of the students going about their lives like everything was normal, except that the United States had invaded Iraq, false pretenses, and our country was quote unquote at war. So I would look outside and see no [inaudible] whatsoever people going about their normal lives and immediately connected this with climate change, which is that we have a world of perception of the economy as normal. And it’s working just fine in our tiny little cultural bubbles. And we do not have the perception to experience the world as it really is including that our wealth and village comes from the rape and pillage of the planet and creation of poverty. And a lot of things, I was just starting to learn about that. So there’s recognition that the world was in a bad place in part because humans could perceive a false reality and that this was the making of our minds and our ways our bodies experience the world. That was a key moment. And when I shifted from atmospheric science to cognitive science, it was because what I was actually studying was complexity. I went into atmospheric science because it was a place to study how patterns form and how patterns form in very complex situations. I was studying clouds and clouds are very complex things. And a lot of little interactions that create these emergent patterns. And I was applying what I was learning to, to human behavior and society. And that took me on this road of how does the human mind create this ability to not see a climate change? How could those students on the campus not see we were at war? And that’s how I ended up eventually working with George Lakoff and doing cognitive linguistics and applying it to politics and to social movements. And years later realizing that what I was actually doing was studying cultural evolution. How do living systems evolve and what is so distinctive and interesting about human culture and human culture changes. And this gets me closer to how we ended up in Colombia because I spent more than 10 years teaching people about the science of the human mind and the scientific knowledge that informs how social change occurs. But I had this planetary science background. So I was always thinking about the earth and very aware of the earth as a presence in all of it. And one of the things that I came to discover was that there is a long history of human cultures that are not the way this human culture is that I grew up in. And there’s even an acronym flip from a 2010 psychology paper, weird, which was the discovery that almost all psychological research is bias because they study people from weird cultures – Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic, translation – college students at Western universities. No sustainable cultures in history that meet those criteria, they don’t exist. All sustainable cultures have been indigenous. And as I came to realize there was this huge diversity of human cultures that I always felt this strange connection with. Like I wanted to be part of them. I used to be part of them. I forgotten how. And I didn’t know how to get back. Just turns out in the human evolution story is historically correct. All of us are descendants of hunter-gatherer peoples who either were conquered or were the conquerors, but to be the conquerors, we were probably conquered. And so our path to Colombia involve a lot of steps in between, but when our daughter was born in January of 2017. We just couldn’t take halfway changes anymore. Got rid of our car years ago, only got around by bike, did work that was related to environmental issues, but I was still working with social movements, trying to address global poverty. And my wife was working for a university on waste diversion and recycling and urban sustainability realizing that all faith-based because there’s zero evidence of sustainable cities in human history. So it’s just based on faith that they can be made sustainable. And when we looked at our daughter knowing full well like we chose to have a child, we debated it for years, we’re talking about possible human population crash and all kinds of things. Should we do this? So I always say as we had a baby with eyes wide open and that made us very responsible to have every moment of our decisions after she was born, be something we could look her in the eye years from now, even if terrible things are unfolding and say, look, we knew, and we still did this. And one piece of that was we teach to believe in the future of humanity and to the quote from Nassim Taleb, who is kind of a narcissist and a bit of a jerk, but he’s also really smart guy. He observed that people who make investments in the stock market do a lot better if they use their own money than if they invest someone else’s money. So as this phrase, people need to have skin in the game. Well, we literally have skin in the game, the skin around the body of our child and the skin in the game, as we invested in the future of humanity, because our daughter is going to be 33 years old in 2050, if she lives that long, that’s where she’ll be. So we put ourselves into the necessity of living into a human culture that has a future for our child. So we made plans step-by-step to leave Seattle where we were living at the time to Eugene, Oregon, that was less expensive and more family oriented to Costa Rica living Off-grid at a like eco hotel permaculture project, regenerative agriculture project and found it wasn’t really the right place to raise a child. And it was just complicated in a lot of ways, but traveled a lot in Costa Rica at the time. And that was when I really started diving into regenerative economics at the large scale, I had a previous history that enabled me to do that fairly quickly. I wasn’t starting from scratch. And I worked with John Fullerton in the capital Institute and Stuart Cowan for those who know him, a wonderful regenerative finance expert and biomimicry expert for economies. And we started exploring how to create regenerative bioregional scale economies. And just a little side note, I was born in the Ozarks in Missouri and the first international bioregional Congress in human history was a year after I was born, 10 miles from where I was born, just outside of Springfield, Missouri, which has a very strong bioregional craft culture, artisans of many kinds. And I wanted to get away from that place my entire childhood. So to have the irony that I grew up in the hot bed of bioregionalism, having no idea what it was until decades later. The humor is not lost.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. There’s a lot of things that I wanted to pick up on in what you just said then, but maybe start with that last comment around bioregional economics. So can you kind of describe what a functioning bioregional economy looks like and perhaps how, how we can start to really move towards that at a pace that we need to be moving towards that.

Joe Brewer:

The first thing is that bioregion is a term that doesn’t just apply to the humans. I like to use the example of starfish. Starfish live in an intertidal zone and their bioregion or the biological region is the geography of place that supports their entire life system, which for them is the intertidal zone and the tide pools. But if they looked at the Roosevelt elk of the Pacific Northwest and North America, you’re at the end of the bioregion of these coastal forests and mountains or into the mountain ranges of the continental interior. And you would look at their entire life system and say, well, what do they need to survive? And you’d be able to say, what was their niche? What is their population’s needs? What are the individual’s needs? And so on map that out. And most people would just say this is ecology. So it’s interesting when we apply this concept to humans is that a human bioregion includes the structure of culture. So we can do things like engage in regional trade. So it changes what a bioregion is for humans. And it also starts to show us what our regenerative bioregional economy is. And that is a subsistence economy. An economy that enables people to just survive and live. Obviously you can do better than that, but at a minimum, they need to have subsistence in a place in a way that is sustainable for the long-term. And so it can look at historical human patterns of Hunter gatherers that move with the seasons, and maybe they follow the migration of animals that they hunt, then that entire geography and everything about their culture that enables them to live that way. Is there a bioregion? And what’s interesting is most bioregions are defined around watersheds, islands, coastal zones, or estuaries that specific mountain range specific floodplain, which may be a little different than the watershed, depending on the trade network. Like what are we are in Colombia? There are three major rivers and three mountain ranges that together and have this plateau in the center. And the entire area is about 500,000 hectares. And there is an indigenous culture called Guane that lived here for well, as the Guane people may be only a few hundred years, but ancestrally there’ve been humans here for more than 13,000 years. And the geography of the mountains and water that the canyons and the rivers creates an extended trade network that is limited by the geography of the structures. [inaudible] You can start to design the conditions of an economy. You can ask yourself, what is the ecological history of this place, and how did humans live here? What was their ancestral range? If they had a trade network or a Federation of tribes interacted, what did that look like? How much did they have relative autonomy? Like maybe 90% of their economy is local and they traded it just for information and shiny things like seashells, when they didn’t live close enough to the ocean and what you start to see as a fairly clear cultural boundary that is also biologically, geologically AND ecologically constrained. So this is the natural organizing pattern of human economies. Actually all economies of all biological organisms, but particularly for humans we need to understand this.

Morag Gamble:

It’s interesting to look too at the map of Australia or what is called Australia. When you look at the indigenous nation, the regions, and then you overlay that with by regions and it’s pretty much this perfect fit and there’s hundreds across Australia. And so that idea of using that as a map for regenerating human culture in this country is what we’re working on now. I’m actually going pretty much straight from our conversation to a meeting that’s indigenous led conversation of people around Australia, looking at a regenerative way forward. And it’s such a different way of perceiving where we are and where we’ve got to go. which kind of leads me to another question that I had for you too, which is based around this idea of being indigenous. As you said that we’re all indigenous. Can you kind of unpack that a bit? Cause sometimes I get in to trouble, trying to explain what I mean by that. And I would love to hear someone else share that because you know, you get into these conflicts around, well, no, you’re the colonizers, you’re not the indigenous. And, you know, particularly in a place like Australia, it can be quite a fraught concept.

Joe Brewer:

Well, one place to maybe start is going back to the cognitive linguistics piece, which is colonization happens to our minds. And so we can think of it this way, that the life form that colonized humans to make us colonizers was [**inaudible**]. It was information patterns and a lot of them are connected to the neolithic revolution, the emergence of agriculture, the need to have slave labor connected with agriculture, Imperial models of conquest and domination for empires and civilizations. And you sort of just come forward in time and it becomes pretty complex. But what’s interesting is you can have a person within one of those empires or civilizations who doesn’t have that mindset because they’re still connected to their ancestry. And so, you know, we could think of like some of the gypsy cultures of Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, or look at some of the like here in Colombia, there are a lot of ways that people practice indigenous rituals with tobacco, with the Coca leaf or other, such things. And they’ve held on to part of the indigenous culture, even though it’s blended. And what we can see is when they are able to connect to landscapes in a sacred and meaningful way with an ancestral history, they’re behaving as though they’re indigenous. And when they feel like they’re an owner of land, separate from it, dominating and extracting from it, they’re behaving like a colonizer. Doesn’t matter, their blood ancestry to the place. It’s the cultural orientation of those relationships. And my favorite diagnostic for this is an Algonquin term from the Algonquin people of the new England areas of North America. And they have a term that they call wetiko. There are other tribes like the Cherokee that call it wendigo, and there are a couple of different names, but they’re really talking about the same thing. And it comes from the basic human psychology, the ability to imagine something that’s separate, that’s not separate. Like imagining your body separate from your mind or that men separate from women. Well, that humans are separate from nature. You pick your version. And Wetiko is the illusion of separation that enables the mindless consumption and destruction of life, pathology the disease, but also in their spiritual tradition, it’s a monster. It’s like a zombie. And in particularly because there are, you know, the Northern part of North America, it’s a mindless zombie that engages in cannibalism that comes out of the winter, the dark winter from the North. And it’s an emaciated human form that has its heart and ice. So it’s no longer empathy or compassion and it mindlessly consumes and destroys all life. And when they see a human person who represents this as an embodiment of it, like Christopher Columbus as an example, they called him a big Wetiko. Cause he was the embodiment of Wetiko. I find this a very helpful diagnostic because you can be within a colonizer culture and not be Wetiko. And when you do that, when you’re not being Wetiko, you’re being indigenous, or at least you’re moving toward, or you’re seeking to be indigenous. You may not remember your ancestry. You may not know the land you’re from and so on a whole bunch of things. But the reason this is really important now to disconnect being indigenous from ancestral indigenous is because we’re an unprecedented moment in time and what we need as indigenous people of the future. And because human cultures are adapted to their environments and environments are changing so quickly, we can’t simply trust that ancestral cultures are adapted to these changing environments. So we need to actively create cultures that are trying to be indigenous and this changing context. And it may not be like the indigenous of the past. So we might use Western science for part of it, just as an example. But do you [**inaudible] in an indigenous way? I think there’s a lot to learn from indigineous, but you know, it’s, it’s very muddy, very messy,

Morag Gamble:

Thank you so much for explaining it in that way. And I think it also encourages to the shift from this idea that culture is a fixed thing. You know it’s constantly shifting and it’s always sort of pigeonhole different ways of being it’s like when you started out saying, what we see is now is what we see is as normal. It is the way of life, but it is just such a short period of time in all of human history and traditional cultures in all different places have shifted and changed over time. So I wanted to maybe then jump to where you were, where you were heading to and saying, actually we need to imagine a different way forward. We need to design new pathways forward. So you describe yourself as a cultural designer. So there’s sort of two parts of this question. Like what, I mean, you’ve talked a bit about it, but if there’s some way that you could describe what that world is that you’re imagining, and it’s not one world either it’s multiple worlds, I would imagine too, but also linking in there to where are some of those blocks? So you were talking before about when you saw, you know, the Iraq war was just starting and people were walking around with blinkers on, and we still see that now today with everything that happens, you know, all the multiple crisis that we’ve been facing over these last, you know, year or so, even just things seem to be going on like normal now we’ve kind of, uh, climatized to those sort of bits of news. And, you know, people are back out onto them onto the streets and just continuing on as though nothing’s really changed and we’re back into, we sort of snap back to normal. So there’s this big shift that needs to happen in our way of thinking and in our way of being. So what is a cultural designer? How and how can we all become more like cultural designers in our own places?

Joe Brewer:

Well, I really liked the way that David Sloan Wilson describes this. And he is a evolutionary biologist in New York and he says, we need to become wise managers of our own evolutionary process. And he’s very careful with every word to be in an evolutionary process he really speaking about Darwinian evolution, which is that there is a dynamic fitness that is related to the kind of environment an organism is in and what it means to thrive in that environment. And because every population has variety of different expressions of physical traits and behavioral traits, some of them are better suited than others to a particular moment in an environment. And there tends to be a statistical pattern that over time, the things that are more fit tend to propagate things that are less fit, tend to die off. And so that’s like the shorthand of the evolutionary process. So we’re in this evolutionary process, which is that with lots of more details. And if we’re going to be managers of the evolutionary process, first thing is we need to understand that that’s what we’re in. We’re in an evolutionary process, but then we know that evolutionary processes are complex adaptive systems. So we don’t manage them as though they’re other kinds of systems. We have to manage them as complex adaptive systems, which means we don’t have control, it’s improvisational , it’s creative. If there is control, it’s limited. When there is insight it’s limited. And so what we need to do is develop understandings of system logic, system behavior, dynamic system attractors, phase transitions, instabilities, and other such things. And then we need to know how to work with them. And that’s how we can manage an evolutionary process. [**inaudible] is a good facilitator, can hold a conversation and work with what comes up, but they can’t predict what’s going to come up. And so that’s an example of managing an evolutionary processes to facilitate a dialogue. Now, to be a wise manager means we need to understand how our personal values and our ideology and our worldview relate to the future of the evolutionary process and wisdom and it’s deep kind of practical sense is anything that relates to wellbeing and flourishing of living systems. And you can define that in lots of particular ways, but if we’re thinking about the entire biosphere of this of the earth is a three and a half billion year living process, that we’re a part of. Then the highest form of wisdom is to serve the future evolution of the biosphere of the earth at the planetary scale. And so this is how we can get into design. We’re designing for the living system of the entire planet, but then as nested scales, it comes down to local and we do this by understanding how to manage complexity and how to be part of a complex system. And we need to understand what the evolutionary processes are and what this relates to is that this there’s only one way that ends up falling out of this and thank goodness that Dana Meadows named this in 1983. So I don’t have to be that the white guy in the future who’s doing it. She was a pretty smart lady and she gathered, it was a lot of really smart people. And what they found was, in this very mistitled paper called a brief history of the Balaton group and the Balaton group was the think tank that formed out of the study was they said after 10 years of meeting at lots of universities and talking about this with really smart people, we need to create local living economies organized around their territories. And each one is to have its own bioregional learning center. Turns out that’s the way. They were right. And so the way we design then this is what you said, we look at ancestral humans, human patterns, the biogeography of place. And then we design for the the dynamic living pattern of living systems at that scale. And what we find is that does not work unless we network up to larger scales, because let’s say that you do this really well in your bioregion. And then the next bioregion over there are fundamentalists militants with a dictator and they come and kill you and steal all of your stuff. So it turns out that doesn’t work. The only way that works is to network this across entire continents and the entire planet. And this is the solution. It’s actually quite simple to state doing it as a different story. And so the design of this becomes partly to know that the scale of analysis, which is the scale of these bioregional territory and then the networks of them. Now we create collaboration across. And what’s beautiful about this scale is that as a relatively autonomous organizing, you know, it’s like a super organism, not exactly it doesn’t quite meet all the criteria. [**inaudible**] then it would be close. It’d be a good first approximation to think with. And so you start to see things like, well, how do you manage a watershed? What is the carrying capacity of your bioregion, which Peter was asking this question back in the seventies and no one had good answers back then. I think we have much better answers now because we have satellite data of net primary production and embodied carbon and amount of available rainfall and how it’s connected to a larger. Like we actually know a lot about the carrying capacity. Unfortunately, we over the carrying capacity decades ago. [**Inaudible] is the low number of [**Inaudible] levels. And this is a predicament, not a problem. What it means is we have to design for these regenerative economies as that collapsed process runs its course. I think this is a really critical thing because a lot of people are afraid of collapse, but they don’t realize that collapse and breakdown is part of emergence. It’s actually essential we understand how it works to design as part of the process. So that’s decomposition, composting and so on.

Morag Gamble:

So collapse is something you talk a lot about. And it’s what you just said is acknowledging that that’s actually part. A necessary part of the process. So how would you describe what it is that we need to do to people who kind of want to take this step forward, but still feel apprehensive because you know, it’s comfortable where they are. They know what’s happening. They know they need to step over there, but just don’t quite have the confidence possibly to make that transition. How would you speak to someone like that to encourage them to take a step across?

Joe Brewer:

I think there are two big pieces that are really important to this. One is that most don’t have social support that make it clear what the steps should be. So we just don’t know what we should do. And I think that’s very common. So to help build these like social bridges of support groups and friends who can show us better ways and help us take simple steps without taking big, risky steps, it’s going to be very important. So that’s where like ecosystem restoration camps, visiting a permaculture project, participating in a community garden or things like this that can be small steps. But in order to do that, there’s other piece, which is we have to let ourselves feel our grief, we have to stop being numb to it. And this is important for a very practical reason. You know, like earlier I named, or I described permaculture as a way of observing and engaging with a context and then acting with care toward it. It’s hard to act with care when you love something and then you watch it being destroyed because that hurts you. It hurts, you feel it, it hurts to stay connected, but it turns out the way we regenerate landscapes is by feeling the life in the landscapes, which means in most cases we feel the death in the landscapes because we begin by feeling what is being destroyed, that we a love. And so the beginning of the process of change is to embrace the grief so that we can become sensitive enough to feel the patterns of life that are still present and work with them. But most of us are so overstimulated and distracted and numb and in pain that we’re not able to feel this much. Embracing grief is sort of paradoxically the first step. We regenerate our ability to feel and to love so that we can attune ourselves to the living systems that we work with.

Morag Gamble:

I think that’s just such a big piece of this, isn’t it? With all of the knowledge that we have, the scientific knowledge in all of this system, it comes back down to that, that deep connection and well, the heart connection and feeling the love. Because like you say, until you love something that deeply and feel so drawn to carry about that you’re not going to be motivated to shift. I mean, I think this is this when you feel broken up about it, when you know. I don’t know if I’d cried so much when the climate rallies were happening and all of that information was just being poured out. And I spent my days researching more and more. I’d been doing this work for decades, but I just decided to just throw myself deeply into exploring collapse. Whereas I’ve been focusing so much on, you know, creating permaculture systems and community gardens and ecovillages, and on that positive side. But I hadn’t, I kind of almost desensitized myself to this collapse that’s happening around because it’s too painful, but I dived into it. I don’t think I’d cried so much for so long and it, I’m not opening up again to it completely, I think, shifted how I decided to enter into this space as well. And so you’re right. It is, it’s definitely about this, you know, it’s not just what we know and how we can speak and communicate it. It’s how we really humanly connect and then relate. It’s the relationship isn’t it. It’s the qualities of the relationships that we have with our place and with one another and our ability to step out, into being fully present in that.

Joe Brewer:

Yeah. And I think this gets nicely to the question, are humans good or bad because one thing humans can do that is different from other animals and there’s the name homo Ludens instead of homo sapiens. Homo Ludens L-U-D-E-N-S. And there’s actually a book called homo Ludens by an anthropologist. And it translates roughly as the hominid that plays and think of it like theater to enact a play. We enact plays, we play out imagine scenarios. What this gives us, and then think of like the role of the shaman in an indigenous culture is it gives us the ability to take perspectives. Like I can take Ayahuasca and become a plant and then connect with the spirit energy of the Jaguar. And I can learn the Jaguar and I can even go and kill someone or a neighboring village as the Jaguar, which happens sometimes in the amazon. So this deep ability to take perspective is also very important for how to cultivate a sacred relationship of care. And so what’s really beautiful about this as we start to be the earth, knowing the earth, caring for the earth, we have, we take our god-like powers and act as though we’re worthy of being gods, which is how we become humbled by the greatness of creation that we’re apart. And we learned to serve it. Without like messing to it. We sort of in the spirit of gratitude, and this is something that is I remember a really a beautiful story once since coming to Colombia. It’s probably the best knowni ndigenous group in Colombia at the moment is the Kogi people. the Kogi people live in Santa Marta. They sent a message. They called the message little brother in the 1990s speaking to all of us. And so they’re one of the better known within, Colombia. And one of the things I learned about after coming here is that if there is violence or conflict in a village near a Kogi village, so the Kogis are fine. They’re just living their lives peacefully. And they find out about a conflict in a nearby village. They begin a ritual. Everyone in their village begins a ritual of purifying their minds so that they don’t have things that might be coveted or desired by someone else. They don’t have insecurity in themselves. They come back to a peaceful place in themselves where they don’t feel like they need anything. And they do this to ward off the temptation of the outside world’s coming to attack them and their practice to do this is to practice gratitude. And it’s really unfortunate that the Spanish word that’s used for this as pagamento which translates into English as payment. Like they’re making payments. Cause really it’s better to call them gift offerings and their gifts of gratitude. What they do is go back and connect with the mother earth and they offer gifts of gratitude. And in doing this, they feel wholesome and complete. And without need, they feel like their needs are taken care of. And this creates a mindset and a real lived expression of peace. They do it by expressing gratitude to what gives them life.

Morag Gamble:

That’s beautiful. And you know, this entering into this way of being in gratitude, but in a gift economy as well. Like I’m just thinking about shifting from where we are now into being in a community in a bioregional context where much of our interactions can be from that place of gifting what we have in our skills is a part of this. I’d like to kind of circle back around to where we were with the youth before because one of the programs that I’m working with a lot is the PERMAyouth and this is a youth led group who are kind of connecting other young people who are exploring. They’re exploring The Systems view of life with Fritjof Capra. And he comes in and he mentors them. He’s, we’re working with Nora Bateson and warm data concepts. And so they’re all becoming sort of warm data hosts and working with them with permaculture. We have groups that are sort of forming up around the world for refugee settlements, to this. And I would love if you would come and speak with the PERMAyouth, they have these monthly festivals. But beyond that permanent youth group itself, if you were to speak to a whole full of teenagers, what would you say to them?

Joe Brewer:

Hmm. I think I’d say to them that I would just say something true. So they’d know that I’m not full of sht. I’d start by saying, the adults are being children and there really aren’t an adult? The world of adults is not full of adults. And we need a world with adults and with elders. And if we’re going to have a world with adults in with elders, then when we need the youth to be adults. And one way that this would be expressed that they could do is to learn how to be humans that are worthy of continuing to exist as part of the earth. I would just say you know, if you are unable to love yourself enough to give yourself to the source of all life that we know in the universe, because we only know of life on this planet at this point in time. If we don’t love ourselves enough to let ourselves have that, then we don’t deserve it. So how can we be worthy of it? How can we deserve it? How do we become responsible enough to serve it and to receive it? And I’ve been really holding the [**inaudible] for a couple of years now on what it means to give a gift and to receive a gift. And what I’ve learned, or one thing I’ve learned is that a gift cannot be given unless it is invited. And a gift cannot be received unless there’s gratitude. And I’m the only one that had this insight. It’s just that I realized that some very practical terms. So I use a practical example. I started this study group earth regenerators because I was writing a book I’ve avoided writing a book for a long time. And finally, one day in mid December of 2019, I’m like, I’m going to write a book. And two weeks later, 60 days later, I’ve written like 14 of the chapters. It’s just like a chapter a day is like, I’ve been putting off writing this so long. It’s like wrote the first half of the book in two weeks. Like, what the? I don’t want to wait a year to publish it. I don’t even have a publisher. I don’t want to feel like I should make money off of it and be known for it because that’s not.. What I’m writing about is regenerating the earth. And I’m taking everyone else’s knowledge that’s been given to me and just repackaging it. I’m a historian while there might be a couple ideas in there that are mine. It’s hard to tell which ones they are. And almost all of it’s not mine. It’s someone else’s. So I’m just filled with so much gratitude to receive all this knowledge. And so it just felt right to create a study group.. Who would like to have a study group to read the manuscript for my book. And as of right now, there are 2,600 members of the study group, and we’ve done quite a lot. We actually started a bioregional investment platform, raised enough money to buy some land, starting nature reserve, and all kinds of other interesting things that are happening. And it all comes out of giving and receiving gifts. So what I would do is I would give away the book chapters, give away my facilitation of learning and all I would say it was at the bottom of like golden had my two book chapters in it and discussion questions. Now just say this it’s freely given in the spirit of a gift economy. If you’d like to support me, here’s my Patrion and here’s my PayPal. But you’re under in no obligation. I give this in service to the year. Now I can say that as a marketing gimmick, but what I found was people invited me to give it simply because they were seeking to find it. And I was grateful to give it. I was actually, a lot of people felt gratitude to me, but from my perspective, I felt deep gratitude that I had some things to give. That in the midst of this terrible time with all of the knowledge I have about it I had something to give. Which validates and affirms my existence and helps me to feel loved. And that’s painful to be as a sensitive person, dealing with all of these things that are in the world. So that there was this reciprocity and then flash forward about eight months when we started a community regenerators training program, we invited anyone in the network who wanted to facilitate the development of the platform to have a free training in the spirit of the gift economy, with the idea that they would receive the training and join a cohort and exchange for being of service to earth, regeneration, to anyone who’s regenerating the earth. And the first day of our gathering first community zoom call, I presented a sacred contract for earth regeneration. And a small number of people were really uncomfortable with the idea of a contract. And we sort of had a conversation that ended without us basically affirming the agreement that was the invitation for them to join. They were unable to receive the gift I was offering as a group. And I reflected on this for a few days. And I was co-facilitating with a guy, Diego from Italy, talked a lot about what was going on. And what I realized was you can’t have a gift economy without a functioning commons, and you need to create the commonts first. So all we did was we started the pro-social training process, which has as one of its pillars, Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons and how to build a comments. So what we did was we facilitated for two months, the formation of a community and social bonds, a shared sense of identity and purpose using a set of different techniques. And then we had a commons and only then could everyone engage in a gift economy? They could freely participate in the creation of a work group of their own making, what other people shared their interests. And they would freely give it joyfully and with gratitude back to the earth regenerators community, because they were supported by the cohort, which was a commons. So to see that people could not actually receive the gift without the ability to receive the gift and someone cannot give the gift without the ability to have it received. And the gratitude has felt on both sides only if there was a functioning commons was visible in that process. It was not visible to me before that process.

Morag Gamble:

It’s really interesting. Yeah. A lot of the work that when I first dived into permaculture work was creating a community garden. And at the time it was really about applying what we’ve learned and creating a garden and thinking about, you know, teaching sustainability. But as it went on, it became so much about exactly what you were just saying about. It’s this place where we have a shared sense of belonging connection and things just started to emerge because people came in there they felt deeply connected to that place, too. They were dreaming into this process that was emerging. It was new, no one had ever done this before in this city, it was this kind of novel, playful, creative space where we were imagining where we wanted to be and how we wanted to do it. And we’re all in service to this place, no one was paid. We had no grants, but yet this unfolding happened. And and a healing happened. Do you know some of the best stories that I share about.. I mean, this started over 25 years ago. Some of the best stories I have are around the healing that took place to, you know, the various individuals, but also what was happening on the land and how people’s lives completely shifted from that into different ways of being, different ways of working, different ways of living in community and thinking about land and housing. And we couldn’t have kind of planned and managed that process without first creating that commons. And then that also ripple down, people were looking at that and saying, Oh, we would love to have one of these in our neighborhood, or when we would travel, we would be attracted to places that were, you know, having those. So that network of these commons became what we created, like the Australian city farms and community gardens network, which wasn’t an organization. It was really simply just this thread of connections. But again, this pointing to that as being one of those seeds of regeneration, I think is a really important thing to do because often we overlook that part of it and we get focused on the actions or the doing rather than the kind of the space, the threads of connection that hold us together. And that sense of, Oh yeah the recommoning. I live in an ecovillage. I’ve been here for about 20 years too in the sense that I don’t own this land and there’s no fences. And that we share this land with all the other species that are here, that we are part of this regeneration of this piece of land here. So the commons I think is a really important seed of regen. What are the other kinds of, cause I know we need to wrap up this conversation really soon. And I’m wondering if we could kind of just bring it back into thinking, well, what are those seeds of the regenerative culture, the pathways that we can kind of identify as being maybe the points that we could see, we could focus more energy on or give more love to.

Joe Brewer:

Yeah, I was thinking of just reading a brief quote of something I wrote, but I was just thinking it fits appropriately here. I wrote this as like a Facebook post, I think a couple of weeks ago and then realized it was sort of profound. I said, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The way we generate the planet and safeguard humanity’s future is to cultivate the conditions for cooperation. We do this at the scale of small functioning groups. Then we weave them together. And this is something that we’re very practically doing. So we now have about 30 self-organized work groups and three generators, and we’re creating more all the time and we’re using the framework called pro-social to do it as I was mentioning earlier. And what’s great about pro-social just to promote it for a moment is pro-social has three like foundational bodies of knowledge and practice connected to it. Elinor Ostrom’s work on managing the commons is one of the pillars, the work of evolutionary studies for how to create conditions of trust and cooperation. So the evolution of trust and cooperation, and the third is contextual behavioral science and a set of techniques called acceptance and commitment therapy, which sort of like the best blend. It’s like what came after a cognitive behavioral therapy as the next better thing. And it’s one of the best established practices in therapy right now and what acceptance and commitment therapy does, which is the piece that we haven’t really talked about so far today is it helps us build up two psychological capacities and thinking of design pathways. These two capacities are foundational. They are the regulation of emotions and psychological flexibility. And it turns out when you scan the public health research on human development and public health outcomes, your success depends entirely on the existence or the absence of these two things. The emotion regulation, and like I get angry, but I manage how I respond instead of just responding impulsively. And you can see all the ways that’s fundamental to cooperation and trust. And the other about psychological flexibility is about not being too judgmental, not being too rigid or dogmatic, being open-minded and creative, engaging in lateral thinking, taking on different perspectives, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like, so there’s this innovative adaptive capacity combined with the ability to manage our emotions. And acceptance and commitment therapy starts with acceptance. We can accept with a mindfulness practice. We can accept when we’re not doing what we feel like we should be doing. We can commit to doing more of what we feel we should be doing. And then we train in that. There are also techniques for doing this, but this is sort of like the secret design pathway for regenerating the earth, because the secret as we cultivate these capacities in ourselves, by practicing them in groups. And as we do this in groups, the groups begin to regenerate the people and they begin to regenerate their places. And then those people, whether they’ve learned it or not start doing ecosystem regeneration and other things, because they observe it as being needed. And so this is it’s so like surprisingly simple.

Morag Gamble:

I also think it’s really interesting too that when you throw in the idea that you’re raising children in that way, how their perceptions are quite different. Because, you know, I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, a city and, you know. Even though it was a kind of an ethical frame, there was still that consumer culture and I’ve had to learn and relearn and unlearn and kind of adapt over. I’m now 51. So it’s a lifelong journey and it’s gonna continue to be a lifelong journey of exploration and deepening and connection. But my kids have grown up in this Ecovillage here. Growing up in commons. Growing up in a gift economy. Growing up with systems perspectives and permaculture ethics. And, you know, I started to talk with them about something. This is kind of leading edge ideas and they’re going, what’s leading edge about it. It just is. And I think this creating the conditions for changing the way that we perceive ourselves and our relationships is, as you’re saying, I think the key. Absolutely the key. And we can raise young people in this way or introduce them into this. So it’s not like they’re going, you know, it’s a cycling right back to that point of drop out of school because if they don’t have to go through the school and university and then eventually afterwards, find out how they’re going to make sense of all of this, the sense-making takes place, right from that very beginning.

Joe Brewer:

Yeah. This might be a good time to share a very important research finding from the field of cultural evolution that’s not widely known. As you know, throughout the history of human studies there’ve been different assumptions about humans being exceptional. Humans are the only ones with intelligence. Oh, wait, dogs are intelligent. Humans are the only ones with language. Oh, wait, whales have whale songs. And it’s a language. And you know, so we have these various things. And as you chip away at anthropocentrism and you say, well, what is left? And they’ve now come to a pretty robust finding that is unlikely to be disproven and it still might, but tHtit seems really robust. And it is humans have the ability for cumulative cultural evolution. which is we can create cultural knowledge and then build on it. And there’s no other animal or plant that we have evidence of that does this. And one thing that this relates to that’s connected to what we were just talking about is another concept from biology called niche construction. The classic example is the beaver that changes the shape of the river by building a dam. It builds. It constructs its niche. So the cultural corollary of that is called social niche construction. And it turns out that humans don’t just inherit genetics. Like I’m born into an English speaking culture. I learn English. So I inherit culture, but we also inherit social niches. So if you were born in New York city, you don’t have to rebuild the subway system. You inherit the built environment with the subway system. So what’s interesting about this is if we design social niches, then the social niches can be inherited and they accumulate. Now what’s interesting about accumulation is cumulation as an iterative process, which means sometimes it’s exponential. So cumulative cultural evolution is why human culture can change faster than human biology. Estimates are about 10,000 times faster. So you can change human culture through cumulative cultural revolution. And the way you do this is by designing and translating social niches. So now why would kids drop out of college or not go because it’s the wrong social niche for the future. They’re going to learn all the things they need to survive and do well in a university environment. The wrong incentives, the wrong directions, the wrong objectives. And then they’re going to come out later and be just as lost and still have to find the social niches. They could have found four years earlier, except during those four years, there’s exponential planetary change. And they’ve lost four years of time to deal with crucial issues that are urgent and they’re at their doorstep and they don’t have that time to waste. And that’s why I tell students to drop out of college.

Morag Gamble:

I think the role too, that there are many of us have been working in this for awhile is to be present and to be available. If young people are choosing a different pathway and not going to college, they still want to learn. So where is it that they can find those ideas that they’re wanting to learn about? Or how do they find the ideas they don’t even know that they want to learn about, but in conversation with people like yourself, that they can actually start to grow. So how can we support younger people more to feel confident and possibly even. So this should be my last question. I know, possibly even the parents, you know, because that’s often we get pushed into a particular pathway of well, this is what you need to do. And you have to almost as a young person to sort of peel off that layer, first. All those expectations and the drive and from that’s coming behind you to push you in a certain direction to say, actually this direction, and then to have us have that, those conditions that can receive them. How can we support that?

Joe Brewer:

I think one of the things that young people really need is they need to know that there is a way to do this and there are places to practice and then they need to lower the barrier to entry to get to those places. So my sort of simple conceptual model for this isn’t quite accurate, but it’s a good start is to combine something like a permaculture camp or an ecosystem restoration gap with something like the folk high schools of Scandinavia together with WWOOFing. So if you think of WWOOFing, but you don’t just volunteer on a project, you actually get trained. And I wrote a paper like just a collection of thoughts about two years ago where I identified 42 thematic elements of bioregional education, just from reading a bunch of stuff. And I just summarize them. And one of them was what I called the passport system. And I had to explain what I meant by that. So instead of getting a college degree, like a passport into professionalism. You get something like badges. Like in social media, you can get badges. You get a badge for learning cob buildings and art and construction. You get a badge for learning group facilitation. You get a badge for learning microorganisms, whatever it is. You know, there are lots of things you can get badges for. But if that’s connected to WWOOFing and connected to real-world long standing regeneration projects that are structured around regenerative economics so that people don’t have to pay to be there. The barriers to entry are lowered and they can have a livelihood that is meaningful and enriching for them to do it. Then they would do it. The one thing that parents can do is encourage kids to explore these things. Another thing that parents can do is make it financially viable for their kids to do it by helping them to like, Oh, you want to go to Rancho Mastatal in Costa Rica, a fricking awesome permaculture camp, or their parents might say, well, I’ll pay for your airline ticket. You know, just whatever it is, those things that make it easier or more possible to do. And in each context, it’s going to be a little different. But I think the gesture of the parents saying I’m investing in you being part of the future that I know you need to be, as the young people are inquiring into, it is huge. It’s just so big. To validate them and say, yeah, you shouldn’t seek the world I was a part of. I grew up in the wrong world and I’m trying to find my way out too. Some of us as parents, we found a way out, but so many parents still haven’t. I think this is really key because we have to break the intergenerational pattern. And one way to do that is to provide social supports and social supports are a kind of niche construction. So they’re doing exactly what I said earlier. It can have calming effects and so on. And so it can change things very quickly.

Morag Gamble:

It’s that it’s the rapid transition that we need. And that what I’m hearing you say is that the rapid transition can take, can happen by fully embracing, being really local and bioregional. It’s this, the multiplicity of those everywhere and the connection of those everywhere. Because a lot of the big picture sort of big ideas about, well, this is going to solve the world’s problems. It’s actually not this one big silver bullet kind of idea, or a few. It’s actually everyon,e everywhere making a shift into this other way of perceiving and being, if I have, I kind of paraphrase that kind of right what you’re saying?

Joe Brewer:

Yeah. And I’ll give a little example that’s probably going to be very familiar to you for from all of the work you’ve done, because you have more experience with it than I do, but it’s something that just happened yesterday. So it’s on my mind. As we have this community reforestation project, that’s owned by an association with 40 members and it’s been going for 12 years and they’re trying to reforest the native tropical drivers to this region. And we’re in an area where there’s this African grass that was brought in for agriculture or for pasture. It’s very aggressive. It kills all of the ground cover. All the bushes. They cannot compete with it. So you can grow trees, but all of the understory, the Spanish bosque all of that dies off and it’s just grass. So we were in this part of the [inaudible] this project and we’re pulling grass. We’re pulling grass in a place where there are some of the little native bushes and shrubs, but they will quickly be choked out by the grass. And we’re at a time of year where the dry season’s about to end the rainy season’s about to start. And right next to it, a lot of these shrubs and bushes sending all their seeds with when to disperse all flying over this area. So if we just pull the grass, chances are good that these bushes are going to out-compete the grass. Cause that’s actually what happened in the area that the seeds are coming from. So here’s the example. You go to this place and you spend an hour pulling grass. Well, what does it mean? It means you’re serving ecological succession to protect and encourage a type of ecosystem that is on the verge of extinction. So you’re not just pulling grass, you have a story and nested levels of a story. That’s simple act of pulling the grass it’s connected to. And so what people need is very simple, very local actions that are nested in stories that actually make sense. And this is a story that someone understands when this tropical dry forest, 78% endemic species, it’s fricking incredible how much only exists here. And it’s 98% deforested and it’s becoming a desert. So like this is a nearly extinct type of ecosystem. And to pull that African grass and help those native bushes to grow is deeply meaningful. We understand the context, but all we’re doing is pulling grass. Yeah. Like it’s so simple. And I think this is what people need is very simple acts and really holistic stories.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. Oh thank you so much for joining me today, Joe, it’s just been an absolute pleasure to have the chance to finally talk. Like I said, it started, you know, we’ve kind of been floating around similar worlds for a long time and it’s just wonderful. Oh, there you are.

Joe Brewer:
We’re very close to the equator. Yeah.

Morag Gamble:

Just kind of the lights just go off, down there. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me. It’s been absolutely wonderful. So where can people find out more about what do, so if I could put some links below, where could they find your book for example to read or where can they find out more about work that you do

Joe Brewer:

The best place would be the Earth Regenerators network, which is on an mobile app called Mighty Networks. And I’ve dropped into the chat right now a link to the preface of my book, which is also on Earth Regenerators so you get them both because the whole book is available for free online. And what I would suggest is join earth regenerators. And we’re structuring a set of social supports for people to make like our design focus of Earth Regenerators is to provide stapling for life transitions. So people can move away from extractive lifestyle to a regenerative lifestyle, and they do this through social support. So we’re trying to create the context in which all this social supports become present. As an example to borrow the beautiful Aboriginal concept of yarning. We have a member of our community who changed the name because it didn’t want to appropriate it. He calls them campfire talks, but it’s more or less the same thing. It’s creating these woven tapestries of people through unstructured conversations hosted regularly. Now this becomes a form of social support for finding ways to make life choices, make life transitions. So we’re setting up really. I say we’re setting up as long emerging dynamically through all of these pro-social groups or these kinds of capacities. And so someone who wants to find out about my work really should try to find out about these community supports more than my work. Because that’s where they find their localized social scaffolding to help them make life choices and to act them out. Just kind to be really important because in the next 10 years, we need a lot more people doing regenerative work tens hundreds of millions of more people.

Morag Gamble:

Thanks, Joe, it’s been just an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today and I look forward to hopefully many more conversations with you over time.

Joe Brewer:

Yes. Thank you so much for reaching out. I’ve been a fan of your work for a while now. So it’s lovely to get to connect.

Morag Gamble:

Take care and have a good evening. Well, thank you for everything that you do. It’s really inspiring and I’d love to connect all the youth programs that I work with with what you’re doing and to sort of explore that with them too. And, you know, maybe create a sort of a campfire kind of concept with them too. That sounds like a perfect place to start.

Joe Brewer:

I think that’s lovely. And it would also be lovely to find ways to invite them to come here to Colombia and work with us on projects. Those who are interested to just start to build relationships.

Morag Gamble:

Excellent. Take care! So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link’s below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PERMACULTURE

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The world needs more permaculture teachers everywhere – local teachers share local ways for one planet living. Let’s work toward a climate-safe future through design, resilience and connection. For you that may be through film and story, kids clubs, workplace education, or hands-in the earth. Whatever the way that moves you to speak up and share, I wholeheartedly encourage.

If that inpsires you, I invite you to join the Permaculture Educators Program with others from 6 continents to explore what that might look like and how you can make the change. This is a comprehensive online course that includes the Permaculture Design Certificate and the only online Permaculture Teacher Certificate anywhere. We are a global learning community. People all over the world encourage you to be the change you want to see in the world.

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JOIN THE GLOBAL PERMAYOUTH – YOUTH FOR YOUTH

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Much love

Morag

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work – the Gubbi Gubbi people. And I pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.

• Podcast Audio: Rhiannon Gamble
• Podcast Music: Kim Kirkman

The post Culture Design with Joe Brewer and Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Sarah and I met as part of Re-Alliance – a global permaculture humanitarian initiative, we are both permaculture teachers, Global Ecovillage Network Ambassadors and members of Permaculture for Refugees.

Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.

Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.

We also have a connection because she is one of the key leaders of a brand new program for youth run by the Global Ecovillage Network Oceania and Asia – which my daughter, Permayouth co-founder, took part in just recently called ReGEN Nations. This is the kind of enabling collaborative ecosystem she designs – others include Re:Source Regeneration Labs with Green Releaf, and the 4 Returns Labs with Commonland.

We also share our activism roots in peace and both work towards whole systems change through education.

Sarah is passionate about transforming the narrative of Disaster Risk Reduction or DRR, into that of Designing for Resilience and Regeneration for communities affected by disasters, displacement, and unsustainable development.

Her passion project, Living Story Landscapes, weaves traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and permaculture using the arts and culture in designing places of remembrance, resilience, and regeneration in climate and conflict vulnerable communities. Sarah is also an artist, using creativity as a pathway for personal and collective transformation. You can learn more about her work via www.soilsoulstory.com

WATCH EPISODE 34 WITH SARAH AND MORAG HERE

Or click here to listen to the Podcast on your chosen streaming service.

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, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation.

Morag:
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.

Morag Gamble:
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:
I’m so happy to introduce you to Sarah Queblatin from Green Releaf in the Philippines in this episode of Sense-making in a Changing World. Sarah and I met as part of Re-Alliance, a global permaculture humanitarian initiative, and we’re both permaculture teachers, global ecovillage network ambassadors and members of permaculture for refugees. We also have a connection because she’s one of the key leaders of a brand new program for youth run by the Global Ecovillage Network Oceania & Asia, which my daughter, Permayouth co-founder took part in just recently. We also share our activism roots in peace and both work towards a whole systems change through education. Sarah is passionate about transforming the narrative of disaster disaster risk reduction or DRR into that of designing for resilience and regeneration for communities affected by disasters, displacement and unsustainable development. Her passion project live in story landscapes. We used together traditional ecological knowledge and permaculture using arts and culture and designing places of resilience, regeneration in climate and conflict, vulnerable community. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Morag Gamble:
Hi everyone. It’s my great pleasure today to welcome to the show Sarah Queblatin who I’ve recently met, and it’s this many connections that we we’ve sort of found ourselves in. Not only is she a permaculture educator in many different ways. She’s also part of the Re-Alliance network, which is a basically a permaculture humanitarian organization working mostly with refugees and internally displaced peoples. She’s also part of the ecovillage network and has been running a training program for youth, which my daughter has been involved in for the last number of months. And so it’s a delight to have you on the show, Sarah and I really wanted to explore the many of the different ways, innovative ways that you’re working with permaculture, particularly in addressing emergency relief and crisis and working towards regeneration and peace, which is kind of a big focus of yours. But maybe we could start right back with where did you come across permaculture? Like what was the door that opened for you for permaculture and what continues to fuel your flame to do this kind of work?

Sarah Queblatin:
Yeah. Hi, Morag. Thank you again for the invitation. As I was sharing with you, it’s a delight to be here. It’s actually an honor because I’ve been following your podcast during the pandemic. It’s been a nourishing ritual to listen to the podcast every Sunday. And so thanks again. And I want to just share that because I know that others might also feel the same way about the podcast. How this started for me actually was it’s funny because when you were asking the question to the image came to my mind was this permaculture magazine I came across at a secondhand book shop years ago. I was probably still in university. It was about natural paints. Art led me to.. I was really wanting to be an artist, but of course, you know, in my world if you want to be an artist, sometimes it’s only often for the privileged people because you have to work more. For me I really wanted to use my creativity. And then because there are so many social issues in the Philippines. So like how can I marry my creativity and working with social change? And so that issue with the arts and natural paints was my first permaculture magazine. And then I read about, wow, this is interesting because I’ve also been interested in working with environment and environmental healing and working. Used to do coastal cleanups prior to that as a young leader as a student. Then later on, I would actually realize it is actually a practice like working with the gardens and healing. And it was when I was working for different fields. I was working in cultural heritage, worked for museum, worked for peace-building and interfaith dialogue, different inter-tribal dialogues. And then I ended up in humanitarian assistance. Primarily because working with art therapy or expressive arts practices because I guess my way of marrying the creativity and into social change was how do we use art to heal others? And so I trained for that. And then I was invited to design some psychosocial modules for a community that was affected by like mass flooding in the south of the Philippines, like overnight, like flash floods just, happening. And it was devastating really. Like people in mud and everything. For me that was such a turning point. My experience I use it for peace building work. I’ve worked with inter-tribal, have chanced upon being able to support the peace process in the Philippines between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and have created like spaces where you’re sort of mutual and working with tribal elders degrade those spaces. So I guess what I’m saying is that from peacebuilding work using the arts, I was able to kind of be drawn to the humanitarian work, to use the arts as well, to heal after disasters. And it gave me this very inspiring drive to like, okay, we can do this. And it is also so massive to see so much devastation and you start thinking how do I weave all my experiences in environmental education, cultural heritage peaces in ways that could heal something that is broken. And many of these places when they’re devastated, there’s a lot of brokenness, right. But what I also saw, many of the solutions we have have also been broken themselves. They’re fragmented. Like if there’s a cluster for food. There’s a cluster for livelihood. There’s a cluster for housing and everything. But they are of course a part of like an integrated design, but there are also, they’re primarily also working independently. And I thought about how can we address brokenness without the same broken system, because the way to heal is really coming from fullness to recover and restore our wholeness. This is where we bring in work, resilience, helping people remember their resilience and capacity to heal and recover. At least from the psychological perspective. When you had experienced loss and damage, our goal is to help them remember that we have something inside us to help bring them, to help us find our wholeness. So from that personal healing, psychological backgrounds, I tried to look at it in from a systems thinking lens. And how do we look at a whole systems approach. Back then I didn’t know about systems thinking. I just, for me, it was just like, I could see the pieces are not together and how can we bring them together? How can we meet them together?

Sarah:
I guess as an artist the way I see the world is maybe just to see the big picture and also how to use to help us imagine something that is not there. Also a time where my mum was diagnosed with cancer. It was such an important turning point in my life that it was.. Here I am working with healing in communities and others and there’s this crisis also for myself. So that was also when I had to look deep within, you know, where’s healing. Where’s the source of healing really, and what is true healing? How can we move from healing to wholeness and how can we find a resilience and also go beyond resilience and go towards regeneration. So that was a time that I was led to my own self healing and went to actually live in an ecovillage cause they used to aspire to learn from ecovillage design education years prior, but never. And it’s like, Oh, this is where I now integrate my permaculture and ecovillage design interest. Back then I started a volunteer initiative called Green Releaf. It was not a nonprofit. It was actually just, you know, how can we restore, address crisis in the country, disasters and emergencies in the country without the same reason that caused the disasters in the first place. Again, back then, I didn’t know about systems thinking. So it’s just common sense. I was standing in front, in a huge row of thousands or hundreds of volunteers packing relief goods for another disaster. And it’s like, wow, these are all plastic, these are all canned goods. [inaudible]. So I wonder how can we design a better way of addressing this disaster? Green Releaf back then was still very young. I gathered people together as.. how can we rethink this? I didn’t even know about circular design before. I had no idea about permaculture. It’s just common sense. And me back then going through this personal crisis myself. So I had to work just to work in integrity of this work, to find my own healing and wholeness. So I moved to an ecovillage. Then I tried to look at how do you actually live it as well as in a way that the holistic approach that I was seeking. How can we live it ourselves in our own way at the same time how can we bring this in communities that are, you know, broken, in disaster. So it took me a while to kind of work with that from self to community. And it’s always like you always go back and forth with the self and community. So it’s a relationship I’m often like looking at. And then there’s also the planetary relationship, of course, where from the bigger perspective, from the global lens. Where my country comes from, it’s like we have like our own 20 typhoons, we have a volcanic eruptions, we have war, we have flooding, we have droughts and everything. It’s like, this is how can we use this holistic approach. We have so many things to face. And so years later I would establish Green Releaf. It was really a journey of finding our voice, finding our calling to do this work. Then through the years also where permaculture has played role with the systemic lens that I have been wondering about. It helped me see the principles and that it does make sense. And then eventually, also trying to look into, because I’ve also worked with indigenous peoples before. Like in the peace pacts, working with cultural heritage or work in the museum and also working for a film festival that honored indigenous values and their work and their plight with environmental restoration. So where I saw as well that permaculture is really also a lot of the indigenous world views and knowing. So how to kind of also recognize that as part of the original permaculture. So when we I established Green Releaf it is really where we brought it all together. The personal work, the healing work in communities from the psychological level. And working with communities, for the resilience in terms of food security and possibly livelihood, if that’s possible in a place. Then it all went down to the garden as the, kind of the container of these things. And so where in communities that are affected. The first thing people need of course, is food security. Looking back to the story of the packaging and so much of the packaging that we are packing, how can we work with food instead, and that, how can we nourish their inner systems, and then at the same time, be able to have that available, being more self-sustaining rather than always dependent on aid. As prior to becoming a nonprofit, we also volunteered with other permaculturist in another typhoon, and then really used that as a first response, like an emergency garden. And while the garden is being prepared, it takes two, three months to harvest something. And we work with the local farms so that they could be the source of nourishing food and seeds for this garden. And so, that kind of like was the initial basis. And in the garden it’s also a space for waste management, because once you segregate waste, you have composting immediately separate the waste from the non-biodegradable. And we’ve seen like IDPs or internal refugees see that actually they can compost and it doesn’t smell. And they have immediately segregated the waste and the plastics, they can sell the bottles they can sell. And so that’s also a space for waste management. But what also nourishes me where I feel like I can still use my creativity and the processes that the garden also becomes a space for healing. And it’s like using placemaking as the garden as refuge for people who need that space to heal from the war from conflict. So when a community that displaced people that we’ve been working with it’s from an islamic city that was sieged by an ISIS affiliated group. They were resettled in one place. And then they really shared how much the garden is in a way for healing for them. And then at the same time, how can it be as a source of income? There’s livelihood there. The IDPs from Marawi that was displaced by the ISIS siege there we wanted to use the garden as well, apart from food, for healing and waste managements. It was also a source of possible livelihoods. So we helped train them with herbal medicines. I mean, making soaps, and we didn’t get to continue because COVID happened and we weren’t going to link them to a spa, a holistic spa. We wanted to source this [herbal] medicinal stuff, but spas also got affected by COVID but the idea is like how permaculture kind of helped us bring all these together. So my inquiry before, how can we bring food livelihood and healing altogether doesn’t have to be separate. It’s became like, that became a canvas or that container to bring them all together.

Sarah Queblatin:
Then the ecovillage approach as well.To actually live it myself and also to engage the idea that we can create a different way of living. We have that power to actually design the way we want to live in a better way. And it has been a meaningful journey for me. And I’ve been involved with the Global Ecovillage Network and have worked with the UN coordination for GEN and and join GEN help bring their story and work for the last for conference of parties, 21 to 24. And it was such an empowering experience because it helped me have the confidence that yes, these low-carbon, zero waste lifestyles that have been modeled by different ecovillages around the world are actually the solutions we are looking at today. And you can see circular economy now being mainstream. You can see renewable energy being mainstream, social enterprise, that these are been things that, people in the movement, people like you and people like many of the permaculture teachers have been living on their own or working at small scale. And so for me from the local going to the global perspective that I’ve been weaving together. Yeah very inspiring for m to be able to experience and share that with others. So yeah.

Morag:
So many things that I want to pick. Every time you got to another point, I was going to pick up on that. So I’ve written down lots of notes here. So maybe we’ll kind of like, sort of start from the latter parts of what you just said and work my way back through some of those comments, because what a story. I mean, that’s quite extraordinary really. And the way that you’re talking about how permaculture has really given you a platform to be able to, there’s kind of like a bowl that all of the bits of the soup can be held within it. It helps to weave the broadened narrative together, I think in terms of creating, you know, every generative approach from all different perspectives, but I wanted to start asking you a little bit more about the relationship between United Nations work and the work of permaculture and ecovillage network. So I’m also an ambassador of the Ecovillage network as well. And part of our work within permaculture too, is to try and find ways, well, actually, let me start that again. We’re currently having lots of conversations, people like Rosemary Morrow and myself, and Eunice, May East about the relationship between the SDGs and permaculture and how it is that we can start to not only deepen the conversations with the United Nations about the role that permaculture can play to embed the SDGs everywhere, but also that people practicing permaculture can understand that the SDGs are also a platform to reach many more people. So your experience and sharing these stories of what projects like the Global Ecovillage Network, how do you feel that voice is heard within the UN and how do you feel that maybe we can be amplifying that more and building a closer relationship between this work cause May East from Gaia Education she said she sees that the SDGs are the framework, but things like permaculture and ecovillages are the pathways. So it’s how you can reach all of those. And that it also with the SDGs, the sustainable development goals. Sorry, I’m using SDGs and I’m realizing people might not know. So SDGs – sustainable development goals. 17 core sustainable development goals that the UN has said is the way forward towards sustainable society or regenerative culture as we’re talking. So the SDGs often get pulled apart. We’ll do this one or we’ll do this one. And this project we’ll make this one. Whereas I think a little bit like what you’re saying with permaculture holds all the threads of the work that you’ve done. And same for me too. The permaculture also is kind of can hold all of those different SDGs together and provide holistic response. So my question really coming back around to that is what’s your experience in the United nations conversations? Have you seen how receptive are people to concepts like permaculture and ecovillages and how do you think we can amplify those conversations more?

Sarah:
Wow. Yeah. This is a really good question. First, I’d like to thank people who really have the confidence to prepare a lot of these conversations in that platform. And for me, I was coming from my country vulnerable [inaudible] And for me, I was more coming from that perspective first person, foremost and always. So much talk and there’s so much plans, but then how can we really meet the grassroots and how can we really see how they deal with this. If this is going to happen again how are they gonna recover again? And that’s always a question we get asked, like when we’re in the field, it’s like, this is going to happen again. And then the projections show this going to happen again, it’s going to be much stronger, more intense. So for me from that lens seeing the different agreements and pathways and goals, from a systems thinking lens where we permaculture practitioners, I’m not, I don’t see myself as an expert, but permaculture practitioners and educators, there’s a lot about being able to adapt our solutions to meet a context or a design. So, yeah, I see that I agree with you, like where you’re saying that it’s the pathways to get there. This is where our solutions are. And for me, it’s also about trying to adapt to the language and being able to try and see where both worlds can meet. So meeting the goals are one of them that it can be. And showing proof of concept, that this is actually SDG. And I think where the movements, I guess, that we would say the regenerative, the regenerative approach, where ecovillage ,permaculture and many other solutions can fall in they offer the perspective where we go beyond sustainable to regenerative, right? And it can be regenerative development and goals, but the word development as well in a way flawed itself, coming from the global South, the word development it’s the history of development. We have to unpack that as well. And we learned that of course, as well in the EDE design education links, how we’ve designed developments in general. How do we restore the connection to a more nature-based, deep ecology approach where the indicators to design have been separate from that, and the indicators have often been more focused on monetary GDP related, goals. So where we have showcased and showed that it’s doable, being able to highlight the stories underground and be able to use well for me also to use that voice, to be able to give attention to what’s being done underground. I think that was important because where we are there in those spaces our role is to amplify and show that this works and that they’d be able to have a seat at the table. I mean, of course we’re still civil society. We don’t know where we stand in general or influence, but I know COSIA’s done really good work to kind of bring in our initiatives with governments and its always been a good pathway because I think there’s also this perspective that the movement is separate. We’re always like trying to design our own communities, our own way and everything, but we also want to be able to work together with the different sectors government and businesses and other civil society groups. So I think where the movement or the work comes in is to help adapt to the context and be able to use that. I don’t know exactly what to share because there’s so much evidence already and proof of concept that we were able to share that it is, it is doable. It is also adaptive enough because because of climate change, there’s so much changes. So the design itself is how to adapt to these changes and to show that it’s scalable. Right now we have to scale as much because there’s so much carbon to capture there’s so much internal migration displacement, global refugees situations, we have to scale fast. But to scale meaningfully as well. This is where I think the regenerative movement always wants to highlight. We have to go beyond sustainable work, it has to be long-term hollistic. There’s also the emphasis of leap scaling where you’re deepening relationships, changing the paradigm, the culture of change in general, because yeah, like I said, the word development has its historical issues. And now we’re seeing a lot of it mainstream. Now you have the well-being economy, you have governments like New Zealand or Iceland. They’re trying to really shift in your votes, [inaudible] the way we measure.

Morag Gamble:
Aren’t those metrics always so fraught because they direct where support for projects though. They direct where policies are made there so the metrics completely need to change. I totally agree with you. And I also want to sort of ask you to maybe expand a little bit on what you’re talking about with development and rethinking, particularly from your perspective of working with the indigenous communities of your country and looking at the impact that unsustainable development has had on them and now climate change and how maybe something like the permaculture movement and the ecovillage movement can be supporting and working with those communities to amplify their voice. Like where do you see that in? Where do you see the sort of edge there?

Sarah:
Yeah. I’m trying to recall an experience where I actually asked this question with an indigenous woman andfor them development is different the way we see it. I guess there’s also this article I remember now from Charles Eisenstein about how we reframe development. I’m trying to remember the title but how we measure and experience change or progress, it’s really, depending on the context of the place and how their world view is, and that’s really important. And then also where we come as development workers or change makers like some humility or ultimately humility because they have so much to teach us. And one story I always carry with me when I was joining the climate talks is that there are so much energy we make to fly, to talk, to make plans and targets and agreements but in the past I’ve worked with shamans and I mean, I’ve had the privilege to work with them. I didn’t plan. So we just accidentally, beautifully, accidentally, chance to listen to them, to their stories and being able to support ways to bring their stories in the mainstream. I’ve seen them ask for the sky to to stop raining and for the sun to come out. And for me, how much energy we create to make the sun shine or stop the rain compared to how they would come from a very deep state of reverence and respect and prayer. That is the edge that I’ve worked with where I’ve seen that and I’m also in a room full of ministers or change makers and leaders and I see like, Oh, this is my senator from my country she’s speaking. And then, but there’s also like this elder that people wouldn’t know by name, but they just need a sky to open up for the sun in the middle of the storm. I don’t exactly how to answer your question, but just to be able to be in both worlds, I guess for me, I’m not saying one is perfect. I’m just saying, it’s like, how do we weave this world where we can have the rational sort of agreements are needed and shape and need to have all these proof of an evidence of metrics, but there’s also these relational work that we have to remember, our connection to the earth. And now it’s also being mainstreamed. You have science saying, you have to reconnect with nature. Biomimicry is there as well as a way to kind of bring those together. And so I think our work is in a regenerative way of being and doing is to help weave that and to help people remember that because it’s not something new, it’s something that we just need to reclaim and remember.

Morag:
Those words that you mentioned right at the start of your conversation earlier was around that, about remembering and imagining and possibly re-imagining and sort of deepening into that relational process. So from a really practical sense, I wonder how have you seen permaculture being of value to possibly give strength to the indigenous voice and to actually help to remember for some people, or to give value to those approaches. You’ve talked about traditional ecological culture. This kind of cultural heritage and the depth of culture that you have in community, that where the permaculture is able to strengthen that. It’s not sort of saying what can permaculture do to help them? It’s like, how can permaculture be informed by that? Or how can permaculture be in support of those communities? So have you seen some kind of examples of that happening, or have a perspective on how permaculture can learn, the global permaculture community can learn from indigenous cultures in your part of the world?

Sarah:
Yeah. There’s so much. I think for many of the people who practice permaculture in their countries who are working with the first nations. And yeah, one story I always remember about how a systems view of working where permaculture is one of the ways to do that is that using the metaphor of the tree and where the tree, you know, the deeper the roots have more resilience to the changes that happen outside with the strong winds and everything. And for me, that’s where working with indigenous knowledge and wisdom can come in. This became important to me because we were working with women affected by Typhoon Haiyan and we engaged them with a university to kind of help us look into where they could restore their ecosystems and protect them for further disasters. One of their questions to the professor was like if you want us to plan trees, cause we were looking at the livelihood program for restoring their ecosystem, and it’s a way for them to make a living as well. If we were to plant trees, we’re worried because after the typhoon all the trees have damaged everything. And so the answer to that was of course in permaculture, it’s the right zoning where you plant, what kinds of species you’ve plant, the most indigenous or local species to plant because it’s more resilient, it knows the ecosystem. Then you have to plant with deep roots. And it made me recall how much.. we have a lot of knowing already that has been passed on over time. That is something that we have forgotten and we have to reclaim to withstand the disasters that are happening. That root metaphor with systems, it’s going deep to the local knowledge and ecological experience. So what is the history of this land? What are the species in this land, what were the local biodiversity of this place. So like this passion project, I’m doing, it’s called Living Story Landscapes. How do we help support the community to document their own biodiversity. The edible, medicinal food so that they could continue growing that because indigenous communities in the Philippines, some of them are already like converting a lot of their land to GMO corn where we are working with. We were invited to an indigenous community after a disaster. And we thought it was just really working with, you know, just permaculture. How do we show them to use this demonstration site in an agricultural school to help them look into addressing the future disasters. And, we found out this village has been actually converting all their, a lot of their forests, their coffee, old mature coffee trees into GMO corn and they’re spraying glyphosate everywhere. It’s also sad because these are indigenous peoples themselves so who have this deep knowing in origin. They still have their granaries where they store rice, they still have rituals, their harvest. So we’re working with this. Of course, there’s the economic need that was the driver for that conversion, but how do we help support the remembering of what you already know and what you’ve so much to share with us?

Morag:
I wonder there, what are the forces at play that are making them go towards that? Are there subsidies in place? Is that the agricultural policy of the country? What is the push that’s actually shifting them in that direction?

Morag:
Definitely economic driver and also of course, the external factors where agro-industrial plants, the private sector or working with the government also I don’t want not disclose the names, but it’s very heartbreaking to see that, because these are, of course for an agro-industrial orientation, you have the corn for feeeds or livestock, and this it is not corn for eating. It’s really for feeds but you have all these villages.. We heard from one government agency that there’s a village effected by the water. They’re having kidney problems. Bwecause of the economic drive, it could also be unsustainable development targets. So prior to this they were really aiming for a massive coffee program for this place. They built roads, there are millions of funds, loans from the government. But because there was a failure in social engagements, there was competition in prices, prices dropped and our price became challenges. There was competition and all these things. And eventually the industry kind of degraded over time. I don’t know what the right term for – industry’s failing, I guess. So people started shifting to more easy income and someone introduced these corn, the roundup, the spitfire, these chemicals that are damaging the ecosystems. But what we’re trying to work here is how do we help them remember and give value to that? Because even us we’re not indigenous we’ve played a role in that who have promoted that kind of commercialization because we do in our consumption, make that demand for thatthe livestock to be fed in all these things. So it’s also our role to look at that. But working with their indigenous knowledge, working with their culture and traditions, helping document that, and now what we’re trying to do is help model this place to help work with the governments, the provincial coffee council of the province to help look into agro-ecology and agroforestry in indigenous trees, in farms where coffee can have more value. So they want the whole…to participate in that. So to help and also engage. I don’t like the word empower because we are trying to say that the power is outside in empowering indigenous peoples, but being able to support them in the right, enabling conditions that their leadership would shine and their representation in the table with the governments. Is there sort of being working on that so that they themselves have input on these design plans? So.. I don’t know if I answered it.

Morag:
No, no, you did it, you did as well. And I wanted to ask as well, how long has it been, you sort of mapped a bit of a, a story of there being sort of the GMO seeds. And before that there was, like big investment to have export of coffee. What was before that? And when was that point where things started to really shift and that big investment started to disrupt possibly traditional patterns and traditional ways of growing? Like how long are we talking here?

Sarah:
I remember, I think it was the 60s because this is where also a lot of the former dictators called for agricultural drive for development in the country that started. Many of the practices of course also inherited from American way of agriculture. We adopted a lot of these. I think in these communities, however they’ve been having their own traditional way of growing food. And I guess over time where development wanted to tap because this place is growing a lot of coffee. It was the first coffee-processing village of that province. And it also kind of one of the contributors to the brand, the taste of that coffee. And so many, I guess, development solutions were invested in that. But because of the design, the development approach. There was also like government when government partner was sharing that, you know, I think we failed supporting the organizing of the community cooperatives because a lot of the breakdown also came from there, a lot of mistrust. So much money was for poured in to these cooperatives and they didn’t have skills to manage such money. We had so much mistrust the project also failed because the solutions tha like how a regenerative approach would be about is working with conflict, working with regenerative leadership, how people can build trust within their sector, across sectors, in governments, in businesses, and how do we design together? So in the same village, we’ve been like prototyping, how do we create a five-year ecovillage regenerative development plan, but we did it one year. Often people plan fast. Sometimes development people are just coming from pulling numbers or pulling targets from just, Oh, I researched this and this but when you’re like really listening to the community and you’re meeting them where they are. And also trying to create this space where their voices are heard and then bringing their right government agencies, our partners to meet with them and did, they could listen to each other and they can plan together. So we came up with this five-year plan. We have an agreement with the local city government and agency partners. And now we’re preparing to meet to work with regenerative businesses. Because there is a market for them, but we put the regenerative businesses last because it’s hard to find regenerative businesses. Second is we didn’t want the business economic matters to be the main driver at the start, because that was the first thing that failed them in different space. And so we had to create trust first and build it.

Morag:
So what does the ecovillage concept look like in the Philippines? You’ve mentioned a couple of different ecovillages, one that you’re living in and then also talking about the ecovillage concept as a regenerative design plan that people engage with to transform to be part of that transition process from unsustainable development to a new way forward. So how are people responding to this concept of ecovillages and what are the different, how would you, how would you characterize ecovillages in your country?

Sarah:
Yeah, it’s very tricky to use ecovillage here because the popular ecovillage perspective is often the ecotourism, you know, you have this natural homes and because we’re tourist destination. So people like use ecovillage as that, like bamboo homes it’s an eco village, it’s an eco resort or so. We also working to reframe that to use the word regenerative development in general or regenerative solutions because it’s broad enough. People don’t understand permaculture in general as a mainstream concept, but we’re trying to capture the idea that there’s already existing practices in a place that have their own regenarative solutions. The core of as we know in the core of ecovillage designs it’s a process of designing together. So it’s more of being able to create the way to design together and enable that whether it’s working with starting with empathic listening and learning the skills to do that, and being able to kind of highlight also what’s already being done in the place and being able to support the different sectors as well, so that they could, at some point meet and dialogue together, it’s an ongoing process.

Morag:
And I’m wondering too, whether, Oh, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to ask you that there’s part of what you were talking about earlier too, was going into places that had been devastated by typhoons or by massive flooding and mudslides, but part of the building back of those communities. There’s different stages of that. So there’s the crisis relief right? At the very beginning. And that being kind of immediate by how do you even get started with that, but then there’s this longer-term process. So are you getting much traction really when you’re working with say governments, or people who are supporting this building back to take on this regenerative approach, how has that, how are you finding that?

Sarah:
So one thing that I’ve discovered last year is that what we’re doing is we’re called the informal aid sector. And so we’re not like the red cross, we’re not, you know? And so that actually more sense to me. And where I stand what we’ve been modeling, it’s a bit challenging to scale in the humanitarian context. Here locally, we’re small, we’re a bit small. I think it’s only starting. Many of the people are like people like Re-aliance, amazing group there. [inaudible] And it’s just really amazing that it’s already starting to mainstream. So for us, we’re still like taking it slow here locally. But what we saw be able to find our niche as informal aid is that apart from, of course the garden gardens in disaster areas are in the refugee camps or evacuation centers or settlements is that recognizing that there’s so much already informal aid being done, but using a systems thinking approach is helping bring them together so that they could cross pollinate and learn from each other and have more collective impact together. So last year we learned this because we were still like in the last year for prototyping of the garden relief. And there was this volcanic eruption. We were like, we can’t go to this place. We’re going to run a PDC. We actually were preparing to run a PDC together with our partners, grassroots leaders who are the displaced and indigenous people affected by typhoon. So we couldn’t go to that place. But what we realize is like using, regenerative design, we use theory, you used our local way of also Filipino way of bayanihan, our spirit of collaboration in the country. We brought like the breastfeeding groups together, the mental health groups, the community kitchens. We have organic farmers. We created a space where we could like listen to each other and look at their ideas and then look into how do we work together rather than separate. And so, like, what if the waste management person can work with the food community kitchen. It can be a livelihood after people are about to get back to their place or how can the breastfeeding groups be able to work with the mental health groups because mothers, and then how can the mappers, the open street map that who joined us work with, how do we map where the initiatives are? Because apparently a lot of the aid ends up in many of the places that are concentrated, but there are other places that don’t receive aid. So what I realized is that our role is that is to use our permaculture skills, design skills, the work of enabling, designing, helping people remember their capacity to lead and then being able to have the confidence to lead together with others and have more collective impact better impact if they were together rather than if they were working separately. So for me, that’s how currently we’re designing locally because we’re still small. We couldn’t do like bigger work in the system. We did work with humanitarian organizations underground. We work with CRS and food program in the displaced resettlement, but it was always having to align with their programs, more like food security alone and so after that’s done, they leave. We didn’t have so much freedom to go further into other collaborations? No, but that’s only our mandates so we can’t go beyond. So this was also our dilemma. And so we try to, where can we best contribute this way? So now we’re now preparing to scale that methodology so that when another disaster hits so many of the responders so much aid reliever, actually, I guess, immune to aid because it’s always like, Oh, another eruption, another typhoon. So how do we bring that deep scaling as well, where we build relationships across the people helping. And so right now, while last year after the volcanic eruption, COVID happened so we couldn’t continue the volcanic eruption action plans. But when COVID happened, people started exchanging ideas too and started to kind of cross-pollinate organically even if without a workshop or anything. So I think this is also in the work of the regeneration. We create the place, we designed the container, we designed the system, but it just naturally, [inaudible] like the way living systems work.

Morag:
It sounds so amazing. And it’s the way forward, isn’t it. It’s building that resilience and the ability for it to keep self-replicating. It’s not getting bigger and bigger and bigger when you’re talking about scaling, it’s really about, replicating so that it’s contextualized here and here, and it’s sort of the network is scaled, but the projects stay contextualized. And I wonder, like, where do you, where are you finding support for this kind of work? Do you have a relationship with the government or an agency, or is it community support? How do you, how do you get this started? Because I know many people who are listening, thinking, this is brilliant. This is exactly what we need in our community to help address the multiple crisis that we’re facing and help to create a shift of perception and greater levels of integration and community driven programs. How do you make it work?

Sarah:
Yeah, I think good question. It makes me reflect too. Well of course it was also very meaningful to have support. We have like Lush is very generous to have given us funding to start organization, that also help enable us. There’s also building trust, across partners, civil society, movements. I think social media helps a lot when you’re like, just really being able to tell your story and people are like I wanna help, I’m going to join. Being able to learn to ask for help, which is something that I need to learn. I continue to learn and unlearn. It’s really just being able to ask for help because we can’t do this alone. And this was also a learning last year the regenerative aid with the volcanic eruption because we can’t be there all the time. We can’t do all disaster response. This is, I think this is, we will burn out if it were, we were always like hopping around from one place to another. And that we were not also strong enough. We are a small organization. But what we had was the skills to network the way and the skills to bring people together, to design together and using those skills, being able to know our strength is also key and to know, okay, this is where we need help. And this is where you come in and this is where we can work together. Keeping the vision alive. And the purpose alive is also important because I guess if that’s the driver of the you know how to bring people together it needs to be constantly fueled and constantly nourished and nurturing. So yeah..

Morag:
With the work that I do too with ethos and the work with Re-Aliance, it is a lot like you’re saying, it’s about sharing the story. It’s about sharing story through various networks and building collaborations with different organizations. And we start to look out for each other and build that trust and relationship because we realized that we’re all kind of working in the same direction. And it’s interesting, it’s a different approach, isn’t it? And it’s very much a relational approach. It’s very much about trust building and it’s just phenomenal what you’re able to do. And I love this informal aid sector and it’s sort of permaculture, kind of eco humanitarianism, or I don’t know what the words are for. This is kind of a whole new world, but it’s, you know, sadly it’s the kind of skills that we’re needing more and more and more. And I wonder if people wanted to find out more about what you do and how you do it. Do you have like a website that people can go to, to find out this information or some videos that show into some of the work that you do? How can people find out more about your work, Sarah?

Sarah:
Yeah, we have a website. We changed the word relief into leaf with a leaf, like from the plants. And it was never meant to be an organization. So we didn’t really think, I didn’t really take it seriously back then. And now people think we’re a weed growing organization So yeah it’s greenreleaf.org. Also I am trying to define my own voice because of course when you create an organization, you find also you kind of attach your identity to that. I’m also like needing to go back to my creative path and working with ecotherapy and healing. And so I’m also creating a platform called Soil Soul Story, but I’m hoping to launch it at some point, but it’s also where.. I no longer live in an ecovillage but my mom left me this land that I work on and it has been my own grief work and also healing work for myself. So I’m also like preparing to do some to remember my creative path, I’m working with healing and giving to the earth and the ecology practice. Doing work that reconnects and in working with indigenous wisdom that I’ve learned over time and hope to kind of give back to them, the elders that I have been learning from. So this is something that I’m happy to share at some point Soil Soul Story. I don’t have a platform yet for that but I am ready to launch.

Morag:
Well I’ll put down the links below, so whatever you send me in terms of links, we’ll make sure we put them down below. And if you have any maybe photographs too, of some of your work, we could include that in a blog. So people can kind of see what, what are these first response gardens look like, or, you know, some of the work that you’re doing that would be just fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today, Sarah. There is so much more, I want to ask you, but I kind of feel maybe we need to do a part two, because like I said before, what you’re doing is something that the world needs so much now, and I’m so delighted to be, to have had the chance to chat with you here and also to be in constant contact with you through through ReGEN and through Re-Alliance and being part of this global network of people who are really looking for the regenerative way forward and remembering, but also like you’re saying healing. I think there’s a lot of.. there’s so much trauma in the world and planetary trauma, personal trauma, and that healing work is really possibly one of the biggest challenges and biggest tasks that we have is personal and planetary healing for wellbeing. So thank you again, Sarah. It’s lovely to have you on the show.

Sarah:
Thanks Morag. And again, it’s not only my work and when you say my work is this and that, but it’s a lot of people behind this work, a lot of teachers and people I learn from. And so I wanna acknowledge it as well.

Morag:
Thank you for doing that, yes. Alright. Take care. So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link’s below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PERMACULTURE

Join me to learn more about permaculture. Come and explore the many free permaculture resources my Our Permaculture Life Youtube channel and subscribe to this blog below.

The world needs more permaculture teachers everywhere – local teachers share local ways for one planet living. Let’s work toward a climate-safe future through design, resilience and connection. For you that may be through film and story, kids clubs, workplace education, or hands-in the earth. Whatever the way that moves you to speak up and share, I wholeheartedly encourage.

If that inpsires you, I invite you to join the Permaculture Educators Program with others from 6 continents to explore what that might look like and how you can make the change. This is a comprehensive online course that includes the Permaculture Design Certificate and the only online Permaculture Teacher Certificate anywhere. We are a global learning community. People all over the world encourage you to be the change you want to see in the world.

PERMACULTURE FOR REFUGEES

We support free permaculture education for people in refugee camps. Help by donating to Ethos Foundation– our registered charity.

JOIN THE GLOBAL PERMAYOUTH – YOUTH FOR YOUTH

And we invite young people to join the Global Permayouth Festivals each month which Cate is joining in April – hooray!

LEARNING TO GROW A GARDEN?

If your main interest is getting a thriving and abundant food garden set up, then take a look at my online permaculture gardening course: The Incredible Edible Garden.

Much love

Morag

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work – the Gubbi Gubbi people. And I pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.

• Podcast Audio: Rhiannon Gamble
• Podcast Music: Kim Kirkman

The post Episode 34: Design for Resilience and Regeneration with Sarah Queblatin and Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Good question, and one I had not thought to ask before I met Panut Hadisiswoyo and his colleague Nayla from the Orangutan Information Centre in Nth Sumatra a couple of days ago.

Maia, Me, Panut and Nayla from the Orangutan Information Centre

I had the pleasure of interviewing Panut (recorded on August 17, 2019) at my home in the permaculture village. Panut is a quietly spoken and humble man, who is currently travelling around Australia with his 2 children (13yo & 9yo) to share the story of their orangutan protection work and permaculture farm.

World renown orangutan conservationist runs a 100ha permaculture farm in North Sumartra.

Panut is a world renown conservationist and recipient of many prestigious awards recognising his pioneering work as founder of the Orangutan Information Centre – including National Geographic’s Emerging Explorer Award, UK’s Whitley Award, Ashoka Fellowship Award, the World Wildlife Fund’s Russell E. Train Education for Nature Award, and the UN GRASP’s Ian Redmond Conservation Award. Panut’s work is also supported by Lush.

Introducing Founding Director of Orangutan Information Centre, Panut Hadisiswoyo in our recorded conversation.

In this conversation (click below) Panut shares the interconnectedness between permaculture, saving forests, protecting waterways, saving keystone species and creating sustainable livelihoods, nature connectedness and human well-being.

Permaculture Education Institute and the Ethos Foundation host a free community talk exploring how permaculture helps save orangutans

We hosted Panut and Nayla of the Orangutan Information Centre (OIC) for 2 days – offering community meals, accommodation, a tour and ecovillage experience in exchange for a presentation to the local community. (I love these rich, money-free exchanges!). He gave an amazing talk – the founder of Crystal Waters, Bob Sample, said this was one of the most inspiring ever given by a visitor to Crystal Waters.

Introduces orangutan conservationist, Panut Hadisiswoyo at  the Crystal Waters event.

Orangutan Information Centre

The Orangutan Information Centre is based in North Sumatra, in and around the Leuser Ecosystem. Panut and his team have been working there for 20 years. They have helped to regenerate 2000ha of forest, ripple permaculture to over 1000 villages, start a full time nature and permaculture school for local children, create a permaculture field school for farmers, rescue and relocate hundred of orangutans. They have not only helped to stop forest clearing, but have actively removed illegal plantations of palm oil and replanted with natural forest again – already these are being re-inhabited by wildlife.

Permaculture Demonstration Farm

Panut has launched a 100ha permaculture farm to demonstrate a different way of farming, a more nature-connected, diverse, sustainable, soil-building, health-giving, educational, wildlife-friendly place to be. Their students are sharing the results that ecological farming/permaculture is actually more profitable and sustainable for them on their little farms (average size 1-2ha).

The introduction of permaculture approaches into local communities has helped to re-invigorate more traditional approaches to farming – agroforestry approaches with a big focus on diverse tree crops in permanent, multi-layered food systems.

This new permaculture farm and education centre has been supported by Lush and they are also exploring the production of organic plants for essential oil production – such as lemongrass, patchouli, ylang ylang and vanilla. This is a great partnership for local farmers that can really help them move out of plantations to polycultures, from chemical farming to organic.

Nayla loved meeting our chooks and exploring our permaculture garden.

Positive practical story of action to stop extinction and contribute to soil, habitat and climate restoration

Panut’s is such a positive story of vision, dedication, love and determination. I hope you enjoy listening, and are inspired to support their work, help your local community and environment, and be really conscious of not buying products that contribute to forest destruction.

Nayla was born into a palm oil family, and was a teacher. She fell in love with the orangutan, left her teaching job and is dedicated to helping them, their forests, and helping others to appreciate and love them too.

Panut and Nayla joined a tree planting day at Crystal Waters with local families.

I am so delighted to be sharing their amazing stories with you. They are doing incredible work for the planet, for the community, for wildlife.

Hugh, our 11yo son, was so inspired by their visit. “When are we going over to work with them?” he asked as soon as they left! We are discussing creating an in-situ course – permaculture and ecosystem regeneration – with OIC.

THINGS TO DO

1. CHANGE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE: Sign up to Ecosia – it’s free. Instead of using Google, Firefox etc, use Ecosia and you will help support projects like the Orangutan Information Centre.  Make a positive difference every time you search. My daughter has supported planting 500 trees in a coupld of months. Nayla’s film from Ecosia is above.
2. DON’T BUY PALM OIL: Avoid products with palm oil – particularly non-sustainable palm oil. Here’s one source of palm oil free products
3. DONATE: Please support the Orangutan Information Centre
4. LEARN: Become a Permaculture teacher and ambassador at the Permaculture Education Institute. I’ll guide you through a comprehensive online course to receive both your Permaculture Design Certificate and Permaculture Teacher Certificate.
5. GARDEN AND COOK: Grow as much local food as you can and cook from scratch to avoid palm oil and other destructive ingredients. If you need help to get your thriving diverse edible garden going, join my permaculture gardening course – The Incredible Edible Garden
6. SUPPORT: Become my Patreon to support me to continue making films for the Our Permaculture Life channel

The post Permaculture Helps Save Orangutans appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Merry Christmas and my very best wishes to you all.

It has been an exciting year for us and I am so delighted that so many of you have joined me from around the world on the new Permaculture Education Institute online permaculture program.

Thank you

Now we are in East Africa until the end of the year supporting local permaculture teachers and permaculture programs for women and children in need.  Thank you so much for your generous donations to support these programs.

Best wishes for 2019

When I get access to more constant internet, I can’t wait to share with you so many stories, conversations and project updates.

I look forward to chatting with you all in the new year.

Once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Merry Christmas and our very best wishes for 2019.

With Love,

Morag and all the team at Permaculture Education Institute, Our Permaculture Life and Ethos Foundation

xox

In East Africa. Photo by my 10yo son

Maia and Hugh at the children’s home

with Madinah (farmer educator) and Sakina (Congolese refugee)

wtih Jenipher – who makes and gives free washable sanitary kits to vulnerable girls in western Kenya, and teaches them about looking after themselves. Now she is going to share permaculture gardens in the schools and neighbourhoods too. We have been supporting Jenipher throughout this year with the Gofundme campaign and recently to attend the PDC in Uganda. I go to her home tomorrow.

My crazy travel companions on this trip… seriously though. They have been amazing and now they are permaculture graduates having taken a course with people from Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Liberia. Very proud of them.

Mary and Maia made their own games!

with Florence who was so kind to me at the school helping me to find water and food. Thank you Flo!

Maia making a mud oven with Arafat

Jenipher is also a seamstress and is measuring Maia for a handmade dress.

Maia and Hugh with their new friends, Arafat, Anthony, Hassan, Faith and Joan at the children’s home

One of the school cows.

Hugh and Arafat loved harvesting fruits all around the school permaculture garden.

The post Merry Christmas from East Africa appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Morag on ABC Radio today

This morning I had a great chat with Annie Gaffney , morning show host of ABC Radio, about our forthcoming journey to Uganda and Kenya. My daughter (12yo) and eldest son (10yo) are travelling with me. Annie and I chat about why we are going to East Africa, who we are working with, what we are doing there, and why I am asking for your help.

Here’s the 10 minute interview with Annie on ABC Sunshine Coast morning show. Please take a listen and share this blog.  Could you help us spread the word so we can reach our goal of $10,000?

Permaculture fun(d)raising tally

I have a big goal of raising $10K to take with us to give directly. 100% goes to local people doing local projects for local benefit. These are permaculture gardens and teacher trainings for schools and women’s self-help communities.

Fun(d)raising goal = $10k

Total raised so far = $845

Ethos Foundation – our registered permaculture charity

You can find out more about the programs we are volunteering with on the Ethos Foundation Website: https://ethosfoundation.org.au, and also at https://kwaya.org/permaculture. We have partnered with Kwaya Australia, a registered charity working directly with the African Children’s Choir, because we are going to be helping them to design an edible food garden on their half acre primary school site.

I have recently relaunched the Ethos Foundation. Previously I ran, a registered charity, that works in partnership with the Permaculture Education Institute. Ethos Foundation is run as a donation-based organisation – from community to community.  Ethos directly supports the the permaculture education programs we are volunteering with around the world, and offers scholarship places to enable local leaders to attend permaculture teacher courses . The funds that Ethos collects and distributes are used 100% for the local projects and people. We cover our own expenses and volunteer our time – this is our permaculture community service work – fair share!

A little Youtube Clip about the trip

Here is the little film that Maia and I made last week.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far. Today are shout outs for …

• Annie Gaffney of ABC Radio who welcomed me onto her morning show today
• Frances Michaels of Green Harvest who has just offered donated seeds
• Amanda Hogg has donated the use of her house, her time and music for the fun(d)raising House Concert on 18 November – please come along!
• Hayden Hack, Jacinta Foale and Emma who have agreed to play at Jambo! Africa House Concert – it is going to be amazing.
• Thanks too to everyone who has donated to the fund. I am grateful for any amount you can contribute.

Thanks everyone!!

The post Permaculture Fun(d)raising for Food Gardens appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Traditionally, Timorese people lived the kind of life that permaculture is describing. However with colonisation, the Green Revolution and political upheaval, Timor Leste was devastated. The renewal programs focus on creating sustainable food systems and ensuring that children have not only the understanding, but know the value of sustainable agriculture.

Leading many of these programs of renewal is Ego. The conversation in this clip was recorded at the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in Canberra in April 2018.

Who is Ego Lemos?

This is Ego’s bio from the conference (impressive!!)

Ego Lemos works as the National Adviser on Curriculum Development for Basic Education on Arts & Culture and Permaculture School Gardens, for the Ministry of Education of Timor-Leste. He is also a lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture and Public Arts & Culture at the University of Timor-Leste. He has received several international awards for his national contribution to music, art & culture and community development.

Ego is the founder-coordinator of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and Organic Agriculture Movement in Timor-Leste. He is also the founder-coordinator of Permaculture Timor-Leste (PERMATIL). Also founder of PERMASCOUT and PERMA-YOUTH movements.

He co-authored ‘Permaculture Gardens for Kids’ produced by PERMATIL, and ‘A Tropical Permaculture Guidebook’. (NOTE: You can freely download all of the chapters of the International edition that are complete – but please donate generously if you can)

He is sole author of the ‘Training Manual for Agro-biodiversity in Timor-Leste (GIZ-AMBERO) and National Curriculum for Basic Education Grad 1 – 6 (Min of Edn).

Ego holds a Diploma of Permaculture Design (Permaculture Institute) and certificates in Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MDF Pacific-Indonesia Consultancy) and Integrating Nutrition in Primary Education Curriculum (FAO). His Ted Talk: Ego Lemos/TEDxDili ‘School Gardening to Tackle Malnutrition’ illustrates why embodying permaculture within the school curriculum is so important.

Thanks to Richard Telford of Abdallah House in Victoria (featured in David Holmgren’s Retrosuburbia) for stepping in to grab the camera.

Listen to the Audio recording:

Permaculture Educators’ Program

Have you ever wanted to be a permaculture teacher. Learn online at your own pace through the Permaculture Education Institute. To find out more, click the image.

The post A Permaculture Country: A conversation with Ego Lemos from Timor Leste appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Jenipher is compassionate and committed activist helping vulnerable girls in her community.

 

 

Reusable, durable, washable pads given to girls in ruraKenya

The post Permaculture People Care: Please join me in helping these young women in Kenyan villages appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Originally this livestream was meant just for my Patreon supporters (https://www.patreon.com/moraggamble) however I was encouraged by one of my Patreons to share this update more widely. I’m glad he did, because I’d love you to hear about all the great work that is happening and hopefully widen the support for the local and international permaculture projects I mention. Perhaps you’d like to become a Patreon too.

I also want you to know that I am very happy for you to share my blog posts, masterclasses and films as widely as you like (for personal and education purposes).  These are intended as free and accessible materials that are available for people wanting to take practical and positive action in their home, garden, school and neighbourhood.

My key websites are:

Our Permaculture Life Blog – around 500 articles, over 2 million pageviews

Our Permaculture Life Youtube Channel – 23,000 subscribers, almost 1 million views (no ads!)

Permaculture Education Institute: New online permaculture design and teacher program. Scholarships also open for refugees, displaced people, indigenous communities, women in rural villages in the ‘global south’ (contact me directly).

Our Permacuture Life Patreon : from just $1/week you can support the development of more freely accessible materials. I’m so keen to get the podcast up and running.

In this livestream, I mention:

• The Tropical Permaculture Guidebook
• Retrosuburbia by David Holmgren , also My interview with David
• Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe – award-winning Indigenous author
  Bruce Pascoe’s 2018 Australasian Permaculture Convergence APC14 Keynote Presentation
• A Resilient Life by Mariam Issa (Raw Aspiring Women garden project)
• I also mention a crowdfunding I am setting up to support young woman in Kenya- stay tuned.

NB: Apologies for the mediocre film quality – internet is not great here for streaming. I’m currently working hard to find a better way to connect.

The post Permaculture Project Update appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

On Tuesday I joined the stage with Maddie, a young indigenous leader, a strong empowered woman, a 21 year old single mum, working hard to finish school. She was there to share her story about what it’s really like to be poor and regularly experience food insecurity.

She told us how last week she was standing in the supermarket with $10 to her name, trying to work out how to feed herself and her son for the next week, and that this is not an uncommon thing for her. Everyday life is a struggle.

What would you do if you had $10 left to buy food for 5 days?

Like I said in my last post, one in six children in Australia live in poverty and experience hunger.  I feel that those of us who have the capacity to do something, can help but growing good food in public places – food that is available to anyone who needs it. Also organise community cook-ups and welcome people and organisations to participate. Most importantly we need to listen to the people who are experiencing hunger and work with them to find positive, lasting solutions.

Dr Richard Denniss, Chief Economist at the Australia Institute – the funniest and most understandable economist I’d ever met who made so much common sense.

 

The event was the Ending Poverty and Inequality in QLD Public Forum at the Edge, Southbank, that was part of Anti-Poverty Week. The MC was social justice advocate & channel 7 TV anchor, Kay Macgrath.

The post Grow real food in the city to cut hunger appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Will you?

It deeply troubles me how much damage our society is causing with everyday waste and the culture of disposability.  

Living a simpler life, a permaculture way of life, does dramatically reduce plastic dependence, but there is always more we can do, and more we need to do. The planet is drowning in plastic.

On my Simple Living segment on ABC Radio Queensland’s Evenings show, I chatted with host Trevor Jackson about this issue. You can listen here:

https://soundcloud.com/user-523529725/choose-to-refuse-single-use-plastic-plastic-free-july

12 things to consider about single use plastic

Here’s a dozen fact to keep in mind when we’re making decisions about what to buy:

1. 6% of the world’s fossil fuels are used to make plastic
2. from 2000-2010 1 billion tonnes of plastic was made – same amount as between 1950-2000
3. half the world’s plastics are used once before going to landfill
4. 8 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans every year – that’s like putting five bags of plastic trash on every foot of coastline in the world.
5. Almost 75% of the plastic found in the oceans is single-use (food wrappers, food containers, caps and lids, plastic bags, polystyrene…)
6. 90% of sea birds have eaten plastic, 50% of turtles have too
7. 1 million sea bird and 100,000 turtles die from eating plastic and becoming entangled each year.
8. 5 billion plastic lined coffee cups are used each year 
9. 4.7 billion toothbrushes are made each year. They’ll last around 1000 years.
10. each person on the planet uses around 700 plastic bags a year each
11. it takes around 5 litres of water and a litre of oil to make a litre of bottled water
12. In Australia, we use almost 120,000 tonnes of plastic drink bottles each year. 

Image Source: CSIRO

What will it take to dramatically cut down on throw-away plastic?

Simple steps

We can impact change in our sphere of influence, and that is different for us all. Out and about, in our home, at work, at school, in our community …  

Source: www.sustainablecoastlines.org

Single use plastic is a massive problem in the world, and while many of us are aware consumers, we still manage to come home with more single-use plastic than we’d hoped because it is just everywhere!

Some simple steps to reduce single-use plastic waste:

1. Grow more food
2. Choose to shop at farmers markets and CSAs (community supported agriculture programs), and bulk food stores.
3. Store leftovers in jars or reusable lidded containers
4. Make more things from scratch and pack food to take out with you.
5. Choose biodegradable options
6. Take our own cups and bottles or slow down and have a cuppa in a ceramic cup.
7. Pick up rubbish we see around.

Plastic free veggies and herbs from my garden – freshly harvested for dinner.

Choose to Refuse

Choose to Refuse is the theme of this year’s Plastic Free July campaign.  The idea really is that we use this time to change habits and then continue on with less plastic in our lives. Since signing on last July with my family, there are lots of things I no longer buy such as: plastic wrapped toilet paper, shampoo or conditioner, hand soap, laundry liquid, dishwashing liquid, take away coffee cups, plastic straws, microfibre clothing… and more.

I’d like to extend a special big thank-you to my growing community of patrons who help me keep this blog and youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/moraggambleourpermaculturelife)  free and ad-free. If you’d like to support me too, you can find my Patreon page on  (https://www.patreon.com/moraggamble). 

Morag’s workshops coming soon:

Subscribe to Morag Gamble’s Newsletter

The post Can you go a day without single-use plastic? appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.